NCJSS Welcomes Yair Wallach
The North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar welcomes Yair Wallach, a social and cultural historian of modern Palestine/Israel, studying the entangled and relational histories of Jews and Palestinians. He specialises in the urban history of the Middle East and is based at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he directs the Centre for Jewish Studies. He is also a commentator on Israel/Palestine and on antisemitism.
His work has focused primarily on visual and material culture and on the urban fabric as sites and vehicles of contestation and transformation in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. Before coming to SOAS, Wallach was a post-doctoral research associate at Cambridge University, as part of the "Conflict in Cities" project.
His book, A City in Fragments: Urban Text in Modern Jerusalem (Stanford University Press, 2020), looked at Arabic and Hebrew texts in the urban environment, on placards, signs and artefacts, and showed how reading, writing and the very meaning of textuality changed between the 1850s and 1948. The book explores how street texts were used to write and re-write population and space; how long-established textual artefacts such as Islamic and Jewish stone inscriptions, Arabic gold-embroidered banners, and Hebrew pilgrims' graffiti, were sidelined and sometimes banned. At the same time, new texts, such as street-name plates, shop signs and ID cards were introduced to organise the city in the service of colonialism, settler-colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism. The book won the Association for Jewish Studies' Jordan Schnitzer Book Prize in 2022.
More recently, Wallach's research has moved to questions of migration, race and whiteness. In 2020-22 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow, gathering material for his next book on the integration and acculturation of Jewish migrants from Central and Eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) in Arab society and culture in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon in the 19th and 20th century. This research investigates the difference between migrants and settlers, and studies the manner in which the migrants were racialised (by themselves, the Arab society and by outsiders).
In addition to scholarly writing, Wallach has also written on Israel/Palestine and on Antisemitism for the Guardian, Haaretz, 972+, and other publications.
