User:Derekpenslar

Derek Jonathan Penslar is a comparative historian with interests in the relationship between modern Israel and diaspora Jewish societies, global nationalist movements, European colonialism, and post-colonial states. Best known for his book Jews and the Military: A History by Derek Penslar.

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Jews and the Military: A History (2013)

published by Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691138879

Israel has continued along the path of those modern Jews who claimed the military uniform as a natural part of their raiment, thereby subverting the biblical motif of the timid patriarch Jacob furtively donning the animal skins worn by his elder brother, the hunter Esau. In the centuries before Israel’s creation, some Jews lustily wielded military power, others fantasized about it, but few condemned it altogether.

In military affairs, as in so many other respects, Israel represents a continuation of the diaspora via other means.

Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (2001)

published by University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520225909

Modern economic antisemitism [is] a double helix of intersecting paradigms, the first associating Jews with paupers and savages, and the second conceiving of Jews as conspirators, leaders of a financial cabal seeking global domination.

Although today's Jews are haunted by many spectres from the past, Shylock's ghost is not among them.

Zionism was not the child of diaspora Jewish politics; rather, the two were cousins, sharing a common ancestor in the very conception of a "Jewish problem" and the contradictory senses of crisis and competence that stimulated the formation of modern Jewish social policy.

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