Given the power of American popular culture to shape perceptions of reality, perhaps it should not be terribly surprising to discover that one of the most important touchstones in the history of the country’s debate over Israel was a best-selling work of fiction that was later turned into a blockbuster Hollywood film. Even so, the enduring power of the images of the Israel/Palestinian conflict created by the author Leon Uris for his 1958 book Exodus, and by director Otto Preminger for the 1960 movie version, has few parallels in the history of US foreign policy discourse, or indeed, in the discussion of any political question. Uris’s own braggadocio—that he felt himself to be writing a Zionist sequel to the Bible—would, rather amazingly, come pretty close to describing a profound political truth.
It was sometime in 1955 that Uris, an ex-Marine private and moderately successful novelist and screenwriter, decided he wanted to write a big book about the birth of Israel. Why this became his goal remains something of a mystery. Uris thought of himself as having been “a very sad little Jewish boy isolated in a Southern town, undersized, asthmatic.” He dropped out of high school after allegedly failing English three times. He was not remotely religious. The son of communist parents, he’d had no Bar Mitzvah or Jewish education. He had married a gentile woman in a church service. Yet he had somehow grown obsessed with the fate of the Jewish state. During the 1948 war, he swore to his half-sister, “You can bet your bottom dollar if I weren’t married, I’d be over there shooting Arabs!”1
Uris’s first novel, the World War II story Battle Cry, published in 1953, featured a morally flawless American Jewish soldier among its rainbow cast of Marine Corps grunts and had become a best-seller. He also wrote the screenplay for the financially successful film it inspired. Uris knocked out a second novel two years later called The Angry Hills (1955), about Jewish soldiers fighting the Nazis in Palestine for the British army, as well as the script for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a classic 1957 western. All this presumably gave Uris the unusual idea of pursuing a film deal for his unwritten novel in order to put himself “in a position to demand more from a publisher.”2
The idea would prove inspired, especially given the fact that Israel was hardly topic number one for American Jews at the time. What’s more, while Hollywood was unarguably dominated by Jews at its highest levels, its top executives had long proven allergic to making movies with prominent Jewish characters. To a man—and they were all men—Hollywood honchos feared inspiring an antisemitic backlash or conspiracy theory should Christian America realize the truth about who was behind America’s “dream factory.” It was an industry, as historian Francis G. Couvares described it, “financed by Protestant bankers, operated by Jewish studio executives and policed by Catholic bureaucrats all the while claiming to represent grass-roots America.” This was a moment when the US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was headed by Congressman John Rankin, a Democrat from Mississippi, who warned of the “alien-minded communistic enemies of Christianity” who were “trying to take over the motion-picture industry.” Lest anyone remain confused about who he meant, Rankin noted that the threat he identified had “hounded and persecuted our Savior during his earthly ministry, inspired his crucifixion, derided him in his dying agony, and then gambled for his garments at the foot of the cross.” Now, this same group of “long-nosed reprobates” was out “to undermine and destroy America,” one alien-minded movie theater at a time.3
Inside the studios, the fears of the Jews who really did run Hollywood but preferred that nobody take much notice of this fact came to dictate the parameters of political content in the movies made during the Red Scare. Right-wing censors were invited to scissor scripts for even a hint of pink partisanship, and anti-Communist blacklists ruled hiring at all levels. But movie moguls were willing to raise and contribute large sums to the Zionist cause; they especially enjoyed paying to smuggle arms and immigrants to Palestine as the Yishuv prepared for war. And the pervasive fear notwithstanding, Hollywood remained a place where left-wing liberalism almost always remained in ideological fashion. On the night that he recognized Israel, President Truman personally telephoned Bartley Crum, the pro-Zionist lawyer who represented the communist “Hollywood Ten” before HUAC. At a rally planned by the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists and Scientists, Crum joined playwright Arthur Miller and many others for a “Salute to Israel.” The Black communist folk singer Paul Robeson sang two Zionist anthems—ironically, in Yiddish. But business was still business. Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann were both respected directors with many profitable films under their belts. Both tried to raise financing for Zionist-inspired films, and both failed.4
