“Then and Now”: The Making of a Visual Frontier

Abstract

This article explores the role of the visual field in establishing and expanding the frontier of Jewish settlement in pre-state Palestine. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Zionist funds, including the Jewish National Fund and the Foundation Fund, among others, produced and distributed visual material in an ideologically controlled way that was meant to resonate with American audiences deeply invested in their own frontier mythologies. Through an examination of the work of formative Zionist photographers Abraham Soskin and Zoltan Kluger, as well as visual forms found at the Jewish Palestine Pavilion in the 1939–40 World's Fair in New York, the author identifies three central tenets of frontier building that wove their way through the Zionist visual field: transformation, citizenship, and security.