Yaron Ezrahi

Yaron Ezrahi (ירון אזרחי; 19 April 1940 – 29 January 2019) was an Israeli political theorist and philosopher, professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, and a public intellectual.

Ezrahi was 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 late work focuses on the deterioration of the Enlightenment version of the partnership between science, technology and democracy, the changing parameters of postmodern imaginaries, and performances of the democratic order.

His books, written in English and Hebrew, were translated into German and Chinese.

Ezrahi was born in 1940 in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine.

He is the son of the music educator, composer and violinist Yariv Ezrahi (cousin of President Ezer Weizman; counts amongst his pupils Daniel Barenboim), and Hannah Ezrahi (née Diesenhaus) who was a curator and librarian in the early years of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

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.

Yaron Ezrahi was married to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi and they have three children: Talya, Ariel, and Tehila.

As a doctoral student, Ezrahi served as an adviser on science policy at the White House in 1970, and the OECD (1969-1970).

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.

Later he served as an adviser to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Israel (1973-1983).

Ezrahi's works since the early 1990s 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 investigated the impact of the shifting political imagination of the political order on the rise, decline and transformation of democracy.

This research 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.

Ezrahi was one of the founders of the Israel Democracy Institute where he served between the 1993–2003.

In this capacity he co-founded 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.

From 2001 he was married to Ruth HaCohen (Pinczower), a professor of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

This work has been consolidated in Ezrahi's 2012 book Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions.

Ezrahi collaborated with his wife, Professor Ruth HaCohen, in writing Composing Power, Singing Freedom, a book which probes the ways whereby diverse musical forms were deployed for the sake of legitimation or delegitimation of early and late modern regimes, including monarchies, republics, liberal and social democracies, as well as totalitarian regimes.

His last book ''Can Democracy Recover?

The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faith'', which he completed shortly before he died, analyzes the current crisis of democratic institutions and of faith in democracy that reflects the increasing inability of contemporary lay publics to make sense of the political universe in which they live.

It explores the current breakdown of common-sense conception of political reality and the erosion of democratic political epistemology that trigger the disruptive proliferation of popular political conspiracy theories.

The book further attempts to propose the conditions for the refashioning of democracy on a new post-Enlightenment basis.

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 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.

His grandfather, Mordechai Krichevsky-Ezrahi, came to Palestine in the 19th-century from what is now Ukraine in Zionist first Aliyah, taking a  part in the revival of the Hebrew language.