Throughout the existence of the Palestine Mandate photography was considered a prime means to draw global attention to the Zionist presence in the Middle East. Photographers' insights into Zionist building activities were produced and disseminated in large numbers. The ways the different photographers and image agents staged these views according to their own imaginations of the Jewish presence in Palestine, however, have found little consideration in historical research. This talk approaches local and international discussions on the nature of Jewish statehood through the photographer’s lens to challenge the assumption that the production of Zionist visual arts merely corroborated the political ideology of the Labor Zionist establishment. It places particular emphasis on the mobile nature of photographic communication thereby offering insights into neglected nuances of Zionist political thought in a highly transnational decade.

Rebekka Grossmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on the intersections of Jewish political history, migratory mobility, and global visual culture. Before joining the Franz Rosenzweig Center she was a Tandem Fellow at the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has also been supported by the George L. Mosse Program in History, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Hebrew University and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Her dissertation, which is currently transformed into a book manuscript, discusses photography as a space of formulations of concepts of national belonging in Jewish migratory history. Aspects of this research have been published for example in Jewish Social Studies and the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook.

The Salo Baron New Voices in Jewish Studies lecture is supported by the generosity of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation.

Presented jointly by Fordham University's Jewish Studies program and Columbia University's Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

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