Yair Wallach
SOAS University of LondonYair Wallach is a social and cultural historian specializing in modern Palestine/Israel, exploring the interconnected histories of Jews and Palestinians. His research focuses on visual and material culture within the urban landscape, examining sites of contestation and transformation in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. Previously a post-doctoral research associate at Cambridge University, he contributed to the "Conflict in Cities" project. Wallach's book, A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford University Press, 2020), analyzes Arabic and Hebrew texts in the urban environment, revealing shifts in reading, writing, and textuality from the 1850s to 1948. The work investigates the use of street texts to shape population and space, highlighting the sidelining and banning of established textual artifacts and the introduction of new texts to serve colonialism, settler-colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. The book earned the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize in 2022. Wallach's recent research delves into migration, race, and whiteness, exploring the integration of Jewish migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in Arab societies during the 19th and 20th centuries. As a Leverhulme Research Fellow from 2020 to 2022, he investigated the racialization of these migrants and studied the distinctions between migrants and settlers. His work also examines British racialized approaches to Zionism and Jews, arguing in an article in Racial and Ethnic Studies that the partition framework in the Zionist-Arab conflict relied on a racial matrix positioning both Jews and Arabs on Europe's periphery. Beyond scholarly writing, Wallach has contributed to publications such as The Guardian, Haaretz, and 972+, addressing topics related to Israel/Palestine and antisemitism.
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