ABSTRACT
Alcalay's "Jew as Pariah" transformed into the "Jew as Book" is writ masculine, a metaphor extracted from material culture and conceived of in terms of the universalizing and homogenizing stereotypes of abstracted scholarship; out of time and out of place. In the period leading up to the "War of Independence" and the establishment of the state in 1948, we see a shift in the photographic construction of femininity circulating within the culture. The images, though, indicate another set of shifts, in the perception of a femininity mobilized for a cause, dictated by circumstances rather than by the severe strictures of ideological purity. It is a poignant image of cultural nostalgia, of the ideals of modernism looking back to the seductive fictions of the old world and its belief in culture's ability to transcend reality. The imaginary setting of the work is a fiction of urbane, European culture centered around the world of opera houses and concert halls.
