Inside the Cult of Equinox

THE SPECTATOR, September 15, 2025

Inside the Cult of Equinox

Fueled by a mysterious marketing campaign, the gym now has more than 100 outposts

Scratch the surface of Silver Age Rome and what do you find? Most likely, a tight subterranean vault built as a meeting room for the followers of Mithras. This Persian mystery cult was everywhere in the early Anni Domini, coming to prominence between the decline of Hellenism and the rise of Christianity, filling that gap between the gods of Olympus and the God of Moses. The cult’s dark temples, the Mithraea, squeezed devotees into opposing benches designed to make them uncomfortable, all while in communion with their fellow initiates. Today, sociologists might call a Mithraeum a “third place.” Here was the kind of space where Roman men who had become disillusioned with Jupiter Stator could go between work and home to be purified together in a shower of bull’s blood.

The modern gym is one of our own ubiquitous third places, but only the urban fitness chain known as Equinox has positioned itself as an upscale mystery cult. “COMMIT TO SOMETHING,” beckons the gnostic advertising campaign of this self-described “high-performance lifestyle leader.” When presented with the accompanying outsize images obstructing the gym’s windows, we might well wonder: commit to what?

Launched in 1991, the gym now has more than 100 outposts spread across New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Houston and Washington, DC, as well as London, Toronto and Vancouver. The Equinox campaign started by the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy in 2016, diverged notably from the standard gym appeal of “improving lives through fitness” or “member-friendly memberships that won’t break the bank,” as the bargain-basement New York Sports Club might say. First shot by Steven Klein – whom the New Yorker described as creating “fashion photography with a pistol and a pulse” for his images that “teetered between the seductive and the sadistic” – the Equinox campaign was far from mens sana in corpore sano. It wasn’t even about going to the gym at all.

Instead, we saw a model etching a tattoo over what remained of her preemptive double mastectomy. “Scars aren’t ugly,” she said in the video component. “Scars are really just beautiful badges reminding you what you chose to go against; not just the size of your opponent but the size of your commitment.” Other materials presented a young man with a paralyzing stutter. “Your commitment tells your story better than you ever could,” he eked out. In another, three deaf cheerleaders signed in unison. In another, a model cut her hands practicing the harp as blood ran down her instrument. In another, a naked man received a haircut and manicure-pedicure as a small mirror covered his pudendum. In another, a woman breastfed two babies at her table at a restaurant. In yet another, a shirtless man was soon covered in bees.

At the time, Equinox promoted its campaign as an “intimate, provocative and deeply moving exploration of personal identity” that “confronts current cultural issues and asserts that commitment has the power to define who we are in the deepest sense.”

This year, Equinox updated the approach with a shoot by the British fashion photographer Charlotte Wales that extended these themes: a model licks a leather boot; a woman lies on a bed of nails as a robotic arm sticks her with a hypodermic needle; another model (this time transsexual) walks side by side with an AI version of their likeness covered in metallic parts. “Commitment is obsessed,” reads Equinox’s latest ad copy. “It’s now. It’s relentless. Always one step ahead. Abandon half-measures. Surrender to your urges. Sacrifice for obsession. Commitment isn’t a choice. It’s an awakening. Let desire drive you. Commit to something.”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here? To hammer home the infernal message, Equinox throws extra shade on those who make that naive New Year’s resolution to get in shape. “If you waited for the ball to drop, you dropped the ball,” advises the gym. “On January 1, we blocked new membership sign-ups. Because commitment doesn’t start when the calendar resets. It’s for those who are all in. Not when the ball drops, the clock strikes, or the calendar flips – but always.”

So what if you can’t commit to the gym, the message goes. You should really be committed to an intensive-care unit. Or a mental asylum. Or you should receive a felony charge. But in truth, the “something” to which one mainly commits at Equinox is a mid-four-figure annual fee.

The real mystery of Equinox is what you get for the expense. In June, New York attorney general Letitia James won a $600,000 judgment against the company by arguing that its contractual agreements were too hard to break. The award of a mere $250 to each of the plaintiffs – which equaled less than a month of dues, to say nothing of the initiation fee – left members less than impressed. “Tish gets ripped!” ran the New York Post headline. “New Yorkers not impressed with AG Letitia James’s crackdown on gyms.”

