Liora Halperin

Jewish cultural history and collective memory, the history of Zionism, Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, language ideology and policy

Professor Halperin is a scholar of Jewish cultural and social history, with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory and Jewish-Arab relations both in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and in the early years after Israeli statehood. She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford University Press, 2021) and Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine  (Yale University Press, 2015), which was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She has published academic articles in The Journal of Social History, The International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Jewish Social Studies,and The Jewish Quarterly Review, among other venues. She is currently working on a book project about the twentieth-century self-image and commemorative practices of those Jewish communities whose family origins in Palestine/Israel dated to before the founding of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century.