Guian Bolisay (Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
Hillel Kogan, the great storyteller among Israel’s choreographers, views Israel through the lens of Spanish dance. What emerges is nothing less than a violent clash of cultures, the relentless struggle of colonial capitalism against its adversaries: the arts themselves.
Art goes to the army. Poster at the Habait Theatre in Jaffa
“You could say: We are at war in Israel. You could also say: Israel‘s army is at war. On all fronts, since the founding of the state, since 1948. We in Israel have elected a government for reasons relating to this war. But everyone here says: There’s an elephant in the room. Everyone sees it, but they can’t say anything: Because we are at war with Palestine or Hamas, with Iran or the mullahs, with Lebanon or Hezbollah, with Yemen or the Houthis. We would rather get rid of the elephant in the room that no one talks about. The war.
The centre of the protests against the war: the square in front of the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv
Of course, we can join the thousands who gather every Sabbath at Habima Square in Tel Aviv to get rid of the war. But the war won’t just let us go. How do you get rid of a war? Just knowing that the conflict is unsolvable is an elephant in the room that can’t leave because the door is too small to push it out.
Let’s talk about art instead. In art, when war is raging, everything depends on your passport. British-Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter is not held responsible for the war in Israel because he has a British passport. However, others are, such as Ohad Naharin and his Batsheva Dance Company. Passports play a very special role in this world, especially in art.
The Batsheva Dance Company performs the trunk in “Zo” by Ohad Naharin
The question of how to get rid of this elephant is, of course, also a concern for our art. Ohad Naharin brings it onto the stage; in his choreography ‘Zo,’ he fills it to bursting with air. The piece premiered in Tel Aviv at the Suzanne Dellal Center, a large dance center on the border with Jaffa, the Arab suburb of Tel Aviv.
Before the family of dancer Suzanne Dellal, who died young, came here, Neve Tzedek was the poorest neighborhood by the sea – full of junkies, drugs, and prostitution. Then art came along, the old residents were displaced, and prices rose sky high. All you have to do is build a synagogue, a museum, or even a theater, a secular place where everything is sacred. The untouchable painting, the untouchable dancers and singers do not belong to those who used to live here. Art is supposed to transport us to another world without this elephant, so that we can view our own reality from a foreign perspective. To enjoy the Middle East from the perspective of ballet, or Israel from the perspective of Andalusia and its flamenco. That’s enough to understand that you are in a place where there’s an elephant in the room that leaves you speechless.”
(Excerpt from an interview with Israeli choreographer and dancer Hillel Kogan at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv in December 2025)
Hillel Kogan with Adi Boutrous in “We Love Arabs”
Born in 1974, Hillel Kogan is a member of the Batsheva Dance Company under Ohad Naharin and began his international career in 2013 with the acclaimed piece “We love Arabs.”
A more recent masterpiece, “Thisispain” (2022), tells his own story as a flamenco dancer, as an appropriation of Andalusian culture. In the process, Madrid is quietly transformed into today’s Jerusalem, and Portugal becomes Gaza, given their striking geographical similarity.
Hillel Kogan
View from the Israel Museum of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset
In Jerusalem, within sight of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, stands the Israel Museum. Architecturally, it looks like an ovum of Jewish cultures gathered here from all over the world – from America to Russia and Europe to Israel. Dance moved in to mark the museum’s 60th anniversary, led by the wonderful choreographer, gifted dancer, and humorous storyteller Hillel Kogan.
At the very top of the Israel Museum
A dancing guided tour through the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
by Hillel Kogan
The Indian Kadavumbagam Synagogue at the Israel Museum
Welcome to the Israel Museum! Here, together – some of you in person and others virtually – we will experience a guided tour through eight stations in this museum. You will see dance at a museum that aims to demonstrate the shared identity of Jews from around the world. However, you will see that identity is a tricky thing. This is especially true in dance, which is not represented anywhere in the museum.
The Wing of Jewish Life and Arts lies almost in the center of the enormous Israel Museum. We start our guided tour here, surrounded by dozens of Hanukkah lamps collected from Jewish communities all over the world – a lamp shop representing, as it were, the primordial light of Jewish culture. This is where our journey through the museum begins: a journey of dance seeking a home.
