Dotan Greenvald
New York University
Dotan Greenvald is an Associate at the Center for Jewish Studies (CJS) at Harvard University. He holds a joint Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History from New York University. His research focuses on the development of the Israeli nation-state, economic and social mobilization in 20th Israel/Palestine, Jewish-Arab relationships, and modern Middle East geopolitics. With a particular focus on communities that have been marginalized in political narratives, Greenvald explores the evolution of civil society in the geographic, economic, and cultural periphery of the modern state of Israel and the political challenges it poses to the hegemonic nation-state. Using a history-from-below framework, he is most interested exploring spaces of social reproduction, sovereignty, and the contest between ideology and the normative power of daily life in changing political contexts in Israel and Palestine. At CJS Greenvald will work on two projects. The first is a book manuscript, based on his dissertation, Zionizing Zion: Jerusalem and the Struggle for Hebrew-made Products 1920–1940, that examines the nexus of consumerism, nationalism, and political power in the Zionist Yishuv during the British mandate in Palestine. In this research he argues that in cities where Jewish and Arab population coexisted, the mundane day-to-day political economy continuously redefined the boundaries of Zionist influence. The second and new project will be focused on the tension between government practices, ideological aspirations, and everyday praxis in Israel’s southern border city of Eilat. While Eilat was established in 1949 as a settlement in the southern frontier of Israel, it also attracted individuals – adventurers and outlaws alike – who sought refuge in the secluded desert that offered them freedom from the intensity of the ideological nation-building project. This tension between frontier and periphery, is what makes Eilat a unique case of extraterritoriality that was both integral to the creation of the state of Israel, and to the development of a tri-state semi-autonomous region between Egypt, Israel, and Jordan.