Meirav

Jones

Yale University

Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld Fellowship

Research Topic

Jewish Sovereignty as Westphalian Sovereignty

Bio

Meirav Jones completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at Hebrew University in 2013, working on “Images of Israel and the Development of Political Thought in England, 1640-1660.” As a student she received numerous awards, spent time at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, and worked as founding Associate Editor of the journal Hebraic Political Studies. Since completing her Ph.D. she has held post-doctoral and visiting positions at Tel Aviv University, New York University, and Yale University where she taught prior to her position at the Katz Center. Her work has been published in Journal of the History of Ideas and Political Studies. As a fellow in 2016-2017, Jones will extend her work on Jewish sovereignty as a Westphalian construct. Having found a discussion of modern Jewish sovereignty in the theoretical framework of Westphalian sovereignty from Jean Bodin to Benedict de Spinoza, she will be tracing the Westphalian “Jewish question” through the foundations of modern Zionism to the modern state of Israel. She hopes to contribute to rethinking Jewish sovereignty and sovereignty itself from this historical and theoretical perspective.

Fellowship

2016–2017

Political Ramifications: Expanding Jewish Political Thought

Asking if and how Jewish history, culture, and experience offered new paradigms with which to engage the political—and, conversely, how mainstream political theories might expand Jewish studies in new and productive directions.