Equinox positions its membership as fast-track admission to the cosmopolitan faith. At the root of such modern urbanism, of course, is masochism. High taxes, crowded subways and filthy streets appeal to the broken-window theory in reverse: that our souls will only get better if our city lives get worse. Professional sadists such as New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani therefore thrive in the same way as that Equinox spin instructor who comes around to crank up your bike’s resistance. It’s all about abnegating the flesh and globalizing the intifada to a techno beat. In one early Equinox advertisement, a screaming, shirtless woman holds up her fist in front of a classical building surrounded by a night-time security detail. Just what she is protesting does not matter so much as the appearance of her consequence-free LARPing. (She is portrayed by the fitness model Bianca Van Damme, daughter of the “muscles from Brussels” Jean-Claude Van Damme.)

Equinox members may not be true basement-dwelling “Brooklynites for Gaza,” but they are content to go along with the latest thing as long as the towels are stocked and the steam room stays open. We all signed up to be in this Paul Verhoeven-movie of a place, and that’s life in the big city.

“A manic attempt to make the posthuman sexy,” is how one agnostic member explained it to me. “I have the distressing sense that I am beholding another stripe – or, heaven forbid, chevron – on the ghastly and vexillologically metastasizing ‘progress flag.’ The clientele strikes me as being finance and finance-adjacent bros plus gay men for whom human growth hormone, rather than Ozempic, is still the lifestyle supplement of choice. As for the women, I’d have no idea. I don’t notice.”

Not noticing is a big part of the Equinox culture. Members don’t converse. Most employ monastic silence as they move from station to station, carrying their water bottles and iPhones upon which a small dog must be featured on the lock screen. No grunts. Little sweat. The chilled eucalyptus towels see to that. After reports a decade ago of problems in the steam room, the facility posted signs of a “zero-tolerance policy regarding inappropriate, sexual or lewd behavior. Our staff is on notice.” The closest most come to catching a sexually transmitted disease at today’s Equinox is when a form of athlete’s foot requires an oral course of fungicide (I now wear shower shoes).

And yet, past the many cult symbols that line its entry, Equinox tends to be well-maintained and almost always uncrowded. Bottles of four different soaps and lotions line each shower stall: a shampoo and conditioner of rose, pepper and sage; a facial cleanser of aloe, geranium and rose; a body cleanser of chamomile, bergamot and rose. Additional bottles of face and body cream are available in the locker rooms. So too are Q-Tips, deodorant, mouthwash, razors, even a container of black hair ties to maintain one’s man bun. The only recent controversy here occurred a year ago, when Equinox switched out its Kiehl’s line of products for Grown Alchemist, a brand that can also be purchased at (gasp) Target.

My Equinox membership grants me access to all the spin classes and boxing sessions my heart desires. There is a mobile media library showing the proper use of every exercise machine – something I found particularly useful as I recovered from a suite of orthopedic setbacks. With my level of membership, I can visit the Flatiron location across from my office, the Upper West Side location next to my apartment, the Columbus Circle location with the saltwater pool and just about every other location save for the nirvana that is the new Equinox Hudson Yards, which would cost me another $50 a month. Perhaps one day I too will join this “most spacious, thoughtful, and connected Equinox ever… the purest expression of high-performance living yet. The 60,000-square-foot luxury destination spans two floors and includes a 15,000-square-foot pool and sundeck.”

Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been spotted in his Make America Healthy Again jeans and hiking boots, lifting at Equinox. At some point we all reach that moment in life when we realize our aging frames must be committed to a daily routine of physical therapy.

By spending more than $300 a month with a company that advertises personal destruction, many urban professionals may feel they have purchased some progressive blessing on their self-care. For others such as myself, Equinox is simply a very nice gym.

When Art Goes to War

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2025

When Art Goes to War

Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South Bronx and found him surrounded by a pantheon in plaster and bronze (see “Gallery chronicle,” May 2007). At the time, Howard was completing a statue of Apollo. As with all of his work, this multiyear labor, built up through tens of thousands of hand-applied dots of plasteline, was destined to be cast in an alloy, one might say, of his own autobiography. Howard sculpts in epic and myth, including his war against our cultural status quo. He has long approached the plastic arts as if he were a Prometheus, a fallen god out to redeliver that creative fire from Mount Olympus.

