On February 26, 2024, IIJS, Barnard College, and the Barnard Program in Jewish Studies hosted a lecture with Liora Halperin (University of Washington) and Derek Penslar (Harvard University), titled “Israel and Palestine: A History of the Present.”
Liora R Halperin is Professor of History and International Studies, and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (2021) and Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (2015). She is currently writing a book about the Old Yishuv, the urban Jewish communities who lived in Palestine before Zionism, and the complex and varied ways that their descendants narrated, commemorated, and appropriated these pasts over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His books include Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001), Jews and the Military: A History (2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020; German ed. 2022), and Zionism: An Emotional State (2023). He is currently writing a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. He is a past president of the American Society for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Much of Dr. Halperin and Dr. Penslar’s discussion is available to view below. Unfortunately, the end of Dr. Penslar’s talk and the audience Q&A session are omitted due to recording issues.
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