Yuli Tamir

Tamir wrote her PhD under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin. Her work concentrated on nationalism. In her first book "liberal nationalism" she established the inherent ideological connection between nationalism and liberalism. As Professor Sandy Levinson writes in his review of the book: "It is a mark of Tamir's achievements that one finishes the book willing to credit the non-oxymoronic nature of the term "liberal-nationalism" and thus accept the possibility that one is not forced to choose among them. In her new book "Why Nationalism" Tamir continues this line of thought and claims that national sentiments lie as the core of the modern nation-state and that their erosion, due to the development of hyper-globalism, is responsible for the rapid growth of social and economic gaps. Tamir suggest that liberals should not surrender the power of nationalism to right wing extremists but rather try to harness it to recreated a cross-class coalition that can promote social solidarity and social justice.