Liora R. Halperin

Project Description

Professor, Jewish Studies, History

Ph.D. UCLA (2011)

Faculty Profile

Liora R. Halperin is a scholar of Jewish cultural and social history, with particular 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 recently published “The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past” (Stanford University Press, 2021), which tells the story of Zionist settler memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies (mashavot) established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. She received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2011. She previously served as Chair of the Israel Studies Program.

Videos

View a video on the history of the Hebrew language written by Liora Halperin for BimBam.com: