Jerry Rabinowitz of Weehawken
Jerome Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz on 11 October 1918 at the Jewish Maternity Hospital on East Broadway, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His father, Harry (Herschel) Rabinowitz, was a Jewish immigrant from Rozhanka, a small town in what is now Belarus; his mother was Lena Rips. His middle name honoured President Woodrow Wilson, whom his parents admired. He had an older sister, Sonia. In the early 1920s the family moved across the Hudson to Weehawken, New Jersey, where his father and uncle ran the Comfort Corset Company in nearby Union City.
In 1924 his mother took Jerry and Sonia to visit the family’s old world in Russia. The trip, and the memory of the Yiddish-speaking grandparents and shtetl life he glimpsed as a small boy, stayed with him, though for most of his life he kept them at a distance. The family had many connections in show business, including vaudeville performers and theatre owners.
Finding dance
At high school in Weehawken he studied modern dance with Alys Bentley, who encouraged her pupils to improvise their own movements to music; he later credited her with giving him the freedom to make up his own dances without inhibition. He graduated in 1935 and enrolled at New York University to study chemistry, but left after a year, partly for financial reasons and partly to dance full time. He joined the company of Senya Gluck Sandor, an expressionist modern dancer, who encouraged him to take ballet classes and suggested that he change his name to Robbins; the family later adopted the name legally.
He studied ballet, Spanish dance, Asian dance and composition with a series of teachers, and made his stage debut in a small part with the Yiddish Art Theatre. From 1937 he danced and began creating comic and dramatic numbers at Camp Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos famous for its weekly revues; one of his early dances there was set to Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching song Strange Fruit. He danced in the choruses of Broadway shows choreographed by George Balanchine, and in 1940 he joined the new Ballet Theatre, later American Ballet Theatre, becoming a soloist.
Fancy Free and On the Town
In 1944 Robbins created his first ballet, Fancy Free, about three sailors on shore leave in wartime New York. It mixed classical ballet with the social dancing of the day and the timing of screwball comedy, and he commissioned the music from a young, almost unknown composer, Leonard Bernstein. Its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House was a triumph. That same year Robbins conceived and choreographed On the Town, a Broadway musical growing out of the ballet, with music by Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Robbins insisted that the chorus of On the Town look like a real New York crowd, and the show is credited with breaking Broadway’s colour bar, putting Black and white dancers on stage together as equals. It launched his double career. Over the next fifteen years he choreographed or directed High Button Shoes, which won him his first Tony Award, Call Me Madam, The King and I, with its celebrated ballet The Small House of Uncle Thomas, The Pajama Game, Peter Pan with Mary Martin, and Bells Are Ringing. At the same time, from 1949, he was associate artistic director of the New York City Ballet alongside Balanchine, creating ballets such as The Cage, Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert.
West Side Story
In 1957 Robbins conceived, directed and choreographed West Side Story, retelling Romeo and Juliet as a war between rival street gangs, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It brought together Bernstein’s music, the lyrics of the young Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents. Robbins conceived book, music and dance as a single whole, and for the first time on Broadway the cast had to be equally strong as actors, singers and dancers. Dance did not decorate the story; it told it, in the explosive opening, the rumble and the dream ballet.
His methods could be harsh. He kept the actors playing Jets and Sharks apart during rehearsals and, according to cast members, spread rumours to sharpen their hostility. But the result transformed the American musical, and its treatment of ethnic hatred, poverty and violence among young people brought social reality to a genre known for escapism. For the 1961 film version Robbins was co-director with Robert Wise. He was dismissed partway through filming for running over schedule, yet the film won ten Academy Awards, two of them for Robbins: Best Director, shared with Wise, and an honorary award for his choreography on film.
Fiddler on the Roof
For much of his career Robbins had been uneasy, even ashamed, about being Jewish, and he hid it along with other parts of his life. Fiddler on the Roof, which he directed and choreographed in 1964, brought him back to the world he came from. Based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories of Tevye the dairyman in a shtetl in the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century, it told the story of a Jewish community holding on to its traditions while history closed in.
Robbins researched it intensely. He interviewed his own father about life in Rozhanka and his departure, and went with members of the company to Jewish weddings in Brooklyn to study the dancing. The score was by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, with a book by Joseph Stein, and its opening number, Tradition, set out the show’s theme of a way of life under strain. Starring Zero Mostel, Fiddler ran for 3,242 performances, then the longest run in Broadway history, won Robbins Tony Awards for direction and choreography, and has since been staged in many countries and languages around the world. For millions of people it is their most vivid picture of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe.
The shadow of HUAC
Robbins had once been a member of the Communist Party. In the early 1950s he came under pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee. He resisted for a long time, and family members later said he was threatened with public exposure of his homosexuality. In 1953 he testified and named people he said had been Communists, among them the actor Jack Gilford and his wife Madeline Lee Gilford, who were blacklisted and suffered serious hardship.
His career did not suffer, but many colleagues never forgave him; Gilford himself later appeared in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which Robbins helped rescue, and Zero Mostel, who had been blacklisted, openly scorned him during Fiddler. Robbins carried the episode as a lasting source of shame. His private life, including relationships with men and women such as the actor Montgomery Clift and the ballerina Nora Kaye, was largely kept out of public view during his lifetime.
Ballet, Israel and a wider stage
In 1958 Robbins founded his own small company, Ballets: U.S.A., a deliberately ethnically diverse troupe of young American dancers that performed at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto and toured Europe under the auspices of the State Department, showing works such as N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz. After Fiddler he largely left Broadway for ballet, returning to the New York City Ballet, where he became ballet master and created major works including Dances at a Gathering, In the Night, The Goldberg Variations and Glass Pieces.
He also helped dance grow in Israel. In 1951 he visited the young country on behalf of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation to assess its dance companies, and was struck by Sara Levi-Tanai’s Inbal Dance Theatre, rooted in Yemenite Jewish traditions; he urged the impresario Sol Hurok to bring it to America and recommended that the American choreographer Anna Sokolow be invited to work with it, helping it become a professional company. Years later he staged his ballets for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company.
Last years and legacy
In 1989 Robbins assembled Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, an anthology of his best musical numbers, which won him a fifth Tony Award. In his later years he also worked on a deeply personal autobiographical theatre piece about his father and his own Jewish identity, known as The Poppa Piece, which he never completed. His honours included the Kennedy Center Honors in 1981, the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and the French Legion of Honour. After a stroke, he died at his home in Manhattan on 29 July 1998, aged 79, and the lights of Broadway were dimmed in tribute.
Robbins changed the American musical by making dance a central storytelling force, and he brought the energy of American streets, sailors, gangs and immigrants into classical ballet. West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof remain among the most performed musicals in the world, and his ballets are danced by companies across the globe. He was a difficult man, demanding and often cruel in rehearsal, and his testimony in 1953 hurt real people. But the son of a corset maker from a vanished shtetl gave the world two of its best-loved portraits of outsiders: young immigrants fighting for a place in America, and a Jewish milkman fighting to hold on to his family and his faith.
Sources & further reading
Jerome Robbins, Wikipedia · Timeline, The Jerome Robbins Foundation · Jerome Robbins, Batsheva Dance Company Archive · Sara Levi-Tanai, Society of Folk Dance Historians · Fiddler on the Roof, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.