About
Yoram Hazony is President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, a public affairs and educational institute he founded together with Ofir Haivry in 2012. In addition, Hazony serves as Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a Washington-based organization that has hosted the National Conservatism Conference in the United States, Britain, and Europe since 2019. He was appointed a trustee of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC in 2026.
Hazony publishes primarily in the fields of philosophy, Bible, and political theory. His 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic, 2018) is considered one of the key texts of the nationalist revival of the last decade. It was selected Conservative Book of the Year for 2019, and was an amazon #1 best-seller in the categories of International Diplomacy and Nationalism. An expanded second edition of The Virtue of Nationalism was published in 2025. You can read reviews of the book here.
Hazony’s most recent book Conservatism: A Rediscovery was released by Regnery in May 2022. You can read reviews of the book here.
His next book, Human Nature, will be published in 2028.
Hazony’s previous books include The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which won the second place PROSE award for the best book of Theology and Religion from the Association of American Publishers; The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (Basic Books, 2000); A Jewish State: Herzl and the Promise of Nationalism (Sella Meir, 2020) [Hebrew]; and God and Politics in Esther (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
He has also edited several volumes on Jewish theology and political philosophy, including The Revelation at Sinai: What Does ‘Torah from Heaven’ Mean? with Gil Student and Alex Sztuden (Ktav, 2021); and The Question of God’s Perfection with Dru Johnson (Brill, 2019). In April 2016, Hazony appeared with Morgan Freeman in his hit National Geographic miniseries “The Story of God.” You can watch them talk about God here.
Earlier, Hazony founded and led the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research institute that conducted nearly two decades of pioneering work in the fields of philosophy, political theory, Bible, Talmud, Jewish and Zionist history, Middle East Studies and archaeology beginning in 1994. The Center’s publishing arm, Shalem Press, became Israel’s leading publisher of Western philosophy translated into Hebrew and published Azure magazine. In 2013, Shalem was accredited to grant Israel’s first Liberal Arts B.A., and became Shalem College. Hazony served as President of Shalem from 1994-2002, and as Provost from 2005-2012. A journalistic write-up about his work at Shalem is here.
After that, Hazony served as a member of the Israel Council for Higher Education’s commission on General Studies and Liberal Arts programs in Israel’s universities and colleges, and was Director of the John Templeton Foundation’s project in Jewish Philosophical Theology during the years 2010-2018.
Hazony was born in Rehovot, Israel in 1964. He graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in East Asian Studies in 1986, and completed his Ph.D. at Rutgers University in Political Theory in 1993. As an undergraduate, Hazony founded and was the first editor of Princeton’s conservative student journal, The Princeton Tory. The first issue appeared in October 1984, when Ronald Reagan was President and Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of Britain.
Hazony lives in Jerusalem with his wife Yael. They have nine children.
You can subscribe here to receive Jerusalem Letters, Hazony’s series of occasional essays on politics, philosophy, Judaism, Israel, and higher education.