Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Acknowledgement -- Illustrations -- Note on Terms and Transliteration -- Introduction -- Before Statehood -- The Clarion Call: E. M. Lilien and the Jewish Renaissance -- Boris Schatz’s Pantheon of Zionist Cultural Heroes -- “The Garden of Love”: Early Zionist Eroticism -- Zionist Revival and Rebirth on the Façade of the Municipal School in Tel Aviv -- Objects and Conceptions of Sovereignty -- Israel’s Scroll of Independence -- Hues of Heaven: the Israeli Flag -- Menorah and Olive Branches on Israel’s National Emblem -- From Exile to Homeland: the Mythical Journey of the Temple Menorah -- Zionism Liberates the Captured Daughter of Zion -- The Twelve Tribes of Israel: from Biblical Symbolism to Emblems of a Mythical Promised Land -- Old and New in Land of Israel Flora -- Ancient Magic and Modern Transformation: the Unique Hebrew Alphabet -- Sculptural Commemoration within the Israeli Public Space -- From Pilgrimage Site to Military Marching Grounds: Theodor Herzl’s Gravesite in Jerusalem -- Natan Rapoport’s Soviet Style of the Yad Mordechai and Negba Memorials -- Holocaust and Resurrection in Yigal Tumarkin’s Memorial in Tel Aviv -- In Conclusion: Secularizing the Sacred, Israeli Art, and Jewish Orthodox Laws -- Back Matter -- General Index.

As historical analyses of Diaspora Jewish visual culture blossom in quantity and sophistication, this book analyzes 19th-20th-century developments in Jewish Palestine and later the State of Israel. In the course of these approximately one hundred years, Zionist Israelis developed a visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging “civil religion.” Bridging internal tensions and even paradoxes, artists dynamically adopted, responded to, and adapted significant Diaspora influences for Jewish-Israeli purposes, as well as Jewish religious themes for secular goals, all in the name of creating a new state with its own paradoxes, simultaneously styled on the Enlightenment nation-state and Jewish peoplehood.