Acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz shares his story Nov. 15

Amos Oz

Amos Oz, world-renowned novelist, intellectual and peace activist, will speak about his personal perspective on Israel at 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, in Hassenfeld Conference Center.

Tickets are no longer available for the event, which is sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. It will be broadcast live in the Shapiro Campus Center Atrium and streamed live on the Brandeis Web site. (Viewers on campus will be redirected from the streaming page to IPTV. Click "Tune In" and then click on the event.)

While on campus, Oz also will conduct a workshop for alumni of the Schusterman Center’s Summer Institute for Israel Studies, a program for educators who teach about Israel. More than 50 of the summer institute’s 122 fellows, from schools and universities around the world, will return to campus for the session with Oz, which will focus on “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” one of his 12 novels.

Oz devotes his time to writing, teaching and campaigning for the peace movement in Israel, where he has been a leader in Peace Now since 1967. He holds the Agnon Chair of Hebrew Literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer-Sheva, and has published, in addition to his novels, three books of short stories, seven books of essays, and a children’s book. Since the 1967 war, he has published numerous articles and essays about the Israeli/Arab conflict, campaigning for a compromise based on mutual recognition and co-existence between Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. His family included scholars and teachers, some of whom were militant right-wing Zionists, who emigrated to Israel in the early 1930s from Russia and Poland. In 1954, aged 15, Amos Oz rebelled against his father's world and left Jerusalem to live and work in Kibbutz Hulda, where he also completed his secondary education.

After completing his Army service in 1961, he returned to the kibbutz to work in the cotton fields. In his early twenties his first short stories were published in the leading literary quarterly Keshet, before the kibbutz assembly sent him back to Jerusalem to study philosophy and literature at the Hebrew University. With his BA degree, he returned to Kibbutz Hulda where, for twenty five years, he divided his time between writing, farming and teaching in the Kibbutz High School.

As a reserve soldier in a tank unit, Oz fought on the Sinai front during the 1967 Six Day War, and on the Golan Heights in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. In 1969-70, he was a visiting Fellow at St. Cross College, Oxford. In 1975, and again in 1990, he was Author in Residence at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 1984-5, together with his wife and son, he spent a year in residence at Colorado Springs College in America. In 1997 he was a visiting professor at Princeton University, NJ and in 1998 at Oxford University, England.

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