CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Abramson, Hani |
|---|---|
| Title | Crowning Hebrew Beauty: Gender, Race, and (Trans)Nation in the Interwar Pageants of Warsaw, Tel Aviv, and Beyond |
| Summary | In this thesis, I draw primarily upon the local Jewish press coverage of two key examples of Zionist pageantry in the interwar period: the Miss Judaea pageants of Warsaw, Poland in 1929 and the Queen Esther pageants of Tel Aviv, Palestine between 1926 and 1929. I consider how ideas about Jewish (trans)national identity, bodies, gender, race, and nation were negotiated and arbitrated through the practise of pageantry, informed by theories and concepts from Gender Studies, Nationalism Studies, and Jewish Studies. I make the case that the nationalist fashioning of Zionist identity and femininity by urban interwar Zionists through beauty pageantry was steeped in interconnected discourses regarding Jews and their supposed bodily degeneracy, racial thought, and modern nationalism and colonialism. I also argue that the pageants allowed urban men to negotiate their own gender and sexuality in reference to the creation of Zionist femininity. Following the cessation of the pageants in Poland and Palestine, this thesis moves to consider the continuation of this practise amongst urban Jewish communities in North America and Australia between 1928 and 1977. In doing so, I establish that the negotiation of Jewish national identity was (and still is) transnational. In this thesis, I bring together different strands of Jewish history to examine the historical process of manufacturing (trans)national aesthetics, allowing us to complicate the process that was imagining the pre-state, Jewish national collective. Further, I demonstrate that settler-colonialism informed the self-fashioning of Jewish Zionists, who saw themselves in competition with the local Palestinian-Arabs over, amongst other things, nativity to the land and ownership of it. Ultimately, I prove that across borders, urban Zionist men and women attempted to reconcile the contradictory elements of their collective identity through pageantry, dealing with existential questions regarding Jewish understandings of race and gender that exist to this very day. |
| Supervisor | Wilke, Carsten L. and Loney, Hana |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/abramson_hana.pdf |
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