Daughters of sunshine: diasporic impulses and gendered identities

Text of a paper delivered at a conference held at University College London in June 1995, in which the author discusses the nature of Jewish culture and national identity and the influence on them of the experience of the Diaspora. She explains that, through her own experience as an Israeli citizen who has taken as her field of study modern German culture, she perceives in the culture in which she was raised both a sense of identification with, and of exclusion from, European culture which she attributes to the experience of Diaspora Jews before they founded the state of Israel. Using photographs of women taken in the early years of the Israeli state, she examines the Zionist ideology that informed the founding of the state. In these photographs, which depict, ostensibly, empowered female workers contributing in equal terms to the founding of the nation, she finds evidence of a bourgeois, patriarchal attitude which she attributes to the Eurocentricity of the Jewish establishment at the time. She concludes by considering the work of the contemporary Israeli artist Sigal Primor, which explores in the context of modernism similar questions concerning the relationship between Zionism and European culture, and the role of gender within this discourse.