Derek Penslar

Derek J. Penslar's research specialties are the history of modern European and North American Jewry, Zionism, and Israel/Palestine. Penslar’s books include Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918 (1991, Hebrew version 2001); In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918-1933 (1998, co-edited with Michael Brenner), Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001); Orientalism and the Jews (co-edited with Ivan Kalmar, 2004), Contemporary Antisemitism: Canada and the World (2005), Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (2006); The Origins of the State of Israel 1882-1948:  A Documentary History (with Eran Kaplan, 2011); Jews and the Military: A History (2013),  Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (2020; German ed. 2022); Zionism: An Emotional State (2023), and Unacknowledged Kinships. Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism (co-edited with Stephan Vogt and Arieh Saposnik, 2023).  Penslar is currently writing an international history of the 1948 Palestine War.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research, and an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.