Hotel design in British Mandate Palestine: Modernism and the Zionist vision

From the early 1920s through the 1930s, an important yet forgotten avant-garde architectural phenomenon developed in the Zionist community of British Mandate Palestine. In cities and resort regions across the country, several dozen modernist hotels were built for a new type of visitor: the Zionist tourist. Often the most architecturally significant structures in their locales and designed by leading local architects educated in some of Europe's most progressive schools, these hotels were conceived along ideological lines and represented a synthesis of social requirements, cutting-edge aesthetics, and utopian national ideals. They responded to a complex mixture of sentiments, including European standards of modern comfort and the longing to remake Palestine, the historical homeland of the Jewish people, for a newly liberated, progressive nation. This article focuses on Jerusalem's most ambitious modernist hotel, the Eden Hotel, to evaluate how the architecture of tourism became a political and aesthetic tool in the promotion of Zionist Palestine.     

A Zionist torn between two worlds: Aharon Eisenberg's correspondence after the Young Turk Revolution

Through the correspondence of Aharon Eisenberg (1863–1931), this article examines the reactions of Zionist activists in Ottoman Palestine to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. It challenges the presumed dichotomies between supporters and opponents of the Yishuv's integration in the Ottoman framework in the aftermath of the revolution and between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and argues instead that there was wide-ranging support for Ottomanization in the national circles in the Yishuv, mainly due to realpolitik considerations. This support was made possible by the fluidity of the term “Ottomanism,” which allowed a broad spectrum of groups to interpret it as best suited to their interests.     

Poster power: rural electrification,visualization, and legibility in the United States

This article examines graphic visualization and visuality in Lester Beall’s 1937 series of posters for the United States Rural Electrification Administration. The posters are commonly thought of as raising public awareness of the benefits of electricity in the rural America, but what was meant by public and awareness in 1937 in terms of rural reform in the United States has remained unclear until now. This article posits that to understand how these posters were seen in 1937 requires an acknowledgment of how Beall’s posters graphically visualized the complexities of rural electrification, and how graphic visualization was contiguous with bureaucratic communication and the visual sensitivity of a public.     

Red Aesthetics,Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract

This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.     

Imagined homeland: landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s*

Abstract. This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre‐State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.     

Fatherhood in Labour Zionist Children's Literature: Space,Masculinity and Hegemony in Mandate Palestine

This article analyses the connection between gender and fatherhood in Labour Zionist children's literature during the formative years of the Zionist project which preceded the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Contrary to most similar social movements in the interwar period, Labour Zionism was leading a settler-colonial project with the imperative to expand the Jewish presence throughout the country, making the category of space particularly relevant to the success of its hegemonic project. This article contributes to the understanding of the role of gender in the process of Zionist settlement and colonisation, and at the same time calls for more attention to the entanglement of gender and masculinity with space in the study of colonial history.     

人民币升值对中国入境旅游的影响评估——基于扩展旅游引力模型的实证分析

汇率变动通过价格效应对入境旅游需求产生影响。在人民币面临较大升值压力的背景下,探讨人民币升值对中国入境旅游的影响具有重要的现实意义。本文基于标准贸易引力模型和传统旅游引力模型,构建一个扩展的旅游引力模型,采用面板数据计量方法实证分析了人民币升值对中国入境旅游发展的影响,结果表明:人民币升值给中国入境旅游发展带来了强烈的冲击,客源国的经济发展水平及其人口规模以及中国的经济发展水平与中国入境旅游发展呈正相关关系,客源国与中国的距离则是中国入境旅游发展的一个阻碍因素。     

Children and Print Visual Culture During the Chilean Popular Unity Government

This article analyses the visual figuration of children during the Chilean Popular Unity government (1970–1973) in a diverse archive of photographs, posters, album covers, magazines, and comics. First, it reads the realist representation of children in photography, which emphasises the dramatics of poverty as a form of establishing a photographic “civil contract” (Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008). Second, it interprets posters and texts concerning the Allende government’s Plan de Leche (Milk Plan) as an affirmative biopolitics. It concludes by showing that the children on illustrated posters are the idealised version of childhood projected by adults as a way of imagining a coming community.     

