David Dean Shulman

David Dean Shulman (born January 13, 1949 in Waterloo, Iowa) is an Indologist and regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the languages of India. His research embraces many fields, including the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies, and now holds an appointment as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1988.

He is a winner of the Israel Prize for 2016. He announced that he will donate his 75,000 shekel prize to Ta'ayush, an Israeli organization that provides support to Palestinian residents in the Hebron area.

He is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, a cultural anthropologist. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India.

He is a peace activist and a founding member of the joint Israeli-Palestininian movement Ta'ayush. In 2007 he published the book "Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine" which concludes the years of his volunteering activity in the movement.

Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He is married to Eileen Shulman (née Eileen Lendman) and has three sons, Eviatar, Mishael, and Edan.