Jewish issues did briefly rise to the forefront of the moviemakers’ concerns in the aftermath of the discovery of the Holocaust. The year 1947 saw the release of a film titled My Father’s House, a tale of an eleven-year-old Polish boy’s search for his lost parents in Palestine, a land portrayed as one where Jews and Arabs worked and lived together in peace and harmony. Financed by the Jewish National Fund and filmed in Palestine with amateur actors and little in the way of sophisticated equipment, the syrupy melodrama garnered few favorable reviews and did little business with moviegoers. That same year, however, boasted what would become two classic films devoted to the now red-hot topic of antisemitism. In Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, a gentile journalist, played by Gregory Peck, experiences all manner of social slights and subtle forms of discrimination while impersonating a Jew for the purposes of an investigative article about antisemitism. (Ring Lardner Jr. is one of many people credited with the quip that the movie’s ultimate theme was “Never be rude to a Jew because he might turn out to be a gentile.”) Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire was the story of a deranged soldier who kills a fellow fighter in a fit of anti-Jewish hatred. Both movies were produced over the objections of professional Jewish organizations, lest they somehow stir up the feelings of Jew-hatred they were seeking to expose. The directors of both movies would eventually find themselves forced to “name names” of their alleged communist comrades to congressional committees in order to be allowed to continue to work in the field again. (Dmytryk did so after serving a jail term for initially refusing. Those actors in each film who refused to do likewise found themselves unable to find work in the industry afterward.)5
Six years later, Dmytryk—who had been dining with Crum on the night Ben-Gurion declared Israel into existence, May 14, 1948, teamed up with the actor Kirk Douglas, who was Jewish, to make The Juggler, the tale of a traumatized Jewish Holocaust refugee who attacks a policeman and escapes to Israel. There, the kindly Israeli doctor treating his psychological condition helps to cure him with the explanation, “Every person is precious to us.… That’s why we have an Israel, for no other reason.” This was the first—and, pre-Exodus, only—Hollywood film shot in the new nation of Israel. But it made little impression on either filmgoers or critics at the time. Neither did the only other film of the period dealing with Israel’s creation, 1949’s Sword in the Desert, which was filmed outside Los Angeles. In this film, directed by George Sherman and starring Dana Andrews, the British are the bad guys, and the Arabs are dirty, smelly, and without manners. Bizarrely, this terrible movie concluded with its hero being saved from capture by the sight of a star arising over Bethlehem on Christmas Eve as a chorus sings a soaring “Christ, the Lord,” finale to “Oh, Come Let Us Adore Him.” These two, however, turned out to be exceptions that proved a rule. It did not help a film’s box-office prospects in the world’s second-largest English-speaking market to cast the British as the black hats, nor to risk a boycott in the entire Arab world by portraying the Israelis as heroes. Aside from the biblical melodramas featuring the likes of Moses, King Solomon, and Samson, after these films few, if any, major motion pictures featured either an Israeli locale or a Jewish protagonist. That changed only slightly with 1958’s Marjorie Morningstar, a tale of a young Jewish girl’s romantic entanglements in which Israel figured not at all.6
Given these obstacles, the success of Uris’s audacious plan was hardly predestined. Yet the thirty-two-year-old author made surprisingly lucrative sales, both in New York and Hollywood. MGM vice president Isadore “Dore” Schary can be considered a brave maverick in this historical moment. Like most studio executives, and most American Jews, he was a political liberal. Unlike them, he was also quite religiously observant and committed to producing “message” movies at a time when the threat of the anti-Communist blacklist had made other studios reluctant to address politics with anything but patriotic pabulum. Schary would go on to become national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League and a nearly full-time activist on behalf of Israel. His final film project was the 1975 documentary Israel: The Right to Be, and his final theater production was the unsuccessful 1976 Broadway play Herzl, which he coauthored with the Israeli writer Amos Elon. Clearly, Uris could not have found a more sympathetic sponsor. Schary promised the young author a generous advance, which Uris combined with the advance from Random House for the novel. Meanwhile, Uris arrived in Israel in time to report on the 1956 invasion of Egypt, believing, as he wrote his father, that “the good Lord sent me to Israel to write this book for my people.” In this spirit, he decided to frame the story he was telling as “just another page in the story that started 4000 years ago in Genesis.”7
