Hooked on a Feeling

Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Emotions

When Derek Penslar, a professor of Jewish history, was appointed to co-chair Harvard’s Antisemitism Task Force in January 2024, all hell broke loose as this mild-mannered academic came under withering attack from a quartet of dimwitted bullies. Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers rebuked Penslar for “invok[ing] the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel” and “referr[ing] to Israel as an apartheid state.” Trumpian billionaire donor Bill Ackman, still giddy from dethroning president Claudine Gay earlier that month, intoned that Harvard “continues down a path of darkness.”¹ Congressional Grand Inquisitor Elise Stefanik shrieked about Penslar’s “despicable antisemitic views.”² ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt called Penslar “a professor who libels the Jewish state and claims that ‘veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization.’ ”³ They needn’t have bothered. Colleagues rallied to Penslar’s defense, he kept the position, and the report was released in April 2025, with the predictable conclusion that antisemitism (together with its steady companion, “anti-Israel bias”) is a serious problem at Harvard.⁴

Published in June 2023, half a year before his contested appointment, Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers University Press) is middle-of-the-road scholarship, with information and analysis that will be unremarkable to knowledgeable people, even if it offers irresistible tidbits for bad-faith actors. Unforgivably for them, the book does entertain notions of settler colonialism and apartheid, as Summers charged, though it stops short of fully endorsing them.⁵ But Penslar is far from being anti-Zionist, let alone antisemitic. Adopting the cool voice of the historian, even as he homes in on emotions, Penslar intimates a liberal Zionist orientation not just in the language he chooses⁶ but in the symptomatic strategy of elevating Jewish feelings while passing over the conditions of Palestinian lives (and deaths) that are generated precisely by those feelings. “Zionism has frequently been steeped in fear,” he aptly notes, “and it is sustained by chronic anxiety felt by Jews in even relatively comfortable and secure environments” (10).

In looking at feelings, Penslar is onto something, even if he does not have the political nerve to reckon fully with their ramifications. Instead he implicitly leans into “complexity”—a key word in discourse around Israel-Palestine and, arguably, more a matter of feeling than of material reality.⁷ One might say that for committed observers like Penslar, Israel-Palestine is “complex” not because its contours are difficult to comprehend but rather because the feelings around it are “complicated.” What does one make emotionally of a beloved object, a “beacon of democracy” (167) that deprives half the people under its power of basic civil and human rights?

Penslar intimates his orientation not just in the language he chooses but in the symptomatic strategy of elevating Jewish feelings while passing over the conditions of Palestinian lives (and deaths) that are generated precisely by those feelings.

The complexity must, then, be externalized, and Penslar is eager to demonstrate that “Zionism is…heterogeneous” (18) even if it has a bottom line: “the belief that Jews constitute a nation that has a right and need to pursue collective self-determination within historic Palestine” (1). In “Staging Zionism,” Penslar illustrates this heterogeneity by swamping the reader first with an old taxonomy (Hibat Tsion, Political Zionism, Practical Zionism, Cultural Zionism, Labor Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, General Zionism, and Religious Zionism, 36–44) and then a revised taxonomy, “a list of eight ingredients that, in any specific historical situation, are blended to varying degrees” (Philanthropic Zionism, Hebraic Zionism, Statist Zionism, Catastrophic Zionism, Transformative Zionism, Ethnic Zionism, Sacral Zionism, and Judaic Zionism, 44–61). With so many flavors of Zionism, both old and new, how is one to say what Zionism even is? Famously, in 1979, Edward Said took up one form of Zionism that perhaps cuts through all the others: “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,”⁸ which in fact Penslar cites as “a canonical article” that “brought nuance, theoretical ballast, and elegance of expression to the Palestinian critique of Zionism” (68). The standpoint of Israel’s victims is one that even military leader Moshe Dayan was able to articulate in a 1956 eulogy for a soldier killed in a cross-border raid: “Why should we complain about [the Palestinians’] hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt” (225).

