About

Ran Heilbrunn is a writer and political theorist. He was born in Israel and lives in Munich.

His work runs along four connected lines. The first is nationalism and the nation-state — what the form actually is, what its critics have made of it, and how Hannah Arendt’s account of it has been rewritten by readers who inherited a hostility to the nation she did not share. The second is Israel and Zionism, in their political and their intellectual history. The third is technology as ideology: the belief, most consequential inside military institutions, that instrumentation can stand in for judgement. The fourth is sexuality, and the body of theory that has grown up around it.

What holds these together is a question rather than a subject. In each case Ran is asking what becomes of a theoretical, ideological, or technological system at the point where it meets political and human reality — and what the gap between the two reveals about the system.

Writing

His essays are long, researched, and fully cited. “The IDF’s Cult of Technology” (American Affairs, 2024) argued that Israel’s defence establishment had come to treat advanced sensing and analysis as a substitute for judgement, and traced the consequences of that substitution to the failure of 7 October 2023. “Hannah Arendt and the Nation State” (Café Américain, 2026) argues that the contemporary hostility to the nation-state has no real precedent in Arendt, who distinguished the nation-state from totalitarianism and understood the latter as what arrives once the former has been destroyed. A new essay is forthcoming in American Affairs.

“Abolish Queer Theory!” — a chapter in Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual (Verdurin, 2025) — is a long argument that the academic theory of sexuality has lost contact with the lives it claims to describe. He has also written for Newsweek, Der Tagesspiegel, Telem, Hazman Hazeh, and Haoketz. In October 2023 he coordinated an open letter in Newsweek, co-signed by more than seventy-five Israeli progressives and peace activists including David Grossman and Yuval Noah Harari, on the response of parts of the international left to the attacks of that month.

Teaching and academic work

Ran has taught philosophy, political science, and intellectual history at Wittenborg University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands and at Touro College Berlin. He has presented conference papers on Arendt and Heidegger at the Association for Israel Studies (Kinneret College, 2019), and at IFTR (Stockholm University, 2016) and Haifa University (2016).

Talks and appearances

He presented “Return to Sodom” at a Verdurin symposium in London in February 2025, and spoke at the Berlin launch of Inversion in December 2025. He has appeared on Bungacast, The Tel Aviv Review, TheMarker’s podcast, and Geekonomy. A fuller list is on the Conversations page.