Zionism: An Emotional State

Join us for a talk with Harvard University’s Derek Penslar. Based on Penslar’s forthcoming book, the talk relates the history of Zionism through the lens of emotion. It argues that Zionism is a matrix of emotional states—bundles of feeling whose elements vary in volume, intensity, and durability across space and time. The history of emotions is a flourishing sub-field that dates back at least a half-century, but few historians of Zionism have engaged with it, preferring to focus on ideology and political institutions. Yet emotions are key to understanding Zionism, which has historically been sustained by visceral sentiment, as well as instrumental reasoning and moral values. Emotion is one of the most important cohesive forces within states and social movements. Scholars have created paradigms of “emotional regimes” created by states and informal “emotional communities,” but the Zionist project has combined aspects of both. Just as the study of Zionism can benefit greatly from an emotional perspective, emotional history is also enriched by engagement with a case that challenges reigning paradigms in the field.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. He previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and Oxford University, where he was the inaugural Stanley Lewis Chair in Modern Israel Studies. Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism. Penslar’s books include Shylock’s Children: Economics and Modern Identity in Modern Europe (2001), Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (2006), The Origins of the State of Israel: A Documentary History (with Eran Kaplan, 2011), Jews and the Military: A History (2013), and Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020). He is currently completing a book titled Zionism: An Emotional State and is beginning work on a global history of the 1948 Palestine War. Penslar is president of the American Academy for Jewish Research, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.