One strategy for generating complexity in the matter of colonialism is through the non-identity of comparable cases. Speaking of examples of settler colonialism, including “former English settler colonies that are long-lived, independent states (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) and regimes that no longer exist, such as French Algeria” and “South Africa under apartheid,” Penslar cautions that “the developmental arcs…vary greatly, as do the character of their Indigenous communities, historical relations between settlers and natives, and the course of colonial rule” (82). The implication is perhaps that Israel is not exactly an apartheid state or a settler colonial state because it is not exactly like South Africa or Algeria or Australia, though Said’s perspective, as summarized by Penslar, seems to be on point:

Zionism…sought or formed alliances with the Western Great Powers…[,] considered the natives to be backward and claimed they would in time be grateful for Zionist developmental largesse…[,] dismissed native resistance as the product of primitive passion or elite manipulation and refused to see the natives as a national community with desires and rights of its own. The institutions developed by Zionists in pre-1948 Palestine emphasized political, economic, and social separation between Jews and Arabs. (69)

Penslar acknowledges that “many scholars in history, sociology, and anthropology have identified Israel as a settler-colonial state” (70), and he draws some of his own parallels. For example, the Afrikaner assertion that Bantus arrived as immigrants only after white colonization resonates with “the propagandistic claim that before the arrival of the Zionists, Palestine was a mostly empty land”(88).⁹ Likewise, French entitlement to Algeria relied on the heritage of the Roman Empire, and “French scholars zealously pursued archaeological excavations of Roman ruins to cement the link between ancient and modern Latin rulers of the land” (90), just as Zionism hearkens back to ancient times, with a corresponding archaeological impetus. All the same, Penslar says, “Placing Zionism within the broad sweep of Western colonialism leaves unexplained many of its key aspects, such as the nature of Zionism’s connection with historic Palestine” (70). As Rabea Eghbariah wrote in response to this very sentence: “One is left wondering: Is nuance the enemy of a value judgment? What is the value of nuance if it obfuscates the harms essential to certain ideologies?”¹⁰

“Many scholars in history, sociology, and anthropology,” as Penslar acknowledges, “have identified Israel as a settler-colonial state.”

Despite the flirtation with colonialism, Penslar often expresses a liberal Zionist mindset in his language and emphases. When he observes that “in leftist (or, in current parlance, progressive) circles in Europe and North America, hostility to Israel intensified in the wake of the Second Intifada…and violent confrontations…between Israel and Hamas” (223), he both sarcastically distances himself from the “progressive” label and elides the power differential that made those “violent confrontations” much more deadly on the Palestinian side. In the same vein, when he refers to “the Second Intifada…, during which some one thousand Israelis were killed” (236), he does not feel compelled to note how many Palestinians were killed. Even punctuation serves as a graphic reminder of which stories matter less than others. Noting that “less than a week after” the end of the 1967 war, “two hundred thousand Israeli Jews poured into Jerusalem to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot and what was called the reunification of the city,” Penslar adds in literal parentheses, “The Arab residences near the wall, home to more than 130 families, had been blown up by military personnel” (143).¹¹ If you blink, you might miss Penslar’s reference to “Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, during which the IDF subjected Beirut to seven weeks of intense bombardment that killed thousands and abetted the Lebanese Christian forces’ massacre of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp.” Penslar mentions the war only to make the point that “unequivocal Jewish support for Israel dimmed, but only slightly” in the face of it (157–58).¹²

Penslar’s underlying perspective may well be close to that of Ari Shavit’s 2013 book, My Promised Land, which he describes as “an act of both homage and critique” whose “appeal lay in its presentation of the dark side of Israel’s history as the tragic but necessary counterpart to Zionism’s heroic dimensions” (168–69). Shavit’s book, Penslar says, “communicated a love so deep that it endures despite recognition of the beloved’s flaws” (169). Speaking of “most American Jews” in recent decades, Penslar says that although their attachment to Israel had “lost much of its earlier romantic mood,…it retained a romantic mode in which Zionism remained an unfinished project, both tragic and joyful” (173). (The chapter entitled “Zionism since 1948” bears the subtitle “A Great Romance.”) The fact that this love for Israel is unrequited is something Penslar never substantially addresses, though he does note that “diaspora Jews needed Israel far more than Israel needed them” and “for most Israelis who did not have familial connections to diaspora Jews, the latter were of little import” (144). This disconnect between lover and beloved also comes up in relation to “the ‘feeling rules’ governing Jewish public speech on Israel,” which “in the early twenty-first century…were beginning to change.” According to such rules, “the most acceptable topic for criticism was the State of Israel’s discrimination against non-Orthodox Jews.” In “fierce but familial” discussion, it was OK to express “unease, disappointment, and frustration” regarding “nonrecognition of Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel, or the denial of gender-egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall,¹³ though “advocating for concrete measures such as boycotts or lobbying for U.S. governmental pressure on Israel to end the occupation was forbidden” (168).

