Robert Weltsch: German Zionism and Nationalism in Retrospect

The talk examines the private and public writings of Robert Weltsch (1891-1982), a prolific journalist and a prominent German Zionist, who was a unique observer of his time. As editor in chief of the Berlin-based newspaper Jüdische Rundschau from 1919 to 1938, Weltsch closely witnessed the destructive side of nationalism in Nazi Germany and warned against similar tendencies he saw among Zionists in the Jewish Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine. While he grew ever more critical of the forms of Zionism in the Yishuv, he was also deeply connected to it, and Palestine was the only place to which he could flee in 1938 and where he spent the war years. Although shortly after the war Weltsch left for London, where he worked for many years in the Leo Baeck Institute, he decided in the late 1970s to spend his last years in Jerusalem. The talk will examine Weltsch’s changing views and contradictory sentiments about Zionism as expressed in private correspondences, published articles, and interviews. The first part will discuss Weltsch’s conceptualization of “positive” and “negative” nationalism and his ambivalence toward the nationalistic expressions of political Zionism. The second part will focus on the postwar years and ask how Weltsch reassessed his own responses and views from the 1920s to 1940. Did he acknowledge past miscalculations and false prognoses and wholly embrace Israeli Zionism or rather continued to fight for his old ideas?

This event is part of Many Promised Lands, LBI's 2026 lecture series covering migration of German-Jewish refugees after 1946.

This programming is made possible through the generous support of the Levi-Thalheimer Fund for Research and Public History.

Kobi Kabalek (Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia, 2013) is Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at Penn State University since 2019. His research focuses on historical perceptions, moral sentiments, emotions, and memory in Holocaust testimonies, historical writing, and popular culture. Recent publications: Rescue and Remembrance: Imagining the German Collective after Nazism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025); “No Moment of Peace: Terror, Panic, and Horror in Responses to Nazi Violence against Jews, 1933 and 1938,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Spring 2026); “‘The Exception Proves the Rule’ in the Memory of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in Israel,” Journal of Israeli History (2025); “‘Trained Incapacity’: German Conceptions of the Holocaust and the ‘Fight against Antisemitism’ after 7 October 2023,” Journal of Genocide Research (2026); “Between Nationalism and Internationalism: Robert Weltsch and the Colonial Dilemma in WWII Palestine,” AJS Review (2024).