A poster from 1927 for an Academy Award-winning picture whose story was written by Ben Hecht.
BEN HECHT
Fighting Words, Moving Pictures
By Adina Hoffman
THE NOTORIOUS BEN HECHT
Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist
By Julien Gorbach
For understandable reasons, biographies about Ben Hecht have focused almost exclusively on his screenwriting career in Hollywood. And why wouldn’t they? Consider a few of his credits: “Underworld,” directed by Josef von Sternberg, for which Hecht won the first Academy Award. (Not his first Academy Award, the first Academy Award ever given for best story. The year was 1927.) “Scarface,” “The Front Page,” “Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Wuthering Heights,” “His Girl Friday,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious.” And that’s just films with his name on them. Uncredited, he script-doctored countless others, including “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “A Star Is Born” (1937) and “Roman Holiday.”
Across four decades, Hecht worked on about 200 movies. He helped establish the ground rules for entire genres, including the gangster film, the newspaper picture, the screwball comedy and postwar film noir. Jean-Luc Godard said “he invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.”
However, what gets repeatedly overlooked, when historians and film buffs consider Hecht’s life, are his politics. That’s understandable too, given that he hated politics. Thanks to his early days as a Chicago newspaperman, he came to believe that all politicians were hopelessly corrupt. He was deeply cynical about the human condition, and didn’t take do-gooders seriously. He dismissed the fashionable leftism among Hollywood’s screenwriting elite as group therapy for intellectuals.
But unexpectedly, in middle age, Hecht dropped everything to become a propagandist and political organizer, in a nationwide campaign to pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue the endangered Jews of Europe. His dramatic transformation surprised his friends and colleagues, and may reveal more about the man than any of his Hollywood successes.
Two new books finally give this chapter of his life the emphasis it deserves. “Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures,” by Adina Hoffman, an accomplished literary biographer, and “The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist,” by the first-time author Julien Gorbach, a crime reporter turned journalism professor, both play down Hecht’s screenwriting in order to dig more deeply into his relatively unexplored Jewish side.
But as these biographies clearly show, Hecht’s Jewish American identity runs like a soundtrack through his entire life. He once joked that he became a Jew only in 1939, yet in fact he was pickled in Yiddishkeit from the beginning. Born on the Lower East Side, raised in the Midwest, he wrote novels, short stories and newspaper columns about Jews throughout his life; Sholom Aleichem was an enduring inspiration.
Hoffman’s book is part of the Yale Jewish Lives series of brief — in this case too brief — biographies. She condenses his film and theater career into a mere 50 pages or so, eager to get to the metamorphosis Hecht underwent on the eve of World War II. And that’s where she starts to draw closer to the man than any previous attempt.
What follows is a brisk, readable tour through Hecht’s wartime alliance with the right wing of the Zionist movement — the Revisionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky — and his support for the Irgun, their clandestine paramilitary affiliate, led by Jabotinsky’s young lieutenant Menachem Begin. She describes Hecht’s awkward lunch at the “21” Club in New York with a young Irgunist, a Palestinian Jew named Peter Bergson, who persuaded Hecht to help him create a Jewish army to fight against Hitler. Later, galvanized by news of the mass exterminations taking place in Europe, the team mounted a bold campaign to pressure the United States government to make the rescue of European Jewry a wartime priority. Their efforts were fought not only by Roosevelt and the State Department, but also by establishment Jewish groups, fearful that Judaizing the war would trigger more anti-Semitism. Jewish-owned newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed, burying news of Hitler’s Final Solution..
Hecht wrote furious columns for the short-lived liberal newspaper PM, excoriating the passivity of American Jews. (His friend Groucho Marx congratulated him after one particularly angry screed. “That’s what we need,” Groucho wrote, “a little more belligerency, professor, and not quite so much cringing.”) Hecht also wrote a long exposé in The American Mercury called “The Extermination of the Jews,” later excerpted in Reader’s Digest. These were, Gorbach says, “the only substantive coverage” of the Holocaust “to appear in mass-circulation magazines.”
In order to make an end-run around the political and media establishment and bring the story directly to the American people, the Bergson group bought full-page ads in major newspapers, usually written by Hecht himself. “Action — Not Pity Can Save Millions Now!” was a typical headline.
