Cute Jews: Modernist Photographic Forms and Minor Aesthetic Categories in ‘Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel. Ein Fotobuch’

Abstract

Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel was the last overtly Jewish-themed photobook published in Germany before the Holocaust. Although it consists only of a six-page introduction by the scholar-activist Bertha Badt-Strauß, one page of captions, and twenty-one photographs by photographer Nachum ‘Tim’ Gidal of adorable young children in Mandatory Palestine, its propaganda mission transcends its diminutive size and surface superficiality. This article interprets this photobook as an example of the photo essay, a modernist form that emerged from Weimar Germany’s unique media environment, in which photographs assumed rhetorical and argumentative functions generally associated with written language. To encourage German Jews and particularly German-Jewish women to emigrate, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel creates an allegory of the children’s vulnerability by eliciting responses associated with the minor aesthetic category of ‘cuteness’. To this end, it draws on two important photo essay genres of interwar Germany: photobooks and illustrated magazine photostories about cute children and about Palestine. By synthesizing these discourses, Gidal and Badt-Strauß create a cultural artifact that aims to establish positive, affective relationships between German-Jewish readers and Mandatory Palestine, and to convince the former to visualize and embrace the latter as they might imagine their own children. In this way, Jüdische Kinder in Erez Israel broadens our understandings of both the media constellation from which photo essays emerged, and how this form helped broaden the visual lexicon and aesthetic strategies central to the project of Jewish cultural and political regeneration.