Chapter 45
When you need a miracle to occur, you go to the place where miracles are not past, but future, and where they are not rare, but everywhere. From 1885, when Nathan Birnbaum coined the term “Zionism,” to the eve of World War II, those who supported the forging of a Jewish state popularized the notion at world’s fairs and expos, an inventory of shows that included the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris, the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, and the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Modern, also in Paris.
At the Century of Progress fair, for example, instead of dull speeches pestering crowds with let-my-people-go harangues, the Zionist impresario Meyer Weisgal produced a pageant. Called “The Romance of a People,” it was performed on Jewish Day at the Chicago expo. It was one of two dozen days the fair’s overseers designated to spotlight the nationalities that composed Chicago’s stupendous and stippled immigrant population: In 1927, nearly 30 percent of the city’s inhabitants had been born in Europe, with its Jewish population numbering about 275,000.
It wasn’t the first time a Jewish social movement had found expression through exhibitions. In 1909, the first Jewish Farmer’s Exhibition was held over two days in New York during Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. Funded by a philanthropic program that helped Jewish immigrants avoid the squalid tenements of overcrowded urban areas, it loaned these former artisans and mechanics money to start farms in twenty states and Canada. The crop of farmers grew from about 8,000 the year of the show to 90,000 in 1930. The program’s success, noted the New York Times in 1909, belied the ethnic group’s negative image, of “object[ing] to hard physical labor.” Sixty years after the exhibition, a descendant of those immigrants hosted the most famous party in history, when Max Yasgur’s upstate New York farm accommodated the Woodstock music festival in 1969.
In the years leading up to World War II, Jews staged Palestine-themed exhibitions to aid the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) and agitate for a Jewish national home. Yishuv’s Commerce and Trade department focused heavily on international exhibitions, called Levant Fairs, as part of its strategy of turning Palestine into a commercial hub.
While a Palestine exhibit was part of the “Races in Residence” section of Great Britain’s Empire Exhibition in 1924, the real impetus to exhibit Palestine at world’s fairs came from Jews who supported Jewish resettlement there and the creation of a national Jewish home.
After fair officials and Weisgal debated whether the Jews were a race, a religion, or a nation, a deliberation that would determine the kind and location of any building they would be represented in, they cut the conceptual Gordian knot and agreed to the conventional—a Jewish exhibit in the Hall of Religion—and the curious—a pageant, which would be called the Romance of a People.
Held in Soldier Field, and using the machinery and properties of the Chicago Opera House, the Romance of a People depicted 5,000 years of Jewish history in a setting that made Cecil B. DeMille movies look like community theater productions. Headlining the event was Chaim Weizmann. Perhaps the best-known Jewish figure in the world, he played a key role in England’s issuing the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the country committed itself to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Weizmann also headed the Jewish Agency, which was established in 1929, and after World War II he served as the first President of Israel.
The voices of cantors, sounding the way headstones feel, intoned the opening lines of Genesis in Hebrew: “And God said ‘Let there be light—and there was light.’ Trumpets and multitudes of voices heralded the coming of the earth’s first dawn.” The cast encompassed 3,500 singers, actors, and dancers, along with 3,000 Jewish youths who made up the chorus and 750 dancing girls who sprinkled flowers around a massive Torah that had been placed on a four-tier stage. Overhead, the Star of David and the blue-and-white flags of what would be the new Jewish Palestine hung before a crowd estimated to number 125,000, who paid 50 cents per adult and a quarter for each child.
The pageant, which lasted about ninety minutes, was a panorama of Semitic history, from the Old Testament to Jewish rituals, from the bondage in Egypt to the dreadfulness of exile and the shame of idolatry. Even Moloch, the Canaanite god, appeared, the unholy abomination breathing fire and demanding the sacrifices of children it was then fed. The night’s soundtrack was a mixtape of the shofar, the Song of Miriam, and the chants of the camel driver. The pageant was so popular that the Chicago Tribune sponsored a restaging of it a few days afterward.
Song and dance weren’t enough to move history in the right direction just yet, however. Hitler came to power and a three-year period of violence against Jews in Palestine, known as the Arab Revolt, saw hundreds of Jews killed to stem the tide of their immigrating to and purchasing land in Palestine. To realize the dream of a homeland, Weisgal needed a similar huge stage as vast as the Chicago expo but a radically different strategy. To break out of the conceptual ghetto of religious dioramas to which Jews were often forced into at fairs, Weisgal fought for a static pavilion at the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair. At about 1,200 acres the fair would be nearly triple the size of the Chicago expo, with perhaps a correspondingly huge audience that would match the Windy City fair’s attendance of more than forty million.
More importantly, Wesigal fought for Jewish Palestine to be recognized as a kind of de facto nation equal in standing to any of the thirty-three countries exhibiting there. Negotiating the prejudices and preconceptions of fair officials, Wesigal won a series of victories that were all the more remarkable for their time and place: In 1939, the year the fair opened, the United States turned back the S.S. St. Louis, carrying a doomed freight of 937 mostly Jewish refugees from Germany, and Congress swatted down the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have given safe harbor here to 20,000 Jewish refugee children under the age of fourteen from Germany.
Despite the entrenched Gentleman’s Agreement to leave Jews to their fate, Weisgal got his wish that the pavilion would be cataloged in the fair’s Book of Nations, represented in the Parade of Nations, and its blue-and-white flag flown along with those of other countries. His only setback was the pavilion’s being stationed in the Community Interest area instead of the Government zone. (But then, Turkey and Sweden were stuck in the Food zone. Florida, no stranger to irony even then, ended up in the Amusement zone.)
Weisgal’s approach to the fair also included linking a Jewish state itself to the show’s theme of “Building the World of Tomorrow.” Just as the Futurama beckoned with the promise of cars in every garage and uncongested superhighways to drive them on, the Jewish pavilion would offer a sparkling future Palestine over a primitive past one. It would be a choice as simple as choosing antibiotics over bloodletting.
Weisgal and the pavilion’s organizers vetoed the idea, which had gathered steam, of hiring Norman Bel Geddes to plan the pavilion. Bel Geddes, a polymath who had conceived skyscrapers, radios, refrigerators, and scenic designs for the Metropolitan Opera and the General Motors Pavilion’s Futurama, was rejected in favor of Arieh El-Hanani (Arieh Sapoznikov), a Ukrainian émigré who had settled in Palestine in the 1920s.
The pavilion, modeled in the Bauhaus style popular then, conveyed that promise of modernity, alongside a nod to tradition, with a massive hammered-copper relief sculpture that decorated the exterior. Created by Art Deco sculptor Maurice Ascalon, the monument, called “The Scholar, the Laborer, and the Toiler of the Soil,” contained a trio of human forms, each expressive of the three vocations that, together, fuel a prosperous society. The exterior garden was planted with Cedars of Lebanon near a front entrance whose doors were made of eucalyptus, the tree whose use in Palestine’s malarial swamps dried them out and rendered them safe. Inside, Palestinian marble lined the walls of the Memorial Hall, which was dedicated to those who sacrificed their lives for the dream of a Jewish homeland. The pavilion’s various exhibits emphasized the way Jewish settlers had terraformed a region, as Conrad said of the Sahara, “without restful shade, without refreshing water”: irrigating desert wastelands, reclaiming swamps, and cultivating farmlands. Numerous displays covered the Palestinian school systems and the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. There was even a glass model of The Levant Fair on display.
The pavilion’s subtext argued that a Jewish state was a fait accompli, as much as the next sunrise or full moon. What was arid, would be green. What was backward, would be modern. The world finally agreed, when the state of Israel was formally declared on May 14, 1948.