Practices of photography on kibbutz: The case of Eliezer Sklarz

This article explores how socialist egalitarian ideology affected forms of documentation on the kibbutz in Israel, by examining its practices of photography. The study analyzes the work of one photographer, Eliezer Sklarz, and his role and function in the community, focusing on the visual content and style of his work. The article also describes the role of the kibbutz archive in promoting his work and in constructing kibbutz identity through its photographic archive, as a mechanism for creating Zionist kibbutz historiography. The study addresses the conflicted approach of kibbutz society towards photography: promoting documentation through the function of the archive on the one hand, while maintaining a dismissive role towards photography as a highbrow, middle-class practice, on the other.     

Contesting France: French informants and American intelligence in the dawning Cold War

By integrating French archives and untapped US intelligence records, this article uncovers a debate within US government circles about the accuracy of the entrenched image of France at the onset of the Cold War as decadent and teetering toward revolution. In exchanges with the White House, State Department and military, right-leaning French sources bolstered this view. French contacts in the Resistance meanwhile shaped Office of Strategic Services analysis that France was a strong, worthy ally. France became a contested idea with warring factions in both capitals seeking to influence US policy – with repercussions for Franco-American relations for decades to come.     

The Electrophoretic Revolution in the 1960s: Historical Epistemology Meets the Global History of Science and Technology**

This paper uses zone electrophoresis, one of the most frequently used tools in molecular biology, to explore two ideas derived from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's reflections on experiments. First, the constraining role played by technical objects—instrumentation and material conditions—in the production of knowledge or epistemic things. Second, the production of interconnected experimental systems by such technical objects, which results in the unexpected entanglement of research fields and experimental cultures. By the beginning of the 1960s, the inception of zone electrophoresis in laboratories around the world transformed—some say, revolutionized—the study of proteins. Even today, electrophoresis continues to open research venues and questions in biomedicine, molecular biology, human genetics, and in the field of molecular evolution. In my essay, I seek to look at the interconnected lives of zone electrophoresis and address the broader social, and even global context, in which this apparently humble technique became a salient tool in the production of biological knowledge. In so doing, I aim to take the past and present of the history and historiography of experimental systems to the future, where experiments and technologies are interrogated as they are used in different geographies and contexts, including contexts of poverty.