Daniel Monterescu was born in Jaffa, Israel, to Romanian and French immigrant parents, studied at the Collège des Frères and received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. For twenty years he studied the dangerous liaisons between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in ethnically mixed towns. His first monograph “Jaffa Shared and Shattered: Contrived Coexistence in Israel/Palestine” was published in 2015 with Indiana University Press and has been named finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award in Jewish and Israeli Studies. His second book "Twilight Nationalism: Politics of Existence at Life's End" came out in 2018 with Stanford University Press. He is currently professor at the department of sociology and social anthropology, the Central European University in Budapest.