Research
My research brings together a novel combination of archival and published sources to illuminate the construction, workings, and limits of Jewish national culture in Palestine during the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods (1870s—1948), and the early decades of Israeli statehood after 1948. These were periods marked by the settlement of heterogeneous groups of Jews in Palestine, the establishment of Zionist institutions and political parties, and evolving, competing perspectives from local Jews and Arabs, as well as diverse international actors, on the nature and eventual outcome of Zionist immigration. Through studies of contested and constantly negotiated Jewish rhetoric in Palestine, my research has laid bare some of these fractures, probed the construction of national narratives, and resituated the Jews of Palestine in their overlapping local, Middle Eastern, imperial, and Jewish diasporic contexts.
My first book, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948, was published with Yale University Press (2015) and received the 2015 Shapiro Prize—the annual prize for best book from the Association for Israel Studies. Babel in Zion, along with several additional articles on the politics of language in Palestine, overturns the conventional historiographical wisdom about a Jewish nationalist crystallization around a single, symbolic tongue—Hebrew. I demonstrates the extent to which Jews in Palestine, despite an overall collective commitment to the revived national vernacular, were aware of, knowledgeable in, and constantly talking about the symbolic and practical relevance of languages other than Hebrew. These linguistic spheres included Jewish mother tongues such as Yiddish and Ladino; languages of nation states such as German, French, Russian, and Polish; the imperial English of the British mandatory power in Palestine; and the Arabic spoken by Palestine’s majority population and, more broadly, in the Middle East region, including by many Jews of Middle Eastern descent.
More recently, I have been working on a new book manuscript, provisionally titled Furrows of Memory: Narratives of Violence, Victimhood, and Heroism in Palestine’s Early Zionist Colonies, which explores the evolving legacy, in Zionist collective memory and historiography, of the earliest period of Jewish agricultural settlement in late 19th century Palestine. Though known retrospectively as the “First Aliyah [ascent],” this period has often been overshadowed by subsequent waves of Jewish settlement, dominated ideologically by Labor Zionists who denounced their predecessors’ colonies as weak, bourgeois, or excessively religious. Nonetheless, Zionists and non-Zionists of multiple stripes built highly evocative narratives around the figures and events of the First Aliyah period. Why, how, and in what specific historical contexts, I ask, did these early settlement narratives get revived, and to what ends?
Focusing on a set of local incidents and individuals from this period, my project considers the conceptions and representations of violence, victimhood, and heroism in newspapers, correspondence, colony (moshava) records, memoirs, and local historiography. These sources enable me to comment on the shifting and ambiguous utility of national origin stories and the changing appropriations of the past in both local and national frameworks during the rising Jewish-Arab tensions of the British Mandate period (1922—1948); the 1948 war and the resulting Israeli destruction of many of the Palestinian villages central to First Aliyah narratives; anxieties about heroism and sacrifice in the Israeli state of the 1950s and 1960s; and the political shift in the late 1970s from Labor to right-wing political control.
My first book, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948, was published with Yale University Press (2015) and received the 2015 Shapiro Prize—the annual prize for best book from the Association for Israel Studies. Babel in Zion, along with several additional articles on the politics of language in Palestine, overturns the conventional historiographical wisdom about a Jewish nationalist crystallization around a single, symbolic tongue—Hebrew. I demonstrates the extent to which Jews in Palestine, despite an overall collective commitment to the revived national vernacular, were aware of, knowledgeable in, and constantly talking about the symbolic and practical relevance of languages other than Hebrew. These linguistic spheres included Jewish mother tongues such as Yiddish and Ladino; languages of nation states such as German, French, Russian, and Polish; the imperial English of the British mandatory power in Palestine; and the Arabic spoken by Palestine’s majority population and, more broadly, in the Middle East region, including by many Jews of Middle Eastern descent.
More recently, I have been working on a new book manuscript, provisionally titled Furrows of Memory: Narratives of Violence, Victimhood, and Heroism in Palestine’s Early Zionist Colonies, which explores the evolving legacy, in Zionist collective memory and historiography, of the earliest period of Jewish agricultural settlement in late 19th century Palestine. Though known retrospectively as the “First Aliyah [ascent],” this period has often been overshadowed by subsequent waves of Jewish settlement, dominated ideologically by Labor Zionists who denounced their predecessors’ colonies as weak, bourgeois, or excessively religious. Nonetheless, Zionists and non-Zionists of multiple stripes built highly evocative narratives around the figures and events of the First Aliyah period. Why, how, and in what specific historical contexts, I ask, did these early settlement narratives get revived, and to what ends?
Focusing on a set of local incidents and individuals from this period, my project considers the conceptions and representations of violence, victimhood, and heroism in newspapers, correspondence, colony (moshava) records, memoirs, and local historiography. These sources enable me to comment on the shifting and ambiguous utility of national origin stories and the changing appropriations of the past in both local and national frameworks during the rising Jewish-Arab tensions of the British Mandate period (1922—1948); the 1948 war and the resulting Israeli destruction of many of the Palestinian villages central to First Aliyah narratives; anxieties about heroism and sacrifice in the Israeli state of the 1950s and 1960s; and the political shift in the late 1970s from Labor to right-wing political control.
