Convener: Professor Yaacov Yadgar
Speaker: Professor Yaron Peleg
The Zionist claim to Palestine was based on a very old story; so old that it became a myth. And since the distance between the Jewish present and the Jewish past was vast, the wish to make Palestine a home for a modern Jewish nation called for creating that nation anew. It was an immense claim that required an equally immense innovation. The lecture reexamines this well-known story by looking at some of the cultural innovations of Zionists--body culture, space, art, music--and considering their fraught legacy a century later.
Yaron Peleg is Kennedy-Leigh Professor in Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Cambridge. His monographs include New Hebrews; Making National Culture in Zion (2025), Directed by God, Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television (2016), Israeli Culture Between the Two Intifadas (2008), and Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (2005). Professor Peleg co-edited numerous scholarly anthologies, including most recently, The Cambridge History of Modern Hebrew Literature and Israeli Visual Culture beyond 2010, a New Reader in Israeli Film, TV, Online Works (both forthcoming in 2025). Professor Peleg is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (Taylor & Francis).
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