Yaron Brook

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Yaron Brook (Hebrew: ירון ברוק) was born on May 23, 1961, in Jerusalem and grew up in Haifa. He is an Israeli-American writer and a leading advocate of Objectivism, the philosophy created by Ayn Rand. He is the chairman of the board of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) and was its executive director from 2000 to 2017.

Brook’s parents were Jewish socialists from South Africa. When he was 16, he read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and became a committed Objectivist. He served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence from 1979 to 1982 and earned a BS in civil engineering from Technion in 1986. He later connected with key Objectivist thinkers, including Leonard Peikoff, and helped start Lyceum International in 1994 to run Objectivist conferences and online courses.

Before joining ARI, Brook taught finance for seven years as a professor at Santa Clara University. He left in 2000 to lead the Ayn Rand Institute, which moved from Marina del Rey to Irvine, California, in 2002. He is a strong advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and often defends the rights of businesses and the virtues of capitalism. He has criticized government taxes on multi-millionaires, Sarbanes-Oxley, and antitrust laws.

Brook co-authored Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality with Don Watkins. He has argued that Zionism merges a valid goal of self-preservation with problematic ethnically based collectivism and religion. In 2018, a public event featuring Brook and Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) was protested by masked activists. He has said that Islamic ideology is not compatible with Western moral values. Brook has two sons, Niv and Edaan.