Daniel J. Elazar

Daniel J. Elazar
Born 1934
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Died 1999 (aged 64–65)
Alma mater University of Chicago
Occupation Political scientist
Known for Founder and president of Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Daniel Judah Elazar (1934–1999) was a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University (Israel) and Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[1] and the founder and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Biography

Daniel J. Elazar was born in Minneapolis in 1934. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He maintained residences in Philadelphia and Jerusalem. He was married to Harriet , with whom he had three children.

Academic career

Elazar was a leading political scientist and specialist in the study of federalism, political culture, the Jewish political tradition, Israel and the world Jewish community. As founder and President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he headed the major independent Jewish "think tank" concerned with analyzing and solving the key problems facing Israel and world Jewry. He was Professor of Political Science at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he founded and directed the Center for the Study of Federalism, a leading federalism research institute. He held the Senator N.M. Paterson Professorship in Intergovernmental Relations at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, heading its Institute for Local Government. In 1986, President Reagan appointed him a citizen member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the major intergovernmental agency dealing with problems of federalism. He was appointed for a second term in 1988 and a third in 1991. He was the founding president of the International Association of Centers for Federal Studies, was Chairman of the Israel Political Science Association, Secretary of the American Political Science Association, and was a member of various consultative bodies of the Israeli government.

Elazar was the author or editor of more than 60 books and many other publications including a 4-volume study of the Covenant Tradition in Politics, as well as Community and Polity, The Jewish Polity, and People and Polity, a trilogy on Jewish political and community organization from earliest times to the present. He also founded and edited the scholarly journal Jewish Political Studies Review. His books in the area of federalism include The American Partnership; American Federalism, A View from the States; The American Mosaic; Cities of the Prairie and Cities of the Prairie Revisited; and Exploring Federalism. He was also the founder and editor of Publius, the Journal of Federalism.

Elazar was recognized as an expert on Jewish community organization worldwide, on the Jewish political tradition, and on Israel's government and politics. He was a consultant to the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization, the city of Jerusalem, and to most major Jewish organizations in the U.S. and in Canada, Europe, South Africa and Australia. He took a leadership role in numerous local and national Jewish organizations. He was President of the American Sephardi Federation, and served on the International Council of Yad Vashem.

Elazar was twice a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer, and received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Earhart and Ford Foundations, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. He served as consultant to many federal, state and local agencies, including the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, the National Governors' Association, the Education Commission of the States, and the Pennsylvania Science and Technology Commission, as well as to the governments of Israel, Canada, Cyprus, Italy, South Africa, and Spain.

Honors and awards

Elazar was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded honorary degrees from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati and Gratz College in Philadelphia, and received awards for distinguished scholarly contributions from the Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management of the American Society for Public Administration, the Section on Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations of the American Political Science Association, and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry.

Political theories

Elazar authored a four-part series on the idea of covenant which featured: Covenant and Civil Society: The Constitutional Matrix of Modern Democracy, Covenant and Constitutionalism: The Great Frontier and the Matrix of Federal Democracy, Covenant and Commonwealth: From Christian Separation through the Protestant Reformation, and Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations & Jewish Expressions.

Elazar wrote extensively about the tradition of politics in Jewish scripture and thinking. His works on the subject include: Kinship and Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses, Authority, Power and Leadership in the Jewish Polity: Cases and Issues, and Morality and Power: Contemporary Jewish Views.

The Elazar typology of Jewish communal involvement is a typology laid out in Community and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of American Jewry. It categorizes the degree of involvement American Jews have in the Jewish community:

Elazar's theories on the political subcultures in the American states, articulated in American Federalism, A View From the States have been influential and remains relevant among scholars of American politics. Elazar argues that there exists three dominant political subcultures in the American states: moralistic (government viewed as egalitarian institution charged with pursuing social justice), traditionalistic (government viewed a hierarchical institution charged with protecting elite-centered status quo), and individualistic (government viewed as minimalist institution charged with protecting the functionality of the marketplace but is otherwise not active). [3] Elazar's theory is still routinely discussed and debated among political scientists, and is often thought to be the intellectual basis of the "red state/blue state" divide in American politics.[4][5][6][7]

Published works

References

  1. ↑ Inventory of Daniel J. Elazar's papers at the Minnesota Historical Society
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 ufl.edu Elazar's typology
  3. ↑ Elazar, Daniel J, American Federalism: A View From the States (T.Y. Crowell).
  4. ↑ Abramowitz, A., & Saunders, K. (2008). Is polarization a myth?. The Journal of Politics, 70(2), 542-555. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30218906
  5. ↑ Boeckelman, K. (1991). Political culture and state development policy. Publius, 21(2), 49-62. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3330400
  6. ↑ Laitin, D., & Wildavsky, A. (1988). Political culture and political preferences. The American Political Science Review, 82(2), 589-597. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1957403
  7. ↑ Lowery, D., & Sigelman, L. (1982). Political culture and state public policy: The missing link. The Western Political Quarterly, 35(3), 376-384. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/447552

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