I doubt I was the only observer who felt a mixture of elation and apprehension when, in 2016, the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission selected Howard out of some 350 submissions to design the centerpiece for its new war memorial on the Washington Mall. Here was a creative battle to end all art wars. I feared one unelected agency after another would wear down this aesthetic belligerent to a stalemate, if not gassing him into unconditional surrender.

It did not help matters that the designated site of Pershing Park, just around the corner from the White House, already contained a design from 1981 that had been the result of an earlier competition involving no less than Robert Venturi, Richard Serra, and M. Paul Friedberg—establishment grandees all. True, their site had been in decline for decades. First it was shoehorned into a sunken ice rink, then a swamp designed by the firm of Oehme, van Sweden, and finally a brownfield site of broken water features, abandoned postmodern pavilions, and a derelict garage for the Zamboni. Despite the sorry state, preservationists were quick to panic in this needle park as they dug up Kodachromes from opening day, 1981. Any commission would need to accommodate Pershing Park’s bones—including its existing monumental plaza dedicated to General John J. Pershing, which had been designed by Wallace K. Harrison with a statue by Robert White from 1983—even as it looked to create something revivified and new.

The location of the memorial site was just one of Howard’s many troubles. Our nation’s art-and-architecture insiders were sure to see the selection of Howard and his competition partner, Joseph Weishaar—a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of Arkansas, an architect who did not yet have his license at the time of the announcement—as interlopers in what was supposed to be an exclusive lawn party for pedigreed insiders. After all, the last starchitect to dip his beak in the National Mall was none other than Frank Gehry. In 2020, he left it with an anti-monument made of chicken wire, purportedly dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Of course, the war over the National Mall goes back much further. In 1982, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, submitted when she was an undergraduate at Yale (whew!), was a minimalist broadside against the capital’s classical aspirations. The assault was only somewhat countered two years later by the addition to the site of Three Soldiers, Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze sculpture of multiracial brothers-in-arms.

Sure enough, as I tuned in to view the endless agency meetings in the years following the commission announcement, it seemed as though Howard and Weishaar’s concept, called “The Weight of Sacrifice,” would be bled through a thousand bureaucrats. What initially called for three walls of engravings, all designed to surround a freestanding battle sculpture and an elevated lawn, was eventually reduced through eighteen different iterations to a single wall of sculptural relief less than sixty feet in length. Weishaar’s elevated lawn, meanwhile, returned back to Friedberg’s sunken plaza, now merely modified and tidied up, with Howard’s sculptural frieze essentially replacing the old Zamboni dock. (gwwo Architects, meanwhile, stepped in as managing architects, with David Rubin Land Collective serving as the landscape designer.)

The pressures might have been enough to shell-shock any creative soul. For Howard, it appears to have fired up some essential distillation, encouraged by his commissioners, including Edwin Fountain, as well as by Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society. Relief sculpture going back to antiquity has a special ability to convey the cycles of war. Unlike freestanding statuary, its program can be episodic. Rather than a single moment, relief can contain many moments across a single frame progressing from left to right, as for example up the spiral of Trajan’s Column in Rome.

Howard appears to have drawn from numerous sources as he recast his sculpture into what he titled A Soldier’s Journey—a long frame of a single figure in multiple scenes as he turns from his daughter and wife, marches off to war, faces the ferocity and terrors of the trenches, and returns home to his family. Howard’s wife, the novelist Traci L. Slatton, as project manager recorded the evolution online in preparation for a documentary about the commission called Heroic, to be released this summer. She also served as a model for a nurse in the composition; their teenage daughter provided the model for the girl at the start and end of the frieze.

For inspiration Howard looked to Ghiberti’s baptistry doors in Florence and John Singer Sargent’s Gassed, that epic processional painting of blinded soldiers from 1919 based on Sargent’s own frontline observations, now in London’s Imperial War Museum. The minimalism of Lin and the realism of Hart both seemed to become reflected in the synthesis of the evolving relief. So too the turmoil of Henry Merwin Shrady’s sculptural battle groups for his tripartite Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, which leads up to the United States Capitol from the west. That work took Shrady twenty years to complete and accelerated his untimely death in 1922 at just age fifty, a fact that did not bode well for Howard. The Grant Memorial was only completed by Shrady’s studio assistants Edmond Amateis and Sherry Fry. (Shrady’s pendant equestrian statue in Charlottesville of Robert E. Lee, completed by Leo Lentelli in 1924 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, was removed and melted down in 2023 as a consequence of the moral panics of 2017. This is just one of the many recent crimes against our sculptural patrimony that has yet to be redressed.)

