The Israel Studies Annual Lecture Series
Presents
Between Honor and Authenticity: Zionism as Theodor Herzl’s Life Project
Prof. Derek Penslar
5:00 pm, Thursday, 29 January, 2015, FAMES, Sidgwick Site, Rooms 8&9
This talk will explore the significance that Zionism held for Theodor Herzl as a life-project, i.e., as a set of goals and practices that endow a person’s existence with meaning and direction, and the ways his striving toward honour and authenticity fuelled his Zionist passion and sustained him during the eight years in which he irrevocably transformed the Jewish world.
Prof. Penslar is a comparative historian who taught at Indiana University and the University of Toronto before coming to Oxford in 2012. He is the co-editor of The Journal of Israeli History and Jewish Social Studies, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Academy for Jewish Research. He is author of Zionism and Theocracy (1991), Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe(2001), Orientalism and the Jews (2004), Israel in History (2006), and Jews and the Military (2013).
reception and refreshments following