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AMOS KENAN |
Amos Kenan; Israeli writer who rejected Jewish history
JERUSALEM - Amos Kenan, a member of Israel’s founding generation whose writing and art helped define modern Israeli culture, has died in Tel Aviv. He was 82.
Born in 1927 in Tel Aviv, which had been founded less than two decades earlier by Jewish pioneers, Mr. Kenan was a product of the city’s rich cultural life.
Mr. Kenan was known for his newspaper columns, plays, and books, many of which satirized the Israeli government and organized religion.
In the 1940s, Mr. Kenan was one of a number of artists and intellectuals who sought to create an Israeli identity without Judaism by rejecting Jewish history and harking back to the Biblical Canaanites, whose name the artists adopted for their group.
“Amos Kenan was one of the creators of Hebrew culture, Hebrew, not Jewish,’’ said Avnery, who met Mr. Kenan when the two served as soldiers in Israel’s War of Independence.
Mr. Kenan saw Israelis as an entirely new creation, separate from the Jewish Diaspora, Avnery said, and believed they had more in common with Palestinian Arabs.
Mr. Kenan was party to several efforts to create an alliance with the Palestinians.
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