Montesquieu's Shadow: Debating reform in the Austrian Netherlands

Arthur Ruppin was the central figure in the Zionist colonization project in Palestine-Land of Israel in the decades preceded the establishment of the state of Israel. Ruppin's immense contribution gave him in Zionist historiography the title of ‘The Father of Jewish settlement in Palestine.’ Nevertheless, in spite of the title ‘Father’, Zionist historiography actually treats him as a ‘Zionist clerk,’ diminishing his role to an apolitical expert on bureaucracy and the economy. Exploring the reasons for his ambiguous position in Zionist historiography and memory, the historical account in the following article reveals how formative were his activities not only in the establishment of the bureaucratic field of the Yishuv (pre-state of Israel), but also in producing and disseminating the modern Hebrew identity models, consequently the article analyzes the relation of these models to the German-social Darwinist perceptions and practices, which shaped Ruppin's cultural identity, weltanschauung and actions.     

American Red Cross posters and the cultural politics of motherhood in World War I

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women's participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the US involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the US involvement in World War I on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women's – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women's movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and warfronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.     

Medizinische Expertise – zionistische Visionen: Ärztinnen und Ärzte als Immigranten in Palästina / Israel

In National Socialist Germany Jewish academicians and professional staff were initially deprived of their rights and marginalised, later they were chased down and murdered. With regard to those, who were able to escape the National Socialist realm of power, one can speak of a forced migration of academicians that reached a dimension which until now was unknown. A greater number of different academic as well as non‐academic occupational groups have been examined in the past few years in connection with their influence on scientific as well as social developments within the context of immigration. In this context Palestine, later Israel, occupies a special position. There exists a deficiency in research for the occupational group of physicians with regard to overindividual studies, which will be the focus of this analysis. There is no question about their part not only in the establishment of medical care structures in Palestine as well as the design and diversification of the Israeli health care system, but also in the international significance of Israeli developments in medicine and life sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. This study will examine members of a Zionist grouping that had exhibited Zionist engagement already before their flight from Europe. The objective of this examination is to determine the substantial contribution of Zionist physicians in designing the medical structures in the country.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

Whispers from Below: Zionist Secret Diplomacy,Terrorism and British Security Inside and Out of Palestine, 1944–47

This article discusses the global aspect of Zionist terrorism against Britain during 1944–47, relying on recently declassified documents and Hebrew records. Britain struggled against a global terrorist campaign which attacked British targets in Palestine, Egypt and the wider Middle East, continental Europe and the United Kingdom. This article refutes claims by other authors that British rule in Palestine failed because of intelligence failure. Intelligence failure was limited, but so were successes. British intelligence produced reasonable assessments on Zionist politics, but could do little to prevent violence without the cooperation of the Jewish Agency. Success was driven by a combination of signals intelligence, secret agents, one key defector, interrogations and intelligence shared by the Jewish Agency. Failure resulted from a weak understanding of the Zionist underground and from lack of cooperation by Agency authorities. Normally Britain's junior partner, the Jewish Agency was, by 1945, struggling against British restrictions on Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine. Its militia, Haganah, turned to cooperation with terrorists. British intelligence predicted that such developments could occur, but failed to identify them as they unfolded. Britain's dependence on Zionist security intelligence was a key vulnerability that never was addressed by policy-makers. The Jewish Agency leveraged its cooperation, applying it to prevent terrorism in Egypt and the United Kingdom, where violent incidents would harm the Zionist cause. It had little reason to prevent terrorism in the key battlegrounds of Palestine or Europe, and so terrorism harmed Britain's will to continue fighting. The root cause of Britain's failure was at the policy level. Despite known weaknesses, government never assessed its own will and ability to uphold restrictions on Zionist immigration, or to fight terrorism, as against the Yishuv's will and ability to struggle against Britain.     

Reclaiming A. D. Gordon's deep eco-nationalism

This study seeks to add to the burgeoning literature on the relations between nationalism and environmentalism by examining the ideas of A. D. Gordon (1856–1922). Gordon is not well-known outside the realm of Zionist scholarship. Nonetheless, a close re-examination of his ideas reveals that Gordon offers a hybrid brand of deep eco-national theory that frames traditional deep ecological themes within a general theory of nationalism. Whereas Gordon's theory introduces the ‘nation’ as a central notion to deep ecology thought, at the same time, it adds an ecological dimension rarely taken into account in theories of nationalism. This analysis further shows that although Gordon's pioneering eco-national theory had high potential for bridging between the two disciplines, it eventually faded into obscurity like eco-national ideas elsewhere. As Jewish national independence came into view, Gordon's distinctive eco-nationalism was overshadowed by anthropocentric-based Zionist politics.     

A Selection of Books on Zionism and the Land of Israel, 1989

Barnet Litvinoff, ed., Selected Letters of Weizmann, Am Oved and Yad Chaim Weizmann, 463 pp.

Meir Miber‐Maiberg, In the Shadow of the Citadel: The Stand of Safed, Milo Publishers, 379 pp.

