To the casual observer, Landau may have appeared something of an enigma. Provocative and forthright on one hand, yet hugely charismatic and personable on the other, he had an unswerving commitment to religious and political beliefs that might have appeared contradictory. Aye, as the Irish historian Hugh Nolan wrote, the two things happen at the one time. His trenchant views won him deep respect and occasionally steered him towards controversy.

Born in London’s Golders Green into a family of Ger Hasidim, he was the product of a religious Zionist upbringing that included Hasmonean Grammar School, the Bnei Akiva youth movement and studies at the prestigious Slabodka and Hebron yeshivot in Israel in the mid-1960s. It was here that he had his first taste of journalism, volunteering to help out at the Jerusalem Post by taking the place of reservists called up as tension grew in the summer of 1967. His parents’ demands that he return home got short shrift. Impassioned by the enormity of events, he conned a press pass to join journalists on a tour of the Old City, newly under Israeli control. He soon began to articulate a profound opposition to Israel’s control of the Palestinians.

Returning to London, he completed a law degree at University College, London and married his wife Jackie in 1969. Interested neither in a career as a lawyer nor in joining the family business, a year later they returned to Israel, settling into the apartment in Tel Hai Street in the Greek Colony that remains their home. He returned to the Jerusalem Post as night editor, then diplomatic correspondent, then diplomatic editor, and finally as the paper’s managing editor. At the same time he was Jerusalem bureau chief for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and became Israel’s leading English writer on political and diplomatic news.

He secured a major scoop in 1978 as the first Israeli to interview Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, ending the interview with the traditional Jewish blessing recited in the presence of a monarch, thanking God “who shares his glory with flesh and blood.”

Read the article in full at the Jewish Daily Forward.