Critics slammed Harvard’s antisemitism czar for his new book. He says he’s been misunderstood
Photo by Robin Levin Penslar, Rutgers University Press
By Irene Katz Connelly February 5, 2024
Derek Penslar never expected the book he published last June, Zionism: An Emotional State, to circulate on social media.
It is an academic study of the emotions that have shaped Zionist thought and practice since the movement’s inception. But Penslar, a Harvard history professor, found his work and public statements under new scrutiny when he assumed leadership of the university’s antisemitism task force after the university’s president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign in part over her response to campus activism after Oct. 7.
Critics slammed Penslar for having signed an open letter that described Israel’s control over the West Bank as “a regime of apartheid.” Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard, called for Penslar to resign his position as co-chair of the task force, and Rep. Elise Stefanik said in a statement that he is “known for his despicable antisemitic views.” Bill Ackman, a billionaire Harvard alum who led the campaign for Gay’s ouster, posted on X that by appointing Penslar, Harvard “continues on the path of darkness.”
Others debated snippets from the book’s section on anger in Zionist thought, especially Penslar’s assertion that “veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.” (This quotation comes from a passage in which Penslar discusses the biblical Israelites’ hatred of their enemies and the revenge fantasies of persecuted Jews in medieval Europe.) Citing this argument, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called Penslar’s appointment “absolutely inexcusable.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of scholars signed a letter supporting Penslar, and Zionism: An Emotional State was named a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Reached by phone, Penslar described the past few weeks as difficult and mystifying.
“I feel like there are two Derek Penslars in the world,” he said. “There’s the Derek Penslar who teaches at Harvard, who has devoted his professional and personal life to Israel, who cares deeply about his Jewish students, and who is very concerned about antisemitism. And then there is a malicious avatar whom people are accusing of heinous misdeeds.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you become interested in studying Zionism through an emotional lens?
National movements are steeped in emotion: feelings of deprivation and hope for independence and freedom; the feeling of joy upon attaining independence; fear that one’s enemy is going to do harm; and then love of the collective, love of the nation. At least in their original forms, nationalism and patriotism were all about various forms of love.
A lot of the work on Zionism and the state of Israel is about political and military leaders. So many courses on Israel are taught in terms of wars, without thinking about the underlying emotions of love, fear, collective solidarity, that have made it possible not only for Israel to materially fight these wars but to endure psychologically as a community.
The book is also about diaspora Zionists and their own attachments to the state of Israel, the fact that they have raised money for Israel and supported Israel diplomatically. They do that out of a feeling of very powerful emotional connection that binds them to Israel. We don’t study that connection.
I was especially interested in your discussion of Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus, which you argue both reflected and produced a deep emotional attachment to Israel among American Jews.
The novel was a bestseller in America for 18 months, and it was read by a great many people who weren’t Jews. But it clearly had a particularly powerful effect on Jewish readers. It appealed to their sense of solidarity with Israel, a sense of profound connection with Holocaust survivors and the revival of Jewish life in Israel. But there’s also a muscular, romantic, and even erotic value to the novel. This is made even more clear in the movie, with Paul Newman cast as Ari Ben Canaan, who embodies a masculine but sensitive ideal of the Israeli Jewish man.
A lot of the ideals of Israel that American Jews found so appealing in Exodus were already present in the 1950s. And we see in the 1960s, and particularly after the 1967 War, how this sense of adoration became even stronger. I can’t say categorically that the novel Exodus increased emotional connection to Israel by X%, but it clearly embodied that connection.
One observation that surprised me was that some of the affective responses I considered essential to Zionism — like the adoration you just mentioned — are actually relatively new.
American Zionism was fairly weak until the 1940s. A lot of Jews were busily trying to Americanize, many of them were Orthodox, and there was also a very strong Bundist movement. When Zionism did begin to take hold during World War II, with hundreds of thousands of American Jews joining Zionist organizations, they were doing it out of a sense of solidarity and compassion with European Jews suffering through the Holocaust. They weren’t necessarily doing it because of a love of the land of Israel.
From 1946 to 1948, most of the fundraising efforts by the United Jewish Appeal emphasized Israel as a home for Holocaust survivors. As the 1950s wore on, and Israel became established, the emotional turn towards adulation began, leaping forward in 1958 with Exodus and reaching a peak after 1967.
This book provides a new taxonomy of different kinds of Zionism and examines the emotions underlying each. Why do you think it’s important for people today to be able to distinguish between the Zionism of solidarity with Holocaust survivors, the Zionism of love for the Ari Ben Canaan-style Jew, and the Zionism of feeling inspired by seeing Hebrew letters on a Coke can?
