Education

Experiencia laboral

Project: "Hailing from the Periphery of the Diaspora: Generational Identity and the Transnational Trajectory of Zionist pioneering Movements in Italy and Mexico (1942-1956)"

Supervisors:  Prof. Dr. Sina Rauschenbach, Universität Potsdam; Prof. Dr. Carsten Schapkow, University of Oklahoma

Funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation

My project investigates the construction of a pioneering Zionist consciousness, collective and individual, among Jewish youth in Italy and Mexico in the late 1940s. These young people were part of pioneering Zionist ‘halutzist’ movements that participated in the transnational effort to train and send activists to the ‘kibbutzim’ collectivist agricultural settlements in Palestine. This topic, which falls within the broader study of Zionist ideology and the human movement that led to the creation of the State of Israel, is based on examining the perspectives developed by the young people involved on their own future based on their previous individual and collective experiences in their contexts of origin. The idea of conducting a comparative study between such distant contexts is based on my thesis that there was a common framework in the future perspectives produced in the pioneering Zionist movements. I will study the development of the ideology of ‘halutzism’, pioneering Zionism, with its constant tension between present conditions and future perspectives, between discourse and practice, using monthly periodicals and individual letters produced within the Hechaluz movement in Italy and the Hashomer Hatzair movement in Mexico. The research posits that Jewish youth participation in the halutzist movements was driven by the development of generational self-awareness during and after the Shoah. Both movements show how, in the 1940s, the transnational dynamics of activism made it possible to establish halutzist movements in places where they had not previously existed, such as Italy and Mexico, and to shape a conception of pioneering Zionism based on Marxism. The study argues that, for this generation, activism in the halutzist movements was a way of reacting to the persecution they had suffered and a means of participating in the global effort to establish socialism. This led activists to formulate halutzism as Zionist and Marxist socialist: a Marxist Zionism.