“Passion and Solidarity,” “A Great Romance,” “Gratitude and Betrayal” —the chapter headings map out the feelings that structure Penslar’s analysis. In his introduction, Penslar places his book within “the emotional turn” (11), explaining that he “became interested in the history of emotions” a decade ago (5). “The more I read about the subject,” he says, “the more convinced I became that its insights, when applied to the history of Zionism, would be illuminating and even transformative”(5). Penslar distinguishes his own approach from the “scholarship on Zionism,” beginning in the late 1950s, that “focused more narrowly on elite ideology and political institutions” and also from more recent “social and cultural history,” which “often refers to emotions, but…does so in passing, rather than treating it as a primary factor or organizing principle” (5). As for emotion itself, he distinguishes it conceptually from “affect” and “disposition,” because it is “cognitively processed” (8) and “articulated through language, either our mind’s internal monologue or speech” (9). “Feelings associated with the fate of the collective are known as political emotions,” Penslar says, “and they lie at this book’s heart” (9). The book “seeks to demonstrate the salience of emotion for the history of not only Zionism but also nationalism as such” (13).

The results of this approach, however, are not especially “illuminating,” let alone “transformative.” When emotional exposition intrudes in Penslar’s account, it is often on the level of dictionary or textbook definitions, with no trace of counterintuitive insight or psychoanalytic depth. When he seeks to define solidarity, for example, Penslar calls it “a bundle of action-oriented cognitive states, such as attachment, admiration, and obligation” (129–30). Speaking later of betrayal, he resorts to sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda to define it as a “violation of trust and loyalty.” Trust, Penslar adds, “is a relationship based on ‘confidence’ and ‘predictablility,’ and loyalty assumes fidelity and devotion,” whereas “betrayal…is an action that is performed by an individual who appears to be loyal and trustworthy but is not” (175). In another “defining” moment, Penslar informs readers that “positive emotions respond to the fulfillment of desire or to the anticipation and expectation of its realization,” while “negative emotions are generated by the failure to obtain the object of desire or by the anticipation of that object’s loss” (213). Needless to say, such definitions are not revelatory, nor do they generate revelatory observations. Penslar’s consideration of gratitude, which stretches on for twelve pages (178–89), offers little worth highlighting. And though the treatment of betrayal that follows, fifteen pages long, has some piquancy, the interest derives from the history covered rather than from the “emotional” frame.

That a book centering on emotions should frequently be so dry is in part a result of Penslar’s disavowal of a political position—a disavowal that is, of course, highly political in itself. Penslar separates his own work from what he calls “engaged scholarship,” even while conceding that such scholarship “is not necessarily bad” and “often of great merit” and that that he substantially draws on it in the chapter entitled “Zionism as Colonialism” (96). The fact that Penslar casts his own work as not “engaged” is telling, as is his justification for departing from this putative disengagement in the chapter entitled “Hating Zionism,” which, “although based in historical narrative and analysis,…also engages in normative evaluation and prescription.” The reason for an ostensibly different approach in this case: “hatreds of Zionism, or hatreds justified in the name of Zionism, are accelerating, and they are destructive” (214–15).

