Amal Elsana Alh'jooj

Amal Elsana Alh'jooj was born in 1972 in Soroka Medical Center

She was born in 1972 at Soroka Medical Center and grew up in the Bedouin village of Laqiya in the northern Negev. She was the fifth daughter of her parents, and her father was an agricultural worker. From age 5 to 17 she worked as a shepherd, and as a teenager she took part in protests and was once held in jail for a night.

As a young woman she founded Desert Embroidery, an organization for Bedouin women focused on job training and embroidery. She studied social work at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev from 1993 to 1996 and headed the Arab Student Union there. She earned a master's degree at McGill University in Canada in 1999.

In 2001 she co-founded AJEEC with Vivian Silver as an Arab-Jewish community organization, and she led it until 2012. She later headed its North American branch until 2017. She also served on the board of the New Israel Fund.

She completed a PhD at McGill University in 2017 and did postdoctoral research at Harvard Kennedy School in 2019 and 2020, focusing on gender-based violence. She lives in Montreal, teaches at McGill's School of Social Work and leads PLEDJ, which she founded in 2020. Her autobiography, Hope is a Woman's Name, appeared in 2022.