Boycotts and Political Emotions

Are boycotts strategic political instruments or emotional outbursts? This talk examines boycotts through the lens of political emotions, focusing on political actors’ efforts to maintain a distinction between ‘cold’ strategic politics and ‘emotional’ politics—and the subtle ways this distinction tends to erode on the ground. Scholarship on boycotts often categorizes them as strategic, expressive, or punitive, but I suggest viewing these not as types of boycotts but as modes of political emotion-work.

Understanding boycotts as evolving social dramas—where emotions shift roles as the plot unfolds—reveals how actors script and perform self-righteous anger, fear, or love, while portraying adversaries as either overly emotional or, alternatively, unfeeling and cynical. The lion’s share of the talk will illustrate this model through the historical case of the sequence of boycotts, counter-boycotts, and anti-boycott campaigns initiated by Jews and Germans after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, with particular attention to debates in Jewish Palestine.

This episode reveals three forms of political emotion-work—strategic, expressive, and punitive—while highlighting the labor required to sustain the ostensibly ‘unemotional’ politics governing the Zionist mainstream and the moments when its regime of emotional restraint was breached.

Bio: Prof. Hizky Shoham of Bar-Ilan University heads the Program for Hermeneutics and Culture Studies and co-directs the Center for Cultural Sociology. He is also a research fellow at the Kogod Institute at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His theoretical work explores the meanings of everyday practices, and his empirical research focuses on the anthropological history of Zionism, the Yishuv, Israel, and world Jewry, with particular attention to cultural processes that emerge from below with minimal institutional involvement.

His most recent book is A Moving Feast: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah across Jewish Cultures (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2025).