In referring to “hatreds justified in the name of Zionism,” Penslar seems amenable to the taken-for-granted idea that anti-Zionism often serves as a cover for antisemitism. In what might be called a liberal (if not liberal Zionist) formulation, he advocates for allowing a space for “anger” against Israel, but also seems to reinscribe the heavily policed line between “legitimate” criticism and “illegitimate” (presumably antisemitic) criticism:

Anger over the oppression of the Palestinians and the denial of their rights of self-determination, security, and dignity can indeed be bound up with a hatred of Israel that assumes destructive and violent dimensions. Anger toward Israel can, however, also be free of the expression or promotion of hatred, even if the anger is passionate and disturbing to people who sympathize with Israel. (225–26)

One criterion often employed for determining whether criticism of Israel is “legitimate” is whether comparable criticism might be applied to “any other country” or whether Israel is in some sense being “singled out” or subjected to a “double standard.” Penslar himself activates that criterion with a variant of a Hasbara talking point—that a focus on Israel is prima facie suspicious:

What stands out about the Palestinian cause is not the emotions of those at its center but the intensity of feeling of outside observers. People who know and care little about oppressed peoples throughout the world have passionate feelings about Israel/Palestine. (226)

Drawing out the implication of this unsupported claim, Penslar adds, “The reasons for this intensity of awareness and passion are manifold. Israel’s Jewish character is one of them” (226). Or, as he goes on to say: “There is abundant evidence of negative conceptions of Israel that catalyze or are catalyzed by anti-Jewish hatred” (227). When “a negative view of Israel” is expressed, Penslar prefers a critique in which “emotions such as disappointment and anger” are “blended with sympathy” so as to “stimulate meliorative actions directed not at destroying Israel so much as reforming it” (227). Yet the recommended blend of emotions is hardly enough to protect against charges of antisemitism, as Penslar himself can now attest from the standpoint of a Jewish scholar of Jewish history with “a love so deep” for Israel “that it endures despite recognition of the beloved’s flaws.” So-called “antisemitism” has always been the most powerful weapon of Israel’s militant defenders, and the promiscuous use of the term has only expanded alongside the genocide in Gaza—to the point that, as an epithet, “antisemite” has become virtually meaningless.

True to the logic that one can only be betrayed by a friend,” Penslar says, “pro-Zionist Jews” in the twenty-first century, “were particularly incensed by Jews who distanced themselves from Israel or whose attachment to Israel did not prevent them from being strongly critical of it” (211). However, as Penslar rightly warns, “the act of cementing diaspora Jewry with Israel and arguing that all Jews do or must support the country in its current form open Jews worldwide to accusations that they are responsible for Israel’s actions” (223). And while “antisemitism is irrational in that it prejudges Jews to be members of a coherent body possessed of common character traits and exercising unwholesome influence…,” Penslar says, “there can…be a rational base to negative feelings about a state…. A state’s actions can wreak havoc on people’s lives—or end them” (225).

One item missing from Penslar’s discussion is “narcissism,” the emotional complex that makes some American Jews limit their criticism of Israel to its discrimination against the non-Orthodox or that leads a billionaire to imagine herself as a latter-day Anne Frank.

Also possibly rational, Penslar suggests, is the charge of racism against Israel in light of the 2018 Nation-State Law’s formal enshrinement of Jewish supremacy in historic Palestine. Referring to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of racism, he observes that “it is not necessarily hateful to see in Israel…the presence of ‘prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group’ ” (227). Generally, however, Penslar seems inclined to downplay Israeli hatred of Arabs. Speaking of Abba Kovner, a leader of the Vilna Ghetto resistance and later a writer of “propaganda” during the 1948 war—pamphlets “whose savagery and bloodlust were off-putting to hardened commanders”—Penslar says, “Zionist attitudes toward Arabs were usually more complex than Kovner’s unhinged fury” (228–29). In that war, Penslar writes, the IDF “encouraged recruits to feel a ‘rational hatred’ toward the enemy, a feeling that would both propel them into battle and restrain them from committing atrocities” (231). He also says that “hatred of the country’s Arab minority was not expressed in school textbooks, the newspapers, or the radio” (233). Though the work that Penslar cites here covers the period from 1948 to 2000 rather than more recent times,¹⁴ anyone who has followed Israeli media since October 7, 2023, will find this claim surprising. Penslar does report that “survey data from the twenty-first century’s first two decades suggest that anti-Arab sentiment is widespread among Israeli Jews,” including one “in which 77 percent of Israeli Jews opposed sexual relations between Arabs and Jews, and 56 percent opposed granting Arabs equal social rights” (237). Already by 2016, “almost half of Israeli Jews agreed that ‘Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel’ ” (237). In his discussion of Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein, one gets the sense that Penslar, like other liberal Zionists, wishes to present them as outliers (233–35) even if the 2022 elections brought their ideological heirs into the heart of Israeli government, giving them the power to make decisions drastically affecting people’s lives (235–36).¹⁵

