Fields of Interest
Biography
Prof. Halperin is Professor of International Studies and History, and Distinguished Endowed Chair of Jewish Studies, at the University of Washington. She is an historian 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 descendants of the urban Jewish communities of late Ottoman Palestine and their role in land settlement and the growth of the Zionist project.
She is the author of The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past (Stanford, 2021), a study of the European Jewish agricultural colonies established in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine and the politics of their twentieth-century commemoration. She is also the author of Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale, 2015), which was was awarded the Shapiro Prize from the Association for Israel Studies for the best book in Israel Studies. She has published academic articles in The Journal of Social History, Jewish Social Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among other venues.