Dr. Ronit Lentin is an internationally renowned Irish Jewish (Israeli-born) sociologist, political activist, and author. She served for many years as Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and was the director of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the same institution.
Lentin was born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine in 1944 and grew up in Israel. She was exempted from military service in the Israel Defense Forces for medical reasons and began studyig at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, though she did not complete a degree. According to Lentin, she became anti-Zionist shortly after the Six-Day War when she began following the socialist anti-Zionist group Matzpen.
She is a leading voice in framing the Israel-Palestine issue through the lens of settler colonialism, arguing that racialization is a core mechanism of state control. Her book, Traces of Racial Exception, is a seminal text in this discourse. Her pioneering research explored how the memory of the Holocaust is gendered and how Israeli national identity utilizes these memories to shape its socio-political landscape.
As a key figure in Jewish Voice for Just Peace Ireland, she has built a platform for Irish Jews to dissent against Israeli state policies, rooting their activism in universal human rights. She also champions the institutional boycott of Israeli academic institutions, arguing that the academy is complicit in maintaining the structures of occupation. Throughout the crises of 2023–2026, Lentin has been a prominent voice in Dublin, demanding that the Irish government translate its symbolic support for Palestine into concrete diplomatic and economic sanctions.
In her latest article, Race, Zionist Colonialism, and Resistance in the Time of Genocide, she compiles her lecture delivered at the University of Turku, in which she concludes: When speaking about Gaza we must remember that all the ongoing solidarity work by millions of supporters throughout the world, pales into insignificance by comparison with the powerful courage and steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance movement in the face of the appalling genocide inflicted upon the Palestinians by the zionist racial colony and its imperialist capitalist sponsors.