The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times

II. Siting the Jewish Tomorrow

II. Siting the Jewish Tomorrow Scenes of ideological persuasion reshaped the Jewish future by establishing rhetorical and visual ‘‘facts on the ground.’’ Essays by Anna Shternshis, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Anat Helman, and Amy Horowitz all examine the role of aestheticized ideology in the twentieth-century Jewish experience . How have art, popular and folk music, architecture, and exhibition practices been employed by Jews (or on their behalf) to advance specific political agendas? Modern Jews no less than governments and political parties , it seems, have richly exploited the aesthetic domain to advance their various models of the ideal tomorrow. In ‘‘May Day, Tractors, and Piglets: Yiddish Songs for Little Communists ,’’ Anna Shternshis offers an oral history of Soviet Jewish propaganda songs instituted by the Bolshevik regime from the 1920s to the 1940s. Here the Soviet formula of ‘‘socialist in content and nationalist in form’’ meant instilling in Jewish children a secular collectivist sensibility that would be reflected in new Soviet celebratory rituals. The goal was to reinforce the legitimacy of the communist state through a cultural indoctrination that would be at once ethnically particularistic and nationally transcendent. Through interviews with approximately two hundred former students of Yiddish schools, almost half of whom were able to recall music and lyrics from their childhood with remarkable accuracy, Shternshis demonstrates how the skillfully wrought songs utilized Yiddish-Russian homonyms and double entendres to subvert traditional religious culture and inculcate an ethos favoring secularization, modernization, and collectivization. At the same time, however, as Shternshis suggests, the reliance upon Yiddish as a vehicle of Russification ironically reinforced the sense of a distinctive Jewish identity within Soviet life. While Bolshevik planners aimed their new rituals at the hearts and minds of Yiddish-speaking children, American Zionist visionaries promoted a future statehood in Palestine, nowhere more grandly than in the subjunctive space of the world exposition. In ‘‘Performing the State: The Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, 1939–40,’’ Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that the architects of the Jewish Palestine 80 Siting the Jewish Tomorrow Pavilion, chief among them the Zionist impresario Meyer Weisgal, created, through the ‘‘agency of display,’’ an adumbration of an ‘‘inevitable’’ Jewish state. They did so at a time, moreover, when Zionist political fortunes, not to mention world Jewry’s existential circumstances, had come under severe threat. The Jewish Palestine Pavilion was in essence a performance, a veritable enactment of statehood through the three-stage process of ‘‘envisioning ,’’ ‘‘visualizing,’’ and ‘‘projecting.’’ Kirshenblatt-Gimblett situates this process within the larger framework of the visual culture of the New York World’s Fair, which opened on the eve of World War II and reopened for a second season during the war itself. At this fair, Communist, fascist, and New Deal regimes employed the techniques of Madison Avenue to merchandize their respective utopias. The difference was that while the former were states seeking to make propaganda, the Jewish Palestine Pavilion was propaganda seeking to make a state. The disparity in Zionist history between its prosaic ideological fantasies and more colorful (and certainly messier) human realities emerges sharply in Anat Helman’s exploration of the cultural character of Tel Aviv. In her provocatively titled essay, ‘‘Was There Anything Particularly Jewish about ‘The First Hebrew City’?,’’ Helman argues that Tel Aviv has occupied a unique place in Zionist mythology. Although in modern times Jews have been stereotypically urbanites, Zionists depicted Tel Aviv as the first city since ancient times actually to be built by and for Jews. Yet such assertions begged the question of precisely how Tel Aviv should be ‘‘Jewishly’’ experienced . Helman describes the various alternatives posed by Tel Aviv’s planners , artists, and residents. She shows that from the time of its creation the city found itself perpetually juxtaposed with the sacral Jewish center of Jerusalem . Embracing the contrast, Tel Aviv sought to forge its counter identity as a ‘‘Hebrew’’ (meaning secular and national) as opposed to ‘‘Jewish’’ (religious and diasporic) metropolis. Despite these efforts, Helman demonstrates that Diaspora Jewishness (in terms, for instance, of taste, speech, and worship) continuously penetrated the city’s borders to subvert the official ideology. If Russian Jews in the 1930s were made to sing the Soviet Yiddish future and American Jews persuaded to visualize statehood in Palestine , then the citizens of Tel Aviv were, by necessity, forced to live out the contending narratives of the ideal Jewish tomorrow, a fate which Helman delineates in terms of the city’s architecture, languages, artistic ‘‘schools,’’ ethnic...