ABSTRACT
The Zionist photographic archive, with its national ambitions, was not the only mechanism active in the Jewish space. There is another archival framework which needs to be considered in the context of the Zionist project, which suggests a nuanced, divergent system of distribution and narration adopted by the JNF. This chapter explores a non-Zionist, Diasporic approach to the formation of a Jewish nation, a Yiddishist perspective, which also developed an archival framework to preserve, maintain and distribute a deterritorialized space of collective belonging. From this point of view, the JNF archive becomes part of a broader constellation of archival activity and the shaping of a civic space, and communal memory. A view of this different system and its possible intersection with the Zionist archival space reveals archival relationships that were not previously examined: between seemingly disparate discursive spaces, namely the Hebraic-Zionist and Jewish, Yiddish-speaking cultural arenas. Moreover, I suggest that without observing these multifaceted relations, the Zionist archival system cannot be fully comprehended.
