Yaron Ezrahi

Yaron Ezrahi

Yaron Ezrahi, born in 1940 in Tel-Aviv, is an Israeli political theorist and an Emeritus professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.^[1] He is also a senior Fellow Emeritus at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem.^[2] Ezrahi is known for his work on the relations between modern science and the rise of the modern liberal democratic state and the political uses of scientific knowledge and authority. His latest work focuses on the deterioration of the Enlightenment version of the partnership between science, technology and democracy and the changing parameters of postmodern imaginaries and performances of the democratic order. His books have been translated into German and Chinese.

Theories and Works

In Ezrahi’s publications between 1971 and 1990, he established the impact of the scientific revolution on the rise of the instrumental concept of politics in the modern democratic state and on its commitments to the transparency and accountability of power, the ideological neutrality of the state, deliberative public discourse and the rationality of public policy. Ezrahi has shown that despite such commitments, the political uses of scientific authorities and experts as political resources have often eclipsed the application of relevant bodies of knowledge in public policy. Ezrahi has backed up his claims by the analysis of the controversy over the relations between IQ group scores and genetics, the political uses of science indicators, the analysis of the latent selective process induced by civil epistemology and the political contexts of scientific advice. Professor Ezrahi's works since the early 1990s has concentrated on the changing interaction between science and politics in Post-Enlightenment or postmodern democracies. They include two articles on the impact of Einstein’s physics on democratic culture and the ironic implications of his esoteric theories on his commitment to participatory democracy; Ezrahi's entry in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences;^[3] and his work on the relations between modes of reasoning and the politics of authority in the modern state. Ezrahi contributed articles on liberty and republicanism to the Harvard volume on the classical tradition. Ezrahi has investigated the impact of the shifty political imagination of the political order on the rise, decline and transformation of democracy. This research has evolved into a revisionist theory of democracy which combines the institutionalization of hegemonic imaginaries of order with their enactment or performance by political actors and the latent processes of naturalizing fictions into realities. This work has been consolidated in Ezrahi's latest book "Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions".

Most recently, Ezrahi collaborated with his wife, Professor Ruth HaCohen, in a book examining the voices of the individual and the voice of the many in the encounter between music and politics. He currently works on a comparative study of the respective roles of violence, political theatricality and the authority of science in legitimating political power.

Works on Israeli Politics and Public Policy

Professor Ezrahi has been one of the leading academic interpreters of Israel’s politics and civic culture in the Israeli and international media. His prize winning book "Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel" examines the ways Zionism by increasingly promoting tribal values has come to devalue liberal democratic ideals of individual happiness and self–realization. The book provides a candid critical examination of the implications of the mounting tensions between nationalism and liberalism for Israeli attitudes towards military violence, political rhetoric, education and culture.

Ezrahi has published with his assistants at the Israeli Democracy Institute also policy oriented works in Hebrew on the need to reform the Israeli television, a book on the problem of cross ownership in the Israeli media and with Professor Kremnitzer a book on Israel’s Path towards a Constitutional Democracy.^[2]

Public Service

As one of the leading authorities on Israeli politics and democracy Yaron Ezrahi has been appearing regularly as an analyst on the Israeli and the international media. He has written columns for the Israeli Daily Haaretz, The New York Times, and other magazines, and has been frequently interviewed by international newspapers and magazines such as Haaretz,^[4] the New York Times,^[5] Foreign Affairs,^[6] CNN,^[7] the BBC,^[8] 60 Minutes,^[9] Al Hayat,^[10] etc.

As a doctoral student Ezrahi served as an adviser on science policy at the White House in 1970, the OECD (1969-1970) and upon returning from his studies to The National Academy of Science in Israel (1973-1983). Ezrahi served also as a senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute (1993-2003). In this capacity he cofounded The Seventh Eye, Israel’s reputable magazine for press criticism charged with guarding professional journalistic standards. As a Senior Fellow at the IDI, Ezrahi joined a small committee of scholars headed by the former chief justice Meir Shamgar which wrote the most elaborate and recent draft of a constitution for Israel. Ezrahi has been also a sharp critic of Israel’s foreign and defense policies. He has relentlessly warned against the corrosive effects of a lasting occupation on the Israeli democracy, legal system, political culture and civic education.

Family

Yaron Ezrahi’s father Yariv was a leading musician, music teacher and critic. He studied music in Vienna, graduated and later directed the first conservatory of Israel in Tel-Aviv. His mother Hanna Diesenhaus was a curator and librarian in the early years of the Tel-Aviv Museum. His sister, Ofra, married to the noted archeologist and former director of the shrine of the Book Magen Broshi, was the director of a conservatory of music in Jerusalem. His grandfather Mordechai Ezrahi-Krichewsky was a Hebrew intellectual, pioneering head of the teachers association and coauthor of the first Hebrew curriculum in pre-state Israel. Yaron Ezrahi was married to Sidra Dekoven and is the father of their three children Talya, Ariel and Tehila. Since 2002 he is married to Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower), a professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University.

Education

He graduated from Tichon Hadash high school in Tel-Aviv in 1958, completed army service in 1960, graduated in political science and philosophy at the Hebrew University in 1964, received his master's degree in political science at the Hebrew University in 1966 and PhD in political science at Harvard University in 1972. Ezrahi studied at Harvard with professors Judith Shklar, Don K. Price, Michael Walzer, Louis Hertz, Everett Mendelsohn, Gerald Holton, Nelson Goodman and Karl Deutsch.

