Yossi Yona

Yossi Yona was born in 1953 in Haifa

Yona was born in 1953 in the ma'abara of Kiryat Ata, near Haifa. His parents, Salman and Sabrina, had immigrated from Iraq, and he grew up in a family of 6 children. He attended the Nahum Sokolow school in Kiryat Ata.

He joined the IDF in 1971 and fought in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War. After his release in 1974, he studied philosophy, history and art at the University of Haifa, where he joined the Left Camp of Israel. He later earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, completing it in 1988.

He taught at the Hebrew University from 1988 to 1995 and then joined the Education Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute from 1999 to 2012. His research covers multiculturalism, liberal democracy and equal opportunity in education, and he helped found the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition and lead the Geneva Initiative.

He joined the Labor Party in 2012 and was placed 20th on its list in 2013, but was not elected. In 2015 he entered the Knesset on the Zionist Union list and did not run in April 2019. In 2019 he founded the Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights, and he later published 2 novels and a book on politics in art.