Arie M. Dubnov
Arie M. Dubnov
Associate Professor
Intellectual History, Jewish Modern European, Imperialism and Colonialism
Contact:
801 22nd St NW
Washington DC 20052
Arie M. Dubnov is as an 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.
Trained in Israel and the U.S., he 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.
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.
Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies
- Senior Research Fellow, Leibniz Institut für Europäische Geschichte (Leibniz Institute of European History), Mainz, Germany.
- Visiting Fellow, Leibniz Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur - Simon Dubnow (Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture), Leipzig, Germany.
- Former Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for
Advanced Study, Berlin). - Former Visiting Fellow, The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton.
- Former Dorset Visiting Fellow, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies
- Modern Europe
- Middle East
- Imperialism and Colonialism
- Intellectual History
- Jewish History
HIST 2001, JSTD 2002: History of Zionism, Or: Varieties of the Jewish Nationalism, 1882-1948
HIST 2001, JSTD 2002: War & Peace in Israeli Society
HIST 2001, JSTD 2002: Emigre Intellectuals and the Making of Post-WII Politics
HIST 6005: History & Historians
HIST 6801: Partition, Transfer, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
GSHED 6001: Foundations of Contemporary Israel
Books
Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), 316pp.
(with Guy Miron, Roni Beer-Marx, and Gadi Sagiv), Zionism - A New History (Ra'anana: Open University Press, 2024) [Hebrew; forthcoming]
Edited Books
editor, Amos Oz's Two Pens: Between Literature and Politics (London & New York: Routledge, 2023), 215pp.
editor (with Laura Robson), Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century Territorial Separatism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 376pp.
editor (with Ella Florsheim and Raphael Tsirkin-Sadan), Zionism – A View from the Outside (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute and the Cherrick Center for the Study of Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel, Hebrew University, 2010), 124pp. [Hebrew]
Special Issues (Guest Editor)
(co-editor, with Motti Golani), "The British Mandate at 100: Proceedings of the Mandate Scholars Forum," Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, vols. 27-28 (Tel Aviv University; 2021) [in Hebrew].
(guest editor), "Amos Oz’s Two Pens," special issue of Journal of Israeli History, vol. 38, no. 2 (2021).
(co-editor, with Abigail Jacobson and Jonathan Gribetz), "The Uncertain Legacy of Great War Diplomacy in the Middle East," special issue of Journal of Levantine Studies, vol. 8 no. 1 (Summer 2018).
(guest editor), "Jacob Talmon and Totalitarianism Today: Legacy and Revision," special issue of History of European Ideas, vol. 34 no. 2 (2008).
Peer Reviewed Articles
"The Toynbee Affair at 100: The Birth of ‘World History’ and the Long Shadow of the Interwar Liberal Imaginaire." Histories 3, no. 4. (2023): 308-30. [online]
'I Am Civil War,' Or: Haim Gouri's Poetics of Lyrical Concealment," Dibur: Literary Journal 14 (Spring 2023): 47–70. [online]
(with Basma Fahoum). "Agnotology in Palestine/Israel: Tantura and the Teddy Katz Affair Twenty Years On." American Historical Review, vol. 128 no. 1 (March 2023): 371–383.
"Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States: A Critical Engagement with Eric D. Weitz’s A World Divided," Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 23, no. 1 (2021), 139–45.
"On Vertical Alliances, ‘Perfidious Albion’ and the Security Paradigm: Reflections on the Balfour Declaration Centennial and the Winding Road to Israeli Independence," European Judaism, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring 2019), 67–100.
(with Ofri Kirscher), "The Bentwich Saga," Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, vols. 27-8 (2021), 271–312. [in Hebrew]
"‘Fog in Channel - Continent Cut Off’? Anti-Semitism, Pride and Prejudice in Britain, 1830-1982," Zion: A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History (The Historical Society of Israel), vol. 84 no. 1-4 (September 2020), 265–293. [in Hebrew]
"Theory on the Move: Between New and Old in the Historiography of Intellectual Exiles," Historia – Journal of the Historical Society of Israel, vol. 39–40 (2018), 147–173 [in Hebrew].