These apparent delusions of grandeur would eventually turn out to be only slight exaggerations. Exodus would spend over a year on the New York Times best-seller list, including nineteen weeks at number one. Eventually, translated into fifty different languages, it would sell over twenty million copies in eighty-seven printings. The sociologist Norman Mirsky claimed that it was “virtually impossible to find a Reform Jewish home in the 1950s without a copy.” Rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg would later write that Exodus had come to represent “the contemporary ‘bible’ of much of the American Jewish community.”8
After being approached by Uris and then by Preminger, the Israelis treated both the novel and the film of Exodus as if planning a quasi-military campaign. Before the author set foot there, the Israeli consul in Los Angeles, believing that Uris intended to “cover his ‘debt’ to Jewry,” informed the prime minister’s office that the project would “work to everybody’s satisfaction” so long as its author was kept in “close contact with the army” and given plenty of opportunities for “interviews with the big shots.” “Operation Exodus” landed Uris a car and an official driver, along with a customs exemption for purchasing foreign foodstuff. When it came time to film the movie, the government built roads, constructed mock villages, bused in schoolchildren, provided military vehicles and soldiers dressed up in British military garb, shut down the entire port of Haifa (when necessary), and convinced forty thousand citizens to act as unpaid extras, so that the film might recreate Ben-Gurion’s declaration of statehood (Preminger had requested a mere twenty thousand).9
And what an investment it turned out to be. When the book was published in 1958, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion admitted that Uris’s work suffered from the author’s “lack of talent” when judged as a work of fiction. But “as a piece of propaganda,” he thought it “the greatest thing ever written about Israel.” Foreign Affairs Minister Golda Meir (and Ben-Gurion’s future successor) concurred. On a fund-raising trip to the United States, she found “there was no meeting where the book was not mentioned.” While she admitted that the book contained “a lot of kitsch,” she expected it would prove to be “of greater importance than all of the Ministers’ visits and even of 60 years of Zionism, and of all the propaganda and publicity.” The head of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism remarked, “We could have thrown away all promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated Exodus.” The official Israeli airline, El Al, offered Americans a sixteen-day tour covering its film locations, where, according to one wag, “they swallow the novel ‘Exodus’ whole… and think everyone here dances the Hora constantly and goes around making courageous postures.”10
Leon Uris would always insist that “most of the events in Exodus are a matter of history and public record.” This is true, though not in the manner Uris intended when he said it. Yes, there had been a repurposed, dilapidated transport vessel called Exodus 1947 filled with 4,500 DPs from a camp in the south of France that sailed to Palestine to confront British immigration restrictions. The crew was made up of mostly American Jewish veterans who had volunteered for the trip. When the British forcibly boarded the ship, they clubbed one crew member to death and shot two passengers. Then, after a brief stop in Haifa—not coincidentally, just as the UN Special Commission on Palestine, accompanied by much of the international media, was meeting in Tel Aviv—the refugees were sent not to Cyprus, per usual practice, but all the way back to France, where the passengers refused to disembark. A choir of children sang the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah,” as journalists from publications all over the world watched from the shores. The Zionist leader Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver was guilty only of minimal overstatement when he observed that the broadcast footage “filled every right-thinking man and woman everywhere with indignation and horror.” The majority of passengers—women and children included—remained onboard for a month and began a hunger strike. Determined to demonstrate their toughness toward this pathetic but determined bunch, the British made the crazy—from a public relations perspective—decision to return the Jews to Germany, the site of the mass murder of their friends and families, where passengers were forced off the ship and into DP camps, resulting in 33 serious injuries and 68 arrests. It proved to be a gift from the propaganda gods for the Zionists, one they could barely have scripted if they were writing their own movie.11