It’s very important for Jews the world over to appreciate that there are many ways to be connected to Israel. The adoration of Israel which was very common in my youth, and that I experienced quite strongly as a young man, is not the only one. There are connections to Israel based on solidarity, there are connections to Israel based on fear for the survival of the state. There are connections to Israel based on worry that the state has taken the wrong direction.
One of the great signs of love is worry. Something I didn’t write about in the book, because it came up right as I finished, was the crisis after the 2022 elections and the attempts by the government to limit the power of the judiciary. A lot of American Jews who are very connected to Israel began to express trepidation, worry, fear for Israel. A word that entered the vocabulary, which I hadn’t seen before, is “anguish.” Anguish is a sense of near despair for something that you care about deeply. And that’s a sign of connection to Israel. Now, in the wake of Oct. 7, there’s yet a new wave of emotional responses.
Something else I point out in the book is that younger American Jews are less likely to be passionately connected to Israel than their parents. They’re not necessarily anti-Zionist, but there’s an emotional cooling going on. A lot of American Jews in their 20s are aware of Israel, but it’s simply not central to their Jewish identity in the way it was for an older generation. So that’s a different emotional connection.
One tension I see among people on the left is between those who disavow Israel’s current actions but also see Zionism as a positive cultural attachment to the country and Jewish people as a whole; and those who say that the only meaningful analysis of Zionism is of its material implications for Palestinians today. Can your scholarship add anything to that debate?
I don’t really see that as a contradiction. The official organizations of American Jewry have emphasized for a long time that certain kinds of criticism of Israel are allowable if they come from love. The question is, what kind of criticism?
Can an American Jew criticize the occupation of the West Bank, and what does it mean if that criticism is made from love? Organizations like J Street, and others to the left of J Street, often combine a positive emotional connection to Israel with an appreciation of the untenable nature of the occupation. One can proclaim a strong attachment to Israel and have a clearheaded understanding of the deeply problematic nature of certain aspects of the Israeli state.
Does the demand that criticism of Israel come from a place of love suggest a belief that only Jews can legitimately criticize Israel?
It could be a way of limiting criticism to Jews. It could also be a way of limiting criticism from Jews — because who will be the arbiter of whether the criticism from Jews is sufficiently loving?
In the book, I mentioned the short-lived peace organization Breira, in the 1970s. Its members were young American Jews, many of them students of elite universities, who had lived in Israel; many of them spoke Hebrew, they knew the country well, and they proclaimed their love of Israel. The establishment Jewish response was: No, you don’t. You’re talking about Palestinian statehood, therefore you cannot love Israel.
The idea that Zionism is rooted in emotions, like fear, pride or the desire to belong, can be threatening to those who see it as a rational political ideology. Did you expect this book to be provocative?
I’ve encountered some pushback that the history of Zionism needs to be understood purely in the realm of thought and ideas; and that if you move to the level of emotion, somehow you are cheapening an exalted national project. I think this is wrong. All political movements have a very strong emotional element. To adapt that methodology to the case of Zionism is to accept that the Zionist movement is a political movement and that the state of Israel is a state.
I didn’t think the book would be provocative in the sense that I’m not by nature a polemicist. The emotional perspective reflects our growing interest, in the 21st century, with the inseparable connection between body and mind — mindfulness, for example.
People invoked the book’s treatment of anger or hate in Zionist thought as evidence that you aren’t fit to lead Harvard’s antisemitism task force. Did that surprise you?
I’m hurt, to be honest, and I feel that those people have misunderstood. Fundamental to my approach to Jewish history is that Jews are human beings like anyone else. When Jews act as collectives, their behavior is not totally different from that of other human beings.
Human beings are capable of hatred. To write that under certain circumstances, a Jewish national movement can foster hatred, is to recognize that Jews are normal people. I don’t see this as an insult; I see it as an act of compassion with human beings who have a wide variety of emotional reactions to situations that they find endangering or threatening.
What would you say to those who oppose your leadership of the task force?
I would only say that I approach the study of Israel the way I would expect my colleagues anywhere in the world to study the country of their choice. I’m not terribly happy with the United States right now, but I’m very happy to have been born here and live here. I don’t see why there should be a contradiction between being critical of a particular country’s policies and having a deep love of the country.
The real question is, do I care about Jews? Do I care about Jewish students? I love teaching, and I care very deeply about my students, whether they’re Jewish or not. Antisemitism is a problem all over the United States, and we need to investigate it and do what we can to address it.
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