Howard’s most significant invention in A Soldier’s Journey was surely mothered by the necessities of his impending deadline and what he could fully do with the sculptural space that remained for him. For an artist who could spend years building up a single statue, a multipart relief of more than three dozen figures, all over life size, could quickly add up to a terminal Shrady sum. A manual artist, Howard turned to digital solutions. At first he took some twelve thousand pictures of his models, posed in authentic period uniforms, with his cell phone. The many models—a mix of actors and military veterans along with his family members—recited period poetry during the long posing sessions. “Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920, proved to be particularly relevant to the emerging sculptural story:

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

To advance his production schedule further, Howard relocated for nine months to New Zealand, where he worked with Wētā Workshop, the concept-design company behind the Lord of the Rings franchise. Through Wētā’s digital modeling software, he developed and tweaked his sculptural maquettes to secure commission approval. With his models and their wardrobes in tow, Howard then traveled to the Cotswolds in England to work with Steve Russell Studios and the Pangolin Editions foundry. Here he positioned his models one by one in a 360-degree photogrammetry rig—a cage of 156 inward facing cameras feeding three-dimensional scanners—for a final round of imaging. After digital editing, Pangolin milled foam mannequins of these figural forms, which were left coated with a thin layer of clay.

Beyond merely accelerating his development time, this digital process significantly altered Howard’s final results. His use of digital modeling not only helped him to arrange his figures but also allowed him to build his relief more fully in the round, with increasingly true-to-life complexity. With the foam figures back in his studio, now a garage in Englewood, New Jersey, he sliced and diced slivers off of them while slapping on additional layers of plasteline. The action added an expressionistic finish and an urgent manual dash to the underlying digital printouts. The entire assembly was then cast by Pangolin in large bronze sections. In a final step, Howard patinated his bronze in dark gray with a brush and blowtorch.

Technological advancements have always upended creative practice in both destructive and generative ways that can be long debated. A century ago, the sculptor Paul Manship lamented the imposition of the Janvier Reducing Machine even as the mechanical lathe allowed sculptors to rescale their reliefs as never before (see my “Tokens of culture” in The New Criterion of December 2024).

A Soldier’s Journey, by Sabin Howard, The National WWI Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photo: James Panero

For an artist long dedicated to the importance of manual craft, Howard’s digital intervention has created a hybrid sculpture. A Soldier’s Journey is not classical in its own right. It is rather a modern work that speaks to the classical tradition, quite literally, through a contemporary lens. Viewing the completed assembly soon after its unveiling last September—most revealingly in the stark spotlights that illuminate the monumental site at night and shimmer in its reflecting pools—I sensed I was experiencing not traditional sculpture at all but rather actors frozen on a stage. The uncanny-valley hyperrealism of Howard’s digital scans has left us with a cinematic diorama caked in plasteline mud. In memorializing a war that defied all convention and accelerated our modern era, this end result may ultimately be more successful than any purely classical relief. Staring at his figures, which seem to stare right back as they march and spin and cry through the muck, I regarded the work as an unalloyed triumph.

It should come as little surprise that movie-making, an art form coming into its own at the time of the First World War, should have proven so successful at depicting the flashing terrors of that modern slaughter—and in turn influencing more traditional creative forms. King Vidor’s 1925 film The Big Parade remains one of the finest reflections of that conflict and deeply informed the cinematic painting style of Andrew Wyeth. The films All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), and, more recently, 1917 (2019) have all arguably done more to keep World War I in the popular consciousness than any other form of art.

Howard has taken up this cinematic idiom to give us a sculptural statement on the First World War that manages to make its century-old realities newly real. At the same time, his composition speaks to the history of relief in bold new ways. I was particularly struck by his use of traditional relief framing at the start of the composition that then appears to crumble away in the mire of battle. Further along, an American flag rises above the relief’s upper frame to signal the new standard on the horizon and the turning point in the war. Throughout the deep relief, the helmets and weapons and gas masks that are scattered about appear as though they could almost be kicked off the stone plinth and into the cascading fountain and reflecting pool beneath them.

