Yoram Hazony

Yoram Hazony (born 1964) is an Israeli-born philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist who advocates for nationalism rooted in historical traditions and biblical principles as essential for preserving political liberty and cultural coherence. Educated at Princeton University, where he earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies in 1986, and Rutgers University, where he completed a Ph.D., Hazony founded the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem in 2012 to advance research in Jewish political thought, philosophy, theology, Zionism, and Israel studies. As president of the institute and chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, he has organized international conferences promoting national conservatism, emphasizing sovereign nation-states over supranational empires or universalist ideologies that he argues undermine self-determination and empirical governance. Hazony's influential works include The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), which contends that independent nations provide the most stable framework for mutual respect among peoples and protection against coercive universalism, and Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), which rediscovers conservatism as an empiricist, religious, and nationalist tradition grounded in Anglo-American heritage rather than abstract rationalism. His earlier books, such as The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (2012) and The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul (2000), explore the political teachings of the Hebrew Bible and the ideological foundations of Zionism. These contributions have positioned him as a leading voice in debates over the role of tradition, religion, and national particularity in resisting what he describes as the erosion of Western liberties by progressive internationalism.