AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies

The evolution of the Zionist movement under Herzl's leadership coincided with the mass migration of eastern European Jews to the United States that lasted from 1881 until the de facto closure of the United States borders to Jewish immigrants in 1924. American Zionist leaders worked out a unique interpretation of Zionism centered on the quest to legitimize Jewish life in the United States within the bounds of Zionism. They tried to build a Zionist movement that would provide the political, public, and ideological means for improving and bolstering the status of Jews in American immigrant society. Initially, American Zionism was an underfunded minority movement, but subsequently, most markedly following Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's Zionist activity during World War I and the Balfour Declaration, it became one of the most dominant public forces among American Jews and played a major role in the dramatic events experienced by the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s. The founding fathers of American Zionism invested considerable intellectual effort into formulating an ideological amalgam that would reconcile Herzl's philosophy with the American version of Zionism. American Zionism did indeed travel a different path from that of its European counterpart. American Zionists generally did not stress migration to Palestine as a fundamental tenet of their ideology and practice, preferring instead to cultivate Zionism as a central component in the fabric of their lives within American society rather than as a means to promote migration to the Land of Israel.

Jessica L. Carr's valuable and absorbing book provides a unique and fascinating contribution toward understanding the course of the development of American Zionism and toward illuminating the complex network of relationships that existed between the Zionist movement and the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, [End Page 458] and between the State of Israel and the American Jewish community. Orientalism and the way in which it is reflected in a wide variety of pictures and images provides the framework for the book's argument. Carr's book begins with a comprehensive discussion of its theoretical background, focusing mainly on the general concept of Orientalism while highlighting its specifically American manifestations. The use of Orientalism as a central organizing theme defining the collection of pictures presented in the book enables the author to discuss the fundamental questions concerning the place of Zionism among American Jews in general and during the first half of the twentieth century in particular. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a discussion of images connected to an organization, event, or publication, such as The Zionist Organization of America, The National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, The Jewish Encyclopedia, The Jewish Exhibit and Jewish Day at the 1933 World's Fair, and maternalism in Hadassah's "Propaganda."

We learn from the book that Orientalism was harnessed by American Jewish opinion shapers as a means to mitigate the tension between the opposition of American Jews in general and the Reform movement in particular to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Zionist movement, which aimed to do exactly that. The use of oriental rather than national elements was an indispensable tool in this process. Orientalism served to forge an affinity with the Land of Israel while eschewing nationalist imagery. The author correctly notes that Orientalism was also a crucial component of Christian imagery relating to the Land of Israel, and that this facilitated the use of these images in a Jewish context as well. Naturally, after the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and as the crisis of European Jewry deepened until its tragic culmination in the Holocaust, the Zionist and national elements in the pictures presented in the book came more to the fore, testifying to the growing importance of Zionism among American Jews.

Throughout the book, Carr emphasizes the fact that Mizrahi Jews and Arab inhabitants of Palestine were excluded from the pictures published in the United States. Insofar as they did appear, they were portrayed as passive bystanders who...