| Amos Kenan, a member of Israel’s founding generation whose writing and art helped define modern Israeli culture, has died in Tel Aviv, reports Matti Friedman for the Associated Press. Born in 1927 in Tel Aviv, which had been founded less than two decades earlier by Jewish pioneers, Kenan was a product of the city’s rich cultural life. He was known for his newspaper columns, plays, and books, many of which satirized the Israeli government and organized religion, and also as a prolific painter, sculptor, and film director. In the 1940s, 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 Israeli political activist and journalist Uri Avnery, a friend and colleague of Kenan’s since the two met as soldiers during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
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ART LIBERTY
