Speakers: Derek Penslar, Trudy Gold

The life of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) was as puzzling as it was brief. How did this cosmopolitan and assimilated European Jew become the leader of the Zionist movement? How could he be both an artist and a statesman, a rationalist and an aesthete, a stern moralist yet possessed of deep, and at times dark, passions? And why did scores of thousands of Jews, many of them from traditional backgrounds, embrace Herzl as their leader? Acclaimed historian Derek Penslar shows that Herzl’s path to Zionism had as mu to do with personal crises as it did with antisemitism.