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Book Review - Ben Hecht: From Successful Screenwriter to Jewish Activist

(Standpoint-UK) Robert Low - In her lively and readable biography, Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, the latest in Yale's excellent Jewish Lives series, Adina Hoffman charts Hecht's progress from America's most successful screenwriter to Jewish activist. Beginning in Chicago, he wrote a daily newspaper column, short stories, novels, plays, and launched his own magazine. Ending up in Hollywood, his first screenplay, "Underworld," won Hecht his first Academy Award for original story in 1929. After that, he never stopped churning out screenplays. Hoffman writes that in his World War II work on behalf of the doomed Jews of Europe, "Ben Hecht had at last found a cause worthy of his formidable fury." He was one of the first public figures to grasp the full horror of the Holocaust, thereafter campaigning tirelessly for the U.S. to intervene. He lobbied, raised money, wrote speeches and scripts, and organized a celebrity-packed "mass memorial" show called "We Will Never Die," which opened to a packed Madison Square Garden and then toured the country. After the war he campaigned just as vigorously for a Jewish state in Palestine, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause.
2019-03-08 00:00:00
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