His grandfather Rabbi Dr. Samuel Kalman Mirsky was born in Bessarabia. Yehudah Mirsky is Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis and on the faculty of theSchusterman 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 ofthe law review, and completed his PhD in Religion at Harvard. He worked in Washington as an aide to then-Senators Bob Kerrey and Al Gore, and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and served in the Clinton Administration as special advisor in the US State Department's human rights bureau. From 2002-2012 he lived in Terusalem and was a fellow at the Van Leer Institute and Jewish People Policy Institute and a grass-roots activist. He has written widely on politics, theology and culture for a number of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and The Economist, The Daily Beast, and The Guardian After the attacks of September 1 he served as a volunteer chaplain for the Red Cross. He co-founded Ha-Tenuah Ya-Yerushalmit, the movement for a pluralist and livable Jerusalem. He is the author of the widely- acclaimed volume, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press), recently published in Hebrew as Rav Kook: Mabat Hadash (Devir).