Jewish Pioneer Cemeteries and Zionist Geographies at the US Mexico Border

As organizers and scholars explore the intimacies between Israeli and US nation-building projects, the phrase, “Palestine-Mexico Border” has emerged to capture the way that US and Israel collaborate through militarized surveillance and ecological extractivism to reassert their national borders. Overlooked, particularly in the US context, is how religion and religious space are important technologies and processes that justify and entangle national borders in global context / imperial borders. This paper explores the relationship between Jewish sacred spaces in Southern Arizona, and the intimacies of racio-religious geographies across and between US and Israel border zones. 

At the crossroads of Religious Studies and Critical Geography, my project looks at the Bisbee-Douglas and Tombstone Jewish Cemeteries, two historically preserved Jewish burial grounds in Southern Arizona established at the turn of the twentieth century that have been protected by organized preservation initiatives in the last forty years. Through auto-ethnographic accounts of my years of travel and from the cemeteries, including encounters with US Border Patrol, I juxtapose the safety and value the State assigns my white Jewish body and Jewish space, with the destruction and criminalization of the bodies and sacred sites of the O’odham Nation. Furthermore, I draw from secondary and primary accounts of the Tombstone and Bisbee-Douglas cemetery restoration projects, including testimonies from Jewish and non-Jewish community stakeholders, commemorative plaques, and museum exhibits, to demonstrate how Jewish sacred sites function as commemorative sites of American democratic freedom as told through the mythic figure of the Jewish Pioneer. The Jewish Pioneer archetype was born through nineteenth century travel memoirs, photography, broadway/vaudeville, poetry, historical fiction in the Jewish presses, written by mostly assimilated, mostly urban Jewish Americans writing about eastern european Jewish immigrants into frontier narratives to assert their americanness via land, masculinity, and racialized violence. The cemetery restoration projects offer a contemporary canvas for these 19th century fantasies… but the frontier on which they imagine and celebrate Jewish settlement is not only the American frontier, but the frontier of Western imperialism in Palestine. The memory making that unfolds in the cemeteries reveals a Jewish Pioneer subject who helped settle the American frontier as a stepping stone towards settling a Jewish frontier through Israeli nation-building in Palestine. As such, the “Pioneer Jewish” cemeteries demonstrate how Jewish place-memory can function as an alibi and justification for Western settler colonial projects between the American Southwest and Jerusalem through a mobile myth that casts the West as a process that produces religious refuge despite its reliance on indigenous dispossession.