What is Israeli writer Amos Elon famous for?”
Amos Elon, the Israeli journalist and author who died in Italy on May 25 at age 82, was described for decades as Israel’s leading public intellectual — the writer who, more than any other, explained Israelis to themselves and to the world. And yet, he spent his final years in self-described “exile” in Italy, despairing of Israel’s future. His passing received more notice in Europe and America than in Israel. A Haaretz staff writer for five decades, Elon was one of the first Israeli journalists to chronicle the lives of neglected Sephardic immigrants in the 1950s and to describe the emerging challenges of Palestinian nationalism and the West Bank settler movement in the 1970s. He wrote the definitive biographies of Zionist founding father Theodor Herzl and of banking patriarch Mayer Rothschild. His best-known book, “The Israelis: Founders and Sons,” an international best-seller in 1971, permanently changed the way Israel was discussed at home and abroad. “He was a journalist who was als
