Amos Kenan | Israeli cultural leader, 82

Amos Kenan, 82, a member of Israel's founding generation whose writing and art helped define modern Israeli culture, died Tuesday in Tel Aviv. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for several years.

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. 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 movie director.

In the 1940s, he was one of several 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. He saw Israelis as a new creation separate from the Jewish Diaspora, said colleague Uri Avnery, and he believed they had more in common with Palestinian Arabs.

Mr. Kenan was party to several efforts to create an alliance with the Palestinians. He also was a key figure in the creation of a new, more vernacular Hebrew that replaced the stodgier, biblically tinged language that had been used in Hebrew literature before Israel's creation.

- AP