EVENT DETAILS

Liora Halperin (Univ. of Colorado): "Babel in Zion: Negotiating Language Diversity in Mandate Palestine."

Liora Halperin is Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focuses on modern Jewish history and the history of Israel/Palestine, with a particular interest in Jewish cultural history, the history of the Zionist movement, and the intersection of language and nationalism in modern history. Her first book, Babel in Zion, will be published by Yale University Press in late 2014. The book is a study of Jewish debates and discussions about the place of languages other than Hebrew within a society vocally committed to promoting modern Hebrew as a vernacular language. By looking at negotiations over the place of Arabic, English, Yiddish, German, and other languages in a nominally all-Hebrew society during the British mandate period, she lends new insights into the evolving relationship of the Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine) to the Jewish diaspora, the British authorities, European culture, and Palestine's Arab majority. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2011 and has held previous academic positions at Yale and Princeton.

The talk will be a discussion of the book, and will focus on the ways in which a study of Zionist responses to language diversity in the pre-1948 period can offer new perspectives into the workings of Jewish nationalism, the Zionist relationship to diaspora and diasporic culture, and the relationship between ideology in practice in the Yishuv’s formative years.