Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine 1920-1948

Co-sponsored event. Organized by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies

 To RSVP, please click here or call (310) 267-5327.

About the Event

The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I.

About the Author

Liora R. Halperin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies and the holder of the Endowed Professorship in Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she has taught since 2013. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history, Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, language ideology and policy, and the politics surrounding nation formation in Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. She is also a member of the advisory board for CU's Archive of Post-Holocaust American Judaism, and affiliated faculty in Middle Eastern Studies at the CU Center for Asian Studies.
Her first book, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948, was recently published by Yale University Press and awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for best book in Israel Studies published in 2014.

Halperin received her Ph.D. from UCLA's history department. In 2011-2012 she was the Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. In 2012-2013 she was an Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. She teaches courses on Israel/Palestine, Jewish History, and the Modern Middle East, as well as courses on historical methodology.

She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and has held additional visiting affiliations at U.C. Berkeley, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Harvard.

Sponsor(s): Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies