Yoram Hazony


Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist. He is President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, and serves as the Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation.
Hazony's book The Virtue of Nationalism was selected as the Conservative Book of the Year for 2019. His Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture received the second-place PROSE Award for best book in Theology and Religion from the American Association of Publishers.
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.

Early life and education

Hazony received his B.A. from Princeton University in East Asian Studies in 1986, and his Ph.D. 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. He is the brother of David Hazonyand Daniel Hazony.

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 weblog on philosophy, politics, Judaism, Israel and higher education called Jerusalem Letters. Hazony has published in outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and American Affairs.
Hazony is an outspoken nationalist and has written that nationalism uniquely provides "the collective right of a free people to rule themselves." However, several critics of Hazony's book The Virtue of Nationalism maintain it is both theoretically inconsistent or incoherent and that it bears little relation to the historical body of nationalist thought.

Religious views

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.

Published works

; Books
; Edited books
; Translated books