Notwithstanding the various critical (if loving) things Penslar has to say about Israel and, by extension Jews, one word that never appears in his emotional analysis is “narcissism”—defined by the New Oxford American Dictionary as “selfishness, involving a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and a need for admiration.” Penslar’s focus on emotions—predominantly Jewish emotions—reflects but also reinforces the narcissism that plagues many of us in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere.¹⁶ There is the narcissism of American Jews who can only bring themselves to criticize Israel for its discrimination against the non-Orthodox; of the anti-war movement in Israel, concerned almost exclusively with the hostages and IDF soldiers rather than the Gazans slain in the tens of thousands;¹⁷ and of a liberal Zionist like Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, who fretted that young congregants were being “bombarded by anti-Israel posts” on social media even while Gazan children were bombarded by actual bombs. There is the narcissism of the earlier mass protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reform, which relegated opponents of the occupation to the ostracized edges.¹⁸ And then there is the extra-special narcissism of billionaire Sheryl Sandberg, who imagines herself as a latter-day Anne Frank—blurting out to a friend, “Will you hide me?”—while remaining silent as neighbors are snatched away by ICE agents and shipped to detention camps.¹⁹ When, as Penslar writes, liberal Zionist rabbi Sharon Brous responded to the IDF’s Pillars of Defense operation in 2012 “with professions of love for Israel and condemnation of Hamas, alongside empathy for suffering Palestinians and a recognition of their right to live in security and dignity,” even this modest expression of humanity was too much for Daniel Gordis, “an American rabbi who had moved to Israel in 1998.” As he complained in The Times of Israel: the “universalized Judaism” espoused by Brous “bequeaths us a new Jew truly incapable of feeling loyalty,” one with the temerity to refer to Palestinians as human beings “on weeks like this, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis sleeping in bomb shelters and many millions more unspeakably frightened” (emphasis added, 175–76).

Penslar is not obtuse; his book demonstrates a keen awareness of many of the issues raised by his fellow scholars—the “engaged” ones—and he deserves credit for being honest enough to trigger some of the world’s worst people and stand his ground when they came after him. In the frame of the moral panic about “antisemitism” on campuses, Penslar may have offered some kind of reality check. (Speaking of antisemitism on campus at the time of his appointment, he told The Boston Globe, “It’s not a myth, but it’s been exaggerated.”²⁰) At the same time, that moral panic, which in a sense he underwrote as co-chair of the Harvard panel, has had dire real-world consequences—people fired, arrested, detained; a frontal assault on higher education as such—all because some Jewish students said that they felt unsafe, and forces of reaction were eager to exploit those claims in the service of an authoritarian agenda.²¹ Feelings, even when connected with language and cognition, are inevitably hazy, amorphous. What is clear is the effects they generate in the world. As Penslar himself would surely agree, Zionism is not just an emotional state. Decentering the oppressive concern over Jewish feelings would be an important step toward a state formation in which the feelings—and lives—of all inhabitants are measured equally.

1. Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah, “Critics Blast, Colleagues Defend Penslar’s Selection to Lead Harvard Antisemitism Task Force,” The Harvard Crimson, January 22, 2024, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/22/penslar-antisemitism-task-force-controversy/.

2. https://stefanik.house.gov/2024/1/stefanik-statement-on-harvard-s-continued-failure-to-protect-jewish-students-unacceptable-appointment-on-antisemitism-task-force.

