American Jewish History

Interwar Hollywood had more than its share of Jewish actors who changed their names and Jewish producers who steered clear of content that might draw attention to their ethnicity. In the early stages of his public career, Ben Hecht, the columnist, novelist and playwright turned screenwriter, seemed to be cut from the same cloth, or worse. His 1931 novel A Jew in Love was awash in stereotypes so grotesque that one prominent critic called the main character "the caricature of the anti-Semite come to life." In reality, Julien Gorbach contends in The Notorious Ben Hecht, he was just "parodying the un-Jewish Jew" (8).

Not many people seemed to get the joke. "Outrage cascaded like an avalanche from some quarters of the American Jewish community," Gorbach reports. Rabbis in Cleveland declared they would never allow Hecht to be buried in their city. Hecht replied that he was not troubled to miss out on "an honor nobody I know has ever yearned for" (97). In fact, he seemed to revel in the tumult that his writings often provoked.

So how did the iconoclast known for writing the scripts for such blockbusters as Gone With the Wind and The Front Page become a notorious Zionist militant? Hecht's transformation evidently had nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish culture, not his immigrant parents nor his boisterously ethnic extended family. He changed because the world had changed. Hecht looked around in 1939 and was horrified to see Jews around the world under siege and most American Jews seemingly hesitant to respond. Many had "discarded their Jewishness out of the belief that as Jews they could line up only for a snubbing," Hecht wrote (118). His instincts—honed as a gritty crime reporter on the streets of early 1900s Chicago—told him that the Jews needed to answer their persecutors with "a battle cry, rather than moans" (164).

In this thoroughly-researched and finely-written study—the first comprehensive scholarly biography of Hecht—Gorbach adeptly chronicles the stages of Hecht's political evolution. It began with his decision to join the Fight for Freedom committee, which on the eve of World War II urged preemptive American military action against Nazi Germany. Polls showed the public overwhelmingly opposed to US involvement in Europe's conflicts, but Hecht never minded being in the minority. Using his dramatist's skills to make his case, Hecht created Fun to Be Free, a three-hour "Mammoth Revue" of patriotic songs, skits and speeches by [End Page 462] stars of Broadway and Hollywood, which played to capacity crowds at Madison Square Garden in 1941.

When reports of the mass murder of Europe's Jews were confirmed in late 1942, Hecht joined the Bergson Group, a political action committee that sought to pressure the Roosevelt administration to aid Jewish refugees. Toward that end, he authored another dramatic spectacle at Madison Square Garden, We Will Never Die. The defiant title summed up Hecht's credo. Gorbach recounts Hecht's unsuccessful effort to coax a sympathetic message from the White House to read aloud at the event. The president and his aides feared that calling attention to the slaughter would increase the pressure to open America's doors.

For Hecht, that episode was a bitter reminder that before rescuing Jews, he and his comrades first had to "rescue the word 'Jew' from the garbage can" (181). In their public statements about Nazi oppression in 1942–1943, President Roosevelt and other US officials mentioned refugees of various nationalities—but not Jews. Even a White House statement marking the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt failed to acknowledge that the fighters were Jews. Whether to focus on Jews or subsume their suffering among that of other oppressed peoples is a debate that did not end with World War II.

Hecht addressed the problem the way he knew best—with his pen. In full-page advertisements with headlines such as "Time Races Death" and "They...