Zvi Keren was born Howard Ralph Kirshenbaum in New York City on August 18, 1917. He graduated high school at sixteen, earned a BSc in chemistry from New York University in 1937, and then turned to music: an MA in composition from Columbia University in 1946, private study with Joseph Schillinger from 1939 to 1943 (he is described in some accounts as Schillinger's last surviving personally-authorized pupil), further composition and theory training with Curt Sachs, Paul Henry Lang and Gustave Reese, and two years of piano study with Nadia Reisenberg and Paolo Gallico. He completed a PhD at the University of London in 1961 with a dissertation on the sources and stylistic development of Israeli art music since 1930.

He immigrated to Israel around 1951, Hebraizing his name and becoming religiously observant around the same time. His career there ran almost entirely through institutions rather than performance: he taught at the Thelma Yellin high school and the Oranim teacher-training seminar, directed the youth music center in Lod (1956–58), lectured for the BBC's Hebrew-language branch in 1959, and worked as an arranger and composer for Kol Yisrael, the Israeli state radio, from 1961 to 1970 — a tenure that, per one account, produced some of the first jazz big-band arrangements performed in Israel. He chaired the Israeli Arrangers Union from 1962 to 1970 and taught jazz composition at Tel Aviv University in 1964–65 and again in 1973–74. In 1970 he became a founding member of Bar-Ilan University's Musicology Department, heading it until 1986.

His 1980 book, Contemporary Israeli Music: Its Sources and Stylistic Development (Bar-Ilan University Press, 296 pages), grew out of his 1961 dissertation and remains his most substantial published legacy — a survey of the forces shaping Israeli concert music broadly, including Middle Eastern musical influence, biblical cantillation and diaspora liturgical melody, the Hebrew language, Western art-music influence, and Jewish folk material, based on interviews with composers, educators and musicologists alongside score analysis. A Rutgers University master's thesis on jazz education in Israel credits Keren, alongside saxophonist Mel Keller and educator Arnie Lawrence, as one of three key figures in the field. His daughter, Alona Keren-Sagee, is a jazz pianist and head of jazz studies at Bar-Ilan University. He died in Israel on October 27, 2008, at 91, and is buried at Yarkon Cemetery, Tel Aviv.

Keren is a genuinely different kind of figure in this catalogue: not a performing jazz musician with a discography, but the academic infrastructure much of Israeli jazz education was built on. His Schillinger-system training — a rigorous, mathematically-grounded approach to composition — fed directly into decades of institutional work: Kol Yisrael radio arranging, the Israeli Arrangers Union, and jazz composition courses at Tel Aviv University that predate Bar-Ilan's own Musicology Department, which he then founded and led for sixteen years. His book treats jazz as one thread within a much larger tapestry of Israeli concert music's stylistic sources, rather than as a subject in its own right — a framing consistent with a career spent building institutions and training composers rather than performing.