David Dean Shulman (born January 13, 1949) is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the now defunct Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies. Presently he holds a chair as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1988. A published poet in Hebrew, Shulman is also active as a literary critic and 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. Shulman 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. Shulman is a winner of the Israel Prize for 2016. He announced that he would donate his 75,000 shekel prize to Ta'ayush, an Israeli organization that provides support to Palestinian residents in the Hebron area. Life and work In 1967, on graduating from Waterloo high school, he won a National Merit Scholarship, and emigrated to Israel, where he enrolled at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He graduated in 1971 with a B.A. degree in Islamic History, specializing in Arabic. His interest in Indian studies was inspired by a friend, the English economic historian Daniel Sperber, and later by the philologist, and expert in Semitic languages, Chaim Rabin. He served in the Israel Defense Forces, and was called up to serve in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982: the medic skills he learned during his army service have proved useful in treating Palestinians injured by settler violence. He gained his doctorate in Tamil and Sanskrit, with a dissertation on 'The Mythology of the Tamil Saiva Talapuranam' (which involved field work in Tamil Nadu) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1972–1976) under John Ralston Marr . He