About Zeev Galili

A retired newspaperman, he was a City Editor and Deputy Chief Editor of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s highest circulation daily newspaper with a readership of 600,000.

He authored twenty children books and ghost written books and biographies to many politicians and business people.

Born in 1936 in the Galil town of Tsfat, he is of the seventh generation of his family to be born in Israel. His family was among the founders of Rosh Pina in the Galil region.

He started his journalistic career at the age of fourteen writing for children and young adults’ magazines. While in high school he began working for daily newspapers as a reporter, news editor, chief of staff and rising to deputy chief editor.

Before his retirement from Yediot Ahronot he founded a workshop for the training of news editors. He developed methodologies of teaching journalistic writing. Some of the workshop’s graduates are now senior editors in the field. Among them is Shilo De Bar, who became editor of Yediot Ahronot and Ron Yaron, who became deputy editor of the same newspaper.

He retired from Yediot Ahronot in 1994 to continue the development of his journalism writing teaching methods, teaching in Bar Ilan University, the Coteret School of Journalism, the Open University and in the colleges of Tel Aviv and Orot.

He also adopted his teaching methods into effective writing programs for dozens of industrial firms and public institutions including all of Israel’s large banks, the State Comptroller Division and the Social Security Department.

With the publication of the Makor Rishon weekly in 1998 he started to write a weekly column titled Higaion Bashigaon (Common Sense for Crazy Times). The column, which concentrated on political and national issues early on, had its emphasis shifted to literature, culture, interview with academic personalities, human interest stories and investigative reporting. The column appeared for eleven years and continues now as part of this blog.

While a working journalist he studied economics and statistics at the Hebrew University, social sciences at Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics, literature and history at Tel Aviv University, philosophy at Bar Ilan University earning his BA and MA degrees and did graduate work toward the PhD degree at the Hebrew University under professor Rivka Shatz.

He wrote a series of children books, among them fifteen volumes of Bible stories. Other volumes included Jerusalem stories, Tel Aviv stories, Environmental Quality—It Is Us, The Redhead From Kadury, about Itzhak Rabin, The Dinosaur Book and many more. As a ghost writer he penned many volumes for political and business personalities.

He is married since 1958 to Yasmin, nee Merkazee, and has four children and four grandchildren.