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Writing the History of Israel: Past, Present, and Future

Speaker

Professor Arie Dubnov, George Washington University

Speaker(s): Arie Dubnov
The Rudnick Lecture at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies on Israel and World Affairs, is pleased to welcome Arie Dubnov, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, who holds the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies and serves as director of the Middle East Program and George Washington University, who will give a lecture entitled "Writing the History of Israel: Past, Present and Future."

Trained in Israel and the U.S., Dubnov is a cultural and intellectual historian of twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the British mandate period in Palestine and the study of Jewish nationalism.

His books include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), and three edited volumes, Zionism - A View from the Outside (2010 [in Hebrew]), seeking to put Zionist history in a broader comparative trajectory, and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson), tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context and Amos Oz's Two Pens: Between Literature and Politics (Routledge, 2023), dedicated to the late Israeli novelist and public intellectual. In addition, he co-authored, together with Guy Miron and others, the textbook Zionism - A New History (Open University of Israel Press, 2024 [in Hebrew]).

His academic work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Leibniz Institute of European History, The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin) and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

His Hebrew essays and short stories appeared in Alaxon, Hazman Hazeh [These Times], the literary magazine Ho!, and the Israeli newspapers Ha'aretz and Yedioth Ahronoth.

His current book research project, tentatively entitled Dreamers of the Third Empire/Temple, examines ties between Zionist and British imperial thinkers in interwar years and seeks to uncover alternative, neglected federalist political schemes for the region's future that were circulating at the time.