"We view what happens in Israel as an indicator of what will happen in the rest of the world. To the extent America abandons Israel, it abandons itself. Israel is a beacon of civilization in a barbaric, backward area," Brook said on a recent trip here to visit family with his wife, also an Israeli expatriate, and their two children. "Israel represents, despite its flaws, the values of the West: individual rights, free speech, freedom of the press, equality before the law and the rule of law."

Ayn Rand. Israel was one of the few causes she ever voluntarily supported financially.

Objectivism upholds values generally associated with Western culture - individualism, reason and science - but its distinctive development is a moral ideal of "selfishness," whereby someone's own happiness is a moral responsibility. The home page of ARI presents Rand's mantra: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

ARI was founded in 1985, after Rand's death, by her intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, to pave the way for a philosophical and cultural renaissance in the US and to reverse what ARI sees as anti-reason, anti-individualism and anti-capitalist trends in today's culture. It concentrates on American domestic issues, but Israel figures prominently in its lectures, essays and editorials.

"Ayn Rand herself commented that Israel was one of the few causes she ever voluntarily supported," Brook said. "The West turning against Israel - which she saw occurring in the late 1960s and early 1970s - was the West committing suicide."

Those familiar with Rand's disdain for religion and socialism might find her sympathy for Israel surprising. "[Rand] said Israel has problems, as all countries, but Israel is still West," Brook said. "It respects individual rights, reason and science. She could separate out essentials from non-essentials. If Israel abandoned all its Western values, it wouldn't deserve support."

BORN ALICE ROSENBAUM in 1905 in St. Petersburg to a secular, middle-class Jewish family, Rand fled to the US from the Soviet Union in 1925 because she saw America as the best model of a free country. The new communist regime had already confiscated her father's pharmacy.

Rand maintained no Jewish affiliation throughout her life and shunned religion because it was based on faith as opposed to reason. At 29, she wrote in her philosophical journal: "I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering." She observed no Jewish holidays, but kept Christmas as an American holiday celebrating life and human productivity. Her only acknowledgment of her Jewish identity came in the face of anti-Semitic remarks, as a retort to racism.

She married an American named Frank O'Conner and deliberately had no children so she could give birth to fictional characters who upheld her vision of a hero. Her trademark character is Howard Roark, the intransigent architect of The Fountainhead, who refuses to bend his architectural vision to society's irrational standards. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, dignifies the villain of socialist artists - the industrial capitalist - through a futuristic depiction of a collectivist America. From the 1950s until her death in 1982, she led an intellectual movement based on Objectivism, although some critics have dubbed it a cult. Brook thinks her popularity is now at its highest, with more than 750,000 of her books sold annually.

Historically, American academia has been dismissive of Ayn Rand, but in recent years her work is increasingly being included in mainstream curricula. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, which works to raise her profile in academic circles, more than 30 professors teach Rand in leading American universities, with the number continually growing.

Rand remains an obscure figure in Israeli academia, even though many Israelis read her novels in their teens and 20s, including Prof. Elhanan Yakira, head of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University. "I don't know anyone with us that really teaches her philosophy," he said. "There could be people that deal with her, but I don't really know. Sometimes people mention her name, but not a lot." He can't comment on whether her lack of representation stems from any antipathy to her ideas.

In the 1970s, a capricious philosopher named Moshe Kroy taught Rand's philosophy at Tel Aviv University, but he eventually abandoned rational egoism for Scientology, and later, Indian mysticism, which may have contributed to the perception that her philosophy is a fad. Rand's philosophy is no longer taught at Tel Aviv University.

When asked what he thought of Rand, Joseph Agassi, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and York University in Toronto, reacted with sharp dislike, calling her a "fool" and her philosophy unserious. "It's very low quality," he said. "It's extreme right, although not religious right."