3. https://x.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1749187870886068411?s=20.

4. Summarizing the results, CNN noted that “among the Jewish students that participated in the survey, 67% reported feeling discomfort expressing their opinions with others at Harvard, compared with 80% of Muslim students” who participated in a twin survey on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias. Andy Rose, Amanda Musa, and Elizabeth Wolfe, “The Biggest Takeaways from Harvard’s Task Force Reports on Campus Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Bias,” CNN, May 1, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/29/us/harvard-reports-antisemitism-anti-muslim-bias.

5. Part of the rap against Penslar was that he had signed a petition with the word “apartheid” in it. As Penslar explained: “The petition simply said that we cannot talk about democracy in Israel and the independence of the court system…without reminding people that the West Bank is…under military law…. So in our mind, when you talk about two different legal systems for people living in the same territory, there was a word to describe it. But at the time, I was a little uncomfortable with the statement. And yes, looking back on it, I should not have signed it, simply because of the ease with which it can be manipulated…. That statement…does not say Israel is an apartheid state…. It talks about what’s happening in the West Bank. But even then, I’m sorry for anything that I may have done that would weaken the credibility or threaten the work of the Task Force.” Sunshine Chen and Johnny H. Perkins, “Fifteen Questions: Derek J. Penslar on the Antisemitism Task Force, Facing Backlash, and Jewish Scholarship,” The Harvard Crimson, May 30, 2025, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/30/15q-derek-penslar/.

6. Penslar notes, for example, that “when discussing current political debates,” he “use[s] the term ‘Israel/Palestine,’ ” which “acknowledge[s] the presence and justice claims on historic Palestine by Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs” (14). According to Penslar, “Liberal Zionism” is “a term that rapidly gained currency in North America after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000[,]…used both by Jews seeking to reconcile their bonds to Israel with commitments to liberal values and by anti-Zionists who derided these Jews for allegedly trying to square a circle” (42). In an interview, Penslar identified himself as someone “who has devoted his professional and personal life to Israel.” Irene Katz Connelly, “Critics Slammed Harvard’s Antisemitism Czar for His New Book. He Says He’s Been Misunderstood,” The Forward, February 5, 2024, https://forward.com/culture/579663/harvard-antisemitism-jewish-campus-derek-penslar-claudine-gay/.

7. In a blurb for Penslar’s book, Shaul Magid, author of The Necessity of Exile (previously reviewed here) refers to Zionism as “contentious and complex.”

8. Edward W. Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” Social Text, no. 1 (1979): 7–58.

9. More specifically, the claim that Palestinians emigrated to historic Palestine only after Jewish settlers began developing the land was promulgated by Joan Peters’s thoroughly debunked From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict over Palestine (1984). See Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 161–64.

10. Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept,” Columbia Law Review 124, no. 4 (May 2024): 924n148. For the remarkable story of the suppression of this journal article first by Harvard Law Review and then by Columbia Law Review, before its eventual reinstatement, see Jonathan Guyer, “Why Are America’s Elite Universities So Afraid of This Scholar’s Paper?,” The Guardian, June 9, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/09/columbia-law-review-rabea-eghbariah-palestine-censorship-controversy.

11. For more on this episode of displacement, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (New York: One World, 2024), 196–98 (previously reviewed here). As Coates writes: “Three days after the Old City fell,…one hundred thirty-five homes were demolished and 650 people rendered homeless. At least one woman was crushed after remaining inside her home. ‘People felt depressed because these houses weren’t just their property, but also the property of their ancestors, from 800 years ago—or more,’ a resident later remembered. ‘They told us to take everything as fast as possible because we didn’t have time.’ ”

12. For accounts of the 1982 war, see, e.g., Kaplan, Our American Israel, 136–77, and Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (New York: Macmillan, 2020), 138–67. Regarding the overall toll of the invasion, Khalidi cites “Lebanese official statistics” for the figure of “more than nineteen thousand Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians,…killed, and more than thirty thousand wounded” over “ten weeks of fighting from early June through mid-August” (143).

