Isaac Herzog

Biography

Isaac Herzog was born in Tel Aviv in 1960, the son of Chaim Herzog, later Israel's sixth president. While his father was ambassador to the United Nations he lived in New York and studied at Cornell University and New York University. He served in the army's Unit 8200, then studied law at Tel Aviv University and became a partner in the law firm his father had founded.

He was secretary of the government under Ehud Barak from 1999 to 2001 and entered the Knesset for the Labor Party in 2003. He was minister of housing and construction in 2005, of tourism from 2006, and of welfare and social services from 2007 to 2011, also serving as minister for the diaspora and the fight against antisemitism from 2007 to 2009.

Elected Labor leader in November 2013, he became Leader of the Opposition and led the Zionist Union list in the 2015 election, which won 24 seats to Likud's 30. He lost the party leadership in 2017 and in 2018 left the Knesset to become chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. The Knesset elected him president on 2 June 2021 with a record 87 votes, and he took office on 7 July 2021, the first son of a former president to hold the office.