Candelabra from the synagogue in Vittorio Veneto
Here, in a museum? Isn’t the museum far too sacred? This place invites contemplation of the deep roots of Jewish culture in the context of art and tradition, handicrafts, and customs. A real synagogue from Vittorio Veneto in Italy stands next to the Kadavumbagam Synagogue from India; a medieval German synagogue from Horb am Main, and the synagogue from Suriname are nearby.
The Hanukkah lamps in this Judaica collection of the Israel Museum seem to carry an eternal light of an ancient culture, assumed to be immutable. That is why dance seems out of place in a museum: It would disturb the nature of a museum – still life, or as the French say, nature morte.
Dance, too, seeks its home. It is driven out, searches for identity, and demands to belong. Our tour follows in the footsteps of a dance searching for home and of dancers searching for identity, like the Jewish diaspora: expelled or exiled, seeking refuge, making a new place a home, then expelled again.
Here I sing in Spanish: “Where are you going, beautiful Jewess? / So festively dressed at curfew / I’m going to look for my beloved / He’s waiting for me in the synagogue…”
What I sing is the Petenera, a flamenco musical style. When Gitanos in southern Spain hear the Petenera, they might leave the room: Petenera equals misfortune (in Spanish: Petenera – mala suerte). God forbid our fate were to mirror that of the Jews. With respect, it was not the Gitanos who invented the association between Jews and misfortune. Spain was once home to Jews, Gitanos, Muslims, and Christians. What is Spanish culture if not a mix of all of these? Then there are the cultures Spain discovered or conquered in the Americas. That is Spain too.
Mijal Natan at the lamp shop
While I sing, Mijal Natan dances flamenco. She is an Israeli flamenca who studied ballet, modern dance, and Japanese butoh as a young dancer. Over thirty years ago, she fell in love with flamenco, the Andalusian art promoted worldwide by Spain’s erstwhile dictator General Franco, as national Spanish art. You know, many Israelis are chasing after a European passport – just to be on the safe side.
With a war happening every year in Israel, you never know. Mijal, from Rehovot, a 30-minute drive from Tel Aviv, does not have a Spanish passport, but she has a German one, inherited from her grandfather Gershon (Gerhard) Natan. Her grandmother, Yehudit (Judith) Atiya, was born in Israel, a fifth-generation Moroccan immigrant to Israel.
My own parents, the Kogan family, immigrated from Chișinău, Moldova, which unfortunately is not part of the European Union, making obtaining a Moldovan passport pointless. Although they made their home in the Soviet Union, the communists did not always treat Jews kindly. My parents sought a new home and found it in Israel. Let’s move on. Follow me.
The Hora: Dance of the Zionist settlers with Adi Zlatin
We enter a round gallery displaying clothes and household items from the first settlers of Israel, around 1880, at the beginning of the Zionist movement and during the rise of antisemitism in Europe. The circular gallery symbolizes the cycle of Jewish life: birth, marriage, and death. The Zionist settlers sought unity and identity, including a national dance – a new Israeli dance. They sought cultural symbols, distinct from local Arab symbols, which were deemed “enemy” in the new Zionist landscape. The local Arab dances were out of the question. They rejected European bourgeois dances like the tango or waltz and sought a dance for everyone that would be danced together outdoors, in nature.
They chose the Hora. In the Hora dance circle, everyone is positioned equally from the center. The Hora originated in the Balkans, particularly in Romania. It is a traditional circle dance in which participants hold hands or shoulders and move together in repetitive rhythmic steps. The Hora was brought to Palestine in the early 20th century by Zionist pioneers – many of them from Romania. There, it was adapted and transformed into a symbol of collective identity and egalitarian ideals. The circular formation, with all participants equally distanced from the center, came to embody the communal ethos of the early Zionist movement. We have made the Hora our own – just like hummus, schnitzel, and falafel.
Here in the museum, we dance the Hora with Adi Zlatin, a dancer born in Jerusalem in 1983, who began ballet at six and later danced with various Jerusalem Hora dance companies and with the Batsheva Dance Company. My own grandfather, Yasha (Jabob) Friedman, was born in Romania. The Hora was the queen of folk dance in Israel until the 1970s, inspiring national dance festivals such as that of the Kibbutz Dalia. Schoolchildren learned it nationwide. Other new folk dances emerged as well, including Yemeni and Hasidic dances.
