The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist

by Julien Gorbach

Overview

2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography.

Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe.

In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state.

The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences.

Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557538659
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2019
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Julien Gorbach spent most of his 10 years as a daily newspaper reporter on the police beat, covering drive-by shootings and murder trials, and publishing an investigative series on killings that remained unsolved because gangs had intimidated witnesses into silence. As a freelancer, he contributed to the Boston Phoenix, Time Out New York, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the New Orleans Gambit, among other publications. He covered Hurricane Katrina for the Boston Globe. Gorbach earned a doctorate in media history at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2013 and is now an assistant professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prelude: The Lost Land of Boyhood
Part I: THE NEWSPAPERMAN
The Chicago School of Journalism
Chapter 1: The Chicago School
Chapter 2: Shades of Black: The Stages of Hecht’s Cynicism
Chapter 3: Propagandist in Training
Chapter 4: The Journalist and the Gangster
Part II: THE WRITER
The Chicago Renaissance and Hollywood
Chapter 5: The Chicago Renaissance: Little Children of the Arts
Chapter 6: Crying in the Wilderness
Chapter 7: The Un-Jewish Jew
Chapter 8: Return
Part III: THE ZIONIST
From Humanist to Public Enemy
Chapter 9: Jewish Knights: The Bergson Group
Chapter 10: “Champion in Chains”
Chapter 11: Campaign for a Jewish Army
Chapter 12: “A Challenge to the Soul of Men”
Chapter 13: “One of the Greatest Crimes in History”
Chapter 14: Blood and Fire
Chapter 15: Only Thus
Part IV: THE MEMOIRIST
Writing about L.A.’s Al Capone
Chapter 16: “Some Kind of Strength”
Chapter 17: Champion in Chains, Revisited
Chapter 18: The Old New Journalist
Chapter 19: Time Out for Psychology
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

03/04/2019

This meticulously researched biography from Gorbach, an assistant communications professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, focuses on two aspects of writer Ben Hecht (1894–1964): his remarkable versatility—he produced journalism, novels, criticism, screenplays, plays, and memoirs—and his vocal support, prior to Israel’s founding, for a Jewish homeland. Gorbach argues that the seeds of Hecht’s success lay in his experiences as a reporter in 1910s and ’20s Chicago, which informed his cynical worldview and much of his best-known work, including the 1928 Broadway smash The Front Page and the 1932 film Scarface. In Hollywood, Hecht was astoundingly productive (of his more than 60 screenplays, “over half were written in two weeks or less”). This sheer output came to be seen by critics as a sign of his “shallowness and dissolute talent.” While Gorbach feels Hecht’s literary legacy is overdue for reevaluation, he admits a troubling shadow is cast by some of Hecht’s political activities, including his public advocacy of reprisals against the British soldiers occupying what was then known as Palestine. Suggesting that Hecht’s self-conscious persona as a “tough Jew” equally shaped his literary output and political ideology, Gorbach leaves readers with a richly provocative and original take on an influential writer. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"…a well written and meticulously researched book…" —American Journalism

"A flowing narrative, impounded by scholarly notes and innuendoes, novel twists, and persuasive if not always total acceptance" —National Association of Professors of Hebrew

"This thoughtful and thorough study of a largely forgotten writer will interest literary and film buffs and anyone curious about the debates going on in the Zionist community in the 1930s–40s." —Library Journal

"This meticulously researched biography…focuses on two aspects of writer Ben Hecht (1894–1964): his remarkable versatility—he produced journalism, novels, criticism, screenplays, plays, and memoirs—and his vocal support, prior to Israel's founding, for a Jewish homeland…Suggesting that Hecht’s self-conscious persona as a "tough Jew" equally shaped his literary output and political ideology, Gorbach leaves readers with a richly provocative and original take on an influential writer." —Publisher's Weekly

"Anyone interested in Ben Hecht or politics would find this an intriguing read." —Communication Booknotes Quarterly

