Matan Boord
Bar-Ilan University
Matan Boord is a social and cultural historian of the Jewish community in Palestine/Israel in the twentieth century, interested in the connections between everyday life practices and social and political questions. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Tel Aviv University. His forthcoming book is titled Men of the House: Labor Zionist Masculinity in Mandate Palestine (Yad Ben Zvi Press [Hebrew] and McGill-Queen’s University Press [English], 2024). In the book he argues that gender, and specifically the development of a new form of masculine domination in the Labor Zionist urban sector, played key role in securing the movements’ hegemony in the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine and in the global Zionist movement.
Before coming to Harvard, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Professor Hizky Shoham at the Bar-Ilan university program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies. Together they developed and secured funding (from the Israel Science Foundation) for a research project on the development of emotional styles in the Mandate period. At Harvard he works as a Marie Skłodowska Curie post-doctoral fellow (Global Fellowship) on a project that puts the emergence of emotional styles in the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine in the context of European colonialism since the nineteenth century. The two main aims of this research are: (i) to understand how the colonial context (within which early Zionism operated) impacted ideas about new emotional styles; and (ii) to survey the attempts to bring these ideas into the homes of (the mostly European) settlers at the time.