The Making of a Zionist City: Ellen Auerbach’s Short Film Tel Aviv, 1933-36

This paper offers an analysis of short film Tel Aviv, which interwar photographer Ellen Auerbach produced in Palestine between 1933-1936. Auerbach is perhaps best known for the photographs she and Grete Stern made as ringl+pit, whose aesthetic sold the excitement of a modern lifestyle at the same time as it made visible the constructed nature of both images and gender. Before settling permanently in the United States, Auerbach initially lived in Palestine where her work continued to engage the intersection of gender and modernity through two endeavors: the children’s portrait studio Ishon, which Auerbach ran with Liselotte Grschebina, and as a photographer for the Women’s International Zionist Organization. Central to my argument is the way in which Auerbach attempts to familiarize the city for Jewish European audiences using New Vision aesthetics. Drawing from Ariella Azoulay, I argue the film effectively “transformed [Palestinian inhabitants] into foreigners.” The sequences of the film, which focus on land, labor, and daily life, depict the city as continuously under construction. Tel Aviv emphasizes the role of women workers, women consumers, and mothers as essential to the modernist project of Zionism.