Writing Histories of the Israeli Diaspora in the Puget Sound

Liora Halperin’s seminar (developed in partnership with Arbella Bet-Shlimon) will study local Jewish Israelis, a community disproportionately represented in the high-tech and engineering fields and tied by virtue of their origins to local debates about Israel/Palestine. Traditional Jewish notions of homeland and diaspora would suggest that Jews, once they leave Israel, simply become diaspora Jews, but in fact Israelis constitute a distinct community whose interests and needs are often at odds with more established American Jewish communities. Students will explore the complications of Israeli identity through historical scholarship, academic analysis of sources from the Washington State Jewish Historical Archives, and interviews with Israelis involved in campus and community groups, some of which explicitly take (a range of) positions on Israel/Palestine politics and some of which adopt an “apolitical” or cultural approach to Israeli identity. This seminar provides a special opportunity to engage a diverse range of local Israelis and confront the challenges of narrating the histories of a community tied to and implicated in--but thousands of miles away from--a particularly contested country.