Zionist art used idyllic oriental-Jew images to conceal labor exploitation

Evidence

In view of this attitude it would be difficult to see the cover of the JNF’s Golden Book of 1913 only as Bezalel artists’ naive expression of Zionist imagery: “pioneers toiling in fields and vineyards, shepherds playing their flutes to their flocks.” Idyllic images of oriental Jews as agricultural workers intended to present the Yemenite workers in an ideal setting; they also helped, however, to conceal the truth about the hardships that the Yemenites had suffered in this project in which the JNF played an important role. All in all, the Yemenite Jews rarely featured in Zionist art of this kind and it is significant that the cover of the third Golden Book of the JNF featured agricultural workers with a more properly Western appearance. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 621

Categorization

• CANDY: The shift from orientalized Yemenite workers on the 1913 Golden Book cover to ‘more properly Western’ workers on the third cover is a compact ironic detail about how image-making sanitizes exploitation.