Jessica Carr

College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Year Fellowship recipient for 2011-2012

I am a PhD. Candidate in the Religious Studies department who completed coursework and exams in Jewish Thought and Culture and North American Religions. My dissertation is currently titled, "The Practice of Palestine: Images of the Holy Land in Jewish American Public Culture in the Early 20th Century." I will examine how travel literature, schoolbooks, art calendars, world's fairs, pageants, posters, and periodicals displayed images of ancient and contemporary Jewish life in Palestine. I argue that Jewish Americans with a wide range of political and non-political commitments used artistic representations of Palestine as a kind of 'projection screen' for their vision of Jewish American life and identity. Discourse on Palestine is frequently studied in terms of Zionist and non-Zionist political ideology. However, this focus on political ideologies does not reveal much about the integration of discourse on Palestine into the quotidian practices of Jewish Americans. I want to consider how the participation in public culture centered on Palestine affected the lives of American Jews outside of Zionist or anti-Zionist politics and how representations of Palestine helped produce culture less concerned with systematic philosophical and political thought and more committed to simply marking life in America as Jewish.

I am honored to have been selected for the 2011-2012 College of Arts and Sciences Fellowship and appreciative for the research opportunities it will provide for me. I began my research at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati in Spring 2011, and the fellowship will allow me to pursue further archival research in Chicago, New York, Boston, and Jerusalem. I am also thankful for all the support I have received from my committee, the Religious Studies Department, and the Jewish Studies program. Many faculty members and graduate students have provided an ideal collegial environment for producing my dissertation.