ABSTRACT
This chapter opens at a crucial moment that accelerated the activities of the Zionist movement and its international visibility: the devastating horrors of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which, for the first time, were photographed and printed in newspapers in the West, such as The New York Times. The photographs haunted public opinion in the US and Europe, and transformed the operations of the Zionist movement. Suggesting the Zionist body is resurrected from these mutilated bodies, this chapter traces the emergence of the body as a concept within a Zionist framework, and the ways in which the Zionist movement sought to realize this body—as an imagined ideal and a concrete form, and, crucially, how photographic technologies were inseparable from the development of this concept in Zionist thinking and praxis. Zionist leaders and thinkers argued that only by working the land of Zion, by redeeming it and thus reclaiming it, could the individual and collective body be invigorated. The Zionist photographic archive would be entrusted with the role of producing the image of this body and disseminate it worldwide.
