Inside the Herzl Institute: The Jerusalem Think Tank Exporting the New Right

Yoram Hazony's Jerusalem-based institute — small, self-funded, and largely ignored by mainstream Jewish media — has become the intellectual engine of the national conservative movement animating JD Vance, Viktor Orbán, and Giorgia Meloni. A diaspora capital story hiding in plain sight.

The Herzl Institute is a public affairs and educational institution in Jerusalem, founded in 2012 by philosopher Yoram Hazony and historian Ofir Haivry. It runs seminars, fellowships, and publications on Jewish political thought, the Hebrew Bible, and the theoretical foundations of nation-states. Hazony is president. Haivry is vice president.

That is what it is on paper. What it is in practice is one of the most consequential ideas-exporters in the diaspora — the Jerusalem node of a global political realignment that has reshaped conservative politics in the United States, Britain, Hungary, Italy, and Israel over the last seven years.

It operates largely outside the field of vision of mainstream Jewish media. And that is the story.

The Origin

Hazony's career runs on a single arc: build the institutional infrastructure Jewish and Western conservative thought needs to compete against liberal universalism.

He began at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, which he helped found in 1994 as Israel's first liberal-arts institute focused on Jewish and Western political thought. Shalem later became Shalem College — the first accredited liberal arts college in Israel — with Hazony as one of its founding intellectual architects. He departed Shalem in the early 2010s and launched the Herzl Institute in 2012 with Haivry, refocused on a narrower, sharper mission: publish, teach, and distribute the arguments that would define national conservatism.

The Herzl Institute is smaller than Shalem. It is not a college. It does not confer degrees. It runs fellowships for scholars working on Hebrew Bible as political theory, hosts seminars for Israeli and international thinkers, and — critically — operates as the intellectual back office for Hazony's Anglo-American public work.

It is an idea forge.

The Books That Moved the Needle

Hazony's arguments live in three books.

The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) — the case for a world of independent nation-states against liberal universalism. Named Conservative Book of the Year in 2019 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Amazon number one bestseller in International Diplomacy and Nationalism. Read and recommended by heads of state. It was Hazony's crossover moment — the book that took him from Jerusalem intellectual to global political influencer.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022) — a full recovery of the Anglo-American conservative tradition from Selden and Burke through the American founding, positioned as the philosophical foundation of national conservatism. The book explicitly makes the case that classical liberalism and conservatism are not the same thing — a distinction that has since reshaped American conservative discourse.

A Jewish State: Herzl and the Promise of Nationalism (Sella Meir and Tikvah Fund, 2020, Hebrew edition) — an argument that Herzl's Zionism is the model, not the exception, for the legitimate nation-state. The book's joint publication with Tikvah is not incidental. It signals the deep institutional overlap between Hazony's project and the broader Jerusalem conservative intellectual network that Tikvah has built.

Together, the three books form a coherent thesis: the age of liberal universalism is closing, the age of the sovereign nation is returning, and the Jewish state — as both idea and reality — sits at the center of the argument.

The Edmund Burke Foundation

In 2019, Hazony took the Herzl Institute's core ideas and built them a Washington vehicle: the Edmund Burke Foundation, of which he is chairman. The Burke Foundation runs the National Conservatism Conference series — NatCon.

NatCon 1 was held in Washington in July 2019. Since then, the conferences have run in Washington, Rome, London, Brussels, Miami, and Orlando. NatCon 5 was held in Washington in 2025. NatCon 6 is scheduled for Washington, October 6–8, 2026.

The speaker rosters are the story. JD Vance, now Vice President of the United States, has been a repeated NatCon speaker and was mapped by Politico as sitting inside Hazony's intellectual inner circle. Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, has read and recommended Hazony's work. Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister of Italy, has done the same. Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Peter Thiel, and Kevin Roberts — president of the Heritage Foundation — have all worked the NatCon circuit.

In July 2025, Hazony and Roberts co-headlined a Heritage Foundation event on the future of American conservatism as the country enters its 250th year. That kind of billing — Heritage, at its own foundation, framing Hazony as a peer intellectual — is the tell for how deeply he now sits inside American conservative institutional life.

This is not a small conference series. It is where the intellectual scaffolding of the post-Reagan American right has been argued into shape, in real time, since 2019.

The Diaspora Capital Angle

Hazony was born in Rehovot in 1964, raised in Princeton, New Jersey, and returned to Israel after finishing his BA at Princeton and his PhD in political theory at Rutgers. He founded The Princeton Tory, the university's conservative student magazine, as an undergraduate in 1984 — the Reagan-Thatcher moment.

That biography matters. Hazony's career sits precisely on the American-Israeli capital-and-ideas corridor. His arguments are made in Jerusalem, staged in Washington, and picked up in Budapest, Rome, and London. The Herzl Institute's funding base is Anglo-American conservative philanthropy — the same donor circles that fund the American Enterprise Institute, the Claremont Institute, and the Hoover Institution.

