Derek Penslar

Derek Jonathan Penslar (born 1958) is a Canadian historian. He was raised in Los Angeles, attended Stanford University for his first degree, and then took his graduate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, where his advisors were Richard Webster, Amos Funkenstein and Gerald Feldman.^[1] Penslar taught at Indiana University in Bloomington from 1987 to 1998, when he moved to Toronto to assume the Samuel J. Zacks Chair in Jewish History at the University of Toronto (U of T). Between 2002 and 2008 he directed U of T's Centre for Jewish Studies.

In 2011, it was announced that he was to become the first Stanley Lewis professor of Israel studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, following a £3m donation. He will become a fellow of St Anne's College.^[2]

Penslar's areas of research expertise include modern European Jewry, Zionism and Israel. Historian Michael Berkowitz calls Penslar "one of the most trenchant [analysts] of how Zionism functioned on the ground in Palestine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."^[3]

In 2011, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.^[4]

Books

• 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)

• Israël face à son passé, with Shlomo Sand, Avi Shlaïm, Les éditions arkhê, 2010, online = http://www.arkhe-editions.com

References

1. ^ Derek Penslar 1991 "Acknowledgmnts" in Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918. Indiana University Press 1991
2. ^ Vasagar, Jeevan (26 May 2011). "Oxford University appoints Israel studies professor with £3m donation" (in English). The Guardian (United Kingdom). http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/oxford-university-israel-studies-professor. Retrieved 27 May 2011. 
3. ^ Nationalism, Zionism and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, By Michael Berkowitz, BRILL, 2004, p. 7
4. ^ "Class of 2011: List of New Fellows". Royal Society of Canada. http://www.rsc.ca/documents/media/Class_of_2011_Citations_ENG.pdf. 

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Name	Penslar, Derek
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Date of birth	1958
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