Uris’s Exodus hewed far closer to the experience of another ship, La Spezia. That voyage took place in 1946 and carried over a thousand illegal immigrants from Italy. Their hunger strike succeeded, and the British eventually allowed its passengers to disembark in Haifa and remain in Palestine. In Uris’s telling, however, they became Jewish orphans traveling from Cyprus who chose to starve themselves rather than agree to orders from the British to get off the ship anywhere but Palestine. The willingness of Uris’s hero, Ari Ben Canaan, to let the children starve to death is intended to demonstrate the Jews’ refusal to repeat the sort of passivity they had been charged with in their response to the Holocaust (and, presumably, for the previous thousands of years of Jewish history). The faint of heart were informed that the starving orphans were “already fighters,” and fortunate compared to the “six million Jews” who had “died in the gas chambers not knowing why.” Uris lifted other details from the war’s history but, again, twisted the facts beyond recognition.12
At the specific request of an Israeli Foreign Ministry official, to whom Uris turned over his manuscript for “corrections” before submitting it to his publisher, he downplayed the role of the terrorist Irgun organization and credited a prison break it arranged to its mortal enemies in the Palmach, an elite fighting force of the Jewish underground army in the pre-state years (“Palmach” is an abbreviated version of its full name in Hebrew, which translates as “strike force”). Significantly, the Uris version of the trip depicted in Exodus contains virtually no Americans in the crew, though, in reality, according to Ike Aronowicz, the actual captain of the Exodus 1947, the ship’s many American Jewish volunteers were “no less determined than the people of the Palmach.” But part of Uris’s self-defined mission was to promote the notion of the “new Jew” under construction in Palestine (one character in the book refers to them as “a race of Jewish Tarzans”). He therefore romanticized the kibbutzniks and other pioneers at the expense of the role that postwar immigrants and European refugees played upon their arrival after the Holocaust. The latter’s horrific experiences were something that both American and Israeli Jews sought to bury to the point of near silence in its aftermath, so painful and discomforting was its memory and those who represented its legacy. Aronowicz judged Exodus to be “neither history nor literature,” and added that its character types “never existed in Israel.” Uris’s reply? “Captain who?… Just look at my sales figures.”13
In Uris’s tale, Zionism drew its moral authority from the history of Jewish persecution, justifying virtually any form of fighting back. “Nothing we do, right or wrong, can ever compare to what has been done to the Jewish people. Nothing the Maccabees do can even be considered an injustice in comparison to two thousand years of murder,” explains one fighter. According to a letter the author sent his father in 1956, “Israel was won by a gun and it will be saved by a gun. If you think this spirit was gained here by old scholars, you are sadly mistaken.”14
The book reflected these beliefs in innumerable ways, perhaps the most obvious being the author’s decision to mimic Hollywood’s time-honored creation of the character of the beautiful woman whose job it is to admire her man’s reluctant willingness to resort to violence to protect his family and community, a trope so common in 1950s Hollywood westerns it had already become a cliché. Uris’s Ari Ben Canaan, to be played in the movie by Paul Newman, “is a simple farmer, who prefers reaping and sowing to violence, but is forced to carry a gun before he can return to his farming,” in the words of the Bar-Ilan University scholar Rachel Weissbrod.15
Seeing Ari through the eyes of the gentile American nurse Kitty Freemont, who would be played by Eva Marie Saint, readers are treated to the casually antisemitic beliefs she held upon her arrival in Israel—beliefs not uncommon in the American heartland. Kitty had “worked with enough Jewish doctors to know they are arrogant and aggressive people,” she says. “They look down on us.” Then she meets Ari, a Jewish Übermensch: a “gorgeous man” with a “hard handsome face” who Kitty says does not “act like any Jew” she has previously met. Unlike diaspora wimps of yore, Ari and his fellow freedom fighters have no compunction about defending themselves against their enemies. Attacked by a group of young Arabs, Ari whips their leader “with a lightning flick” around the neck: the lash “snapped so sharply it tore his foe’s flesh apart,” Uris writes. The Arabs are quieted for the rest of the story by this show of strength. The only tear Ari sheds during the entire ordeal of fighting and building a new country is when he learns that a young Jewish nurse, Karen, who survived the Holocaust, has just been murdered by Arab terrorists.
Exodus’s Arabs are skinny, smelly, and dishonest: “the dregs of humanity,” as one character calls them. Entering one Arab village, Kitty “was not able to smell the goats but she was able to smell the women.” Even their children are “pathetic” and “dirty” compared to “the robust youngsters” of a nearby Zionist settlement. The only Arabs favorably described—the ones who welcome the Jews in their midst and look forward to living alongside them in peace and harmony—usually find their lives ended painfully and prematurely by the bad Arabs, who refuse the generosity offered to them by the Jews they encounter. This saddens the Jews, but only redoubles their determination.
