Episode #8: “You are Welcome Here”: Hilary Falb Kalisman on Teaching the History of Israel-Palestine
Julie and Hilary talk about the effect of 911 on Hilary’s education; Hilary’s scholarship on state education in the early twentieth- century Middle East; nationalism and the classroom; the difference between a victim and a martyr in Israeli and Palestinian literature; what we can learn from the writings of Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Israeli novelist Amos Oz; contested language in the classroom; students’ fears and desires to learn; and how to create an inclusive and open college classroom when teaching the histories of Israel /Palestine.
Texts and authors discussed:
Hilary Falb Kalisman, Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Princeton University Press, 2022.
Hilary Falb Kalisman, “`A World of Tomorrow’: Diaspora Intellectuals and Liberal Thought in the 1950s” 2021
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, "The Palestinian Exile as Writer,” 1979
Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, 2004.
Textbooks mentioned:
Hilary Kalisman
Hilary Falb Kalisman is an Assistant Professor of History and the Endowed Professor of Israel/Palestine Studies in the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley. Her research interests include education, colonialism, standardization, state and nation building in Israel/Palestine as well as in the broader Middle East. Her first book, Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East won the History of Education Society Outstanding Book award in 2023. This book uses a collective biography of thousands of public school teachers across Israel/Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan/Jordan to trace how the arc of teachers’ professionalization correlated with their political activity, while rearranging correspondence between nations, nationalism, and governments across the region.
Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Education, the American Academic Institute in Iraq as well as the International Institute of Education, among other organizations. She has begun a new project analyzing the history of standardized testing in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Initiative, part of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
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