Moshe Dayan - Family

Family

Ruth Dayan, his first wife, divorced Moshe in 1971 after 36 years of marriage due to his numerous extramarital affairs. After the divorce, Dayan remarried. He left almost his entire estate to his second wife, Rachel. In the Israeli best-selling book that followed the divorce, Or Did I Dream The Dream?, Ruth Dayan wrote a chapter about "Moshe's bad taste in women."

Moshe and Ruth's daughter, Yael Dayan, a novelist, is best known in Israel for her book, My Father, His Daughter about her relationship with her father. She followed him into politics and has been a member of several Israeli leftist parties over the years. She has served in the Knesset and on the Tel Aviv City Council, and is the current Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, responsible for social services. One of his sons, Assi Dayan, is an actor and a movie director. Another son, novelist Ehud Dayan, who was cut out of his father's will, wrote a book critical of his father months after he died, mocking his military, writing, and political skills, calling him a "philanderer," and accusing him of greed. In his book, Ehud Dayan even accused his father of making money off his battle with cancer. He also lamented having recited Kaddish for his father "three times too often for a man who never observed half the Ten Commandments".