Our Faculty

headshot of Lior Libman

Lior Libman

Associate Professor of Israel Studies/ Director of the Center for Israel Studies

Judaic Studies
LT 1315

Background

Lior Libman is Associate Professor of Israel Studies and the Director of the Center for Israel Studies. She is a literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in Socialist Zionism and the Kibbutz. Her book State of Shock: The Kibbutz in Israel from Avant-Garde to Fetish, 1948-1955 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines the imagery and political imagination of the kibbutz in the stormy years of the transition from the pre-State Jewish yishuv in Palestine to the State of Israel. Her articles, in English and in Hebrew, were published in Iyunim Bitkumat Israel (Studies in Zionism, the Yishuv and the State of Israel) and Mikan: Journal for the Study of Jewish and Hebrew Literature, among other places. Currently, she is working on two projects: one on the kibbutz-image in modern Hebrew literary canon, and the other on the Zionist Left in the aftermath of 1967.

Libman teaches various courses on Israeli literature from 1948 to the present, and explores with her students questions of nation-building, conflict, class, gender, and ethnicity.

Education

  • PhD, MA, BA: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Research Interests

  • Modern Hebrew and Israeli Literature and Cultural Studies
  • Socialist-Zionism
  • The Kibbutz
  • Critical Theory
  • Cultural and Intellectual History

Teaching Interests

  • Introduction to Israeli Literature
  • Becoming Israeli: Coming-of-Age Novels
  • The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Israeli and Palestinian Literatures
  • The Kibbutz in Israeli Culture
  • Hebrew Literature in Hebrew: Advanced Seminar

Awards

  • Fall 2020: SUNY’s Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Leave
  • Spring 2020: The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Binghamton University Faculty Fellowship. Project Title: “The Politics of Signification in Early Israeli Literature.”