Lentin was born in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine, in 1944: she has lived in Ireland since 1969. A political sociologist, she was an associate professor of sociology at Trinity College, Dublin until her retirement in 2014. From 1997 until 2012 Lentin was the director of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict, Department of Sociology. She was head of the Department of Sociology and a founder member of the Trinity Immigration Initiative, Trinity College, Dublin.[2]
Lentin has published extensively on Palestine and Israel, racism and immigration in Ireland, and on gender and genocide and the Holocaust.
Lentin has advocated an open-door immigration policy for Ireland and opposes all deportations.[3]
Lentin is an activist for Palestinian liberation and for the Palestinian right of return. She supports a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; "one democratic state in historic Palestine where Palestinians, Jews and migrants live in full equality".[4]
Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (Oxford and NY: Berghahn Books 2002) co-editor, with Nahla Abdo. ISBN1-57181-498-1