Eliahu Eilat, Through the Mists of Time: Memoirs, Yad Yitzhak Ben‐Zvi, Jerusalem, 233 pp.

Hagit Lavsky, ed., Jerusalem in Zionist Consciousness and Deed, Shazar Center and the Center for the Study of Zionism and the Yishuv, 464 pp.

Twenty Years in Jerusalem — 1967–1987, a collection of articles edited by Professor Joshua Prawer and Ora Achimeir, Defense Ministry Publishing House and the Jerusalem Institute for the Study of Israel, 267 pp.     

Tourism geography research in China: institutional perspectives on community tourism development

The explosive growth of tourism in China since the 1980s has generated attendant interest in tourism research in the country, among researchers both in the mainland and outside. The dialogue between the two communities (domestic and international researchers) is also growing, but is as yet still limited, with insufficient contributions from Chinese mainland tourism researchers to the international academic world. China provides a rich field for examining the cultural, social and institutional context in which tourism develops. Recent studies of village-based community tourism development in China, with an emphasis on institutional perspectives, provide some insight on the dynamic and complex changes of rural communities along with tourism development. In general, these papers show that village participation in decision making is growing, although examples of disempowerment are as rife as those of growing empowerment. Contested resources are one of the most influential factors in this struggle, along with the rapid growth of tourism that the country has experienced since the 1980s. The papers in this special collection also demonstrate the distinct character of domestic tourism research in China, which engages the rich body of literature published in Chinese, but is generally less connected to broader international debates in the predominantly Anglo-American English publishing realm.     

Decadent pioneers: Land,space and gender in Zionist revisionist thought

Soviet Russia in the 1920s was the scene of intensified Zionist activity, fed by an economic and existential crisis among large segments of the Jewish population and tolerated to a surprising degree by the Soviet authorities. The article explores these factors and the “Soviet context” of Zionism, and documents the powerful influences they exerted on the young membership of the Zionist organizations. The author's interest goes beyond articulated ideological positions to include learned habits of work, political and cultural practices, and perceptions of the social and the personal. She analyzes the transplantation of these elements of political culture into Palestine by the 3,000-odd young Zionist immigrants who arrived between 1924 and 1931, cautioning that ideas and practices were borrowed selectively and modified by the reality of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.     

Symbolic Places of National History and Revival: A Study in Zionist Mythical Geography

Symbolic places that celebrate history and invest locations with mythical meaning provide a sense of identity in place and time; they fuse history and geography in terms of myth and memory. The retrieval and evocation of ancient history in terms of symbolic places seems to be especially significant in periods of national revival, when the invention and reinvention of tradition feature prominently in the framework of nation-building. This study examines an important aspect of the formation of the mythical geography of Zionist restoration: the retrieval and evocation of ancient Jewish history in terms of Modi'in, Massada, Beitar and Yavneh. These four places have figured prominently in the shaping of the symbolic matrix of Zionist revival. The article examines the emergence of these symbolic locations and elaborates on the cultural and political meanings assigned to them in different periods and political contexts. It further elucidates their association with particular sectors of Zionist society, and their affiliation with ideological perspectives, and focuses on particular symbolic places that have emerged in the course of Zionist restoration and the conflation of a Jewish past and a Zionist present. At the same time, this is a case study of the politics of symbolic places and their role in the shaping of the mythical geography of national revival.     

The ingathering of (non-human) exiles: The creation of the Tel Aviv Zoological Garden animal collection, 1938–1948

This article examines the formation of the animal collection at the Tel Aviv zoological garden. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the article analyzes the images and practices of animal importation. It shows that in spite of the importance of Zionist enthusiasm in driving the establishment of the Tel Aviv zoo, and the attribution of Zionist vocabulary to animals living in it, its significance cannot be reduced to Zionist ideology and practice. The zoo’s animal collection was the product of the specific historical, colonial-imperial circumstances formed under the British Mandate. The gathering of the animals reflects the indispensable British contribution to the development of cultural endeavors in Palestine, and the coexistence of British and Zionist aspirations.     

Rats in Alberta: looking at pest-control posters from the 1950s

How did the rat-control program, launched by the Government of Alberta in 1950, become associated with the identity and heritage of the province? The authors answer this question by undertaking close visual analyses of the anti-rat posters and pamphlets that were distributed by the government throughout the 1950s. Using a visual methodology inspired by semiotics, they argue that the early rat-control program ambitiously promoted Alberta as a unified, clean province that was both distinct from its prairie neighbours and for the most part populated with vigilant, hardworking citizens eager to remove unwanted intruders.