Reverse Zionism

My dissertation develops and articulates Reverse Zionism as both an artistic practice and a critical methodology, emerging from my sustained engagement with the visual and ideological legacy of Zionism. Through reflexive analysis of works created between 2006 and 2024, I explore how the appropriation, inversion, expansion, ambiguity, and pre-enactment of Zionist imagery can generate alternative, speculative, and restorative narratives. Rooted in my own biography – growing up in a moshav in Israel, socialized into the national myth, and later working from Europe – Reverse Zionism interrogates the constructed national, territorial, and theological consciousness of Zionism without collapsing into anti- or post-Zionist binaries.

Drawing on archival research in the Zionist National Archives and the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive, I trace how early Zionist propaganda films mythologized the transformation from diasporic Jew to “New Jew” while erasing Palestinian presence. I appropriate this cinematic grammar, redirecting its ideological charge toward critical and speculative interventions. In works such as A Declaration (2006), Summer Camp (2007), and The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection (2008), I re-stage national symbols to destabilize their authority and open space for counter-histories.

This methodology extends beyond Israel/Palestine in And Europe Will Be Stunned (The Polish Trilogy) (2007–2011), which relocates Zionist and National Socialist visual vocabularies to Poland, producing uncanny reversals of exile, return, and nationhood. Later works, Malka Germania (2021) and Light to the Nations (2024), interweave fascist aesthetics, Jewish messianic thought, and science fiction to imagine non-linear, cyclical temporalities and speculative redemptions.

Reverse Zionism reuses ideological imagery to create a counter-imagination that reveals the exclusions, contradictions, and latent utopias of nationalist narratives. By merging fiction and reality, historical and speculative time, this practice aims to transform political memory into a space for potential repair (Tikkun) as a political act. This dissertation positions Reverse Zionism as a transferable artistic methodology for confronting and rewriting dominant histories, destabilizing ideological closures, and proposing potential and speculative futures.