Awards and honours

• Graduate Prize Fellowship, Harvard 1966-1970
• National Science Foundation grant 1977
• Russell Sage Foundation grant 1984
• The Jewish Book Award 1998^[2]
• A prize honoring Professor Ezrahi Life work 2010^[11]

Teaching and research abroad

• Professor Ezrahi has taught at the department of political science at the Hebrew University since 1972. His courses included: Modern political theory, Ancient and Modern Democracy, Science and Government, Technology as a Branch of Ethics, Rationality in Politics, The arts and the political imagination, Ideology and politics in Israel.
• He lectured as a visiting Professor at the history of science department at The University of Pennsylvania 1973-4
• Was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in The Behavioral Sciences at Stanford 1977-8
• Visiting professor at the department of political science at Duke University 1984-1986
• Several visiting professorships at Harvard Summer Schools late 1980s and Early 1990s
• Visiting professor in Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton 1992-1993
• visiting professor in ETH Zurich 2001
• Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Cogut Humanities Center at Brown Spring 2008
• Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton September–October–November 2011
• A Resident Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute for Advanced Studies at Bellagio Italy April and May 2012

Selected publications

Books

• The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Harvard University Press, 1990. Shortly forthcoming also in Chinese at Shanghai by Jiao Yong University Press.
• Technology, Pessimism and Postmodernism: Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn and Howard Segal (eds.), Sociology of Science Yearbook 1993, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Press, 1993.
• Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Published also in German by Alexander Fest publishing House as Gewalt und Gewissen. Israels langer Weg in die Moderne (1998). Winner of the American National Jewish Book Award 1997.
• Israel Towards a Constitutional Democracy: (With M. Kremnitzer), Jerusalem: The Israeli Democracy Institute, 2001 (in Hebrew).^[2]
• Cross Ownership: Control and Competition in the Israeli Media: Economic and Legal Aspects and their Impact on the Israeli Democracy (With Zohar Goshen and Shmuel Leshem), Jerusalem: The Israel Democracy Institute, 2003 (in Hebrew).^[2]
• Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions,Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• The Voice of the many and the Voices of the Individual in Music and Politics, (With Ruth HaCohen ), Forthcoming (in Hebrew).

Selected Articles

• “The Political Resources of American Science” in Science Studies 1 (1971), pp. 117–133 (Republished in Penguin, Modern Readings in the Sociology of Science 1971).
• “The Jensen Controversy: A Study in the Ethics and Politics of Knowledge in Democracy,” in Controversies and Decisions: the Social Sciences and Public Policy Charles Frankel (ed.), New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1976, pp. 149–170.
• “Political Contexts of Science Indicators” in Towards a Metrics of Science, the Advent of Science Indicators, Yehuda Elkana, Joshua Lederberg, Robert K. Merton, Arnold Thackeray and Harriet Zuckerman (eds.), New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978, pp. 285–327.
• “Einstein and the Light of Reason,” in Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 253–278.
• “Science and the Problem of Authority in Democracy,” in Science and Social Structure: a Festschrift for Robert K. Merton, New York: Transactions of The New York Academy of Sciences (series II vol. 39), 1980, pp. 43–60.
• “Utopian and Pragmatic Rationalism: The Political Context of Scientific Advice,” Minerva 18/1 (Spring 1980), pp. 111–131.
• “Science and the Civic Spirit of Liberal Democracy,” in Civil Religion and Political Theology: Leroy S. Rouner (ed.), Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986, pp. 59–75.
• “Technology and the civil Epistemology of Democracy,” Inquiry: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy l35/3-4 (September/December 1992), pp. 363–376.
• “Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies” in States of Knowlrdge, The Co-Production of Science and Social Order, Sheila Jasanoff ed. Routledge 1994 pp254–273
• "The Theatrics and Mechanics of Action: The Theater and the Machine as Political Metaphors," Social Research 62/2 (1995), pp. 299–322.
• “Modes of Reasoning and the Politics of Authority in the Modern State,” in Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cognition, David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 72–89.
• “Dewey’s Critic of Democratic Visual Culture and its Political Implications,” in States of Vision; The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, David Michael Levin (ed.), Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 315–336.
• "New History for a New Israel: Two Landmark Looks at a Sentimentalized Past," Foreign Affairs 79/1 (2000), pp. 158–162.
• “Liberty” and “Republicanism”, essays in The Classical Tradition: Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and Salvatore Settis (eds.), Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 529–539; 819-822.
• "Einstein's Unintended Legacy: The Critique of Common-Sense Realism and Post-Modern Politics", in: Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, Peter Galison, Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 48–58.
• “The Occupation and Israeli Democracy,” in The impact of a Lasting Occupation, Lessons From Israeli Society, Daniel Bar-Tal and Izhak Schnell (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 189–207.
• “The Cultural Dimension of the Concept of Power in Modern Democracy” Zmanim Historical Quarterly 50-51 winter 1994 pp. 4–15 (in Hebrew)
• “How the Individual creates Himself” Zmanim Historical Quarterly 104 Autumn 2008 pp7–10 (in Hebrew)

References

External links

• Israel Democracy Institute
• The Hebrew University of Jerusalem – The Department of Political Science