Colloquium: What’s Love Got to Do with It? The Emotional Language of Early Zionism

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2019 colloquium:

Derek Penslar, Harvard University

What’s Love Got to Do with It? The Emotional Language of Early Zionism

This talk explores the mixture in early Zionism between love and other emotions, parses love into various sub-types, and traces their interactions. The talk focuses in particular on sentimental, non-erotic love, which in rabbinic Judaism is known as hibah and appears in the name of the first Zionist federation, the hovevei tsion (lovers of Zion). The talk has three goals: to put the history of Zionism in a new perspective, to encourage further research into love as a collective sentiment, and to rethink the relationship between love and fin de siècle European nationalisms.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. His research specialties are the history of modern European Jewry, Zionism, and the state of Israel. Penslar has authored or edited ten books, most recently Jews and the Military: A History (2013), and Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale University Press, forthcoming). He is currently writing a book titled Zionism: An Emotional State. Penslar is co-editor of The Journal of Israeli History, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and president of the American Academy for Jewish Research.