Igal Halfin was born in Soviet Ukraine and repatriated with his parents to Israel in 1973.  Upon completing his BA studies in Tel Aviv, Halfin enrolled in Columbia University graduate school, spedcializing in Soviet History. Having completed his dissertation in 1995, he took a position at the Tel Aviv University history department, returning to his alma mater.

In the last 20 years, Halfin has been teaching history and theory at Tel Aviv, emphasizing interdisciplinary studies and borrowing from anthropology and comparative literature for the study of history. Under the mentorship of Steven Kotkin, together with then graduate students and now highly established scholars as Jochen Hellbeck, Peter Holquist and others Halfin established the Columbia school in Russian history, stressing the importance of political language, ritual and meaning and criticism of the reductive social history approaches then in vogue. The goal was to show that ordinary men were involved in the revolutionary project and that Revolution has been an expressive and mobilizing force even during the most difficult years of Stalin’s rule.

Currently, Halfin is a full professor at the Tel Aviv University History Department, where he teaches modern Russian and European history, history of the Cinema and courses in theory of the humanities. Beyond his specialization in early Soviet history, he is interested in historical anthropology, psychoanalysis, theory of literature, and history of the cinema.

He recently published a micro-study of the Stalinist purges in Leningrad (Stalinist Confessions). Investigating NKVD materials, personal files of university leaders located in the Party archive and other archival sources the book focused on the denunciation, arrest and execution of students and professors at the Leningrad Communist universities. How the machinery of terror actually worked? What worldview imbued it with meaning and what practices led to its realization? A study of interrogations, denunciations and notoriously delirious confession through the anthropological lens offers surprising insights into these questions.

Representative Publications:

From Darkness to Light. Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000, xii + 474 pages)

Terror in My Soul. Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Harvard, 2003, 344 pages)

Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918-1928 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007, Hardcover and Paperback, 432 pages)

Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, Hardcover and Paperback, 560 pages)

Red Autobiographies (University of Washington Press, 2011, 224 pages)