Harvard antisemitism task force co-chair talks about post-Oct. 7 ‘petrified anger’
Prof. Derek Penslar recently spoke at the Divinity School about his book ‘Zionism: An Emotional State,’ and the passions motivating Zionists and anti-Zionists, now and in the past

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — This was no ordinary Monday. It was the day before the 2024 US presidential election. That night, a capacity crowd packed Harvard Divinity School for a talk about a hot-button issue.
Not the Trump-Harris contest — the vice president would go on to lose the election but win Cambridge handily with over 86 percent of the vote. No, this concerned another issue at once historical, political, religious, and cultural. An issue that had become relevant again in unexpected ways: Zionism.
At center stage sat Prof. Derek Penslar, who wears a lot of hats at the Ivy League school: He is the William Lee Frost Professor of History, director of the Center for Jewish Studies, and co-chair of a university task force on antisemitism.
Yet the talk concerned an ex officio project — his 2023 book “Zionism: An Emotional State.” Published by Rutgers University Press as part of the Key Words in Jewish Studies series, this treatment of Zionism through the spectrum of emotions it has evoked, by supporters and detractors alike, was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist.
Many things happened between the book’s publication in June of 2023 and the award announcement in January 2024. Hamas terrorists slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel and kidnapped 251 to the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, launching the ongoing war in Gaza; anti-Zionist protests erupted on college campuses and beyond, and with them a wave of antisemitism; and at Harvard, anti-Zionist student sentiment spiked almost immediately after October 7 and culminated, as it did on campuses nationwide, with an encampment in the spring.
A summer and a semester later, cooler temperatures prevailed, mirroring the weather. Yet it was no surprise that during the talk, Penslar addressed a particularly negative emotion — hatred.
“I was putting the last touches on the proofs in early 2023,” he said. “And then came October 7, which brings these issues of hatred as petrified anger to a new level. Again, not completely unpredicted, not completely unknowable, but nonetheless a great tragedy. And I was hoping to end on a happier note.”

A parental love for Israel?
Penslar is accustomed to taking the extremely long view of the historian. Read his book and travel back 130 years to the beginnings of Zionism under Theodor Herzl — the subject of Penslar’s 2020 biography. (You’ll also learn about possible earlier versions of Jewish Zionism and about 19th-century Christian Zionism.) Sift through the nuanced, sometimes academic arguments of the book. Is Zionism a prochronic or parachronic movement? Are there really eight varieties of Zionism, as the author contends? (In his talk, he mentioned such types as ethnic and catastrophic Zionism, dating the former to the pre-World War II era and the latter even earlier, to Herzl’s close colleague Max Nordau.) Is Zionism a colonial and/or settler-colonial movement, which many of its critics claim?
The emotions surveyed in his book can be difficult to control. They reveal the passions that have animated Zionists and anti-Zionists then and now — love and hate, hope and anxiety, gratitude and a sense of betrayal. The author explored them through a variety of sources — from “Ahavat Tsion” or “The Love of Zion,” a spicy 1853 novel by Abraham Mapu set in the biblical Kingdom of Judah, to Jewish-American journalism archives from the 1960s and ’70s, which reflect a mixture of love and anxiety over Israel’s geopolitical situation. The latter era, similar to today, had ample reasons for worry, including the Yom Kippur War and the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, which was rescinded in 1991.

Attendees at the November 4 event noshed on Mediterranean-style wraps and sipped carbonated beverages as Penslar discussed the book with moderator Shaul Magid, a rabbi and professor at the divinity school who had contributed a blurb. Their repartee was respectful, in contrast to the reception Penslar received when he was named co-chair of the university task force on antisemitism last year. Critics used quotes from the book to condemn the choice — and also mentioned his signing an August 2023 open letter, alongside almost 3,000 fellow academics, that blasted the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as spawning an apartheid regime.
In a previous conversation with The Times of Israel last spring, Penslar described his criticisms of Israel as — at least partly — motivated by tough love.

“I care so deeply about Israel,” he said. “This is what makes me so sad over the direction it’s taken, to see what this government has done in the occupied territories and its attempts to eviscerate democracy in the country. Israel can be better. I know I get some flak for my views. But I don’t see anything wrong with being both emotionally attached to a country and critical of it.”
He found an instructive parallel in two of his roles that transcend academia and authorship — namely, abba and zayde, or father (in Hebrew) and grandfather (in Yiddish).
“I love my family dearly,” Penslar said. “But sometimes children don’t behave as they should, or a sibling or spouse is engaging in destructive or self-destructive behavior. In those situations, tough love is not only justified but also necessary.”
In the same interview, he said that many early Zionists were motivated by a more uncritical form of love that made the movement similar to, yet different from, other contemporaneous nationalist movements.
“I can’t think of a nationalist movement in the 19th century that did not talk about love,” Penslar said, adding that this was a love of “mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes — the beauty of the land.”
Yet Zionist literature in the late 1800s and early 1900s contained references to love that were unique.
“The beauty of the Land of Israel, interspersed with ancient religious language and with modern nationalistic language … combined with a spiritual erotic fantasy,” Penslar said. “These are all expressions of love.”
Was it any wonder that an early Zionist group was named Hovevei Tsiyon, “Lovers of Zion,” itself inspired by the principle of hibat tsiyon or “love of Zion”?
Decades later, in the Diaspora, love turned to adoration with Israeli independence in 1948 and with the Israeli victory in the Six Day War of 1967.
“Diaspora Jews did not just love Israel — they fell in love with Israel, adored Israel,” Penslar said, putting himself in this category when he first visited the country 45 years ago. “For the vast majority of Jews, adoration was the primary feeling about Israel well into the 21st century.”

‘Zionists are not welcome’
Israeli independence arguably fulfilled the Zionist dream. Yet over 75 years later, a growing number of critics of Israel see things differently. They describe what they call Zionist militias that in 1948 displaced 750,000 Palestinians in what is known in Arabic as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
This number swelled further in 1967, after Israel’s occupation in the Six Day War of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Israel disengaged from the latter in 2005, although it placed Gaza under a blockade following Hamas’s rise to power there). Many displaced Palestinians from 1948 and 1967 live with their descendants in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere in the Middle East. A growing number of anti-Zionist critics label Israel an apartheid state, accusing it of genocide in its war against Hamas, as well as in its recently-halted conflict with Lebanon.
Anti-Zionists include Jews in their ranks. Two weeks after Penslar’s talk, on November 18, a Harvard student group called Harvard Jews for Palestine organized a demonstration outside Harvard Hillel. Inside, ex-IDF spokesperson Ronen Manelis gave an off-the-record talk; outside, roughly 12 participants chanted such slogans as “Zionists not welcome here.”
“Since October 7 there has been an exponential increase in the emotional waves associated with Zionism and Israel,” Penslar told The Times of Israel last spring. These include “an emotional tsunami in terms of anger and hatred of Israel worldwide,” as well as “an increase in ambivalence, distress, fear and criticism of Israel by young American Jews.”

Yet he also cited “a sense of solidarity and anxiety that many Diaspora Jews have towards Israel.” And it’s a theme he returned to in his recent book talk.
Penslar cited “the notion of ethnic Zionism, which has nothing to do, by the way, with the State of Israel,” but “is simply a form of ethnic identity.” He called it “something that already had roots in the pre-World War II era. And I think it’s been very prominent… among Diaspora Jews since 1948.”
“Israel makes you feel Jewish, and Israel becomes sort of a civil religion of American Jewry,” said Penslar. “That still exists.”
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