The book was generously received, especially given its overall trashiness—yet another indication of the well of sympathy upon which Israel could draw in the discourse of the time. In The Nation, novelist Dan Wakefield congratulated the “war-hardened, bestseller-proved American author” for his alleged “skillful rendering of the furiously complex history of modern Israel” in the form of fiction. Philip Roth’s collection of the brilliant novella Goodbye Columbus and five short stories won the 1959 Daroff Award of the Jewish Book Council a year after a different group of judges gave the award to Exodus. But writing in Commentary, Saul Bellow praised Roth’s literary skill and insight and contrasted it with what he described as Uris’s “public relations release.” Uris was inspired to complain to the press about a new “school” of Jewish authors who “spend their time damning their fathers” and “hating their mothers.” He said their work “makes me sick to my stomach.” He would complain in a later edition of Exodus about “the cliché Jewish characters who have cluttered up our American fiction—the clever businessman, the brilliant doctor, the sneaky lawyer, the sulking artist—all those good folk who spend their chapters hating themselves, the world, and all their aunts and uncles—all those steeped in self-pity—all those golden riders of the psychoanalysis couch”—that is, the far more true-to-life Jews inhabiting the lasting works of literature by Bellow and Roth—who “had no place in his work.” On this limited point, he was surely correct.16
The movie version of Exodus amplified the already seismic impact of the book beyond arithmetic calculation. Uris’s sponsor, Dore Schary, had by this time left MGM, and the director, Otto Preminger, had convinced the studio to sell its rights to him, arguing that an official studio release could inspire a boycott of MGM films across the Arab world. He ended up making one of the most expensive and, at 208 minutes—expansive—Hollywood movies ever filmed up to that time. (At the movie’s premiere, the comedian Mort Sahl stood up late in the film and shouted, “Otto Preminger. Let my people go!”). Uris had originally been contracted to write the screenplay, but Preminger soon fired him for allegedly treating the British as “just another in a long line of Pharaohs who have been pushing [Jews] around for 2,000 years.” His replacement, Dalton Trumbo, was still blacklisted at the time he got the job. But the director knew that Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, a Trumbo-authored spectacle starring Kirk Douglas, was about to break the blacklist (it received an assist from President John Kennedy, who traveled across town to see the movie). This made Trumbo kosher for Exodus as well. Preminger, like Uris, submitted the script to Israeli officials, and, like Uris, accepted a series of “corrections,” further diminishing the Irgun’s role. (Its leader, future prime minister Menachem Begin, would later complain about this, both to Uris and to the movie’s producers, and even undertake a nationwide US speaking tour titled “Exodus—Fiction and Reality.”)17
The movie kept Paul Newman’s beautiful, blue-eyed, blond-haired Ari Ben Canaan at the center of almost all the action. He is a warrior, a lover, a son, a brother, a protector of children, and an extremely sensitive fellow—but one who dresses as if he is still wearing the wardrobe of the uptight young lawyer he had just portrayed in The Young Philadelphians. Newman in fact did have a Jewish father. But the late literary scholar Amy Kaplan compared the “glistening, bare-chested” Ari, who “emerges god-like” in the film, to the “lone gunslinger” of American westerns “who protects struggling farmers from a ruthless cattle baron,” often played by John Wayne or Gary Cooper. In Exodus the “Other” is not the Apache or Comanche, but the Arab. Along with its western tropes, the film also evoked America’s struggle for independence, a common trope in Zionist propaganda before and after the state’s founding. As one reviewer explained, “It’s the story of our own Revolutionary War against the British, transposed to Palestine.” The slogan “It’s 1776 in Palestine” had been popular among Zionists in the 1940s. In the movie’s trailer, Kitty, the nurse, can be heard warning Ari, “You can’t fight the whole British Empire with six hundred people. It isn’t possible.” Her Jewish Adonis replies, “How many Minute Men did you have in Concord, the day they fired the shot heard around the world?”18
The film’s critical reception was mixed, but its box-office business was decidedly boffo. It became the first picture ever to earn $1 million in sales before its opening, and it went on to become the third-highest-grossing film of 1960 in the United States, behind only Spartacus and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It then opened across the globe, and it continued to be shown at synagogue fund raisers, Jewish community centers, summer camps, and Hebrew schools for decades to come. (The Israeli government would arrange showings all over the world throughout the rest of the decade.) Ernest Gold’s shlocky theme song—lyrics including “This land is mine / God gave this land to me / This brave and ancient land to me”—was performed in the film by the evangelist heartthrob Pat Boone, and was soon rerecorded by Eddie Harris, Andy Williams, and Edith Piaf, among others. It earned the Best Soundtrack Album and Song of the Year awards at the 1961 Grammys.19
