Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine: Legitimizing Israel through a Photobook

In September 1948, New York-based journalist Ruth Gruber, with Current Books, published a photobook titled “Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947.” The book is a small volume, with one hundred and thirty four pages of unillustrated text followed by fifty-one photographs, crammed together over thirty-two pages with minimal captions. What Destination Palestine shows are the events of the summer of 1947, when a ship of 4,500 Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees, the SS Exodus 1947, tried and failed to break the British blockade on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The refugees were ultimately sent back to Hamburg and then to British-controlled internment camps in Germany.

Between the dramatic news events and the publication of the photobook, Israel had become a reality. In this context, Gruber’s photobook took on a timely importance as the means through which people saw the new state as a justified reparation to the horrors of the Holocaust. In other words, the book provided a ready-made national mythology. In the decade following its publication, Gruber’s book inspired the best-selling novel Exodus by Leon Uris (1958, Doubleday) as well as its Hollywood film adaptation by Otto Preminger (1960). Each of these subsequent adaptations built on the photobook’s structure, specific imagery, and visual logic. They cemented an enduring myth of the birth of Israel as a direct consequence of the plight of Jewish survivors and refugees. This understanding of Israel proved popular in mid-century America well beyond Jewish circles and is today an institutionalized form of memory in Israel across permanent exhibitions and museums.

Dr. Samols is a Rothschild Hanadiv Europe Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL's Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies. His research explores the connections between European history, Jewish studies, and visual cultures across the twentieth century. His work focuses on vernacular media forms such as photobooks, analyzing how they shaped understandings of Jewish history for both Jews and wider publics. Samols holds a PhD in History from the University of Southern California (2023), an MSc in European studies from the London School of Economics (2016) and a BA in history from New York University (2012). He is also an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow in the ISGAP-Woolf Institute Programme for Critical Antisemitism Studies.