About

Liora Halperin is a Professor of International Studies and History at the University of Washington, holding a Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in 2011, her M.A. from UCLA in 2007, and her B.A. in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 2005. Her research focuses on the history of Israel/Palestine, with particular interests in nationalism and collective memory, Jewish cultural and social history, language ideology and policy, and the politics of colonization and settlement. She is currently working on a book about the diverse urban Jewish communities of late 19th and early 20th century Ottoman Palestine and how various groups and political movements have commemorated and narrated this history.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Archaeology
• History
• Law
• Art
• Ancient history
• Aesthetics
• Economic history
• Literature
• Political economy
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• The Children of Death Never Die: Specters of the Early Zionist Past

  Shofar · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: This chapter considers the curious and perennial recurrence, in Zionist periodicals, memoirs and historiographic literature, of the claim that Palestinian Arabs referred to Jews in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as " Awlad al-mawt " (Children of Death). Invocations of this term are typically paired with ideologically laden statements of Zionists overcoming this characterization by demonstrating their capacity for physical strength and willingness to employ violence. Evoking a legacy of conflict with Palestinian Arabs, a longstanding European trope of Jews lacking vitality, and the promise of Jewish revival, Awlad al-mawt , in multiple dialectical variations and transliterations, became a byword for Jewish transformation but also for a lingering anxiety about its ultimate impossibility. By tracing the usages and context of this term throughout the twentieth century, from its first known appearances just before the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 through 1948, it argues that ambivalence about early Zionist strength informs evolving anxieties about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the inherent precarity of Zionism as a settler project, and the attendant militarization of Zionist and Israeli society.

  PublisherDOI

• Metaphors of the Sacred and Profane in Pre-State Zionist Hebrew Discourse

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past

  2021-08-10 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anniversaries of 'first' settlement and the politics of Zionist commemoration

  2021-11-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article centres on stylized commemorative events staged in Israel in 1962 and 1982 to mark, respectively, 80 and 100 years since the consensual beginning of the “First Aliyah,” the first wave of Jewish rural settlement in Palestine. Focusing on protocols of 1962 and 1982 Knesset sessions, commemorative medals, military parades, summer camps, and local commemorations, it shows that multiple completing Zionist parties used the rhetoric of “firstness” to negotiate and redefine primacy in light of the political present. Drawing from scholarship on settler memory in other settings, it also positions the settlement event as not a onetime historical occurrence but a sacralized referent used to frame and justify ongoing settlement and participate in historical erasures.

  PublisherDOI

• NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Oldest Guard

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Ancient history
  • History

  The Oldest Guard tells the story of Zionist settler memory in and around the private Jewish agricultural colonies ( moshavot ) established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. Though they grew into the backbone of lucrative citrus and wine industries of mandate Palestine and Israel, absorbed tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants, and became known as the "first wave" (First Aliyah) of Zionist settlement, these communities have been regarded—and disregarded—in the history of Zionism as sites of conservatism, lack of ideology, and resistance to Labor Zionist politics. Treating the "First Aliyah" as a symbol created and deployed only in retrospect, Liora R. Halperin offers a richly textured portrait of commemorative practices between the 1920s and the 1960s. Drawing connections to memory practices in other settler societies, The Oldest Guard demonstrates how private agriculturalists and their advocates in the Zionist center and on the right celebrated and forged the "First Aliyah" past, revealing the centrality of settlement to Zionist collective memory and the politics of Zionist settler "firstness."

  PublisherDOI

• 2 Arab Labor and the Rhetoric of Hierarchical Coexistence in Mandate Palestine

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 Jewish Immigrants and the Politics of Settler “First Ones”

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 3 The Old Guard on Display

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-08-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anniversaries of ‘first’ settlement and the politics of Zionist commemoration

  Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2021-02-17 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article centres on stylized commemorative events staged in Israel in 1962 and 1982 to mark, respectively, 80 and 100 years since the consensual beginning of the “First Aliyah,” the first wave of Jewish rural settlement in Palestine. Focusing on protocols of 1962 and 1982 Knesset sessions, commemorative medals, military parades, summer camps, and local commemorations, it shows that multiple completing Zionist parties used the rhetoric of “firstness” to negotiate and redefine primacy in light of the political present. Drawing from scholarship on settler memory in other settings, it also positions the settlement event as not a onetime historical occurrence but a sacralized referent used to frame and justify ongoing settlement and participate in historical erasures.

  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• The Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies fo…