Writing about the film, the Israeli gadfly peacenik journalist Uri Avnery reacted to its implied politics much as Philip Roth had to the novel. He attacked what he called its “revolting kitsch” that turned Israelis into “ridiculous cowboys” manifesting “all the clichés, cheap superlatives and hyped-up descriptions parroted by tourist guides or fund raisers at Zionist schnorer events.” He even seriously suggested that it should be banned. What most upset him, however, as it did Roth, was the manner in which both the book and the novel invited self-hatred on the part of diaspora—especially American—Jews. They incorporated, Avnery said, “all the secret longings of the conflicted galut Jew from the American ghetto, all the inferiority complexes of a man who deals all his life with contempt.”20
Though Roth’s and Avnery’s critiques of the movie apply equally to the novel, they are particularly accurate in regard to the former. Preminger inserted a group of Nazis into the film, something even Uris, with his decidedly relaxed notions of historical accuracy, had not dared to do. In the Trumbo/Preminger telling, an Arab friend of Ari’s, deemed a collaborator, is found dead with a Jewish star branded on his chest and a swastika painted on the wall. (In a ridiculous but revealing review, Monthly Film Bulletin credited Preminger with being “fair to all sides,” as “almost the only character the script is prepared to dislike is the Nazi leader of the Arab terrorists.”) The murder leads to the film’s incorporation of a remarkable moment in Israel’s history, one that took place while Uris was doing his research (and is included in the novel). In Exodus, Ari offers up a syrupy eulogy at the gravesite of the slain Arab and a young Jewish girl who are buried together in the hopes that one day their two peoples can live together in Israel in peace and harmony—if only the Arabs (and the imaginary Nazis) would allow it. Uris was no doubt inspired by a famous eulogy given in April 1956 by Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, offered in honor of Roi Rotberg, a kibbutznik killed by Palestinian infiltrators from the Gaza Strip. Yet, here again, the facts of history are perverted to suit ideological goals. The film ends, as the historian M. M. Silver noted, with the image of Karen (a Jew) and Taha (an Arab mukhtar) being buried together as Ari swears “on the bodies of these two people that the day will come when Arab and Jew will share a peaceful life, in this land they have always shared in death.” Dayan’s words, however, made the opposite point. “Let us not hurl blame at the murderers,” he warned the assembled:
Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt. Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty.… We mustn’t flinch from the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who live around us and are waiting for the moment when their hands may claim our blood. We mustn’t avert our eyes, lest our hands be weakened.21
Rotberg’s murder was followed by a series of back-and-forth attacks between Palestinians and Israelis and eventually resulted in the deaths of fifty-eight Arab civilians in Gaza. But Dayan’s funeral oration earned itself iconic status in Israel, comparable to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in the United States. With gestures toward the brutal truths of Israel’s birth, it perfectly contradicted the myths embraced in the US debate that lay at the center of both Uris’s and Preminger’s creations.22
Just as millions of people around the world were viewing Israel’s birth through the distorted lens provided by Uris and Preminger, Israel captivated the attention of millions more via a real-life drama: the trial of Hitler’s “administrator for Jewish affairs,” Adolf Eichmann, for crimes against humanity. It lasted from April to August of 1961. Eichmann was sentenced to death and executed in Ramleh Prison in May 1962. Thanks to a five-part report published in The New Yorker by the German Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt, and later collected into her best-selling book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the trial has since become a touchstone of intellectual debate on the nature of evil and the responsibility of individuals caught up in its day-to-day processes. The questions raised by the trial and by Arendt’s argument belong in a different book than this one, but it is interesting to note that Ben-Gurion’s stated purpose in approving the kidnapping of Eichmann in Buenos Aires, along with his trial in Jerusalem, was to teach young Israelis about the Shoah.