There is no Israel Museum without the collections of the Jewish diaspora, and no Israeli dance without Batsheva, no 60th birthday of the Israel Museum without a Batsheva dancer. For nineteen years, Adi Zlatin was a Batsheva member, where she danced Gaga, the movement language developed by Ohad Naharin. Gaga is now danced worldwide, except in places that boycott Israeli art or products. Gaga is universal, open to all, yet Israeli in origin, like the USB stick or cherry tomato, but not everyone can dance like a Batsheva dancer.
Times have changed. We are now in the 21st century and the Hora has lost its significance. Israeli identity has shifted. Young people have sought different dances. Dance is searching for a home, and home is searching for a dance. The bare feet and sandals of the Hora have been replaced by Adidas or Nike and Hip Hop; the Hora is no longer “cool.”
Hip-hop, on the other hand, is. So follow me – this way to America.
We enter a gallery with objects and sculptures from North and Central America. At the other end is the gallery of Art of Africa and Oceania; America and Africa are neighbors at the Israel Museum. During the rise of antisemitism in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, most Jewish immigrants, refugees, and other displaced persons did not go to Israel but to America, entering through Ellis Island in New York. We, too, leave the Jewish galleries of the Israel Museum and enter the world through the America gallery.
Which America do we see here? The Incan and Mayan sculptures depict something other than the Hollywood version. What is America if not a melting pot? Native Americans, European immigrants, Italians, English, Hispanics, and descendants of African slaves: Twelve tribes, as we say in Israel. Some of us even conceive of Israel as America’s fifty-first state. Without all these tribes, there would be no America.
But wait – it was Spain that discovered America. Spain that liberated us all from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Who if not the great Spain? Who if not Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, who sent Christopher Columbus off across the seas to discover America? Some say that it was thanks to the money of the Jews! In 1492, Spain expelled its Jews and financed the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The coincidence was too tempting. History offered a footnote; myth turned it into a headline. Antisemitic narratives eagerly recycled the idea of “Jewish money” as a hidden motor of history, feeding the myth of Jewish financial control. Without the Jewish money, America might never have been discovered, and “Latin” America would never have become so “Latin” if the Spanish hadn’t done what they did to the native peoples of the Americas, their lands and their cultures…
Coming back to dance, it’s time to say something about ballet. Cultural appropriation is a term used to describe individuals using elements from communities to which they do not belong, removing them from context, and repurposing them. Historically, ballet has been a prime cultural appropriator. It is an artistic hub filled with political incorrectness, with the ballerina at its center – a beautiful, slender, white model, light as a feather, so light that she doesn’t touch the ground. She lives, eats, and sleeps on her tiptoes. She spends more time in the air than on earth. There is always a strong man around her to lift her up. She might be everything that young girls in the Western world are taught to imagine that they would like to become – a ballerina. And maybe because the West has always been fascinated by “the other,” always in search of something foreign, exotic, spicy, ballet is full of “other” dances and “exotic” characters. At the peak of the parties in „Swan Lake“ or „The Nutcracker“, a display of dances of “others” from around the world, begins. To the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s music, we witness Arabic dance, Spanish dance, Chinese dance, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why does ballet need this?
In the ethnographic gallery of Africa
Maybe simply because it’s sexy. Look around you in the gallery of the Americas, look at the topless and nude sculptures of the “natives.” Their genitals exposed. They don’t have the modesty that a good ballerina needs; after all, a ballerina must not be sexy. But come on – give us a break from European modesty. Ballets and operas last three or four hours: Could we please get some eye candy, a touch of kinkiness ? Some colors to give us a break from all this sylph-like whiteness?
Daniel Ben Ami
Next door is the Africa gallery; America and Africa meet at this intersection. Omer Ticshauer, a former dancer of the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, dances contemporary dance, and Hila Nachshonov blends contemporary with hip-hop. International award-winning breakdancer Daniel Ben Ami from Tel Aviv performs breakdance, house, electro, krumping, popping, locking, waacking, rocking, and crushing. Observe how their dances interact with the gallery’s African and American landscapes.
