In her new book, Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (Yale University Press), essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman captures the turbulent life of one of America’s most talented and prolific screenwriters. Hecht also wrote novels, magazine articles, multi-media historical pageants, and hard-hitting political commentaries.

Though he never spent more than eight weeks on a script, Hecht succeeded in creating crackling dialogue and fast-talking characters. The French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard called Hecht “a genius who invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” Indeed, Hecht worked on nearly 200 films, sometimes without credit, including Gone with the Wind, Roman Holiday, A Farewell to Arms, The Front Page, Spellbound, Notorious, A Star Is Born, Wuthering Heights, Gunga Din, Stagecoach, Strangers on a Train, Duel in the Sun, and Scarface.
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Born on New York City’s Lower East Side in 1893, Hecht moved at age 10 with his immigrant parents to Racine, WI. Following high school graduation, he headed for Chicago, where he became a brilliant newspaper reporter in the years before World War I. His journalistic experiences, especially in bars, brothels, and boarding houses, found expression in his classic stage play The Front Page, adapted later as a film.

(RNS) — On June 6, the world will commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of the French Normandy coast that turned the tide of World War II. D-Day was “the beginning of the end” of Hitler’s “Thousand Year” Nazi Reich because it created the second front that German generals had dreaded: Fighting the Soviet Union in the East and the Western Allies in the West, the generals had warned their demonic Führer, was certain to end in a catastrophic defeat for the Fatherland.

That day I was a youngster growing up in Alexandria, Va., a few miles from our nation’s capital. My father, a U.S. Army major, was stationed at Fort Belvoir on the Potomac River, and our family spent almost every Sunday at Mackenzie Hall, the fort’s Officers Club, enjoying the superb food, shooting billiards or swimming.

While we ate and played, other Jewish children of my generation were trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. Their terrifying existence included brutal arrests, transports to German death camps in filthy crowded railroad boxcars, grisly medical experiments, wretched ghettos, widespread disease. For many of these young Jews, deliverance would only come with death by poison gas, starvation or bullets. It is estimated 1.5 million Jewish children were killed during the Holocaust.
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I am forever haunted by the knowledge that had I been born during the 1930s in Transylvania instead of Pennsylvania, I would have been one of the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

(RNS) — As others have said, translating from one language to another is like kissing through a handkerchief: It’s close, but not the real thing. 

This is especially true when it involves translating the sacred Hebrew Bible, a text that millions of people believe is the literal word of God and whose “newest” additions to the canon are at least 1,900 years old.
How difficult is such a task?

Imagine that 1,900 years from now, in 3919, a future translator came across a sentence about politics that someone might write today: “Many ardent supporters are dancing in the end zone because they believe the senator hit it out of the park with yesterday’s speech.  As a result, they happily assert, the ball is now in someone else’s court.”
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To understand this mix of metaphors demands a familiarity with contemporary football, baseball and basketball terminology. They’d need to know that “the park” in this case does not mean a public area set aside for relaxation, flowers and trees, but rather a sports stadium. The translator of the distant future would also need to know that the word “court” in this context denotes an athletic arena, and not a place to adjudicate legal issues, nor does it mean an ingratiating description of gaining the favor of someone. Only then could an authentic translation even begin.

During his lifetime, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was frequently confused with another internationally famous photographer: his friend Edward Steichen. So, too, were Stieglitz’s remarkable achievements often overshadowed by the fame of his wife, artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

But Phyllis Rose’s book Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters (part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series) brings her subject out of the shadows and into his deserved place in history as the person who made “taking pictures” a respected art form. Rose, a literary critic and a retired professor of English literature at Wesleyan University, has combined her knowledge of photography and modern art with an excellent grasp of the historical trends and events that shaped the artistic world from the Victorian and Gilded Ages to the end of World War II.

Alfred Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey into a wealthy, highly cultured German-Jewish family. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany following the failed political revolution in 1848. Alfred’s father, Edward, was a kunstmensch, an art man who “read Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare…studied works by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Leonardo…”

​(RNS) — There have been more positive encounters between Roman Catholics and the Jewish people since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 than there were in the first 2,000 years of the Christian church. But one major flashpoint has remained unresolved: the bitter controversy swirling around the role played by Eugenio Pacelli, whose 19-year pontificate as Pius XII began in 1939, in the wartime treatment of European Jews.

Today Pope Francis announced that the Vatican archives covering Pius XII’s reign will at last be opened. I have been personally involved in this dispute for more than three decades and have long demanded that this obstacle needs to be fully and finally removed if the historic revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations is to deepen and advance.