At the unveiling ceremony, Howard aptly reflected on the message of his figures and what he hoped to achieve with a monument that gives new life to an old conflict:

There are no victims here. They are all heroes. They are all moving forward, calling upon their better selves, and giving unstintingly to their country, to protect what we so often take for granted, our freedom to choose what we will do with the gift of life.

A Lion in Zion

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2024

A lion in Zion

On “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York.

The raid on the town can only be described as an atrocity. Terrorists from across the border descended on the remote village and quickly overran its defenses. Trained and supported by a hostile state, which had planned the attack as part of a larger proxy war, tribal mercenaries went door to door “with horrid shouting and yelling,” according to one eyewitness account, “like a flood upon us.”

Over the course of the day, the attackers brutalized and murdered as many residents as they could find. They bludgeoned and burned the townspeople in their homes. People of all races and backgrounds fell victim to the assault. Anyone the terrorists could not round up to take back across the border as either a hostage or domestic slave was slaughtered. Women and infants, along with the infirm, were specifically targeted.

By the next day, ten men, nine women, and twenty-five children lay dead out of a population of 291, with more than a hundred people taken hostage. Nearly half the town was reduced to ashes as the attackers looted what remained. Even if they survived the initial onslaught, husbands and fathers had to watch as their wives and children were slain for not keeping pace on the forced march back to enemy territory.

Meanwhile, those who survived back home attempted to raise the funds to pay the kidnappers for the return of their kin—often in vain. Negotiations dragged on for years while the participants in the raiding party fought over the booty. Hostages had to renounce their faith as they were forced to live with their attackers. Half the captives never made it home. Eventually, one survivor gave witness to the massacre in a book that galvanized public opinion. Its title was The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.

The Deerfield Massacre of February 29, 1704, described above, is a reminder of the brutalities Americans endured in the creation of what became the United States. The attack on a remote village in the Connecticut River Valley by Mohawk Indians and their allies, crossing the border from Canada along with their French enablers, was just one episode in what historians know as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), part of the greater War of the Spanish Succession.

Nation-building is a difficult business. Often the outsize burden of cultivating a wilderness and taming a border can only be endured through faith. America’s early settlers, persecuted across the Atlantic, found power in their belief in the City upon a Hill, in creating the New Jerusalem that would become their Manifest Destiny. Some three centuries on, a similar faith in a Promised Land, a Zion, inspired Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to envision what became, just a few decades after his death at age forty-four, the modern State of Israel.

A small but potent exhibition now on view at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica called “All About Herzl” delivers on its promise to reveal this latter-day nation-builder through primary documents and the iconography that came to surround him.1 Drawing on the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization (here mostly in facsimile) and the David Matlow Collection of (original) Herzl memorabilia, the fascinating exhibition curated by Warren Klein presents the Zionist behind Zion and the cultural artifacts he and others deployed to inspire Israel’s creation.

A delegate card from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

The exhibition begins on East Sixty-fifth Street, where a banner for the show depicts Herzl in profile, hands clasped together beneath his Assyrian beard, leaning over a railing and gazing out at the Fifth Avenue façade of Temple Emanu-El and the Brooklyn Bridge. As with much Herzl iconography, this image represents a wishful concatenation. Herzl never visited the United States. The picture is rather a combination of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1901 photograph of Herzl overlooking the Rhine from his hotel balcony in Basel, Switzerland, taken as he attended the fifth Zionist Congress, with modern images of New York. For the exhibition-goer, a further opportunity to be seen in Herzl’s shadow continues just inside the lobby. Here visitors can stand beside a life-size statue of Herzl, arms folded, positioned in front of a backdrop of a Zionist Congress.

Trigger warning! These early chances to see yourself beside the founding father of the State of Israel, even the option to take a selfie with him, reveal a show that is unabashedly pro-Herzl, pro-Zionist, and upbeat about his nationalist vision. Like the energized state he inspired, Herzl understood the joys that could be released from Jewish sorrow, a fact reflected in the show’s sometimes lighthearted application of Herzl-iana. The mascot for David Matlow’s own “Herzl Project,” for example, based in Toronto, Canada, and established “to inspire people to be a little like Herzl and pursue their dreams,” is a Herzl-faced hockey player. At a moment when Israel’s frontiers are under vicious assault and cosplaying Mohawks are attacking America through its ally, the absence of doubt here for Herzl’s vision is refreshing. For those looking for a counterpoint, there is always Columbia University.

