Did not work, unfortunately.  The new install eliminated some deprecation errors, but the kernel still died.  I tried re-installing tensorflow through Anaconda, and it installs v. 2.7.0, and it now works without killing the kernel – but not on EfficientNet models because it can’t find efficientnet:
ImportError: cannot import name ‘efficientnet’ from ‘tensorflow.keras.applications’ (unknown location)
The available models are listed as:
densenet (package)
inception_resnet_v2 (package)
inception_v3 (package)
mobilenet (package)
mobilenet_v2 (package)
nasnet (package)
resnet50 (package)
vgg16 (package)
vgg19 (package)
xception (package)