Yariv Levin

Origins and early life

Yariv Levin was born in Jerusalem on 22 June 1969, the son of Gail Levin and of Aryeh Levin, a scholar of the Arabic language who received the Israel Prize.

Work and career

His mother's uncle, Eliyahu Lankin, had commanded the Altalena, and Menachem Begin was the sandak who held him at his brit milah, the Jewish rite of circumcision: “he was the sandak at my circumcision,” Levin has said. During his military service he was an Arabic translator in the Intelligence Corps and later commanded an Arabic translation course, and in 1995 he published a dictionary of economic terms in Arabic, English and Hebrew that won an award for Arabic language studies.

He studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, practised civil and commercial law, and was elected vice chairman of the Israel Bar Association, of which he was deputy chairman from 2003 to 2005. He entered the Knesset for Likud in 2009, became chairman of its House Committee on 3 August 2009, and was later chairman of the governing coalition. In the twentieth Knesset he served as Minister of Public Security, Minister of Tourism and Minister of Aliyah and Integration, and on 17 May 2020 a majority of seventy-one members elected him Speaker of the Knesset.

After the 2022 election he became Minister of Justice, and in January 2023 he announced the government's judicial reform plan, which proposed to change the way judges are selected; a law restricting the reasonableness standard passed the Knesset in July 2023. In July 2025 he also took responsibility for the Interior, Labour and Religious Services portfolios, and the Jerusalem Post ranked him with Simcha Rothman fifth on its 2023 list of the fifty most influential Jews.