Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2016. Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA ABSTRACT What are the historical proximities and parallels linking Jews and Muslims in U.S. imperial culture? What are the technologies of knowledge produc- tion that make and make sense of these connections, and what are their effects? The Jerusalem Exhibit at ’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis offers a generative site through which to consider these questions. The exhibit included hundreds of “native” Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants, and exemplified a national covenantalism at the interface of U.S. settler colonialism and imperial rule. Visuality played a key role in staging and naturalizing racial difference between and among these vari- ous “natives,” even as its will towards transparency was routinely thwarted. While such overdetermined pedagogical labor never satisfied the predilec- tions of American imperial authority, by the end of the exhibit’s run, it also served as an impetus to express political Zionism’s desires for Jewish nation-state status commensurate with other political formations organiz- ing the World’s Fair. KEYWORDS: comparative racialization, settler colonialism, indigeneity, visual culture, representation KEITH P. FELDMAN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SEEING IS BELIEVING: U.S. IMPERIAL CULTURE AND THE JERUSALEM EXHIBIT OF 1904