The Amos Oz International Conference at the University of Pennsylvania
Israel’s greatest living author and peace advocate is coming to Penn. Amos Oz will speak about his writing and political activism, and read from his new autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness, as part of the conference focusing on his life and works.
"As rich and glorious as a symphony, as immediate and personal as a child’s confession,” writes Random House. “This is a memoir like no other, and one that cries out to be read and wept over."
Join us as Oz gives the Jerome B. Apfel Public Lecture, "On Love and Darkness" at 6 p.m. Tuesday, October 19, in Houston Hall’s Bodek Lounge, 3417 Spruce St.
Sponsors of the Amos Oz International Conference include the Jewish Studies Program, Middle East Center, and Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.
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About Oz
About his work
The Amos Oz International Conference from October 17 to 20 is a collaborative venture between the University of Pennsylvania and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. It brings together between 25 and 30 leading scholars of Jewish and Israeli literature from the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
Oz will attend each of the panel discussions and will respond to the papers in a plenary session on the second evening of the conference. All sessions will be open to Penn faculty and students, while Oz’s address will be open to the wider community. His participation is a rare opportunity for the university and other communities to engage with him directly as he speaks about his writing and political advocacy.
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Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. His family included scholars and teachers who immigrated to Israel in the early 1930s from Russia and Poland. At 15, Oz left Jerusalem to live and work in Kibbutz Hulda, where he also completed his secondary education. After finishing 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 25 years, he divided his time between writing, farming, and teaching in the Kibbutz High School.
From 1969 to 1970, Oz was a visiting fellow at St. Cross College in Oxford. In 1975 and again in 1990, he was an author in residence at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1984 to 1985, together with his wife and son, he spent a year in residence at Colorado Springs College.
Oz is a full professor and holds the Agnon Chair of Hebrew Literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is actively campaigning for the Israeli peace movement. He has been honored with the French Prix Femina and the 1992 Frankfurt Peace Prize.
Amos Oz roots his writing in the tempestuous history of his homeland. Through his prose, both fiction and nonfiction, runs a common thread – examining human nature, recognizing its frailty and glorying in its variety. It is his attachment to the history, landscape and people of his birthplace that undoubtedly also motivates him to continue his longstanding activities on behalf of peace in Israel and the Middle East. Oz consistently makes the plea for an end to ambivalence, for dialogue, for a channeling of passions toward faith in the future.
With an economy of words, Oz presents the people of Israel, its political tribulations and biblical landscape. Newsweek writes, “Eloquent, humane, even religious in the deepest sense, (Oz) emerges as a kind of Zionist Orwell: a complex man obsessed with simple decency and determined above all to tell the truth, regardless of whom it offends.”
Oz has published 18 books, including novels and literary criticism, and nearly 500 essays and articles in Israeli and international magazines and newspapers. His work has been translated into 30 languages in more than 35 countries.
Click here for a list of Oz’s works that have been translated into English.