13. See David Sperber, “Not Orthodox, Not Secular: Reform Jewish Israelis Are Not Welcome in Israel,” Haaretz, June 14, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-14/ty-article-opinion/.premium/not-orthodox-not-secular-reform-jewish-israelis-are-not-welcome-in-israel/00000197-606a-d34b-ad97-f06bc5cb0000. As Sperber reports: “During a debate on the issue of putting on tefillin in schools,” Likud Knesset member Galit Distel Atbaryan reacted to Gilad Kariv’s suggestion of egalitarian language by “likening females wrapping tefillin to holding a bar mitzvah for a dog,” adding: “Please remove this enlightened Reformist[,] as the Jews [here] would like to continue the discussion.”

14. Penslar cites Eli Podeh, “History and Memory in the Israeli Education System: The Portrayal of the Arab-Israeli Conflict in History Textbooks (1948–2000),” History and Memory 12, no. 1 (2000): 65–100.

15. In Penslar’s formulation, “The Israeli elections of 2022, which brought to power the most right-wing government in the country’s history, promised to intensify [the] discomfort” felt by a majority of American Jews,” which “so far has been compensated for by the mixture of adhesive positive and negative emotions that characterized the American Zionist romance since 1948” (173). Penslar has said that his discussion of the elections and their aftermath was limited “because [they] came up right as I finished.” Connelly, “Critics Slammed.”

16. For a cartoon that lays out how “the state of Israel acts like a malignant narcissist,” posted by Rachel Deutsch (Weird Mom Art) on December 21, 2024, see https://www.instagram.com/p/DD2NZzcxok5/.

17. See, for example, Gideon Levy, “Will Not One Israeli Say: End the War for Gaza’s Sake?,” Haaretz, May 25, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-25/ty-article-opinion/.premium/will-not-one-israeli-say-end-the-war-for-gazas-sake/00000197-0391-dbf9-a7f7-33b5f13b0000.

18. Regarding the division between “left” and “right” in Israel, Penslar observes that “later in the twentieth century,” after Israel’s first decades, “all but the most extreme positions within the Zionist Left maintained the primacy of Jewish claims to a state within most of historic Palestine and were wary of, if not downright hostile to, extensive intermixing with the Arab population” (43). On the marginality of anti-occupation protesters, see, e.g., Tom Mehager, “The Center Isn’t Part of the Solution,” Haaretz, August 20, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-08-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-center-isnt-part-of-the-solution/0000018a-0f15-d0e3-a9ee-2f5f170b0000.

19. For Sandberg’s comments, see a tweet promoting October 8, the documentary in which the comments appear: https://x.com/october8thefilm/status/1897377737154912609. Reacting to the tweet, Jewish journalist and podcaster Sam Adler-Bell exclaimed: “Can we just be honest about this for a fucking second: the current government of the US is using the protection of Jews to disappear people from our streets for their political speech. On your behalf.” (https://x.com/SamAdlerBell/status/1905398305997423093.) Checking Sandberg’s Instagram page on July 14, I find approximately seventy posts since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, not one of which includes a word about ICE, detained students, or Gazans. There are, however, many posts about October 7, the hostages, and antisemitism, including a tribute to Frank on June 12.

20. Penslar’s original co-chair, Raffaella Sadun, a professor of business administration, who “was seen as a counterweight to Dr. Penslar,” according to The New York Times, resigned about a month later. Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad told the Times that Sadun “was supposed to be the reassuring voice and leader on the task force” but that she “didn’t feel confident or satisfied that she could lead and influence this process in a way that made sense to her.” Sadun was replaced by a Professor Jared Ellias, who specializes in “corporate bankruptcy law and the governance of large firms,” according to his faculty profile. Anemona Hartcollis, “Co-chair of Harvard Antisemitism Task Force Resigns,” The New York Times, February 26, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/us/raffaella-sadunco-harvard-antisemitism.html.

21. Asked point blank whether he felt “responsible for some of the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard,” Penslar replied, “No, no. What is it they say? ‘If there were no devil, one would have to invent him.’ ” Chen and Perkins, “Fifteen Questions.”