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.

Yoram Hazony was born in Rehovot, Israel, on March 5, 1964. His parents, both natives of what was then British Mandatory Palestine, had deep roots in the pre-state Jewish community there. At approximately one year old, Hazony relocated with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, following his father's professional appointment as a physicist and expert in robotic engineering at Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Hazony completed a Ph.D. in political theory at Rutgers University in 1993, with a dissertation examining the political theory embedded in the Book of Jeremiah and its implications for contemporary statecraft. His academic pivot from East Asian studies to biblical political philosophy was notably spurred not by his American university experiences but by time spent at an Israeli yeshiva, where he encountered rigorous textual analysis of Jewish sources that shaped his analytical approach to governance and nationalism. These influences—combining empirical historical inquiry with scriptural reasoning—underpinned his rejection of abstract rationalism in favor of tradition-based political realism, evident in his subsequent scholarship.