The most serious charge made against Pius XII by his critics, Catholic and Jewish, is that he was inactive, indifferent, and ineffective in the face of Nazi Germany’s horrific policy of mass murder during the Holocaust, when six million Jews were killed in the heart of what Pope John Paul II has called “Christian Europe.”

(RNS) — The four saddest words in the English language are “what might have been.…”
Eighty years ago, as war clouds gathered over Europe, the 33-year-old Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then a faculty member at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, returned to his native Germany after a short stay in the United States.

At the time, Bonhoeffer believed his church’s response to Hitler and Nazism was marked by weakness and cowardice. He saw his country consumed by a monstrous cancer that had devoured nations and had already murdered many hundreds of people on its way to murdering millions.

Frustrated and angered, Bonhoeffer went home to join the political underground movement in Germany. He wrote: “Not in the flight of ideas, but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living.”
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It was a fateful and ultimately lethal decision. Six years later, on April 9, 1945, a month before the end of World War II in Europe, the Nazis executed Bonhoeffer for his opposition to the regime.

Many American Jews shuddered as Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead!” and “America first!” to rally crowds during his 2016 presidential campaign. We remembered how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these slogans were an open call for virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sentiment, white supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism.

Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, deftly deconstructs the origins and evolution of those two highly charged phrases in her new book Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” (Basic Books).

The term “The American Dream” first appeared in a 1900 editorial in the New York Evening Post, a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton and owned today by Rupert Murdoch. It warned readers that “discontented multimillionaires” constitute the “greatest risk” to “every republic” and threatened “The American Dream.” In its original context, the term represented a broad-based progressive aspiration for a just, equitable, and freedom-loving society.

German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller is best known for his celebrated confession:
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• First, they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Communist.
• Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Socialist.
• Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
• Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Jew.
• Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

These oft-quoted words at Holocaust commemorative observances might lead you to believe that Niemöller was sympathetic to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. Not true.

Matthew D. Hockenos, professor of History at Skidmore College and author of Then They Came for Me (Basic Books, 2018), writes that Niemöller (1892-1984) was not incarcerated in concentration camps because he opposed the mass murder of Jews or other atrocities, but for insisting on the political autonomy of German Protestant churches in Nazi Germany.

Does the world need yet another book about Adolf Hitler?

To my mind, three British prominent historians – Alan Bullock, Richard J. Evans, and Ian Kershaw – have definitively covered the subject for English-speaking readers.

Still, fascination of the German Fuhrer does not abate, as evidenced by Cory Taylor’s addition to the genre with How Hitler Was Made: Germany and the Rise of the Perfect Nazi (Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2018).  An Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, Taylor delves into Germany’s post-World War I years (1918-1924), the time when Hitler became “the perfect Nazi.”  
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The first 104 pages of his 274-page book detail the political upheavals in Munich, the Bavarian capital, during the six chaotic years following the 1918 Armistice and the collapse of the German Empire. We learn of Soviet-style leaders in Bavaria, coups and counter-coups, assassinations, street clashes pitting Communists against armed right-wing army veterans, and the emergence of gangs of thugs who emulated the brutal tactics of Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

In Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History, Pini Dunner provides a series of bizarre stories describing how some Jews crashed through conventional guardrails of staid Jewish tradition and sped forward onto aberrant lanes of false messiahs, forgers of Passover Haggadot, rabbis searching for subversive religious meanings of Hebrew amulets, and an 18th-century British lord who converted to Judaism. Best of all, there is the raffish tale of a 20th-century Jewish con man who makes all other imposters in history look like amateur frauds.

Dunner, an Orthodox rabbi who leads a Beverly Hills, California, congregation, combines an expertise in ancient Hebrew manuscripts with a command of rabbinic texts and Jewish history to bring his band of Jewish miscreants to life.  

Heading Dunner’s list is the infamous Shabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676). Born in Turkey, Shabbatai attracted a large number of Jewish followers who fervently believed he was the long awaited Messiah. Dunner writes:

“…he [Shabbatai]  was …joyful, exuberant, and ecstatic, while at other times he was depressed, anxious, paranoid, and passive…symptoms of acute manic depression, or bipolar syndrome…To [his] detractors his behavior was evidence he was an evil madman. To his supporters… his strange behavior attested to the fact that he was divine and a holy man.”
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On May 31, 1665 Shabbatai publicly declared he was the “King of the Jews” and the “Redeemer” of Israel. His followers were delirious with joy, especially because Shabbatai Tzvi had repudiated much of the rigorous religious and moral laws of Judaism and encouraged wild sexual excesses.