Yehudah Mirsky

Yehudah Mirsky is Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis and on the faculty of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion and Yeshiva College and received rabbinic ordination in Jerusalem.

He graduated from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the law review, and completed his Ph.D in Religion at Harvard, before going on to work as aide to then-Senators Bob Kerrey and Al Gore, and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served in the Clinton administration as special advisor in the U.S. State Department's human rights bureau.

From 2002-2012 he lived in Jerusalem and was a fellow at the Van Leer Institute and Jewish People Policy Institute and a grass-roots activist. Prof. Mirsky has written widely on politics, theology and culture for a number of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Economist, The Daily Beast, and The Guardian. He co-founded and is a member of the board of Ha-Tenuah Ya-Yerushalmit, the movement for a pluralist and livable Jerusalem and is the author of the widely-acclaimed volume, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press).