In this event, faculty member Liora R. Halperin will discuss her new book, “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” and the creation of historical narratives around Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine, with Stroum Center Director and fellow faculty member Noam Pianko.

About this talk

In her new book, “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past,” Liora R. Halperin looks at the history of moshavot, Jewish agricultural settlements in Ottoman Palestine, and the ways in which the history of these settlements has been folded into the story of the State of Israel in the early 20th century.

Beginning in the late 1870s, Jews from the religious communities of urban Palestine, joined in the 1880s by migrants from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire and other parts eastern Europe, began to purchase land and establish private agricultural colonies in Ottoman Palestine, with the goal of creating productive, self-sufficient Jewish communities. Though these agricultural colonies predated the Zionist movement of the late 1890s, they served as hubs for subsequent Jewish migrants and later came to be seen as the first Zionist wave of Settlement, or “First Aliyah.” Yet, because of their more religious or socially traditional ethos and use of Arab workers, the stories and ideas surrounding these private settlements were often at odds with later Zionist movements, especially Labor Zionism and the call for “Hebrew Labor.”

In a conversation with Noam Pianko, Professor of Jewish Studies, Halperin will discuss the stories around these Jewish settlements, how they fit into the broader story of Zionism, and how she reconstructed this history via a wide range of sources.

About the speakers

Liora R. Halperin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at the University of Washington, and has scholarly interests in nationalism and collective memory, language ideology and policy, and Jewish-Arab relations both in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and in the early years after Israeli statehood. Her first book, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine” (Yale University Press, 2015), 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, Jewish Social Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and The Jewish Quarterly Review, among other venues. She received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2011, and is the Benaroya Chair of the UW Israel Studies Program.

Noam Pianko is the Samuel N. Stroum Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Pianko also directs the Samuel and Althea Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Herbert and Lucy Pruzan Professor of Jewish Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies & Judaic Studies from Yale University in 2004. His most recent book, “Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation” (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2015), won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Book prize, and traces how the concept of “peoplehood” emerged at the beginning of the last century as an American-Jewish innovation calibrated to shape discussions of nationalism, Zionism, and American Jewish identity.

This event is cosponsored by the Department of History at the University of Washington.