"Becoming An Honest Man Again": Ben Hecht's Transformative Embrace of Jewish Activism

• In Event: Twentieth-Century American Jews as Activists

Abstract

Ben Hecht, the legendary “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” who wrote many of the Golden Age blockbusters, is also remembered for rebelling against the film studios when they refused to make pictures about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. His public confrontation with Hollywood’s Jewish “moguls” represented a dramatic about-face for a bon vivant who had always avoided causes. Moreover, he had written “A Jew in Love,” an infamously anti-Semitic novel that literary critic Leslie Fiedler once called “a work of inspired self-hatred.” This study investigates the mix of personal and political reasons for his dramatic transformation and embrace of Jewish activism. It draws on materials stored in his archive at Chicago’s Newberry Library—most notably recorded interviews with the directors who were his close friends and collaborators, but also his speeches, published remembrances, books, stories and movie and play scripts—to argue that it was his personal dissatisfaction with movie writing and feelings of low self-esteem and dissipation that drove his turn towards political action. As directors Howard Hawks and Otto Preminger emphasized, Hecht’s extra-marital romances, particularly his affair with starlet Mary “Mimi” Taylor, compelled him to routinely turn to Hollywood for quick cash. Finding his marriage in trouble, his literary career adrift, and a rising emergency in Europe, Hecht changed course. In declaring that he “wanted to be an honest man again” at age 47, he began writing a weekly newspaper column in January 1941 that took on the plight of Europe’s Jews. His first column blasted a meeting between the studio executives and Joseph Kennedy, the former ambassador to Britain, who had warned the studios against making movies that would pull America into “a Jewish war.” Hecht went on to orchestrate a spectacular eight-year-long, one-man publicity crusade, in which he first sought to raise a Jewish army, then appealed for the rescue of European Jews, and finally raised funds for militant Zionists in Palestine. "I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes,” he later recalled. “The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, had brought my Jewishness to the surface.”

Author

• Julien Sean Gorbach, University of Hawaii at Manoa