SPRINZAK, Ehud (Zelig) 1940-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 21, 1940, in Israel; died of cancer November 8, 2002, near Tel Aviv, Israel. Political scientist, educator, and author. Sprinzak was an authority on right-wing Jewish political groups and Israeli counterterrorism. Sprinzak received his master's from the University of Jerusalem in 1967 and earned a doctorate from Yale in 1972. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught political science for thirty years at Hebrew University, leaving that institution to found the Lauder School of Government Policy and Diplomacy in Herzliyah, Israel. In addition to this work, Sprinzak was also the Israel-based director for Pomona College in California from 1977 to 1983. Sprinzak's advice and insights were often sought by government officials and journalists; he was a political commentator for the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Achrono from 1973 to 1974, for the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem from 1976 to 1977, and for Jerusalem television and radio in 1978. His advice to politicians was most famously unheeded when he warned that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in danger of being assassinated. This prediction came tragically true not long afterward when a right-wing gunman shot Rabin. Sprinzak wrote about politics and terrorism in five books, including The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right (1991), The Israeli Right and the Peace Process, 1992-1996 (1998), and Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (1999); he was also an associate editor for the periodicals Directions and Journal of Terrorism Research.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Writers Directory, 17th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2002.

periodicals

New York Times, November 12, 2002, p. C21.