How Exodus, the hit novel and film, influenced American views on Israel

After I was 12 or 13, I discovered a duplicate of Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus in my synagogue’s library. I stood amid the cabinets, surreptitiously studying a intercourse scene (did the e book simply fall open proper to it, the way in which each copy of Judy Blume’s Without end did at Chapter 12?) through which the passionate, long-legged, redheaded Jordana Ben Canaan makes like to her cerebral army strategist boyfriend, David Ben Ami, within the ruins of a Crusader fortress on Mount Tabor in 1947 Palestine. As they canoodle, they recite King Solomon’s Music of Songs to one another. Uris makes use of ellipses ecstatically. (“And he kissed her breast … ‘Thy two breasts are like two younger roes which might be twins, which feed among the many lilies …’ And he kissed her lips … ‘And the roof of thy mouth like the most effective wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly’ …”) I used to be scandalized.

I took the e book house and devoured it, a lot the way in which David devoured Jordana.

Exodus not solely titillated me but additionally crammed me with youthful delight. It’s troublesome to overstate what a phenomenon the novel — a sweeping story concerning the founding of the fashionable state of Israel — was, even within the early ’80s, when it was already greater than 20 years previous. It was over 600 pages lengthy, structured in “5 books” (you understand, just like the Hebrew Bible), concerning the exile of Jews from the Holy Land, the terrors of life within the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Japanese Europe, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Largely, although, it centered on a handful of Jewish characters, plus one cunning blond Presbyterian American nurse, in 1947 and 1948.

Should you walked right into a Jewish front room once I was a child (or as we speak, in case you have a grandparent of a sure age), you’d spot it on a shelf. The hardcover version dominated bestseller lists for months; it was translated into over 50 languages. When the paperback got here out in September 1959, it had the most important advance buy order — 1,000,000 and a half copies — of any novel in publishing historical past. It presaged a glut of huge, sweeping nationwide epics by the likes of James Michener, John Jakes, and James Clavell. And in 1960, it grew to become a blockbuster film starring Paul Newman as hottie Jewish freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan.

From the beginning, Exodus massively influenced the world’s notion of Israel. “It’s been mentioned that the solely different e book that had as nice an impression on American overseas coverage was Pearl Buck’s novel about China,” mentioned Riv-Ellen Prell, professor of American research on the College of Minnesota and creator of Preventing to Develop into Individuals: Jews, Gender, and the Nervousness of Assimilation. “The e book wasn’t only a driver of Jewish identification. Individuals within the notoriously antisemitic state division learn it at each stage.”

In Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story, Israeli faculty professor and historian M.M. Silver notes that the e book was a present to Israel’s vacationer trade. “Extra vacationers fly into Tel Aviv with Exodus than with the Bible,” mentioned the director of the Israeli authorities’s vacationer workplace in 1959. David Ben-Gurion, the nation’s first prime minister, reportedly proclaimed, “I don’t often learn novels. However I learn that one. As a literary work, it isn’t a lot. However as a bit of propaganda, it’s the best factor ever written about Israel.” Manufacturing photographs from the Otto Preminger movie, that includes a shirtless Paul Newman carrying a Star of David necklace, solely elevated the story’s attract.

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The e book appeared to suit proper in with the imaginative and prescient of Israel my dad and mom supplied for me. I grew up listening to Israeli people information and listening to concerning the kibbutz motion, through which nobody owned property and everybody tilled the land collectively and labored to make the desert bloom. I used to be taken to the Sinai desert, the place my household camped with Bedouins and appeared on the stars; I noticed the mountain within the Galilee that may later function in my bat mitzvah haftarah, the place the prophet Deborah led the Israelites into battle towards the Canaanites. Israel appeared just like the blissful almost-ending to the story of Jewish historical past. There’s a joke that the which means of each Jewish vacation is “They tried to kill us, we received, let’s eat.” Jaffa oranges and creamy feta appeared like our scrumptious due for surviving the Holocaust.

