This show is an installation comprised of works that Ashery performed, filmed, photographed, painted, assembled, stitched and collected since leaving Israel in 1987. Ashery herself is the represented subject within many of these works. This collection of works has never been seen together before, and some of the works have never been exhibited publicly, whilst others have been widely shown.

Despite Ashery’s continuous artistic engagement with her Jewish and Israeli identity as a form of resistance to the occupation of Palestine, for this show Ashery decided to pick works that conceptually exist outside the notion of Israel. The show is titled The Beautiful Jew for that reason. For the premise of this show, the Jew can only be deemed beautiful outside Israel, outside Zionism, it can no longer be regarded beautiful, and a militant occupier of other people, at the same time.

In this show, the notion of the beautiful Jew, is used in a poetic and performative sense; the Jew as an immigrant, as different, as marked, defined, undefined, redefined, childish, aestheticised, gendered, exotic, politicized, sexualised, an object of fear and desire.

Extracts from the essay Oreet Ashery’s Site-Specific Corporeal Turns

by Roberta Mock

The following year, a few months after the performance of Right, Left, she made an intervention entitled Can I Join You Just This Once? at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. The occasion was a large-scale demonstration and rally, held in June to mark the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of large portions of Gaza, the Sinai, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights following the Six Day War in 1967. Ashery’s intervention was quiet and unsensational: she approached an assemblage of orthodox Jewish men, members of a movement called ‘Neturei Karta’, and asked them if she could “join them just this once”. She is dressed plainly as ‘herself’, with both a photograph of an orthodox Jewish man and a “Free Palestine” badge pinned to her short-sleeved T-shirt. Their reply was firm but pleasant: “No, sorry. You are a woman.” After this rebuff, she tried to stand as close to the group of men as they would allow. Commenting on the video stills, Ashery observed that “there is something a little Charlie Chaplin about it all”, reminiscent of her descriptions of Marcus Fisher as a “clown” and of the filmic effects in Oh Jerusalem.

In seeming to attempt to ally herself with the Neturei Karta, Ashery was opening herself up to risk and accusations of anti-Semitism. This may seem paradoxical to non-Jews since, unlike in Dancing with Men, she is not trying to deceive these men nor does she clearly pose an overt threat that might place her in a dangerous position in their midst. The Neturei Karta, who take their name from a Talmudic phrase that means “guardians of the city” in Aramaic, are anti-Zionist Haredim. The movement was formalised in the mid-1930s and its members still live primarily in and around Jerusalem, although there are significant numbers of adherents in London and New York. Their objection to political Zionism is theological: God exiled Jews from the Holy Land and it is a sin to establish the state of Israel before He chooses to send the Messiah to redeem them. While there are other, mainly Chassidic, anti-Zionist Haredi Jews, even they tend to confer with mainstream Jewry in their denunciation of the Neturei Karta. This is primarily due to the active support of the movement’s radical faction for leaders such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, and the current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There were other Jews participating in that day’s protest and rally, including Israeli military refuseniks, the actress Miriam Margolyes and the comedian and writer Alexei Sayle. Ashery’s intervention, then, was not intended to imply that the Neturei Karta are the only available – or even preferable – option for Jews who wish to support the Palestinian cause. One of its most noticeable effects is that it forced these orthodox men to turn to look at, engage with and respond to a secular woman. However, Can I Join You Just This Once? might also be seen as a return and response to her earlier intervention work.

Rachel Garfield observed in 2004 that by dressing Marcus Fisher in the “generic tropes of orthodoxy” rather than signalling an alliance to a particular community, Ashery indicated that “her interest lies in addressing those who don’t know the difference – the generic art world, gentiles, and non-affiliated Jews”.Through her spatial proximity with the Neturei Karta, Ashery draws the attention of both Jews and non-Jews to several facts: there are many types of Jews including many types of Haredi Jews; there are many different relationships between Jews, Israel and Zionism; and some Jews, of all types, are women. Marcus Fisher had originally represented Ashery’s attempt to (re)claim what she imagined to be an older, more effeminate, homoerotic culture of European Jewish masculinity, one that stands in contrast to the macho, militant posturing of Israeli ‘sabra’ men.This could be considered, at best, queerly utopian and, at worst, hopelessly naive. While the Neturei Karta stance on Israel may not be shared by other Haredim, their positions on gender and women’s roles certainly are. In Dancing with Men, orthodox gender exclusion was represented implicitly through the knowledge of what Ashery was not, what was hidden; Can I Join You Just This Once? makes this exclusion explicit and visual.

Harry Brod, an American professor of philosophy and humanities who has written extensively on male Jewish issues, argued in 1995 that the “Achilles heel of Zionism” has proven to be its masculinity. He therefore called for a “feminist Zionism” that “would have at the center of its vision a consciousness of the needs of other peoples already on the land when modern Zionism began the work of giving birth to the state of Israel”.While productively challenging its central terminology (both feminism and Zionism) and the binary oppositions that sustain it, Ashery’s multiply located, performative “corporeal turns” both open out and further the debate about how such a feminist Zionism might be enacted through the body.

Written for, and published in Ashery’s monograph Dancing With Men,

(Published by Live Art Development Agency, 2009)