The tradition of Jewish political thought goes back to the Bible. But the emergence of an independent Jewish state in modern times has added a pressing dimension to the question of what Judaism has to say about the political realm: How should human beings govern themselves? What is the proper relationship of individuals to the state? And what should the relationship of the State of Israel be to the Jewish people and the texts and traditions of Judaism? Israeli and Diaspora Jewish thinkers have made contributions to discussion of these and related questions. But only in the 1980s did Jewish political thought begin to emerge as a discipline requiring specialized attention combining political and legal theory with the sources of Jewish tradition and contemporary Zionist thought.
Yoram Hazony vs. A.B. Yehoshua on the Jewishness of Israel
The Herzl Institute is today one of the world’s foremost centers for the study and upbuilding of the Jewish political tradition, bringing together Shmuel Trigano, one of the founders of the field of Jewish political theory as modern discipline, together with prominent younger scholars such as Joshua Berman, Yoram Hazony, and Ofir Haivry.
Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic, 2018).
Yechiel Leiter, John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (Cambridge, 2018).
Yoram Hazony, God and Politics in Esther (Cambridge, 2016).
Shmuel Trigano, Philosophy of the Law: The Political in the Torah (Shalem, 2011).
Joshua Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke With Ancient Political Thought (Oxford, 2008).
Aaron Wildavsky, Moses as Political Leader, with Introduction by Yoram Hazony (Shalem, 2006).
Ofir Haivry, “The Way of the World,” Azure 5 (1998).
Hebraic Political Studies was a peer-reviewed journal that ran from 2005 through 2009.