The dancing Ganesha from India. And Mijal Natan from Israel
Surrounded by Indian stone sculptures, tapestries, and a Dancing Ganesha statue – the elephant-headed deity twirls with joy and freedom, embodying wisdom, the removal of obstacles, and the creative spirit of the performing arts. Every movement is celebration, every pose a spark of life.
The museum organizes and categorizes all the cultures, defining what belongs where. Signs tell us who “owns” each room.
Here, next to the dancing Ganesha, Mijal Natan dances flamenco again. A bridge between Spain and India, at the Israel museum in Jerusalem. The Gitanos of Andalusia claim ownership of flamenco. Most people picture the Roma (Gitanos) as arriving from the Balkans. History, ever the spoilsport, says: India, actually. Dance and music travelled to Andalusia with the Gitanos and merged with local Spanish traditions. I dance flamenco, too. The Israeli flamenco scene is flourishing: companies, musicians, shows, schools. Flamenco is now practiced by many beyond its “owners.”
In Israel, we dress like Americans and Europeans, we eat American, Japanese, and Thai food, we consume American music, TV, and cinema. Or is none of that American? Is it simply international? “World Music”: a label invented to corral everything not American or European into one tidy, exotic package. African drums, Asian strings, flamenco guitars – all consumed from a safe distance, stripped of context, often Americanized, always ready for admiration or appropriation. It sounds worldly… but only in a way the West can handle.
Is Mijal Natan even allowed to dance flamenco? A hundred years ago, before World War I, you could travel from Sweden to the Black Sea without using a passport. Picasso could do whatever he wanted with the African objects he collected. Today, artistic freedom has another meaning. What happened? Is art no longer free? Today, artistic freedom has different limits: Folk culture often overlaps with what is sacred – the Bible, flags, masks. Please handle with care.
Hila Nachshonov
We leave folklore and ethnography behind and enter a space of abstraction: few objects, minimal information, no faces, no masks, no figurative objects. On the left is a light installation, on the right, a felt sculpture, and between, a dancer performing “contemporary” dance. We have left the “world” for “art.” Discourse here revolves around matter, form, light, texture, color, and emptiness.
Gaga with Hillel Kogan and Carmel Ben Asher
Gaga and other contemporary dance methods embody the body, are danced by the body, universal, not representational. Listening to John Cage’s 4’33, no notes, no instruments, only silence – or rather, everything around us becomes music. The rustle of visitors, a cough, the hum of the museum. In this gallery, silence is not absence – it is a stage. A stage in Jerusalem, New York, Paris, Dubai – there are museums everywhere, like McDonald’s. And hosting dance in museums has become quite trendy.
In the Picasso room hangs a mask that was not created by Picasso
This gallery shows Picasso’s art, and that of other Cubists. Where would we be without Spain? Hila Nachshonov dances her contemporary piece, performing hip-hop steps, to the sounds of The Three-Cornered Hat, by Manuel de Falla. One dancer, many perspectives. Picasso drew inspiration from African masks, transforming sacred and symbolic objects into the language of Cubism. The masks were intended to convey meaning; he transformed them into geometry. A revolution in art: After artists had been chasing that one, precise perspective for so many hundreds of years, suddenly Cubism appeared and blew everything apart. And now we can see from many perspectives. But why do we need all those hundreds of perspectives if at the end of the day we are left with such a twisted, deformed portrait? Primitivism, artistic curiosity, or cultural appropriation? History leaves us guessing.
The clever curator of this gallery, Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, has placed a mask up above Picasso’s sculpture. If we don’t read the tiny print, we mistakenly think it was created by Picasso.
In my dream I wake up in the middle of the night and my body parts are scattered around me. I try to assemble them but am missing a finger. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door, and I know I might have to open it. But I am missing a finger. In confusion, I find my penis under the bed and attempt to place it on my hand instead of the missing finger. It’s a bit problematic, it’s not exactly the right size and my dick stands out a bit, so my hand looks disproportionate. I am so embarrassed to open the door with the penis on my hand. But the knocking is getting louder and louder.
