Amos Elon

Amos Elon was born in 1926 in Vienna

Elon was born Heinrich Sternbach in Vienna in 1926. In 1933 his family moved to Mandatory Palestine, where his father set up an import-export business in Tel Aviv. At 18 he changed his name to Amos Elon.

He served three years in the Haganah. He then studied law and history at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge.

At Haaretz he first wrote about new immigrants and poorer parts of Israeli society. He later reported from Europe and from Washington, D.C., and in 1965 he joined the paper's editorial board. He took leave from 1971 to 1978.

He wrote 1 novel and 8 nonfiction books, including The Israelis: Founders and Sons and biographies of Theodor Herzl and Mayer Amschel Rothschild. He called for a Palestinian state and for withdrawal from the territories held since 1967. He also wrote for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

In the 1990s he began spending most of his time in Italy, and in 2004 he sold his Jerusalem home and settled there. He died of leukemia in Tuscany in 2009.