Julia Keiner’s Universalism and the Question of Israeli style

The existence, or lack thereof, of a distinguishable Israeli style remains a central question in the historiography of Israeli art and design. This a examines tensions produced by this debate between the 1940s and 1960s—a formative period of Israeli nation-building—as manifested in the design and pedagogical ideology of handweaver Julia Keiner (1900–1992), who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Germany in 1936 and founded the textile department at the New Bezalel School of Art and Craft. I argue that, for Keiner, good design was based on objective, universal principles stemming from the interrelation of process and material, as well as the objective laws of nature. However, her work was ineluctably entangled with this search for a distinctly Hebrew or Israeli style. This essay shows how each of the textile department’s two fields of training—weaving and embroidery—reflected tensions between Keiner’s universalist approach and local efforts to establish such a national style.