When my dad and mom have been rising up, Jewish American identification was in transition. The Holocaust was a shattering collective expertise, not solely due to the deaths of 6 million Jews but additionally as a result of it reminded American Jews that they have been solely visitors in their very own nation. They knew concerning the draconian immigration quotas in America and elsewhere. Nobody needed refugee Jews. Then, abruptly, the newly established state of Israel supplied what appeared like a real haven.

The postwar interval was additionally when American Jews have been beginning to be part of the center class in larger numbers, leaving tight city enclaves and starting a giant collective transfer to the suburbs. It was a bizarre time. As Silver writes, “By the top of the Fifties, suburban Jews developed a brand new, vicarious type of affiliation; as a result of Jewishness appeared inauthentic in suburban area, they sought membership in a far-off land whose ethical credibility was rooted in a sacred Jewish previous.”

Exodus, the novel, arrived when Jews have been trying to find a brand new self-image. Uris was dedicated to a imaginative and prescient of muscular, heroic Jews, not ghetto weaklings or “golden riders of the psychoanalytic sofa” (Silver’s time period for Jewish American mental novelists like Philip Roth, who Uris loathed — and the sensation was evidently mutual). As Prell put it, “Exodus was a piece of well-liked fiction that established a deep sense of Jewish identification, [instead of one] that had been much more sophisticated, fragmented, stuffed with disgrace. This e book made the case that that’s not who you’re as a Jew.”

As I bought older, although, my youthful love of the e book began to really feel like an embarrassing crush on an teen idol. After I thought of Exodus in any respect, I recalled it as wildly sexist and reductive. Extra importantly, I needed to forge my very own sense of Jewish American selfhood that didn’t depend on countless tales of Israeli heroism and Holocaust horror, the dual narratives that appeared to direct a lot of Jewish training and identification formation. Later, the Israeli authorities moved more and more rightward and Jewish settlements expanded incrementally in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Financial institution, and I turned away from Israel as a supply of Jewish identification completely.

I as a substitute centered my consideration on Jewish artwork, Jewish folklore and mythology, Jewish meals, home-based rituals like lighting Shabbat candles and constructing a sukkah and internet hosting Passover seders. I selected to ponder Jewish values and historical past by means of tradition, by means of studying about Jewish management in American labor and feminist actions. After I had youngsters, I addressed Israel the way in which many Gen X and older millennial dad and mom have: by avoiding it. By sighing when the topic got here up, saying “It’s sophisticated,” and passing the latkes.

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I now not have the posh of noping out. I want to handle my ambivalence and confront the gaps in my training if I’m to speak responsibly about Israel and Palestine, together with the present siege of Gaza, with my very own youngsters, who’ve grown up in silence. (I select the phrase advisedly: Breaking the Silence is an Israeli NGO established by Israel Protection Forces veterans to speak about their experiences within the Occupied Territories since 2000.) My failure to debate Israel with my kids, even when I don’t have solutions, is my fault. The primary time I publicly wrestled with the topic of speaking to youngsters about Israel if you’re dismayed by Israel, I bought an electronic mail from a reader who wrote, “Jews like you’re how my household ended up within the ovens.” Now I believe should you’re not being accused of being a self-hating Jew by some people and a Zionist stooge by others, you’re doing one thing mistaken.

As a part of my self-education, I made a decision to reread Exodus and watch the film, which I’d by no means seen. (Spoiler alert: That is a kind of uncommon instances through which the film is best than the e book. Which is damning with faint reward.)

Exodus is a novel, however the foreword begins, “Many of the occasions in Exodus are a matter of historical past and public report.” The remainder of the e book’s 608 (!) pages are stuffed with a litany of historic names and actual locations. There’s no afterword providing clarification; I needed to maintain trying up what was factual and what Uris had invented. The Jewish characters are wholly noble, although their politics differ, with some swearing by diplomacy and others by violent freedom-fighting. The Arabs — each Christian and Muslim — are evil cartoons. Uris luxuriates in phrases like “so illiterate and so backward,” “blood orgy,” “slithering alongside the bottom with knives between their enamel,” “almost insane with rage,” and “the dregs of humanity.” He makes sweeping generalizations like “There was little music or laughter or pleasure in Arab life. It was a continuing battle to outlive. On this ambiance, crafty, treachery, homicide, feuds, and jealousies grew to become a lifestyle.”