Israeli institutional life has largely ignored him. Israeli mainstream media covers Hazony sporadically. The Hebrew-language press profiles him mostly as a footnote to whichever American election he is influencing.

That is the coverage gap. Hazony is arguably the most influential Israeli political thinker of the last decade — measured by heads of state citing his work, by legislators drawing on his framework, by the sheer volume of governing rhetoric that carries his fingerprints — and Israeli media has never seriously mapped him as such.

The Tikvah Adjacency

The Herzl Institute does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader Jerusalem conservative intellectual ecosystem that also includes the Tikvah Fund — the multi-generational Bernstein-estate-seeded philanthropy that runs the Millstone Scholars pipeline, the Emet Classical Academy, and the Tikvah Ideas publishing platform.

The overlap is institutional, not identical. Hazony has been a contributor to the Tikvah orbit for over two decades. His Hebrew edition of A Jewish State was co-published by Tikvah. The two organizations share donors, share a broad intellectual position, and share a bet on the classical-Zionist-conservative synthesis as the future of Jewish thought.

But the operating models diverge. Tikvah is a pipeline — 7th grade through college, feeding students into institutional Jewish life. The Herzl Institute is an idea forge — publishing arguments meant to be picked up by heads of state and legislators. Together, they represent two halves of the same strategic wager on the intellectual future of the Jewish people.

Ofir Haivry and the Anglo-American Tradition

The Herzl Institute's other co-founder, historian Ofir Haivry, is critical to understanding what makes the institute different from a policy shop or a political think tank.

Haivry is a specialist in early modern Anglo-Jewish intellectual history — Selden, Cromwell's readmission of the Jews to England in the 1650s, the Hebraic sources of English constitutionalism. His research anchors the institute's core argument that the modern Western political tradition — English common law, American constitutionalism, the Israeli founding — flows from a shared Hebraic-covenantal source rather than from Enlightenment rationalism.

That argument matters. It gives Hazony's political case a deep historical spine. It allows national conservatism to present itself not as reactionary populism but as the recovery of a tradition that was buried under two centuries of liberal universalism.

Haivry's work makes the Herzl Institute an academic-grade research shop, not just a conference vehicle. That is what distinguishes it from the dozens of American conservative think tanks that came before.

Why It Matters for Diaspora Capital

Three signals for philanthropists and Israeli-connected capital.

One: The Jerusalem node of the global right is under-invested. The intellectual infrastructure — journals, fellowships, translations, book programs — that would scale Herzl Institute-style output to a full policy-influence machine has never been fully funded. The demand-side is enormous. The supply-side is one institute and one man.

Two: The Israeli right's American alliance runs through Hazony. Post–October 7, with campus antisemitism at record levels and the American conservative movement recalibrating its foreign policy toward Israel, the Herzl Institute–Edmund Burke Foundation axis is where those relationships are being maintained at the intellectual level. That is a strategic asset for the Jewish people, not just for one movement.

Three: The Hebrew Bible as political theory is a real category. Hazony's argument that biblical political thought — the covenantal nation, the limited king, the prophetic critique — has something to teach modern constitutionalism is not niche religious content. It is being read seriously by governors, senators, judges, and cabinet officials. That has philanthropic implications for anyone funding Jewish education, biblical scholarship, or Israel advocacy — including the funder networks profiled elsewhere on Olam, from the Marcus Foundation succession to the Wilf family philanthropic operation.

FAQ

What is the Herzl Institute? A Jerusalem-based public affairs and educational institute founded in 2012 by Yoram Hazony and Ofir Haivry. It runs seminars, fellowships, and publications on Jewish political thought and the Hebrew Bible.

Who is Yoram Hazony? Israeli-American philosopher and political theorist. Born 1964 in Rehovot. Princeton BA, Rutgers PhD. President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem. Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington. Author of The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022).

What is national conservatism? The political framework Hazony has built around the sovereign nation-state rooted in inherited tradition, religion, and shared history — positioned against liberal universalism. Now identified with figures including JD Vance, Viktor Orbán, and Giorgia Meloni.

What is the Edmund Burke Foundation? A Washington-based public affairs institute chaired by Hazony that hosts the National Conservatism Conference series. NatCon 1 launched in 2019. NatCon 6 is scheduled for October 2026.

Who funds the Herzl Institute? Anglo-American conservative philanthropy. The institute is small, self-directed, and independent of Israeli government or party funding.

Is Hazony connected to the Tikvah Fund? Yes. The Hebrew edition of A Jewish State was published jointly by Sella Meir and Tikvah Fund. See Inside Tikvah: The Jewish Leadership Pipeline for the broader Jerusalem conservative intellectual ecosystem in which the Herzl Institute operates.

Where can readers find Hazony's work? yoramhazony.org, herzlinstitute.org, and nationalconservatism.org for conference archives.