Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a human rights activist. She received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2001. She is known for her research on the portrayal of Palestinians in Israeli textbooks, which she has criticized as being anti-Palestinian. She has also criticized George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Ariel Sharon for fostering anti-Muslim views.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan was raised in a leftist family in Jerusalem's Rehavia neighborhood. She described her home growing up as a leftist-Zionist home. Her grandfather, Avraham Katsnelson, signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence. She is the daughter of Matti Peled, an Israeli Major-General, scholar of Arabic literature, a member of Knesset and a noted peace activist. Elhanan's daughter, Smadar, was killed at the age of 13 in the 1997 Ben Yehuda Street suicide attack in Jerusalem.
Nurit translated Albert Memmi's Le racisme (1982) and Marguerite Duras' Écrire (1993) into Hebrew. Her book, Palestine in Israeli Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, was released in the UK in April 2012.