The e book proffers solely two good Arabs. One is Kammal, the village chief who says, “The Jews are the one salvation for the Arab individuals. The Jews are the one ones in a thousand years who’ve introduced gentle to this a part of the world.” (When Kammal’s weak-willed son Taha takes over as mukhtar, he spends his time obsessing over having forbidden intercourse with Jordana and making ready to betray her brother Ari.) The opposite good Arab is Mussa, the Druze who saves Ari’s life when he’s shot by British troopers after breaking his uncle out of jail. Mussa is basically faceless, however has a “carriage of dignity” and a village that’s “glowing white and clear compared to the filth and decay of most Arab villages.” How good.

Exodus’s Jews simply wish to reside in peace. The one time they do one thing dangerous, it’s “an odd and inexplicable sequence of occasions” — a mysterious accident! In a brief passage primarily based on the real-life 1948 Deir Yassin bloodbath, through which Zionist paramilitary teams attacked a village of largely ladies and youngsters, Uris says, “a panic broke out amongst Maccabee troops they usually opened up a wild and pointless firing.” Unusual! Inexplicable! His drawback with the bloodbath isn’t the useless innocents; it’s that it “fastened a stigma on the younger nation that it could take many years to erase.”

The 1948 narrative I and so many others grew up with, the one depicted in Exodus, maintains that Arab leaders, each in Palestine and within the wider world, instructed residents to flee whereas Jews begged them to remain. We now know this isn’t true. Left-leaning Israeli media have reported on the Israeli authorities’s ever-increasing efforts to suppress scholarship on 1948-era Palestine and its historical past, together with the truth that Zionists attacked Arab residents and seized their land. Palestinians are greater than justified in calling their very own Exodus the Nakba — the Disaster.

The argument that Uris and the fashionable Jewish proper share, that non-Jewish Palestinians selected to depart, isn’t right. The insistence that Israel is inherently virtuous as a result of, after the Nakba, it did what America refused to do and accepted Jewish refugees (this time, those expelled from or threatened with homicide within the Arab international locations through which they have been residing in 1948) isn’t related. Absorbing all these refugees meant much less land — or the impossibility of return — for the Palestinians. Jews deserve a homeland, however so do Palestinians. As I sighed to my youngsters: It’s sophisticated. However I additionally want them to know that there are Jews working for the rights of Palestinians. Organizations like T’ruah, the New Israel Fund, and B’Tselem have lengthy centered on peace and human rights all through Israel and the Jewish world.

After I sat down to observe Exodus, the film, with my home-from-college child (who shortly fled, noting, “That is boring”), I used to be stunned to search out it extra nuanced than the e book. Director Otto Preminger explicitly rejected Uris’s rabid anti-Arab prejudice. “I don’t imagine that there are any actual villains,” he later mentioned. Preminger employed Uris, who had written a profitable screenplay, Gunfight on the O.Ok. Corral, to adapt his novel right into a film however shortly wound up firing him. Preminger claimed he tried to work with Uris’s script however gave up a 3rd of the way in which by means of; Uris claimed he by no means wrote a phrase and was fired for his beliefs. Uris mentioned, “Otto was a terrorist — he’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein.” Preminger changed him with the then-blacklisted non-Jewish screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; it was Trumbo’s first script credit score since his refusal to testify earlier than the Home Un-American Actions Committee in 1947.

“I believe my image is nearer to the reality, and to the historic details, than is the e book,” mentioned Preminger. In a unusually prescient snippet of dialogue not within the e book, Ari objects to his uncle Akiva’s assaults on unsanctioned targets: “I believe these bombings and these killings damage us with the United Nations,” he says. “A 12 months in the past, we had the respect of the entire world. Now, after they examine us, it’s nothing however terror and violence.”

