Amos Kenan, Israeli Writer and Iconoclast, Dies at 82
Amos Kenan, an iconoclastic Israeli writer whose anti-religious and anti-Zionist views made him a longstanding irritant to the political establishment, died on Tuesday in Tel Aviv. He was 82.
Mr. Kenan, who fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war but also belonged to the anti-Zionist and anti-religious Canaanite movement, consistently roiled Israel’s political and cultural waters as a columnist, novelist, playwright, painter, sculptor, screenwriter and filmmaker. Somehow he maintained a career as a restaurant critic as well.
He was a scathing critic of Israeli religious leaders, and when the mood suited, extended his range beyond Judaism.
His play “Friends Talk About Jesus” was banned from the stage by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1972 for being unacceptably contemptuous of religion.
Politically he was unpredictable. In the 1980s he scandalized his old comrades from the pre-1948 underground when he compared the Palestinian struggle to their own youthful campaign, and in his fiction he took an absurdist, dystopian view of Israel’s future...
... In 1970 Mr. Kenan helped found the Israeli-Palestinian Council. He later joined Ariel Sharon’s Shlomtzion Party, named after Mr. Kenan’s daughter Shlomtzion.
Mr. Kenan is survived by his companion of nearly 50 years, Nurit Gertz, and their daughters, the poet and singer Rona Kenan and Shlomtzion Kenan.
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Mr. Kenan, who fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war but also belonged to the anti-Zionist and anti-religious Canaanite movement, consistently roiled Israel’s political and cultural waters as a columnist, novelist, playwright, painter, sculptor, screenwriter and filmmaker. Somehow he maintained a career as a restaurant critic as well.
He was a scathing critic of Israeli religious leaders, and when the mood suited, extended his range beyond Judaism.
His play “Friends Talk About Jesus” was banned from the stage by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1972 for being unacceptably contemptuous of religion.
Politically he was unpredictable. In the 1980s he scandalized his old comrades from the pre-1948 underground when he compared the Palestinian struggle to their own youthful campaign, and in his fiction he took an absurdist, dystopian view of Israel’s future...
... In 1970 Mr. Kenan helped found the Israeli-Palestinian Council. He later joined Ariel Sharon’s Shlomtzion Party, named after Mr. Kenan’s daughter Shlomtzion.
Mr. Kenan is survived by his companion of nearly 50 years, Nurit Gertz, and their daughters, the poet and singer Rona Kenan and Shlomtzion Kenan.