Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, a lecture by Adina Hoffman

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 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 organized 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.

Free and open to the public.