On Sunday, December 3, Derek Penslar (Harvard University) joined the Institute to continue our webinar series on the Israel-Hamas war, presenting a talk titled “American Jews and Israel: From Love to Anguish” and answering audience questions. Dr. Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. His most recent book, Zionism: An Emotional State (2023), examines the emotions that have shaped Zionist sensibilities and practices over the course of the movement’s history.
This event is the third in our webinar series on the current Israel-Hamas war, which has featured “Israel at War: Live Discussion from Tel Aviv,” with Avi Shilon, and “Unpacking Antisemitism on Campus,” with Pamela Nadell and Britt Tevis.
Dr. Penslar’s talk is available to view in full below.
Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. He is the director of undergraduate studies within the history department and directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is also affiliated with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. His books have engaged with a variety of approaches and methods, including the history of science and technology (Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine 19870-1918, 1991), economic history (Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe, 2001), military history (Jews and the Military: A History, 2013), biography (Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader, 2020), and the history of emotions (Zionism: An Emotional State, 2023). In two co-edited volumes, Penslar has brought Jewish studies into conversation with postcolonial studies (Orientalism and the Jews, [2005] and Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism [2023]). Penslar’s current interests lie in international history, and he is writing a book about worldwide reactions to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Penslar’s teaching reflects his interests in integrating Jewish history into global contexts. In addition to teaching courses in modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism and Israel, he teaches courses on nationalism, military history, and the history of emotions. He brings these themes into his General Education course on war and anti-war movements in the modern world.
Before coming to Harvard, Penslar taught at Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, where he was the inaugural holder of the Stanley Lewis Chair in Israel Studies. He has taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). He has held research fellowships in Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Penslar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford.
This event was made possible by the generosity of the Kaye and Knapp Family Foundations.
Keep up with the IIJS on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or join our mailing list for updates!