Benny Morris - Biography

Biography

Morris was born in Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, the son of Jewish immigrants from the United Kingdom. His father, Ya'akov Morris, was an Israeli diplomat, historian, and poet. According to The New Yorker, Benny Morris "grew up in the heart of a left-wing pioneering atmosphere".

His parents left their kibbutz and moved to Jerusalem when Morris was a year old, so that Morris could spend more time with them: kibbutz life had entailed a degree of separation. In the wake of his father's diplomatic duties, the family spent four years in New York when Morris was nine, and another two years there when he was 15.

Morris served as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War. He was wounded in 1969 by an Egyptian shell at the Suez Canal, and was released from the army four months later. He completed his undergraduate studies in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received a doctorate in Anglo-German relations from the University of Cambridge.

Read more about this topic:  Benny Morris

Famous quotes containing the word biography:

    In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
    Rebecca West (1892–1983)

    As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)