Hecht also coaxed his famous actor, producer and musician friends to join him in mounting “We Will Never Die,” a large-scale pageant — essentially a supersize Broadway musical, written by Hecht, with a cast of hundreds. The production sold out Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl and venues across the country. Tens of thousands saw it. Hecht also wrote a pro-Irgun Broadway play, “A Flag Is Born,” with an unknown Marlon Brando playing a Jewish refugee. The box office receipts helped pay for a ship, rechristened the S.S. Ben Hecht, meant to smuggle displaced Jews into Palestine.
Every step of the way, the brashness of Hecht and Bergson was met with spectacular resistance from the more timid leaders of established Jewish organizations: Rabbi Stephen Wise even compared Bergson to Hitler. It didn’t matter. Public opinion was on their side and the campaign attracted the support of senators, congressmen and Supreme Court justices.
Hoffman ably synthesizes an unwieldy amount of material. But she is hamstrung by her dislike of Bergson and Hecht’s affiliation with the Revisionist movement, which evolved, after Israel’s founding, into the right-wing Likud party of Begin and Netanyahu. She unfairly treats Hecht as a bit of a crank in this regard, ignoring the fact that at the crucial moment, Bergson and the Revisionists were the only ones persistently raising the alarm and demanding a more aggressive American response to the tragedy.
Meyer Levin, by the way, launched a furious attack on Hecht for supporting the Irgun in his autobiography “In Search,” published in 1950. Levin’s connections were with the Haganah, and at the time there was a nasty rivalry between the two organizations, although both were devoted to Jewish independence. Among other things, Levin alleged that, while he, Levin, financed many ships that brought “illegal” Jewish refugees to Palestine, including the famous ship “Exodus,” Ben Hecht financed only one–theBen Hecht. THe implicationwas that Hecht was vain. In a later edition of this book, Levin added a footnote which apologized for the allegations, and retracted them.
@ Boris Gorbis: Boris, one reason for the failure of PM was that it was alleged to be pro-Communist. Meyer Levin, the novelist, who was also a pro-Israel activist during this period, claims in his memoirs “IN Search” that when he was a member of PMs’ editorial board, he was told by another board member that he (Levin) was the only member of the board who wasnot a Communist Party member. Of course , Bartley Crum was probably completely unaware of this alleged fact when he bought the magazine. But it might explain why he couldn’t get members of the Jewish community to contribute to it and prevent it from failing.
Correction: the final title of Bartley Crumm’s book was “Behind the Silken Curtain”. The name earlier supplied “Under the Silken Curtain” was one of the options he reportedly considered. Please forgive me for thinking of the fate of the manuscript, while reporting on the publication.
Here are some interesting threads of history I’d like to weave into the story. One of the most remarkable feats of Ben Hecht (other than allegedly convincing Frank Sinatra to take cases filled with money for Hagana to the waterfront controlled by his connections) was his creation of The American League for Free Palestine. Funded by Hecht and co-chaired by Arthur Schick, then a well-known talented miniaturist and illustrator, this organization was headed by… US Senator Guy Gillette, who left his seat to promote the agenda of ‘free immigration’ to Palestine as the League’s Chairmen. Senator Gillette’s traveled extensively and tirelessly using his august status and connections (including to the White House) to advocate for the program of ‘100,000 Jews to be admitted to Palestine.) His personal archive of responses to and press coverages of this (seemingly unsuccessful) mission as well as Arthur Schick’s appeals on behalf of the League are in our “America-Israel Museum collection. The archive of the other key figure, the unmentioned owner-editor-publisher of the PM magazine, has been lost, but Ben Hecht’s alliance with him should not be.
Born and raised Catholic, Mr. Bartley Crumm was best known then Rita Hayworth’ divorce attorney. This forgotten hero must be credited (together with Hecht, Gillette and Schick) as the key figure in forcing Britain to surrender the Palestine Mandate though enraged public opinion. Crumm began to expose British plans and anti-Jewish duplicity relentlessly and openly even while travelling as a member of the American-British Committee on Palestine (created in part, under the League pressure to examine the 100,000 question) . His unequivocal position to admit the postwar Jewish survivors starting with the 100 000 was essentially adopted by the Committee but tabled (rejected) by the Labor government led by Attlee and directed by the antisemitic trade unionist Bevin (think left) Upon returning to NY In 1947, Crumm published his famous book “Under the Silken Curtain”, whose exposes reverberated throughout the world. He became a celebrity, purchased the PM magazine and gave it a pro-Zionist, pro-Jewish direction. Although involved in many Israel-Jewish causes, including being honored at the Israeli Bonds gala, he found no help from the NY Jewish community when PM began to falter financially and eventually closed. The Museum collection has this autographed book and several copies of the PM editions where he unwaveringly advocated for Israel.
