CROWN FAMILY CENTER FOR JEWISH AND ISRAEL STUDIES

Maayan Hilel (Ph.D., Tel Aviv University, 2019) is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Jewish & Israel Studies and the Assistant Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. She is a historian of the modern Middle East, specializing in the cultural and social history of Palestine/Land of Israel in the first half of the 20th century.

Her book project, Leisure and Pleasure in Mandate Palestine: Everyday Life and the Politics of Culture, examines how the emergence of modern leisure culture — cafés, cinemas, beaches, cabarets, and sports clubs — shaped socio-cultural transformations, collective identities, and intercommunal relations in urban Palestine under British rule. Drawing on multilingual sources in Hebrew, Arabic, and English and underutilized archives, the book highlights leisure as a key arena of cultural production, everyday recreational practices, and political expression by ordinary people. It situates Mandatory Palestine within broader regional and transnational cultural networks, offering new insights into modernity and mass culture in the Middle East.

Dr. Hilel new research project focuses on the history of children and childhood in late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. Before joining the Crown Family Center, Dr. Hilel taught in the Department of History at the University of Limerick, Ireland. In addition to her academic work, she specializes in guiding bi-national groups on issues of conflict resolution.

Among her recent publications:

‘Screening Identity: Palestinian National Culture and Intercommunal Dynamics in Haifa's Cinematic Landscape.’ Palestine/Israel Review, October 2024.

‘Changing Texture of Childhood: Palestinian Children as New Leisure Consumers in Mandatory Haifa,’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, December 2019: 1-19.

Undergraduate Courses:

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - Competing Narratives

The Holocaust and its memory in Israel

Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Land of Israel, 1880-1948

Leisure and Popular Culture in 20th Century Palestine/Israel

Daily life in Israel/Palestine

MENA [Middle East and North Africa] Jewry: History, Society, Culture