Setting aside the moral and philosophical issues raised by Arendt’s arguments and the countless responses they inspired, the Eichmann trial also once again raised the issue that continued to dog Israeli-diaspora relations: To what degree did the leaders of the state of Israel represent all world Jewry? Here again, Ben-Gurion was staking his deeply contested claim by kidnapping Eichmann in Argentina and trying him in Israel despite the fact that whatever crimes Eichmann was guilty of had been committed in Germany. This is no doubt why the American Jewish Committee lobbied him to cancel his plans for a trial in Israel, and turn Eichmann over to Germany, or to an international tribunal. Giving voice to the view most commonly held among American intellectuals, whether Jewish or not, Commentary published an angry assault, by (the Jewish) Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, on both the kidnapping and the trial. This was—again, ironically—the position of the American far right as well. No American publication objected more vociferously to Israel’s trial than William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, which, in an endless series of articles, defended the Germans, especially the German Protestant church, from their association with Hitler, and insisted that only communists were likely to benefit from Israel’s actions. “It is all there,” its editors complained. “The bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of communist aims.”23
These were arguments, however, for another day. During the trial, the hundreds of journalists present from publications all over the world focused their attention first on the story of the super-secret kidnapping and then on the drama of the testimony. They covered, especially, the Israeli prosecutor’s attempts to get Eichmann to admit to the monstrosity of his crimes. The result, at least in the United States, could hardly have been what Ben-Gurion had in mind. A survey of daily newspaper editorials in 250 American cities showed that those condemning Israel’s actions outnumbered those defending them three to one. Almost never did the authors of these pieces argue for Eichmann’s innocence. But they refused to accept Israel’s assertion of its right to kidnap and try him.24
Ironically, it was at this moment that Leon Uris thought to try to lend the Jewish state his talent for turning complex events into simplistic melodramas a second time. Having been treated to a personal audience with Ben-Gurion, and given an inscribed copy of Exodus, bound, Bible-style, in olive wood, Uris sought to contact the prime minister through his then chief of staff, Theodor “Teddy” Kollek (who would go on to serve as mayor of Jerusalem from 1965 to 1993, winning five consecutive elections). Uris offered to get an “exciting motion picture” made featuring Eichmann’s “chase and capture.” In “consideration of my past work on behalf of Israel,” Uris said, he was asking the Israelis for “cleared material” from the Mossad agents who carried out the kidnapping. But the Israelis were not interested in keeping world attention focused on the kidnapping (they have kept the records secret to this day). Kollek admitted that the truth would make “a terrific adventure story and rather better than the normal gangster cops-and-robbers type,” but Uris’s proposal was problematic. It not only brought up the question of Israel’s violation of Argentina’s sovereignty again, but also detracted from the entire purpose of the operation, which was to focus the world’s attention on “Nazi atrocities.” These, Kollek insisted, needed to “form the major part of the visuals of the film.” Uris came back with the reassurance that he would be “hitting hard with visual scenes of the Jewish tragedy.” But ultimately he could not make good on his offer. Israel was not willing to give him the exclusive access he wanted, and anyway, nobody in Hollywood was willing to fund the film. Exodus, for all its commercial success, was viewed in Hollywood as a “one-off.”25
But the influence of Exodus lived on with testimonial after testimonial to its power and influence over time. In 1998, the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said was heard to complain that as a novel Exodus remained “the main narrative model that dominate[d] American thinking” about the conflict. In the early 2000s, the World Zionist Organization maintained a website titled “The Zionist Century,” which offered up a false version of the actual Exodus 1947 voyage. It referenced the novel and the film rather than what historians know to be the truth. In early 2022, Haaretz reported (beneath a photograph of Paul Newman) that the Palmach Museum, which commemorates the elite fighting force, put the compass from the Exodus 1947 on display and described it, in the words of museum director Shiri Erlich, as “‘to the best of our knowledge’ the only surviving relic of the iconic ship that inspired Leon Uris’ bestselling 1958 novel and Otto Preminger’s epic film two years later.”26
Rabbi Shaul Magid, a Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, is one of the most cogent critics of what he terms the “Zionization of American Jewry” as “the ticket into the club of Jewish peoplehood.” And yet, more than sixty years after the release of the film, he would write, “Many in my generation still well up in tears when we hear the score for Otto Preminger’s Exodus, even those who know the film is total propaganda. We just can’t help it.” And in late 2021, I happened upon a discussion on a Facebook page belonging to Kenneth Bob, national president of the liberal Zionist organization Ameinu (Our People), on which he waxed nostalgic with friends about what the film had meant to them as children. One commenter said it had made him “a Zionist at age 11.” Another called it “the first film—other than The Ten Commandments,” in which he “encountered the idea of the tough Jew. It was wonderfully empowering.” Another such confirmation came from journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who said he had moved to Israel to enlist in the IDF as a young man because Exodus set him and others “on a course for Aliyah, and it made American Jews proud of Israel’s achievements.”27
As editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Goldberg would go on to become one of the two or three most influential voices in the entire US media on the issue of Israel, often helping to define the parameters of what would be considered responsible discourse. He also served, albeit informally, as the chosen interlocutor for both President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when they wanted to speak to one another without speaking to one another, in the form of long, challenging interviews that inspired additional discussion all across the media. Among his sources, and those of other journalists, during Obama’s second presidential term was John Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state, who headed up what remains today the last attempt to negotiate an Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement. According to what Kerry learned of Israel’s founding from the movie Exodus, “It was the story of people fighting for a place in the world, a struggle for survival and recognition.”28