Daniel Bar-Tal

Daniel Bar-Tal was born in 1946 in Dushanbe

Bar-Tal was born on January 31, 1946, in Stalinabad, now Dushanbe, in the Tajik SSR. His Polish Jewish parents had fled Poland in 1939. The family went back to Poland and lived in Szczecin until moving to Israel in 1957.

He grew up in Ramat Gan and served in the army as an officer. He earned a B.A. in psychology and sociology at Tel Aviv University in 1970. He then completed an M.S. in 1973 and a Ph.D. in social psychology in 1974 at the University of Pittsburgh.

In 1975 he joined the School of Education at Tel Aviv University as a lecturer and became a full professor in 1989. He held the Branco Weiss Chair from 2008 to 2015 and retired in 2015 as Professor Emeritus. His research deals with the social and psychological basis of conflict, mainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He was President of the International Society of Political Psychology in 1999 and 2000. From 2001 to 2005 he was co-editor in chief of the Palestine-Israel Journal, and from 2002 to 2005 he directed the Walter Lebach institute for Jewish-Arab coexistence. In his book on living with the conflict, he examines the Israeli-Arab conflict from a social psychology view.