Carol Kahn Strauss Fellows in Jewish Studies

Derek Penslar

Class of Spring 2026

William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History

Harvard University

The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History

At the Academy, Penslar will write a book titled The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History. The book examines global reactions to debates at the United Nations in 1947 regarding Palestine’s future, the ensuing fighting between Jews and Arabs in Palestine and between Arab state armies and the state of Israel, and postwar negotiations that led to armistice agreements but no lasting peace settlement. The book, which encompasses both international politics and public opinion, shows that the United Nations’ intense involvement with the Palestine Question drew its member states deep into the conflict, enhancing longstanding connections between Christians and Muslims worldwide with Palestine. The nature of that connection varied greatly from one country to another, in part due to states’ conflicting interests in the region, but also because the public often perceived Palestine through their national, religious, and class identities. In 1948, as in our own day, when people talked about Palestine, they were often talking about themselves.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University. He holds a BA in History from Stanford University as well as an MA and a PhD in Modern European History from the University of California, Berkeley. In his research and teaching, Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism. He is the author of Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of the Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918 (Indiana, 1991), Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (California, 2001), Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective (Routledge, 2006), Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, 2013), Theodor Herzl: The Charismatic Leader (Yale, 2020), and Zionism: An Emotional State (Rutgers, 2023). He also co-edited Orientalism and the Jews (Brandeis, 2004) and Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Theory and the Historiography of Zionism (Brandeis, 2023). Penslar has taught at Indiana University Bloomington, University of Toronto, and the University of Oxford, and has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Penslar 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.