Profile
Contact: l.libman@ucl.ac.uk
Address: Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies
Appointment: Postdoctoral Fellow, Honorary Research Associate
Joined UCL: September 2014
Research
Currently, I am working on a book manuscript based on my Ph.D. dissertation, titled:
A State of Shock: Representation(s) of the Kibbutz in Israel 1948-1954, which
examines the representation(s) of the kibbutz from the foundation of the State of
Israel and in the first years of sovereignty. In this work, I am offering an original
poetical and historical analysis of an endemic, fundamental and persistent image in
Hebrew literature and culture, and, through it, a novel understanding of the kibbutz
and its history.
The first years of Israeli sovereignty were characterized by dramatic turning points
and deep changes which caused a severe crisis for the kibbutz and obligated it to cope
with hard inner-conflicts and to make significant resolutions in the new national
constellation. Paradigmatically, in front of a dynamic and troublesome reality,
representations of the kibbutz remained static, iconic, featuring heroic-pioneering
pastoral-utopian images, those known from kibbutz-literature of the pre-State era. I
claim in my work that this frozen kibbutz-image is a symptom of the Cultural Trauma
of conceptual disorientation the kibbutz experienced with the foundation of the State.
I suggest viewing the crisis of the kibbutz as a moment of a radical, even
metaphysical, undermining, of a rupture in the system-of-meaning by which the
kibbutz’s collective identity was cracked. This interpretation goes back to the
pioneers’ understanding of their historical action, which emanated, I argue, from
secularized and nationalized Hasidic theology. This viewed itself in terms of the
meta-historical Zionist-Socialist narrative, as everyday life fulfilling and embodying
national and social return, repair and salvation.
This perception was no longer conceivable during the 1948 war and thereafter. With
the growing gap between life and history, the kibbutz and its members lost their very
understanding of themselves and their place in the world. This Cultural Trauma was
met with total shock, a lack of conceptual language with which to work-through the
crisis, reflected in the kibbutz’s image of the time which is an “acting-out” of the
trauma by a denial of the collapse of the epistemic framework it caused, and by
fetishism of the pre-traumatic past. My reading of kibbutz publicist-writing and
novels traces, while introducing the concept of Cultural Trauma to the kibbutz’s
context and exposing the function of the political-theology in it, the process in which
the kibbutz turned from avant-garde and symbol – a breakaway human-creation and a
new, lively, actual theme in Hebrew literature and culture – to a fetish. The kibbutz
became an iconic form, frozen, sacred and compulsively repeating itself.
Thus, my work critically engages and redefines a core image of the Zionist, ZionistSocialist and Israeli arsenal: instead of a symbol of utopia, it sees it as an allegoric
signifier of trauma, a broken representation, nostalgic from the outset. Moreover, the
kibbutz, which is usually perceived as a modern, secular and universal physical and
conceptual space-time, is rethought here as a Jewish, theo-political construction. This
approach not only modifies the perception of the kibbutz, but also suggests a cultural,
epistemic-mental explanation to the regularly-described as political-social crisis and
fall of the kibbutz, while connecting it to broader international and regional issues in
the effort to re-think the kibbutz’s position and status in society in Israel.
Publications
•
Co-Editor, Insight Palestina: Cultural Re-Imaginings of Pasts and Futures in
Israel-Palestine (forthcoming, 2015).
•
‘HaKibbutz HaMeuchad’s “State of Shock” 1948-1954: Textual Expressions’,
Iyunim Bitkumat Israel (Studies in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel),
22 (2012), 25-63 (Hebrew).
•
‘Shadows over the Land Without Shade: Iconizing the Israeli Kibbutz in the
1950s, acting-out post Palestinian-Nakba Cultural Trauma, Badiou Studies, 1
(2012), 119 -34 (Extended version, in English).
‘Shadows over the Land Without Shade: Iconizing the Israeli Kibbutz in the
•
1950s, acting-out post Palestinian-Nakba Cultural Trauma’ (Hebrew), in The
Palestinian Nakba in Cinema and Literature in Israel: A Collection of Essays,
ed. by Hannan Hever (Zochrot.org, 2012), 95-105.
‘The Image of Germany in Austrian Newsreels 1945-1955: The Image of
•
Austria in the constitutive decade after the Second World War’, Hayo Haya: A
Young Forum for History, 6 (2008), 44-62 (Hebrew).
Biography
Award year
Qualification
Institution
2014
PhD Doctor of Philosophy
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2008
MA Master of Arts
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
2005
BA Bachelor of Arts
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr. Lior Libman is an Israel Institute Post-Doctoral Fellow and an Honorary Research
Associate at the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College
London. She holds a PhD in Hebrew Literature from The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem (2014), from which she also received her BA in History (2005, magna cum
laude) and MA in Cultural Studies (2008, summa cum laude). Dr. Libman is a literary
scholar and cultural historian specializing in Hebrew Literature and Culture, History
of Zionism and the State of Israel, with a particular focus on Kibbutz and ZionistSocialist Labor Movement history and literature. Her dissertation examined the
representation(s) of the kibbutz in the troublesome years of the passage from the preState Yishuv to the State of Israel. Dr Libman’s work engages with political-theology,
the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, theory of history, and cultural and literary critique.
During her doctoral studies she was granted scholarships to attend UW Madison and
the Harvard Institute for World Literature at the Department for Comparative
Literature. She is a winner of The Hebrew University President's Scholarship for
Outstanding PhD Candidates in the Humanities (2009-2014), and the Wolf
Foundation Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Candidates (2012) among other
awards.