On Tuesday, November 9, Amos Oz, noted Israeli author and activist for Israeli peace, will present the 1999 Lipman Lecture, "Israeli Perspectives." The 7 p.m. talk will be held in the Page Commons Room, Cotter Union, and is open to the public free of charge. A brief memorial commemorating Krystalnacht, "the night of broken glass," when the Nazis carried out a statewide pogrom against German Jews in 1938, will begin the presentation. A reception in the Pugh Center will follow the lecture.

An author of prose for children and adults, as well as an essayist, Oz has been translated into 31 languages and is internationally acclaimed. His works explore conflicts and tensions in contemporary Israeli society and the constraints of ideology, geographic boundaries and historical traditions. His novels include My Michael (1968) and A Perfect Peace (1982). Oz has won the Israel Prize for literature, the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the Prix Femina, France's top literary prize for best foreign novel.

Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. At the age of 15 he went to live on a kibbutz, a collective farm in Israel, where he worked for 25 years while completing his education. At the Hebrew University in Jerusalem he studied philosophy and literature. Oz fought as a reserve soldier on the Sinai front during the 1967 Six Day War and on the Golan Heights in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He has been a visiting fellow at Oxford and Princeton Universities and author in residence at the Hebrew University. He lives in the southern Israeli town Arad and holds the Agnon Chair of Hebrew Literature at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer Sheva.

The Lipman Lecture, presented once each year, was endowed by Bernard Lipman '31 and is devoted to the advancement of jewish studies at Colby.