Yaron Ezrahi

Yaron Ezrahi was born in 1940 in Tel Aviv

Yaron Ezrahi was born in Tel Aviv in 1940. His father, Yariv Ezrahi, was a violinist and music educator, and his mother, Hannah, worked as a curator and librarian at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His grandfather came to the land in the first Aliyah.

He finished Tichon Hadash high school in 1958 and completed army service in 1960. He studied political science and philosophy at the Hebrew University and earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1972.

As a student he advised on science policy at the White House. He joined the Hebrew University faculty in 1971 and became a full professor in 1998, retiring in 2008. He also advised the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1973 to 1983.

He was a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, where he co-founded The Seventh Eye and took part in drafting a constitution for Israel in a committee headed by Meir Shamgar. His research studied how science shaped the modern democratic state. His 2012 book Imagined Democracies set out a theory of democracy.

He was married to Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, and from 2001 to musicologist Ruth HaCohen, with whom he wrote a book on music and political power. He died in 2019.