Date:
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The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents
Liora Halperin
Associate Professor of International Studies and History and Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies, University of Washington
Register in advance: https://bit.ly/3r1rb14
Talk description: Halperin will discuss her recent book about the practice and politics of Zionist memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (moshavot) that were established in late 19th-century Ottoman Palestine. These colonies emerged prior to the founding of the Zionist movement and the rise to dominance of its Labor Zionist stream, but was later integrated, albeit ambivalently, into the Zionist narrative of settlement as the "First Aliyah." Treating the “First Aliyah” as a symbol created and deployed only in retrospect between the 1920s and 1960s, and drawing connections to memory practices in other settler societies, she considers how private agriculturalists and their advocates on the Zionist center and right celebrated and forged the "First Aliyah" past as a model of private ownership, political impartiality, and hierarchical relations with hired rural Palestinian labor. She also considers the centrality of settlement to Zionist collective memory into the present and the politics and erasures of Zionist celebrations of "firstness.”
Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of International Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, and the Jack and Rebecca Benaroya Endowed Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her recent book is The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford, 2021). She is also the author of Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015). (For local interest: she's also a 2005 graduate of Harvard, where she concentrated in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations).
Image: AS Shapiro on horseback in Shomrim conference in Netanya, 1937.
Contact: Liz Flanagan