A distinguished Israeli political theorist, philosopher, and professor at the Hebrew University, he was a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute which he co-founded in Jerusalem. At the IDI he co-foundedThe Seventh Eye, Israel's magazine for press criticism. As a Senior Fellow at the IDI, Ezrahi joined a committee of scholars headed by the former chief justice Meir Shamgar which wrote the most recent draft of a constitution for Israel.
Yaron was a wonderfully brilliant friend. I first met Yaron in 1965 when we were studying together at the Hebrew University on the Givat Ram campus. He was my first encounter with a “public intellectual,” even if I never even imagined the concept at the time. We spent many hours talking over the next years I spent in Israel, in Cambridge, and then many times over the ensuing decades long-distance. He introduced me to ideas in Encounter magazine, to the founders and contributors of the socialist journal, Emda, to friends, Menachem Brinker, Avishai and Edna Margolit. He involved me in the origins of the creation of the Open University of Israel, and in a Van Leer strategic think tank, introduced me to many iconoclastic security analysts on political, military, and long range-strategic thinking, including Abrasha Tamir and Meir Pa’il. He was active in Peace Now, and one of his students I knew through him, Emil Grunsweig was the first casualty of the peace movement. LINK
Ezrahi was known for his work on the relations between modern science and the rise of the modern liberal democratic state and his later work that focused on the deterioration of the Enlightenment version of the partnership between science, technology and democracy.
Among his books are The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Can Democracy Recover? The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faith, and Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions.
He was prescient. This review he wrote expressed an irony that sadly deeply resonates today: “Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, War, Peace, and the Bomb.”
Einstein's impact on the relations between science, politics and freedom, however, transcends his record as a public intellectual. Ironically, the unintended wider cultural legacy of his physics worked against his commitment to democratic values and his faith in the mission of scientists to publicly combat violence and irrational politics.
In a letter to Rolland in August 1917, Einstein insisted that “only facts can dissuade the majority of the misled from their delusion”. But Einstein's concept of facts, as expressed in his exchange with the French philosopher Henri Bergson, was rather esoteric. Failing to appreciate the importance of common-sense realism as the basis of democratic public discourse, he did not seem to anticipate that the shift from newtonian to einsteinian physics would widen the gap between authoritative scientific knowledge and lay opinion. His liberal-democratic commitment was contradicted by his view that “naive realism”, the belief that “things 'are' as they are perceived by us through our senses”, was a “plebian illusion”. Deeply concerned about the turning of the public into a herd in the country of Kant and Goethe, he also failed to see that the public in democratic societies is not exactly moved by rational arguments free from rhetoric and theatricality.
Yaron’s last book, that he completed shortly before he passed away, Can Democracy Recover? The Roots of the Crisis in Democratic Faithanalyzed the current crisis of democratic institutions and of faith in democracy. 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.
This, from his 2012 essay “The Reality of Political Fictions: Democracy Between Modernity and Postmodernity,” published by the IDI in an edited collection By the People, For the People, Without the People? The Emergence of (Anti) Political Sentiment in Western Democracies and in Israel.”
“Unlike philosophical knowledge and political science as fields of systemic propositional knowledge, the business of political constitutional and legal wisdom is not so much to explain or rationally justify, but to guide what Vico so insightfully called the acting out, or the enactment of the fictions which are necessary to the foundation and regulation of the civic order.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the fragility of the American democracy relates to the fact that the government of the Union rests almost wholly on legal fictions. The Union is an ideal nation that exists so to speak only in the mind, and whose extent and bounds intelligence alone discovers. But at the same time de Tocqueville argued that he never admired the good sense and practical intelligence of the Americans more, than in the manner by which they escape the innumerable difficulties to which their federal Constitution gives rise. Much practical wisdom was displayed also by the French revolutionaries when they chose to ichnographically embody the secular Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen within the image of the Mosaic tablets, thus tapping deeply engrained religious sensibilities in support of man-made or “natural laws.”
A leading insightful authority on Israeli politics and democracy, Ezrahi was one of the leading interpreters of Israel's politics and civic culture in the Israeli and international media. His book Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel examined mounting tensions between nationalism and liberalism for Israeli attitudes towards military violence, political rhetoric, education and culture.
Yaron was a frequent analyst for Israeli and the international media, particularly cited in many of Pulitzer Prize columnist Thomas Friedman’s New York Times columns. Recently the IDI and the Hebrew University held a conference on the ‘Future of Democracy’ in memory of Yaron featuring former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Friedman.
Over the years Yaron was very generous with his time and with his judicious advice to the students I would selectively recommend to him. His last name is derivative of the Hebrew word for citizen – Ezrach. He embodied that fully. He died in 2019, and I, and so many of my close community, including Irwin Cotler, miss him, his voice, his influence, tremendously.