Eliane Karp

Eliane Karp was born in 1953 in Paris

Karp was born in Paris in 1953 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family with Belgian and Polish roots. During World War II her father, Charles Karp, was persecuted by the Gestapo and later joined the French Resistance.

She finished secondary school at the Lycée Français in Brussels and studied anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She went on to earn a master's degree and a PhD in anthropology at Stanford University. At Stanford she met Alejandro Toledo, and they married in 1972.

From 1980 she worked for international organizations such as UNICEF, UNDP and the OAS, studying the impact of development projects on indigenous groups. She was a USAID consultant in Lima from 1982 to 1987 and then worked at the World Bank until 1992. She later worked at Bank Leumi in Israel, handling ties with foreign banks.

When Toledo was elected president in 2001, Karp became First Lady and headed a national commission on Andean, Amazon and Afro-Peruvian communities. The commission drew criticism, and she resigned from it in 2003. She also took part in Peru's demand that Yale University return artifacts taken in 1915, and an agreement was reached in 2010.

Karp has taught at George Washington University and been a visiting professor at Stanford. Peruvian authorities sought her extradition from the United States in a separate case involving her, her mother and her husband, and she left for Israel.