Ben Hecht's "The Terrorist": A Jewish Passion Play for a Zionist Matryr

• In Event: Evolution, Revolution, Space and Place

Abstract

Ben Hecht may be the only American playwright to have received a commission from a publicly recognized terrorist organization. In the summer of 1947, Menachem Begin—leader of the Jewish underground army Irgun Zvai Leumi, then fighting in British Mandate Palestine—asked Hecht to memorialize their soldier Dov Gruner, recently executed by the British. Within a few weeks, Hecht (one of Hollywood’s most in-demand screenwriters) wrote a one-act play about Gruner’s execution that celebrated him as a martyr for the cause of Jewish statehood. In calling his play “The Terrorist,” Hecht proudly took ownership of the epithet frequently used to condemn the use of violence in the name of Jewish liberation.

“The Terrorist” had only one performance, at an Irgun-linked fundraising rally in New York in September 1947. It featured a cast of relative unknowns, received no reviews, and (outside of a low-circulation Revisionist Zionist newsletter) was never published. But it is a fascinating historical artefact documenting how Zionism was impacting at least one corner of Jewish-American culture in the immediate post-World War II moment. Specifically, it placed onstage an early incarnation of a new Jewish identity in the American public sphere: the avenging warrior. Dramatic representations of Jews in American theatre and film had long portrayed them as conniving miscreants or passive victims. Even in narratives about antisemitic persecution, suffering Jews were usually “supporting” roles, noble victims redeemed only by the valor of the more central gentile hero. Hecht’s Dov Gruner marks a transition from supporting to lead character, from victim to hero.

Hecht’s large output of wartime propaganda writing on behalf of the Irgun and Revisionist Zionists in America (such as the “We Will Never Die” pageant and the Broadway play “A Flag is Born”) has been widely documented. But “The Terrorist” (one of his last projects in that body of work) remains unrecognized as one of the earliest militant Zionist works of Jewish American drama and literature. And at a moment when the historical legacy of violence in the creation of the State of Israel invites renewed attention, Hecht’s play is a potent reminder of a time when the phrase “Palestinian Terrorists” referred to Jews.

Author

• Garrett Eisler