ABSTRACT

The Illegals (Meir Levin, 1948), which was produced by Americans for the Haganah (AFH) is the only film to provide real-time documentation of these survivors’ attempts to immigrate illegally to Palestine. However, despite the film's significance as a unique visual document, it was not screened when it most mattered, before the founding of the State of Israel, and over the years has been marginalized in the Zionist collective memory and in Zionist research. Based on primary and secondary historical sources, this article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the behind- the-scenes story of The Illegals and its post-production difficulties. It examines the disagreements, the misunderstandings, and the reasons why it failed to reach its potential audiences in time, all of which caused one of the most important documentaries in the history of Zionism to sink into oblivion.

摘要

非法移民（梅厄莱，1948年），这是由美国的犹太自卫军（AFH）生产的是提供这些幸存者企图非法移民到巴勒斯坦的实时文档唯一的电影。然而，尽管这部电影作为一种独特的视觉文件具有重要意义，但它并没有在最重要的时候放映，在以色列国成立之前，多年来在犹太复国主义的集体记忆和犹太复国主义研究中一直被边缘化。本文基于一手和二手史料，首次全面剖析了《盗贼》的幕后故事。及其后期制作困难。它审视了分歧、误解以及未能及时接触潜在观众的原因，所有这些都导致这部犹太复国主义历史上最重要的纪录片之一被遗忘。