Abigail Jacobson is an associate professor in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University, and the Academic Director of the MA Honors Program at the Mandel School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities. She deals with the social and urban history of Palestine/Land of Israel and the eastern Mediterranean in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods, as well is in the first years of the State of Israel. Her main interests are the histories of ethnonationally mixed communities and spaces, particularly in times of war and transformation and the history of Oriental Jews. 
Jacobson’s first book is titled From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press, 2011). She wrote the second, Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine (Brandeis/New England University Press, 2016) together with Dr. Moshe Naor of Haifa University. The book won the 2016 Yehonatan Shapiro Best Book Award on behalf of the Association for Israel Studies (AIS); the 2017 Best Book Award by the Center for the Study of Relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Open University, Israel); and the Polonsky Prize on behalf of the Hebrew University. In 2021, it was published in Hebrew by Magnes. 
Jacobson completed her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Hebrew University, she was a department head at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She also edited the Journal of Levantine Studies. Her academic positions included a research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle east Studies, Brandeis University; lecturer at the Department of History, MIT; and guest lecturer at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University.

Selected courses taught: 

Cities in the Middle East: History, Culture and Society; Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Dilemmas of a National Minority; The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; The Middle-East Beyond Academia: a specialization course 

Recent Publications:

Naor, Moshe, and Abigail Jacobson. 2024. “Trapped Neighborhoods, Trapped Identities: Musrara and Wadi Salib Compared, 1949-1967.” Journal of Urban History 52(1).

Naor, Moshe, and Abigail Jacobson. 2023. “Between the Border of Despair and the 'Circle of Tears': Musrara on the Margins of Jewish-Arab Existence in Jerusalem.” Jewish Social Studies 28 (2): 75-98.  

Jacobson, Abigail. 2022. “Contested Public Space in 'Downtown Jerusalem': The Jaffa Gate and Municipal Garden in Late Ottoman Jerusalem”. In From the Household to the Wider World: Local Perspectives on Urban Institutions in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham during the Transformations of the Long Nineteenth-Century, edited by Yuval Ben Bassat and Johann Bussow, 195-206. Tübingen: Tübingen University Press.