Herzlian Matrix: Theme Parks, Promised Lands, and Simulacra

In his novel Old-New Land (1902), Theodor Herzl, the ‘father’ of political Zionism, elaborated in much detail on his vision of a Jewish State in Palestine. Criticized already by his contemporaries as a mere imitation of European cultural and technological achievements, Herzl’s vision has frequently been measured against the reality of the State of Israel. More recently, it has been suggested in two literary engagements with the Herzlian matrix that Old-New Land functions in a Baudrillardian sense as a simulacrum, or model of the real, which obscures the absence of a corresponding reality. Simon Louvish’s City of Blok (1988) is an early fictional critique of the widening chasm between the model and its real which, almost three decades later, was reiterated in a different format and presumably without knowledge of the earlier postmodern novel in Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider’s semi-fictional Herzl Relo@aded (2016). In this article, I seek to trace both the characteristics of Herzl’s vision as a simulacrum that preceded the real and the potential influence of an early theme park on his conception of the Jewish state in relation to the criticial engagement of Louvish as well as Rabinovici and Sznaider with the Herzlian matrix.