Talk: Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures

One of the greatest American screenwriters, Ben Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts—reporter, novelist, playwright, crusader for the imperiled Jews of Hitler’s Europe, and propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine’s Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared “child of the century” came to embody much that defined America—and especially Jewish America—in his time.

“Adina Hoffman’s superb [book]… loads Hecht’s staggering contradictions into a compact but abounding two hundred twenty pages… She writes with enormous flair.”                                                                 David Denby, The New Yorker

Adina Hoffman is an award-winning essayist, biographer, and critic. The author of four books, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, she lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and co-sponsored by the Program in German and Scandinavian Studies and the Film Studies Program.