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This note is a follow-up to the article "Performing Communism in the American Dance: Culture, Politics, and the New Dance Group" which appeared in the 2008 Volume 7, #1 issue of American Communist History. It focuses particularly on the history of the New York City dance troupe New Dance Group (NDG) established by a group of six radical women in 1932 to promote dance which reflected revolutionary and working-class idealogies. The NDG ceased operations in 2009 and some of its choreographer/performers included Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley, and Eve Gentry.

As the East's premiere socialist daily newspaper in English, The New York Call represented an important if struggling slice of a rich print culture that spread the socialist creed and sustained the faithful. This article uses the prism of The Call to consider functions of social movement media that, in contrast to mainstream media, promote collective action instead of products. It raises the question of whether the notion of a successful social-movement journal in the mass media market is oxymoronic. Besides considering The Call's contributions to the socialist movement, it analyzes the challenges the socialist daily faced in the capitalist-driven mass media market; examines the relationship between he Call and the mainstream press; and probes its relationship to the socialist movement, which it not only reflected but also shaped. The article concludes he Call provided a robust challenge to hegemony and played an important role as a forum for socialist discourse and as a record of New York's labor and socialist movements. Its inability to thrive, however, reflects divisions among socialists and labor as well as financial problems and governmental repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Dr Emil Altman and the New York City Board of Education manipulated prevailing narratives of disability in a crusade to rid their city school system of “unfit” teachers during the late 1920s through to the early 1940s. Capitalising on fears of disability related to ideas about efficiency and eugenics, Altman and board officials redefined the purpose of the New York City Board of Education’s Medical Examiner, pathologised unsatisfactory teaching as illness or disability, introduced new standards and tests required to gain a permanent teaching licence, and forced over 100 teachers out of the school system. An examination of theNew York Timescoverage of this struggle over teacher tenure, retirement policy, competence, and pensions shows how skilfully Altman crafted rhetoric based in current ideas of fitness in order to expand his control over teacher examining and retiring and to help the Board of Education address a major budget deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anti-Semitic beliefs that associated Jews, especially New York Jews, with the news media helped create the idea of a "liberal news media." Anti-Semites around the world have linked Jews with "control" of the news media since the nineteenth century. In the postwar United States, anti-Semitic critiques of the news media were closely linked with Cold War-era anticommunism, Christian conservatism, and reaction to the civil rights movement by white conservatives. Anti-Semites of the postwar period were usually fervent Christian anticommunists who believed that Jews secretly manipulated and masterminded the news in order to promote the civil rights movement, destroy the Christian United States, and pave the way for communist world government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a personal narrative of the experiences of a New York City actor working Off-Off-Broadway at the Theater Genesis in the East Village with playwright, director, and actor Sam Shepard. Topics include experimental theater in the 1960s, the 1964 plays "The Rock Garden" and "Cowboys," and director Ralph Cook.

In the early 1970s, as New York City was in an economic and social downfall, a vibrant downtown arts scene emerged in downtown Manhattan south of 14th Street. The scene's development is often attributed to the neighbourhood's at-the-time inexpensive rent, which permitted artists to live, work, and exhibit with low overhead. This article maintains that the scene's development was also contingent on the growing availability of a new medium: the copy machine. While xerographic copiers had been staples in office culture for 15 years, they were newly available to the general public in the early 1970s. This article examines how copy machines were used by artists and writers to produce and distribute works, to promote upcoming gigs of all kinds from drag shows to punk shows, and, eventually, to facilitate the downtown scene's migration into the suburbs and beyond through the production of mobile texts, including zines and mail art. Finally, this article asserts that as a media technology that is at once capable of intensifying the local and developing and sustaining non-local networks, copy machines were and remain uniquely situated to accommodate the inherent tensions and contradictions that define scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the establishment of the Ninety-Second Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association (YMHA) Dance Center, in New York City in the 1930s. Details on some of the performances at the dance center; Discussion on the history of YMHA; Role of educational director William Kolodney at the dance center; Information on Kolodney.