The biblical prophets dreamed of a time when the nations of the world would turn to Israel for inspiration. Is this just fantasy or could it really happen? As the nationalist revival of recent years has touched one nation after another, Israel’s star seems to be rising as non-Jews turn for intellectual resources to the Hebraic political tradition and to the Jewish state, the most impressive nationalist enterprise in the modern era. In this keynote speech, Israeli intellectual Yoram Hazony, author of ISI’s 2019 Conservative Book of the Year, "The Virtue of Nationalism," brings together political analysis, intellectual history, and Scripture to consider the unfolding miracle of Jewish nationalism and its place in the world. Does the Israel of today have the confidence to share its teaching with the West and contribute to its restoration? Or will the dysfunction and loss of direction afflicting parts of the West instead bring Israel down?

Yoram Hazony

Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, Bible scholar and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. and the founder and former head of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, a 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. He is also the director of the John Templeton Foundation’s project in Jewish Philosophical Theology. Dr. Hazony researches and writes in the fields of philosophy and theology, political theory and intellectual history. His latest is Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and his previous book The Virtue of Nationalism, won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Conservative Book of the Year Award in 2019. His other books include The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, God and Politics in Esther, and The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul. His articles and essays have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and the New Republic, among others. He obtained his doctorate in Political Theory at Rutgers University, and was the first editor of Princeton’s conservative undergraduate student journal. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife Yael Hazony. They have nine children.