Excerpt from Professor Louis Kaplan's

"FREELANDscapes: Imagining a Jewish Refuge in Australia":

"What if Jewish Territorialist leader I. N. Steinberg (1888–1957) and his organization The Freeland League had instituted its proposed Kimberley Plan by purchasing millions of acres from the pastoralist Michael Durack in western Australia in the late 1930s, thereby saving Jewish lives before the Holocaust? Utilizing digital media (including the software programs Rhino, 3D Studio Max, and Photo-shop), This project models and renders nothing less than an imaginary Jewish homeland situated in the Australian outback. From the rugged look of the landscape, we are quite far from the European shtetls and yet Yiddish appears to be spoken here. In contrast to Theodor Herzl’s Zionism that fixated on the return of the Jews to the ancestral Land of Israel as the promised location to build a modern nation-state, the Freelanders rather advocated cultural autonomy alone and concentrated their efforts on settling uninhabited land wherever it was available on the globe. 

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“The Imaginary Jewish Homelands of I. N. Steinberg” is a collaborative research-creation project supported by an Insight Grant of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Like many contemporary works that make art through the excavation of archival or museum collections, the project reanimates and repurposes original documents (e.g., newspapers, letters, memos) found in the voluminous Papers of Isaac Nachman Steinberg housed at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York" 

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When complete, the project will consist of a virtual reality world where the participant can traverse through the 90 virtual buildings that Shiff's team has constructed, and read the I.N. Steinberg archive as it looms larger than life on the walls and facades of each building and, in this way, ponder how history may have taken a different path if Steinberg's utopian dream had been realized. ​​​