"Julien Gorbach's well-researched and lively biography of Ben Hecht delves into both his remarkable careers: as Hollywood's most prolific and, arguably, most talented screenwriter, and as a participant in and chronicler of some of America's wildest journalism. The book is chockablock with marvelous Hechtian sentences and exuberant Hechtian tales, some of which are actually verifiable. And Gorbach's book also presents readers with a much more serious facet of its subject's life―his desperate and unsuccessful campaign, beginning in 1939, to rescue Europe's Jews." —Mitchell Stephens, Author of A History of News and The Voice of America and Professor of Journalism, New York University

"With storytelling skills equal to his subject's, Julien Gorbach shows the nuance and complexity of Ben Hecht's transformation from secular and cynical Hollywood script doctor to committed Zionist activist attempting first to save the Jews of Europe during World War II, and then to found the state of Israel. Gorbach's deeply researched and vivid depiction of Hecht's work on behalf the Jewish survival and freedom features a compelling cast of characters, from stateside intellectuals and entertainers to American Jewish gangsters and Irgun rebels against British rule. The Notorious Ben Hecht rewards readers as much as Hecht's own films, plays, and novels do." —Bill Savage, Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University

"In The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist, Julien Gorbach highlights the character, the motivations, and the involvement of an engaged intellectual, crossing from the world of words into that of assertive advocacy on behalf of a cause deemed too narrow for the milieu in which he was a major element. In focusing on this facet of the life of one who was a borderline American Jew, Gorbach not only details the personal biography of Hecht as Hollywood screenwriter, playwright, and novelist, but in his treatment of Hecht's activities on behalf of the Jewish resistance in Mandate Palestine against the oppressive British rule, he retrieves that period of Israel's history shunted aside due to ideological and political bias, the years of the national liberation struggle prior to the establishment of the state that have been subjected to a campaign of purposeful neglect and which affected Hecht as well." —Yisrael Medad, Research Fellow, Menachem Begin Heritage Center, Jerusalem

From the Publisher

Julien
Gorbach’s well-researched and lively biography of Ben Hecht delves into both his remarkable careers: as Hollywood’s most prolific and, arguably, most talented screenwriter,
and as a participant in and chronicler of some of America’s wildest journalism.
The book is chockablock with marvelous Hechtian sentences and exuberant
Hechtian tales, some of which are actually verifiable. And Gorbach's book also presents readers with a much more serious facet of its subject’s life—his desperate and unsuccessful campaign, beginning in 1939, to rescue Europe’s Jews.”

Mitchell Stephens

In The Notorious Ben Hecht:
Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist, Julien Gorbach highlights the character, the motivations, and the involvement of an engaged intellectual,
crossing from the world of words into that of assertive advocacy on behalf of a cause deemed too narrow for the milieu in which he was a major element. In focusing on this facet of the life of one who was a borderline American Jew,
Gorbach not only details the personal biography of Hecht as Hollywood screenwriter, playwright, and novelist, but in his treatment of Hecht’s activities on behalf of the Jewish resistance in Mandate Palestine against the oppressive British rule, he retrieves that period of Israel’s history shunted aside due to ideological and political bias, the years of the national liberation struggle prior to the establishment of the state that have been subjected to a campaign of purposeful neglect and which affected Hecht as well.”

Yisrael Medad

With storytelling skills equal to his subject’s, Julien Gorbach shows the nuance and complexity of Ben Hecht’s transformation from secular and cynical Hollywood script doctor to committed Zionist activist attempting first to save the Jews of Europe during World War II, and then to found the state of Israel. Gorbach’s deeply researched and vivid depiction of Hecht’s work on behalf the Jewish survival and freedom features a compelling cast of characters, from stateside intellectuals and entertainers to American Jewish gangsters and Irgun rebels against British rule. The Notorious Ben Hecht rewards readers as much as Hecht’s own films, plays, and novels do.

Bill Savage