@ Hugo Schmidt-Fischer:
@ Hugo Schmidt-Fischer: Actually, Hugo, new research shows that Hecht was spot-om accurate in his assessment of Kastner’s behavior. Paul Bagdonor, a well-known and respected Jewish Historian, has recently published a thoroughly researched book about Kastner that demonstates that he not only failed to alert Hungarian Jews that the Nazi trains were taking them to the death camps, he lied to Jewish leaders by assuring them that the trains were only taking the Jews in Hungary to labor camps within Hungary, where they could expect decent treatment. And all this even though he had been fully informed of the truth. He also failed to inform the outside world about what he knew about the Nazi death camps and death trains, although he had several opportunities to do so. And even after the war, he signed numerous false affidavits on behalf of Nazi war criminals to the Nuremberg courts, which enabled them to escape prosecution for their war crimes. This from the Israelmatzav.com web site:
A Child of the Century
by Ben Hecht
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“PeterBergson’s” real name was Hillel Kook. He was a son of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Palestine. I don’t know why he used a pseudonym during his stay in the United States.
According to a hostile historian of the Jewish (Irgun) revolt in Palestine, 1944-48, Bergson-Kook used some of the profits from the pageant “We Shall Never Die” to fund the Irgun. This historian (whose name I forget) estimates the amount of money sent to the Irgun as somewhere between $140,000 and $ one million. I don’t know if this is true, but if it is, it does no dishonor in my mind to Bergson-Kook or Ben Hecht. The Irgun revolt, led by Menachem Begin, helped to make Israel possible.
The musical score for “We Shall Never Die” was written by Kurt Weill, a Jew and one of the twentieth century’s greatest musical composers.
Among the Hollywood actors who volunteered his services for free to act in the pageant was Bob Hope, even though he wasn’t Jewish. Hope always remained a good friend of Israel, even when this ceased to be fashionable in Hollywood circles. One of his somewhat corny jokes that he told when he was asked, as he was for many years, to MC the Academy Awards presentation, was “thank you for inviting me to be your Passover guest.”
Hecht’s actions ought to be a lesson for American Jewish activists in the US in our time. He rightly confronted the Jewish leadership of his time, who internalized the antisemtic policies of the political establishment.
Ostracized by the Jewish establishment, Hecht was not able to change the course of the Holocaust by much. At the very end of WWII, perhaps, his championing did gain some traction. Finally, some of the Allies issued passports and offered some sort of safe harbor to help save the last Jewish remnant in Hungary.
More decisive was Hecht’s impact on Israel’s independence. Helping support the Irgun, this organization numbering 1’000 operatives, was key to driving a British force of 100’000 out of Palestine in 1948. In their endeavors, Irgun members facing death by hanging were hounded, tortured and turned over to the British by the formal Jewish movements then in Palestine.
Only a mere months later, following the end of the mandate, getting rid of the British would likely have failed. The Soviets toppled the transitional regimes in Eastern Europe and so, the US would not have cooperated anymore with Russia in the UN vote for Israel’s establishment, overriding strong British protests. At that point Cold War broke out, and the Americans leaned over to need the Muslim nations in their front against Stalin. Termination of the British mandate at Lake Success at that point would not have gained a majority. Ben Hecht who had supported the Irgun, has a share in Israel’s independence.
Where Hecht failed was his analysis of the Kastner trials. He followed the first trial in Israel in cursory fashion. He was quick to jump at conclusions in his speedily composed book. Kastner was later exonerated. For years, Kastner had warned against the Nazi threat only to be ignored by community leaders. In the end he tried to make the best of a tragic situation and managed to save 1’600 refugees in a negotiated deal with Eichmann. He also alleviated the plight of Jews deported to slave labor in Austria, thereby saving many more. Kastner was treated unfairly by history and Hecht’s role in this is unfortunate.