Preminger’s declare that his movie “avoids propaganda” is debatable, although. It nonetheless encompasses a rousing speech from a Jerusalem balcony, through which Ari’s father Barak, a diplomatic Jewish chief performed by Lee J. Cobb, tells an enormous cheering crowd that the United Nations has voted to partition the land into two states and urges, “To the Arab inhabitants of Jewish Palestine, we make the next enchantment: The Grand Mufti has requested you both to annihilate the Jewish inhabitants or to desert your properties and your lands and to hunt the weary path of exile. We implore you, stay in your properties and in your retailers! And we will work collectively as equals within the free state of Israel!” In actuality, not a lot.

My child is true: The film isn’t nice. It’s three and a half hours lengthy. (Comic Mort Sahl supposedly stood up three hours right into a screening and yelled, “Otto! Let my individuals go!”) Paul Newman is wood. Preminger’s spouse Hope Bryce instructed the director’s biographer that Newman and Preminger bought off on the mistaken foot when the actor arrived with 5 pages of notes and strategies about his character and Preminger instantly knowledgeable him he wasn’t altering a phrase of Trumbo’s script. When filming started and Newman requested what Ari needs to be pondering in a sure scene whereas eavesdropping on two different characters, Preminger barked, “Oh for God’s sake, simply stand there.”

However as Ari Ben Canaan, Newman is at his most ravishing. Who cares about wood appearing when a human seems like that? Seeing this large film star (half-Jewish, as each Adam Sandler and my mom word) carrying a Star of David on his moist, naked, heaving chest — in his first scene, he’s simply swum to shore in a heroic and strenuous reconnaissance mission, clearly — at a time when Jews have been largely depicted onscreen in sword-and-sandal epics and customarily performed by the goyish and unsightly Charlton Heston is surreal. Newman embodies precisely what Uris needed from his Ari: an icy blue-eyed motion hero, not a cringing shtetl weakling.

Sal Mineo — who additionally has a shirtless scene — provides a wonderful efficiency as an offended younger Holocaust survivor and Nazi rape sufferer. (Once more, this isn’t within the e book. Solely Jewish ladies get raped within the e book.) Mineo is naturalistic and emotional, and his chemistry with each different actor is magnetic. The film’s motion scenes are thrilling; there are flashes of humor the e book lacks; the truth that the movie was shot on location lends immediacy and verisimilitude. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless tacky, and it jogs my memory of how distant modern-day Israel is from the naïve, superb promise of my childhood. I ponder what number of different Jews my age and older have thought-about the methods through which Exodus warped our notion of the nation and made us sluggish to demand higher of it.

I’d argue that it’s worthwhile for everybody to revisit books and films they beloved as youngsters. You too could also be shocked to learn the way you missed and even internalized some fairly problematic concepts. Actual life is knotty and multistranded, and reductive storytelling harms us all. “Uris was a vivid and suspenseful author,” mentioned Prell — who, by the way in which, additionally learn Exodus when she was 12 — “and a easy sufficient author to inform a easy story about one of the crucial sophisticated locations on earth.”

The film adjustments the e book’s ending, making it bleaker. Ari stands over an open grave containing two corpses wrapped in linen. A double funeral, for an Arab and a Jew. Ari says, in Trumbo’s phrases, “I take a look at these two individuals and I wish to howl like a canine. I wish to shout ‘Homicide!’ in order that the entire world will hear it and always remember. It’s proper that these two individuals ought to lie aspect by aspect on this grave, as a result of they may share it in peace. However the useless all the time share the earth in peace. And that’s not sufficient. … I swear, on the our bodies of those two individuals, that the day will come when Arab and Jew will share a peaceable life on this land that they’ve all the time shared in demise.” However within the closing shot of the movie, a line of jeeps come, and the women and men with rifles hop in, and we all know there might be extra killing.