By Samuel L. Leiter…
Casual Notes on show biz books, memoirs, and studies, dust gatherers and hot off the presses.
Garrett Eisler, Ben Hecht’s Theatre of Jewish Protest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2025): 261 pp.
In 1992, one of the entries I wrote for my Encyclopedia of the New York Stage:1940-1950 (Greenwood Press: Westport, CT) was likely to have been the most thorough account—apart from contemporaneous newspaper articles—written till then (and for many years after) of a unique play produced in New York in 1946. Starring Paul Muni, Celia Adler, and a pre-stardom Marlon Brando, its title was A Flag Is Born and it was written by renowned playwright and scriptwriter Ben Hecht.
Its uniqueness stemmed from it being a four-and-a-half-hour, pageant-like, propaganda play conceived as way to raise funds for the Zionist cause of gaining international permission for Jews to settle in Palestine. This was when the dream of a Jewish homeland was being blocked by Great Britain, which had ruled there for years under the British Mandate for Palestine, granted in 1922 by the League of Nations.
Regardless of how relatively early or compactly thorough my account may have been, its existence has been vastly overshadowed by the play’s coverage in Garrett Eisler’s outstanding new book, Ben Hecht’s Theatre of Jewish Protest. In it, he not only discusses A Flag Is Born in great detail, but also includes the complete script and all its attendant production data. Additionally, his project offers comprehensive historical and dramaturgical coverage for three other urgent but less well-known Ben Hecht “protest” plays of the same stripe: We Will Never Die (1943), A Jewish Fairy Tale (1944), and The Terrorist (1947).
While A Flag Is Born was produced sequentially for brief runs at several Broadway theatres, We Will Never Die was given four stadium-like showings across the nation, at venues like Madison Square Garden, A Jewish Fairy Tale was given only twice, at large concert spaces, like Carnegie Hall, where The Terrorist also was staged, once.
Their brief stage lives and their obviously agit-prop ideology and purpose has likely helped soften the place they hold in theatre history studies. Even Hecht’s compelling autobiography, A Child of the Century, which offers good background on A Flag Is Born, provides only modest reference to We Will Never Die, with just passing reference to the other two plays.
Two of these works are large-scale spectacles requiring numerous participants, and two are more physically intimate. Those two are A Jewish Fairy Tale, requiring only three actors, and The Terrorist, with eight principals and six “Voice of the Dead.” Each of the four, however, in its own way memorializes the history and persecution of the Jews. They benefitted not only from the presence (in addition to those mentioned above) of major stage and screen actors, such as John Garfield, Sylvia Sidney, Edward G. Robinson, and Ralph Bellamy, but directors, like Moss Hart, Stella Adler, and Luther Adler; composers, like Kurt Weill and Sholem Secunda; and designers, like Lemuel Ayers and Moe Hack.
Supported by powerful music and dynamic lighting effects, they combined realism with surrealism, intimate scenes with striking tableaux, ritual with narrative, dreams with wakefulness, and poetry with prose, making them highly formalistic at a time when such methods were quite uncommon. Apart from We Will Never Die, each includes a version of Sholem Aleichem’s beloved Tevye (spelled Tevya)—later immortalized in Fiddler on the Roof—played by Paul Muni (who portrayed a rabbi in We Will Never Die). Tevya is seen as the eternally suffering, determinedly pious Jew, proud of his people’s history but always seeking a secure homeland. The achievements of the Jews are trumpeted in the plays, but so, in devastatingly exhaustive speeches, are the terrors experienced by them through history.
In the requiem-like We Will Never Die, seen during WW II, Hecht’s anger and passion about his cause makes for powerful reading as he chastises his nation and the world for its silence and stasis as millions of Jews were being slaughtered by the Germans (I don’t recall seeing the name Hitler or even the word Nazi). A Jewish Fairy Tale is a series of dialogues between Tevya and a narrator and Tevya and God, much of the latter concerning God reprimanding the Jews (through Tevya) for the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, the British minister of state in the Middle East. Tevya’s response dramatizes the conflicting moral issues surrounding such actions on behalf of Zionist ambitions.
The postwar A Flag Is Born raised controversy for its damning attacks on the British, whose reluctance to allow settlement by the Jews is sharply criticized. Hecht had been radicalized by controversial Zionist activist Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook); he supported the kind of guerrilla warfare and terrorism on behalf of the Jewish cause associated with militant groups like the Irgun. These insisted that Jews must take up arms to fight for their homeland. The Terrorist takes that theme one step further in idealizing the execution by the British of Dov Gruner, the still honored underground fighter, making him a martyr and justifying the use of violence when one’s people seek only survival and freedom. Eisler doesn’t discuss how such a position could be subverted to reflect on the situation of the Gazans today, but it’s impossible to read without considering the inherent irony.
Ben Hecht’s Theatre of Jewish Protest grew out of Prof. Eisler’s dissertation at CUNY, and comes complete with all the academic bells and whistles. It is, however, a vividly written, always accessible scholarly study that both specialists and general readers will appreciate. Its narrative is a well-packed 123 pages, the rest being the four scripts he rescued from the bibliographic dustbin.
There’s little to take issue with in Eisler’s valuable volume, although a sentence on p. 95 that Paul Muni’s “film stardom [had] peaked” by 1946, while technically correct, gives the impression that his career was nearly over, an impression belied by some rather significant stage performances yet to come. And I do wish my little essay on A Flag Is Born had made its way into the book’s bibliography! For better or worse, Eisler also avoids making political comparisons between the struggle of the Jews in the 1940s and that of the Arabs today, but readers concerned about conditions in Israel will have plenty to contemplate from this excellent contribution.