Whatever else you think of him, Theodor Herzl must be the most consequential theater critic in modern history. The Austrian-born playwright went from working as a cultural correspondent in Paris to inspiring what has become a nuclear-armed state. In the final eight years of his life, Herzl foresaw the descent of liberal Western Europe into barbarism as well as his own reburial in his future nation (by design, he was initially interred in Vienna in a transportable metal casket).

Herzl identified the mechanisms to turn his vision into a groundswell and to set its gears in motion. He mapped out a state that would serve as a beacon and bulwark for the region. In his utopian novel of 1902, Altneuland (The Old New Land), he envisioned a desert transformed into a Jewish metropolis. One translation of this book’s title provided the name for the city of Tel Aviv.

Herzl was not your obvious nation-builder. Born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in what is now Budapest, he attended a Protestant high school, where he studied German literature and poetry and at first looked down on “shameful Jewish characteristics.” The exhibition includes such artifacts as Herzl’s second-grade report card (in facsimile, ca. 1867) from the Israelitische Hauptschule Pest along with a rare photograph of him clean-shaven (ca. 1880).

When his family relocated to Vienna, Herzl joined a German nationalist fraternity and remained a member despite its growing anti-Semitism. In 1891, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse at a moment of populist turmoil in the French Third Republic. Three years later, anti-Jewish sentiment came to a head in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely accused of spying for the German Empire. The exhibition contains several illustrations from this trial and the subsequent degradation ceremony that divided French opinion. If liberal Western Europe could turn so fiercely against its Jews, Herzl reasoned, no amount of assimilation would solve what he called the “Jewish problem.” The only solution, he argued, could be found in the title of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Several editions, including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic translations, are here on display.

A bust of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

Calling in his preface for the “restoration of the Jewish State,” Herzl maintains that the “world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.” The “misery of the Jews,” he continues, can be turned into a new nation’s “propelling force.” History has shown that “the absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur,” since the hatred directed at them by their host nations—of “vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense”—is a “remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will.” In fact, the “longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out,” Herzl continues, since the “world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.” On the question of where this new Jewish state should be established, in one famous passage, Herzl weighs the two areas of recent settlement—“Palestine and Argentine:”

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Driven by necessity, Herzl concludes that the “Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question.”

By expanding Judaism from a shared ancestry and religion into a “political world-question,” Herzl found his earliest critics in assimilated Jews. They saw his Zionist call (a term he did not invent but deployed in a new way) as unnecessarily tendentious. At the same time, many orthodox observers believed that only Hashem, and not man, should aspire to return the Jews to Jerusalem (a handful of their descendants can today be seen joining the campus Hamas-niks). It was in the unreformed East, where Jews lived with no pretense of assimilation, that Herzl found his most fervent believers and the misery to shape his nation’s “propelling force.”

A bas-relief portrait of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

As Herzl devotes much of his book to the mechanics of nation-building—the handling and reselling of assets, the corporate and social entities that must be created, the use of negotiorum gestio, that “noble masterpiece . . . the Romans, with their marvelous sense of justice, produced”—The Jewish State can be a dry read. Yet the manifesto’s arid structure proved to be the kindling that ignited the movement.

As Herzl traveled to Constantinople to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for a parcel from the Ottoman sultan, his followers flocked to see him at the rail stops. Zionist chapters formed in cities across Europe and (to a lesser extent, at first) America. With the paintings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, books, medals, and statues that came to represent him, “All About Herzl” picks up with the abundant memorabilia produced around the early meetings of the Zionist Congress, the annual black-tie affairs that Herzl produced with enough pomp and circumstance to make his vision a reality. “If you will it, it is no dream,” he proselytized. The second Zionist Congress created the Jewish Colonial Trust and its Anglo-Palestine Bank, which went on to become Israel’s Bank Leumi. The fifth Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land, with the suggestion (made by a Galician bank clerk) that a collection box be placed in every Jewish home.

Herzl gave his life for his cause, dying from the fevered urgency of his dream. In death he became a political martyr, his image an icon, as represented in the exhibition’s final, salon-style hanging of twentieth-century depictions of him, which are inventively varied. In a Rudi Weissenstein photograph from Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, we see Herzl’s casket lying in state before its reinterment in Jerusalem—another redeemed captive returning to Zion.

1. “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” opened at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York, on September 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 23, 2025. ↩