What rights do people have to criticize their country? Other countries? When do those criticisms become hateful? And when they become hateful, how should they be combatted? This talk discusses how these questions relate to contemporary anti-Zionism and antisemitism. His discussion draws upon three relevant documents: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “Working Definition of Antisemitism” (2016); The Nexus Document: Understanding Antisemitism and its Nexus with Israel and Zionism (2021); and The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. He is also a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is 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 1870-1918, 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). His current interests lie in international history, and he is writing a book about worldwide reactions to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Sponsored by the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professorship of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont