Yael Dayan, 1939–2024

Yael Dayan, 1939-2024

Only a select few chil­dren of major polit­i­cal fig­ures, such as John Quin­cy Adams or Indi­ra Gand­hi, ever reach the same plateaus that were scaled by their fathers. Oth­ers, such as Jen­na Bush and Meghan McCain, occa­sion­al­ly dis­tin­guish them­selves in oth­er fields. And still oth­ers yet are wor­thy of cov­er­age for all the wrong rea­sons. (Exhib­it A in this cat­e­go­ry is Hunter Biden, whose fed­er­al gun law tri­al is now under­way.) Yael Dayan, who died on May 18 in Tel Aviv at 85, was decid­ed­ly not in this lat­ter group. Her lit­er­ary and polit­i­cal accom­plish­ments allowed her to stand on her own as a sig­nif­i­cant fig­ure in mod­ern Israeli life, irre­spec­tive of the fact that her father, the mil­i­tary hero Moshe Dayan, was one of the most famous fig­ures in all of Israeli his­to­ry. Though, like any child of a note­wor­thy fig­ure, the famou …