The Hoover Institution and the Israel Studies Program at CDDRL would like to invite you to a book launch Explaining Israel The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America on Wednesday, October 29, 2025 from 4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. PT.
The event will feature the author, Peter Berkowitz, Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, and be moderated by Larry Diamond, William L. Clayton Senior Fellow, and Amichai Magen, Director, Israel Studies Program, CDDRL.
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.
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.
FEATURING
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.
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and has written extensively on democratic development worldwide. At Hoover, he co-leads the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and participates in the Program on the US, China, and the World. At FSI, he is among the core faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
Amichai Magen is the founding Director of the Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Previously, he served as the Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and Director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. His research and teaching interests address democracy, the rule of law, liberal orders, risk and political violence, as well as Israeli politics and policy.
