Amos Elon (Hebrew: עמוס אילון, July 4, 1926 – May 25, 2009) was an Israeli journalist and author.
Biography
Heinrich Sternbach (later Amos Elon) was born in Vienna. He immigrated to Mandate Palestine as a child in 1933. He studied law and history in Israel and England.[1] He married Beth Drexler, a New York-born literary agent, with whom he had one daughter, Danae.[2] In the 1990s, Elon began to spend much of his time in Italy. In 2004 he moved there permanently, citing disillusionment with developments in Israel since 1967. Elon died of leukemia on May 25, 2009 in Borgo Buggiano in Tuscany, Italy, aged 82. In 2005, his daughter Danae produced a biographical film about him, entitled Another Road Home.[3]
Elon was the author of nine books.[3] He rose to international fame in the early 1970s after publishing The Israelis: Founders and Sons, described as "an affectionate but unsparing portrait of the early Zionists".[5] A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and The New York Times Magazine,[6] he was widely regarded as one of Israel's leading journalists for many years.[3]
Zionism
In 1975 he wrote an admiring if critical biography of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, but later grew disillusioned.[7] In 2004 he sold his home in Jerusalem and moved to Tuscany. In an interview that year with Ari Shavit he stated that Zionism had "exhausted itself" and that he had come to consider it "perhaps the least successful attempt at colonialism that I can think of. This is the crappiest colonial regime that I can think of in the modern age."[8]
Academic career
In 2007–2008, Elon was a fellow at the Center for Law and Security at New York University School of Law.[1]
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