I open the door. I can’t believe my eyes! It’s Pina Bausch!
It doesn’t make sense because Pina is dead. Wait, maybe I’m not dreaming! Am I dead? Where am I? Is this Heaven? But do they let you walk around in Heaven with your dick attached to your hand? Having appeared before me – dead, yet present – Pina is bumping into my furniture with her eyes closed. She can’t even see my penis. Turns out she didn’t even knock on the door – she just kept bumping into it like many contemporary dance choreographers have been doing since her legendary Cafe Muller. I realize I’m not in heaven but rather in Wuppertal, Germany. My Romanian Jewish grandpa, a Holocaust survivor, always taught me to avoid German soil – and now, in my dream, I am in Germany and with my dick on my hand.
Just as Picasso had his Blue Period, I am in my flamenco period. I am in love with flamenco; my body is in love with the amazing palette of sensations flamenco offers me. One shoe on, one foot bare, I limp to the rhythm, struggling to keep the beat, in this artistic form that requires absolute precision. One foot is very loud and fierce, the other nearly silent.
What does Hillel Kogan, an Israeli contemporary dancer have to do with flamenco? I have nothing to say about flamenco. I honor and salute this beautiful world heritage art form. I am a contemporary dancer; identity is a performance according to queer theory. I am a contemporary dancer performing my tourism in flamenco.
In the Man Ray Collection
Dada Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Dryer, the urinal Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. A man is looking for a home, dance is looking for a home – that’s fine. We artists, constantly try to reinvent the wheel, whether we’re seeking identity, exploring beauty or redefining perspective. Dada actually gave us the option of freedom from identity, and permission to remain in a state of questioning rather than begging for answers. Like the ready-made Dada, dance is entering the age of non-dance. Each of us here in the gallery – artists and audience – is a ready-made non-dancer; all movements are dance because I say so and the art world allows me to do that. Consequently, everything is questionable and absurd, just as this urinal is a fountain.
Yet when we make everything meaningless, everything takes on a much more far-reaching meaning. Hora? Gaga? Flamenco? Hip Hop? Ballet? We can leave the questions unanswered. No longer interested in searching for the home of my dance; identity is no longer relevant to me. What kind of Jew am I if I’m secular and don’t keep kosher? What kind of Tel Aviv gay am I if I’m not allowed to vogue? I understand the problematics of cultural appropriation, and yet I would like to understand my artistic freedom. Can we please remain friends and agree to be strangers without identity? Can we please perform naivety?
A glimpse inside the Israel Museum
The Israel Museum leads us through the process of exploration. Every gallery is someone’s home. In each wing, we know where we are: Jews are Jews, America is America, European art is European art, Asia is Asia, Art is Art and so on.
We arrive at the heart of postmodern discourse, a utopian gallery in which strangers gather – GATHERING OF STRANGERS, as the light installation by Scottish artist Nathan Coley that hangs on the wall announces.
The installation by Yinko Shonibare
A call from Jerusalem to assemble; outside in the museum garden, Anish Kapoor’s statue sees Jerusalem turned upside-down. Inside, we step into the installation presented by Yinka Shonibare, who offers a fascinating story of a British artist of Nigerian origin. He inserts a family scene into outer space, in an act of seemingly postcolonial deconstruction. He dresses his family of astronauts in so-called African fabrics that are actually based on an Indonesian pattern, exported by Dutch colonizers to West Africa. There, in Africa, they were called “Hollandaise” and have since become a symbol of pride in postcolonial African identity. Shonibare sets out with his family on a space vacation and asks that his ethnic body not weigh him down; he seeks a vacation from gravity. At the same time, he takes Nigerian-British identity – deconstructions upon deconstructions and himself and his family included – on a holiday in space.
The installation by Nathan Coley
GATHERING OF STRANGERS – who are the strangers who have been called to gather at the Israel Museum? Are they the Jews of the Diaspora, who arrived like the Hanukkah menorahs, each from a synagogue at the far edges of the world? Or all the foreign peoples who once lived on these lands, the ancestors of our ancestors, as the Archaeology wing reminds us? Are we all gathering as strangers? Are we no longer searching for identity but celebrating our estrangement – no longer afraid of it?
