Yoram Hazony

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Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute[1] in Jerusalem, and serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation.[2] Hazony founded the Shalem Center in Jerusalem in 1994, and was president and then provost until 2012. He designed the curriculum for Shalem College, Israel's first liberal arts college, established in 2013.

Biography[]

Yoram Hazony was born in Rehovot, Israel, and moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey. He was raised and educated in the United States and returned to live in Israel after finishing university.[3] Hazony received his BA from Princeton University in East Asian studies in 1986, and his PhD from Rutgers University in political philosophy in 1993. While a junior at Princeton he founded the Princeton Tory, a magazine for moderate and conservative thought.[4] He is the brother of David Hazony and Daniel Hazony. He married Julia Fulton, who he met at Princeton, and she moved to Israel with him. The couple lives in Jerusalem and has nine children.[5]

Academic and journalism career[]

Hazony has served as Director of the John Templeton Foundation's project in Jewish Philosophical Theology, and as a member of the Israel Council for Higher Education committee examining general studies programs in Israel's universities and colleges.

He is author of a regular blog on philosophy, politics, Judaism, Israel and higher education called Jerusalem Letters.[6] Hazony has published in outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and American Affairs.[7][8][9]

Views and opinions[]

Hazony is a Modern Orthodox Jew and related his views on Open Orthodoxy in an article published in 2014. Hazony stated that he feared that Open Orthodoxy was acting as an ideological echo chamber in which any unapproved views were ridiculed and quashed without debate. Hazony described his concern that elements of Open Orthodoxy had seemingly decided to accept all conclusions of academic Bible critics as indisputable fact, without even going through the motions of investigating whether these conclusions were true.[10]

Hazony is an outspoken nationalist and has written that nationalism uniquely provides "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves."[11] However, several critics of Hazony's book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) maintain it is both theoretically inconsistent or incoherent and that it bears little relation to the historical body of nationalist thought.[12][13][14][15] In a review for the Tel Aviv Review of Books, Yair Wallach argues that Hazony's most recent book (The Jewish State: Herzl and the Promise of Nationalism) is characterised by "intellectual dishonesty", in part for presenting a selective account of Theodor Herzl's understanding of Zionism and nationalism.[16]

Awards and recognition[]

Hazony's book The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) was selected as the Conservative Book of the Year for 2019. His Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture[17] (Cambridge, 2012) received the second-place PROSE Award for best book in Theology and Religion from the American Association of Publishers.

Bibliography[]

Books
Edited books
  • Yoram Hazony and Dru Johnson, eds., The Question of God's Perfection (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
  • Introduction to Aaron Wildavsky, Moses as Political Leader (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2005).
  • David Hazony, Yoram Hazony, and Michael Oren, eds., New Essays on Zionism, (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2006).
Translated books
  • Iddo Netanyahu, Yoni's Last Battle: the Rescue at Entebbe, 1976, Yoram Hazony, trans. (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2001).

References[]

  1. ^ "The Herzl Institute – Machon Herzl -".
  2. ^ "What is National Conservatism? At an Inaugural Conference, a New Brand of Conservatives Are Beginning to Define Themselves". Townhall. 16 July 2019. Retrieved 2 September 2019.
  3. ^ "A JEWISH TELEGRAPH NEWSPAPER". www.jewishtelegraph.com. Retrieved 2020-11-07.
  4. ^ Dietze, Jane (5 October 1984). "New campus conservative journal strives for intellectual approach". The Daily Princetonian. 108 (90).
  5. ^ "The case for nationalism, by the Israeli credited with shaping Trump's foreign policy". Haaretz.com. Retrieved 2020-11-07.
  6. ^ "Yoram Hazony - Gericke on Bible and Philosophy". 7 November 2013.
  7. ^ Hazony, Yoram (2017). "Is Classical Liberalism Conservative?".
  8. ^ Hazony, Yoram. "What Is Conservatism?".
  9. ^ "About me".
  10. ^ Hazony, Yoram (2014). "Open Orthodoxy". I’ve been in that room many times in my life. Too many times. And by now I know it quite well. It’s a room in which there is a single, politically correct point of view that everyone is expected to express. A room in which those who toe the party line are praised over and over for being enlightened, fearless, and committed to the search for truth, while anyone who raises a doubt is greeted with anger and ridicule. A room in which those who might have disagreed or asked a tough question make a quick calculation that it’s just not worth being publicly embarrassed over it and retreat into silence, or else adjust their views to fit in. A room that is said to be set upon by enemies from the outside, enemies who are invariably lacking in any capacity for intelligent thought, who have no good points of their own to make, who in fact possess no recognizable virtues at all. In other words, it is a room in which the persuaded are lavishly rewarded for being persuaded, the undecided are relentlessly pressed to choose the right side or face the consequences, and skeptics—unless they are in the mood for a serious bruising—are made to shut up.
  11. ^ "In Defense of Nations". National Review. 13 September 2018. Retrieved 29 October 2018.
  12. ^ Koyama, Mark. "A Nationalism Untethered to History". Liberal Currents. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  13. ^ Shindler, Michael (July 9, 2019). "Nationalism Qua Nationalism". Jacobite (July). Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  14. ^ Koss, Andrew (November 26, 2018). "How to Defend Nationalism, and How Not to". Mosaic. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  15. ^ Nowrasteh, Alex (November 1, 2018). "Ridiculous Claims in Yoram Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism". Cato Blog. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  16. ^ Yair Wallach, No True Nationalist, Tel Aviv Review of Books, Summer 2021
  17. ^ "Yoram Hazony - The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture".

External links[]

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