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.”

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........

© The Times of Israel