"On Vertical Alliances, Informal Imperialism, and ‘Perfidious Albion’: Reflections on the Balfour Declaration Centennial," Theory & Criticism, vol. 49 (2017), 177–209 [in Hebrew].
"Can Parallels Meet? Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin on the Jewish Post-Emancipatory Quest for Political Freedom." The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 62 (2017): 27–51.
"Theory on the Move: Between New and Old in the Historiography of Intellectual Exiles,"Historia – Journal of the Historical Society of Israel, vol. 39–40 (2018), 147–173 [in Hebrew].
"On Vertical Alliances, Informal Imperialism, and ‘Perfidious Albion’: Reflections on the Balfour Declaration Centennial," Theory & Criticism, vol. 49 (2017), 177–209 [in Hebrew; English translation].
"Notes on the Zionist passage to India, or: The analogical imagination and its boundaries," Journal of Israeli History, vol. 35, no. 2 (2016), 1–39.
"From Hilberg to Arendt (and back?): A few comments on The Destruction of the European Jews and the Banality of Evil," Tabur: Yearbook for European History, Society and Thought (The Richard Koebner Center, Hebrew University), vol. 7 (2017), 54–62. [in Hebrew].
"Jewish Nationalism in the wake of World War I: A ‘State-in-the-Making’ or The Empire Strikes Back?," Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, vol. 24 (2016), 5–36 [in Hebrew].
"The Missing Beat Generation: Coming of Age and Nostalgism in Arik Einstein’s Music," Jewish Social Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (2015), 43–88.
"‘Those New Men of the Sixties’: Nihilism in the Liberal Imagination." Rethinking History, vol. 17, no. 1 (2013), 18-40.
"What is Jewish (if anything) about Isaiah Berlin's political philosophy?," Religions (special issue: Between Religion and Ethnicity: Twentieth-Century Jewish Émigrés and the Shaping of Postwar Culture), vol. 3, no. 2 (2012), 289–319.
"Zionism on the Diasporic Front," The Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture, vol. 30, no. 2 (2011), 211–224.
"Anti-Cosmopolitan Liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the Dilemma of National Identity," Nations and Nationalism, vol. 16, no. 4 (2010), 559–578.
"Between Liberalism and Jewish Nationalism: Young Isaiah Berlin on the Road towards Diaspora Zionism," Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4, no. 2 (2007), 303–326.
Chapters in books:
"Jews, Imperial Liberalism, and the Predicament of “Small Nations”: Lewis B. Namier’s Gentry Nationalism." In Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History, edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 315-38.
"Diaspora, Jewishness, and Difference in Isaiah Berlin’s Thought," in Brian Smollett and Christian Wiese (eds.), Reappraisals and New Studies of the Modern Jewish Experience: Essays in honor of Robert M. Seltzer (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015), 208–234.
"‘True Art Makes for the Integration of The Race’: Israel Zangwill and the Varieties of the Jewish Normalization Discourse in fin-de-siècle Britain," in Geoffrey Alderman (ed.), New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 101–134.
Encyclopedia Entries:
- "Offene Gesellschaft/Open Society," Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, herausgegeben von Dan Diner (Stuttgart / Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler [Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften], 2011-13), Band 4 (2014), 1–7 [in German].
- "Freiheit/Freedom," Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, herausgegeben von Dan Diner (Stuttgart / Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler [Im Auftrag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften], 2011-13), Band 2 (2012), 378–382. [in German]
- "Berlin, Isaiah," Encyclopedia Hebraica, new edition (Jerusalem: forthcoming 2019) [In Hebrew].
-"Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze’ev)," [with Brian Horowitz], 1914-1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War (Freie Universität Berlin: Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Center for Digital Systems)
Ph.D., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010