Lucy Ayoub

Lucy Ayoub (لوسي أيوب; לוסי איוב; born 21 June 1992) is an Israeli television presenter, poet and radio host, formerly of the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) and currently working for Keshet Media Group. Ayoub co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 alongside Assi Azar, Bar Refaeli and Erez Tal. Ayoub was born in Haifa, Israel. She is the daughter of an Arab-Christian father, and an Ashkenazi Jewish mother who converted to Christianity upon their marriage. Ayoub has one brother and three sisters. Her paternal grandmother was the daughter of Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, leaving her in a convent in Israel, and later was adopted by a prosperous Arab-Christian woman named Lucy Khayat. Her maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors: her maternal grandfather had been in a Nazi concentration camp, while her maternal grandmother from Romania survived among partisans as a child. Ayoub celebrates both the Christian and Jewish holidays with different parts of her family, while personally being an atheist, saying "I’m an atheist and it means nothing to me that I was baptized [in church]". She attended a Catholic Carmelites school in Haifa. She wrote stories and poems in both Arabic and Hebrew. Ayoub was enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, serving for two years as a flight simulator instructor in the Israeli Air Force. Since 2016, she has studied philosophy, politics, economics, and law at the Tel Aviv University. She first gained public attention in 2016, when she read several pieces of her poetry in the framework of the Poetry Slam Israel competition. In the same year, she joined the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC) and started writing and submitting videos. In 2017, Ayoub began to host a weekly cultural programme on the radio station. In the same year, she began hosting the daily TV programme Culture Club on Kan 11.