Join Hoover Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz for the launch of his new book Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America at the Hoover Institution in Washington, DC on Tuesday, September 16, from 5:00 - 6:30 PM ET.
The book launch will be in person, commencing with a welcome reception, followed by a conversation with Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Carl Cannon, Washington Bureau Chief of RealClear Politics and Executive Editor of RealClear Media Group.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this collection of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics between 2014 and 2024, Peter Berkowitz explains Israel by reporting events, examining ideas, and placing both in their larger geopolitical context.
The senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution draws on the great Israeli mosaic of people, opinions, and aspirations to illuminate the domestic politics, diplomatic and national security imperatives, and multivalent spirit of the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy.
The carefully curated collection of essays in Explaining Israel demonstrates that to understand the Jewish state, it is necessary to appreciate the nation’s accomplishments and setbacks, the sources of its political cohesiveness and the forces dividing it, and the splendid opportunities and grave threats that it confronts.
The essays commence with Israel in 2014 at the height of its prosperity and self-confidence. They explore intensifying schisms inside the country and gathering dangers on its borders and throughout the region. And they culminate in penetrating analyses of the two crises that struck Israel in 2023. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sweeping judicial-reform proposals set off bitter controversy and months of massive protests. Then on October 7, Iran-backed Hamas jihadists invaded Israel, massacred some 1,200 people and kidnapped around 250, enmeshing Israel in a seven-front war against Iran and its regional proxies.
Berkowitz’s essays clarify the breathtaking achievements, the heartbreak, and the remarkable resilience of a nation struggling valiantly to be Jewish, free, and democratic in a dangerous region crucial to America’s interests.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics and serves as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship. From 2019 to 2021, he served as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior advisor to the secretary of state. Berkowitz is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. In addition, Berkowitz is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions and has written hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications.
Carl Cannon is the Washington Bureau Chief of RealClearPolitics and Executive Editor of RealClear Media Group. Carl is a past recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting and the Aldo Beckman Award, the two most prestigious awards for White House coverage. Previous positions include executive editor of PoliticsDaily.com, D.C. bureau chief for Reader's Digest and White House correspondent for both the Baltimore Sun and National Journal. He was a 2007 fellow-in-residence at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and is a published author.
