Amir Haddad

Origins and early life

Laurent Amir Khalifa Khedider Haddad was born in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris on 20 June 1984, into a Sephardi Jewish family from Tunisia and Morocco; the household first lived at Sarcelles, north of Paris, which has been one of the main Jewish towns of France since the North African arrivals of the 1960s.

Work and career

When he was eight the family made aliyah to Israel, and he took Amir as his everyday name from then on. He did his Israeli military service as a sergeant in intelligence while studying dentistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and qualified as a dentist, a profession he has never entirely abandoned in conversation. He was a finalist on the Israeli talent show Kokhav Nolad in 2006, came third on The Voice in France in 2014, and in 2016 represented France at the Eurovision Song Contest with J'ai cherché, finishing sixth — France's best placing since 2002 — after which he became one of the most reliably successful French pop singers of his decade.

His mother Carmi Haddad died in April 2023. He sings in French, English and Hebrew, and has never made a secret of any of the three countries he belongs to.