Next Monday, December 18 at 5 pm Professor Julien Gorbach will be our guest for a Casual Conversation about Ben Hecht. Professor Gorbach is an Associate Professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the author of Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist. This is how Professor Gorbach describes himself:
I am an award-winning journalist and media historian with more than two decades of experience. I teach news and feature writing and reporting as well as multimedia: photojournalism, audio storytelling and graphic design. Before becoming a professor, I was a newspaper reporter in New York, Boston, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida. As a freelancer, I published in the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix, Time Out New York, the New Orleans Gambit, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and other publications. My teaching is driven by a love for storytelling in all its forms, and by years of investigative reporting in crime, environmental issues, poverty, and politics. My colleagues and I help students become dogged explorers who produce stories that engage, raise awareness, and make a difference.
See his cv at https://sci.manoa.hawaii.edu/julien-gorbach/ .
If you have watched the great movies of the Golden Age of American Cinema, you know Ben Hecht. If you know about the history of crime news reporting in Chicago, or the Chicago Renaissance, or the Algonquin Round Table in New York City, you know Ben Hecht. If you know about the war over the Jewish soul in the 1930s in America between the Jewish establishment (“Jews should be silent”) and the Bergson Group (Jews should yell from the rooftops about the extermination of European Jewry), you know Ben Hecht. If you know about the gangsters, e.g., Mickey Cohen, who helped finance and smuggled arms to the Jews in Palestine to fight the British after WWII ended, and then to fight the Arab armies attacking the newly formed Jewish state after partition, then you know Ben Hecht.
Or do you? More than 200 films written or doctored and 20 Broadway shows: Scarface (the greatest gangster movie of any era—sorry Coppola!); Twentieth Century, the manic movie with John Barrymore and Carole Lombard; The Front Page, Hecht’s cynical love letter to hard-bitten journalism; Hitchcock’s Notorious. And, of course, he contributed the opening lines to GWTW as well as revising at the last minute the last nine reels to create coherence out of riot. He wrote noirs including Where the Sidewalk Ends and Whirlpool, both directed by Otto Preminger.
Then came the Nazis and the film industry turned craven along with a good many Americans. Not Ben Hecht, who knew gangsters firsthand:
“[I]n addition to becoming a Jew in 1939 I became also an American—and remained one.” He may have remained an American, but he also remained, at heart, a Romanticist. His American and Jewish propaganda shared a fascination with chivalry and its code—with the warrior’s oath to protect the innocent and defenseless and a dedication to valor, gallantry, and honor.
In his A Guide for the Bedeviled, Hecht told of a lunch with a woman “’more famous than intelligent,’” one of those ‘insidious racists full of false talk about tolerance and high ideals.” “As she flung about humanitarian phrases, pacing an elegant library stocked with the noblest works of modern civilization, he realized she represented a sickness spreading like the common cold: the quiet acquiescence of high-minded, respectable people everywhere.”
You couldn’t ask for a better guide to this man of many lives and driving intensity than our guest conversationalist whose credential that, perhaps, best predicts his ability to understand Ben Hecht: from his author’s note at the end of his book, Professor Gorbach “spent most of his ten years as a daily newspaper reporter on the police beat, covering drive-by shootings and murder trials, and publishing an investigative series on killings that remained unsolved because gangs had intimidated witnesses into silence.”
Join us and engage. Join us and learn. So much crime and gangsterism in the 20th century. Not too much different from ours, or as Hecht’s contemporary H.L. Mencken well understood, the Booboisie will always be with us; and, as Hecht well understood, so, too, will the antisemites--gangsters and State Department grandees and all the millions more.
The usual rules apply. If you want to participate, send me an email by this Saturday, December 16, to arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson