A Country Shaped by Love and Fear

Popular sentiment has a role in the political life of all nations, but the Jewish state, born after two millennia of persecution and yearning, offers a particularly strong case study in how emotion can affect politics—underlying everything from ideology to the drawing of lines on a map. The last six months alone has seen a surge of strong sentiment, ironically, over the question of who gets to decide whether a particular law is “reasonable.” The streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have filled with passionate protesters, their faces distorted by crying or yelling, waving giant flags as water cannons force them off their feet. And the debate has been colored as much by argument as by resentment, anxiety, pride, and a plethora of other potent feelings.

Two new books, Eva Illouz’s The Emotional Life of Populism and Derek Penslar’s Zionism: An Emotional State, zero in on those emotions, like love and fear, which are so seldom acknowledged for what they are but play an outsize role in shaping politics.

Though written from different angles—Illouz is a prominent, by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”