First Things RSS Feed - Yehudah Mirsky https://www.firstthings.com/author/yehudah-mirsky en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:54:45 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/yehudah-mirsky 60 History’s Most Powerful Rabbi https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/historys-most-powerful-rabbi https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/historys-most-powerful-rabbi Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500 On October 7, some eight hundred thousand people, about 10 percent of Israel’s population and roughly 13 percent of its Jews, attended the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in Jerusalem. Ninety-three at his death, he was the single most powerful rabbi in history and for decades the kingmaker of Israeli politics. His extraordinary, complicated life reshaped not only traditional Judaism and Israeli politics and society but also scrambled familiar categories—of religious and secular, tradition and change, Israeli-ness and Zionism—in ways both petty and profound.

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