Dan Bar-On was born in 1938 in Haifa to parents of German descent. For twenty-five years he was a member of Kibbutz Revivim, where he served as a farmer, an educator, and secretary of the kibbutz. In 1981, he received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1985, he launched a pioneering field of research in Germany, studying the psychological and moral aftereffects of the Holocaust on the children of the perpetrators. In 1998, he co-founded and became co-director of PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East), where he worked on the project that became Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine (The New Press), co-authored with Sami Adwan, Eyal Naveh, and the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East, until his death in 2008.