KATZ, ELIHU

KATZ, ELIHU (1926– ), professor of sociology and communications. Born in New York, Katz received his doctorate from Colombia University in 1956. In 1963 he immigrated to Israel and joined the Guttman Institute for Applied Social Research of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the 1960s he took time out from his academic career and headed the task force charged with the introduction of television broadcasting in Israel. He founded the Communications Institute at the Hebrew University in 1966, heading it until 1980. In the mid-1970s he and Daniel Dayan initiated a series of live broadcasts of recreated historic events inspired by the peace process with Egypt. He was a professor of sociology and communications at the Hebrew University until 1991, when he retired. He also served as professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. With his colleagues in Jerusalem and California he published 10 books and over 90 articles, among them: Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (with Lazarsfeld, 1955); Medical Innovation: A Diffusion Study (with Coleman and Menzel, 1966); The Secularization of Leisure: Culture and Communication in Israel (with Gurevitch, 1976); The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of " Dallas " (with Liebes, 1990); Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (with Dayan, 1992); and Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These? (with Peters, Liebes, and Orloff, eds., 2003). In 1989 he was awarded the Israel Prize for social sciences. He also received the UNESCO-CANADA McLuhan Prize and Burda Prize (in media research). -WEBSITE: www.asc.upenn.edu/ascfaculty/facultyBioDetails.asp?txtUserID=ekatz\#research\>\> . (Fern Lee Seckbach / Shaked Gilboa (2nd ed.) KATZ, HANNS LUDWIG KATZ, HANNS LUDWIG (1892–1940), German painter and graphic artist. Katz was born in Karlsruhe. After leaving school he made a short sojourn in Paris at the atelier of Henri Matisse. From 1913 to 1918 Katz studied painting, history of art, and architecture in Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Munich. He married the pianist Franziska Ehrenreich and they moved to Frankfurt-on-the-Main in 1920, after he had published a series of expressionist lithographs entitled Danse macabre which alluded to the revolution in 1919. In Frankfurt, Katz became known as a painter of portraits, cityscapes, and still lifes, which revealed the influence of Max Beckmann and the Neue Sachlichkeit. But despite the success and the support of the art critic Max Osborn, he had to become a partner in a whitewashing company in 1923 in order to make a living. One of his portraits in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit shows the artist at work. After getting his master craftman's certificate, he worked in the business until 1936. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, Katz took an active part in the Frankfurt section of the Juedischer Kulturbund, and in 1935, one year after his wife died, he planned to establish a semiautonomous Jewish settlement in Yugoslavia. After his endeavors failed he immigrated to South Africa in 1936. Before leaving Frankfurt, Katz married   Ruth Wolf, who followed him into exile. Thus he was able to escape before one of his best expressionist portraits, of Gustav Landauer (1919–20, private collection, Kapstadt), was publicly denounced in Degenerate Art in 1938. Despite becoming deeply involved in painting the landscapes of his new homeland, Katz was unable to make headway in the South African art scene and died in Johannesburg. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Heuberger, H. Krohn (ed.), Hanns Ludwig Katz (1992). (Philipp Zschommler (2nd ed.)