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This series of images was taken over a period of two years in the Palestinian Territories and Israel. Like a lot of people raised in the Bible Belt, the “Holy Land” held a lot of mystique for me, mostly because of my time spent in the church, surrounded by biblical imagery and stories. The storybook images we looked at during Vacation Bible School every summer and in Sunday school every week were particularly vivid. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time reading the Bible, and as I imagined these characters living in a world two thousand years before me, they were not entirely dissimilar to the characters in a storybook: muted, pastel, and dreamy.
In my 30s, there was a two-year period when I was traveling back and forth between Bethlehem in the Palestinian Territories — where I was covering the news for mostly leftist, activist publications, trying and failing to make a documentary about youth imprisonment, and sporadically working as a bat mitzvah photographer for NYC families who had traveled to Israel — and Brooklyn, New York. The majority of my time was spent in the occupied Palestinian Territories, and as an artist and storyteller, it was often an overwhelming and heartbreaking place. But those feelings were always intermingled with my childlike wonder of the place.
Some of you reading this may also know of the more complicated issues at stake here; American Christian evangelical communities that don’t support Palestinians’ right not to live under military occupation or not to have more parcels of their land confiscated and settled, for instance. But most of this series is just about my own personal reckoning with the “Holy Land,” and seeing my magical childhood place in its current state.
David and the IDF (Al Khalil/Hebron)
And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it…1 Samuel 17:49
The Land of Milk and Honey (Firing Zone 918)
If the Lord is pleased with us, then He will bring us into this land and give it to us—a land which flows with milk and honey. - Numbers 14:8
The Lamb (Firing Zone 918)
He was painfully abused, but he did not complain. He was silent like a lamb being led to the butcher, as quiet as a sheep having its wool cut off. - Isaiah 53:7
The Holy Trinity (Nazareth)
Then said Mary unto the angel, ‘“How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” And the angel answered and said unto her, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” - Luke 1:34 - 35
Leah (Al Khalil/Hebron)
Then Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is completed.” 22 So Laban gathered together all the people of the place and made a feast. 23 But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob, and he went in to her. - Genesis 29
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