Yaron Ezrahi

Early life and education

Ezrahi was born in 1940 in Tel Aviv. His father Yariv was a musician, music teacher and critic. His mother Hanna Diesenhaus was a curator and librarian in the early years of the Tel-Aviv Museum. 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.

Career

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 Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 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 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 recent draft of a constitution for Israel.

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.

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; 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".

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

Ezrahi has been one of the leading academic interpreters of Israel’s politics and civic culture in the Israeli and international media. His 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.

As one of the leading authorities on Israeli politics and democracy Yaron Ezrahi has appeared as an analyst on the Israeli and the international media. He has written columns for the Israeli Daily Haaretz, the New York Times, and has been interview by Foreign Affairs, CNN, the BBC, 60 Minutes, and Al Hayat,

Personal life

Yaron Ezrahi was married to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi and they have three children. Since 2002 he is married to Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower), a professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University.

Awards and honours

Books

Articles