https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/history-ideas/2019/07/the-hollywood-legend-who-mobilized-the-english-language-on-behalf-of-the-jews-of-europe-and-israel/
Ben Hecht invented the gangster movie. He also prodded Roosevelt into saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis, and marshaled reluctant American Jews into becoming Zionists.
“In [1939], I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes.”
—Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century
When Ben Hecht died suddenly in 1964, at the age of seventy, the New York Times carried the news on its front page. The lengthy obituary was spread across four columns on an inside page. Buried near the end was only a brief description of Hecht’s Zionism.
Hecht wrote newspaper columns, novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, essays, and books that, in many ways, defined the times in which he lived. His sketches of life in Chicago and New York were collected in two volumes. His first novel made him a national literary figure. He co-wrote the Broadway sensation, The Front Page, and became Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter, composing such classics as Scarface, Wuthering Heights, Twentieth Century, Spellbound, and Notorious. He received six Oscar nominations and won two Oscars.
In all, Hecht wrote 25 books, including several best-sellers, 250 short stories, 20 plays, and one of the great autobiographies, A Child of the Century, which Saul Bellow praised on the cover of the New York Times Book Review as “intensely interesting . . . independent, forthright, and original.” In 2011, Time magazine would place it at number 24 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books since 1923.
Two noteworthy books on Hecht have appeared this year: a masterful study by Julien Gorbach, The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue) and a short biography by Adina Hoffman, Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (Yale). Both conclude that Hecht’s encounter with Zionism in the 1940s, after a lifetime of indifference to Judaism and Jewish issues, “change[d] his life and legacy” (Gorbach) and was “in the end, as important to him as almost anything” (Hoffman).
Because of that encounter, these two biographies speak not only to one man’s life and times, but to ours as well.
