As a response to antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as weak and brainy, Zionism wanted Jews to develop their muscles instead. It was a useful call that coincided with the need to literally build the Jewish home in Palestine from the ground up. The agricultural development of land and the construction of villages and towns on it provided ample opportunities for Jews to become the kind of muscular Jews Zionism fantasized about. Later, when the Arab resistance to Jewish settlement grew, Jewish farmers developed into soldiers as well and completed the transformation of Jews.

Jewish modernity in Europe began with Hebrew, the ancient language of the Jews. Intellectuals like Moses Mendelssohn used Biblical Hebrew to introduce Jews to modern, secular European culture and disseminate the ideas of the Enlightenment among them. This odd choice had two advantages. Hebrew was familiar to many Jewish men and the Biblical version used by Jewish intellectuals was also proof of the ancient heritage of the Jews. But if Hebrew was a kind of cultural affectation for enlightened Jews, after the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, it became a necessity and a vehicle for forming a new Jewish nation there.

Zionists wanted to develop their own musical sound, folk as well as art or so-called classical music. They approached it in a number of ways that were inspired by romantic nationalism again. They went “back to the people” and recorded the musical traditions of various Jewish communities from around the world, primarily from non European Jewish communities, which were considered more authentic and closer to ancient Judaistic musical traditions. They also reinterpreted musical traditions from Eastern Europe, from whence most of them came. The attempt to bind together East and West characterized early Zionist musical creations, which often included lyrics in Biblical and rabbinic Hebrew that emphasized the nation’s ancient pedigree.

Zionists wanted to reshape Jewish culture in the spirit of modern nationalism. They based their national vision on Jewish history and Jewish tradition but gave both a thoroughly modern interpretation. Instead of hiding their difference to ease their assimilation into the greater, non-Jewish society, they emphasized Jewish difference by giving it a distinct cultural character. They began by writing modern literature in Hebrew, their ancient language, and eventually turned Hebrew into a spoken language, the vernacular of their emerging national community. They organized the land they bought and settled in Palestine in new ways that expressed their revolutionary social and communal values and built new kinds of houses on it. Their new occupations as farmers, builders, and then soldiers reshaped their bodies, the clothes they wore, and the way the carried themselves. They renewed their festival calendar to celebrate and commemorate their innovations, and they developed new aesthetic sensibilities in visual art and music that expressed their cultural revolution in more abstract ways.

Zionists wanted to develop a distinct Jewish national art. And although no one knew how to do it exactly, the hope was that the Zionist cultural revolution would eventually take on an aesthetic shape or sensibility as well. The first art academy that was established in Palestine in 1906, the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, emphasized the manufacture of crafts that would express the spirit of Jewish nationalism. The idea was to replace a Christian and European visual dictionary with references that would be more Jewish, that would reflect Palestine more closely, and would eventually become part of a uniquely Jewish visual subconscious. The success of the school was limited and it was eventually replaced by more conventional artistic schools in the spirit of European modernism. At the same time, the spirit of nationalism influenced almost all artists and designers, including painters, sculptors, illustrators, and graphic designers.

The Zionist revolution had a spatial and architectural dimension. Although the land Zionists bought in Palestine had been settled for centuries, they considered it virgin soil and wanted to reshape it in the spirit of Jewish nationalism. To take possession of this land, they spread small villages over it and introduced industrial farming. Most of the villages were agricultural cooperatives called kibbutz in Hebrew. Kibbutz cooperatives were developed to cope with the lack of infrastructure, means of production, lack of agricultural expertise and experience and expressed the national and socialist aspects of the Zionist movement. Land that could not be cultivated was covered by trees, small woods of pines and cypresses. Cities were less important for Zionists, with one exception, Tel Aviv, a low-density, green city that was inspired by anti-urban ideas imported from Europe.

All human societies draw lines between disconnected events in their history and create illusions of continuity or topographies of the past. These traditions of remembering, which began in the Hebrew Bible, played an important part in the renewal of the Jewish festival calendar in the Yishuv. Festivals do this very well because their repetition year after year allows societies to emphasize historical connections and revise their stories of origin by creating unique emotional maps. The Zionist festival calendar did it especially well by revising old Jewish festivals and by inventing completely new ones as part of an updated program that emphasized the ancient Jewish agricultural past and the ancient Jewish military past, all in the spirit of Hebrew nationalism.