Exodus

The flat bread
that scratched

our throats
was not symbolic.

We left too quickly
to bring the symbols.

Neither did the bread
portend of manna.

It was bread.
We left

with the skin
on our backs,

with the imprint
of whips.

The symbols
came after,

finding us the way
a lost dog,

crossing deserts,
pinpoints the master

who can’t
live without him.

—Andrea Cohen

Macaroons

I get it now.
You’re dead.
You can’t do
everything
you used to.
Reruns instead
of new episodes.
I get it.
You can’t send
macaroons this Passover,
those dense confections
without flour, conforming
to the rules
of kashrut, the rules
of engagement, which
in the case of our people,
involved fleeing, trading
slavery for the desert.
The land of milk & honey
was a kind of paint-
by-numbers kit
everybody lugged
in his head through
sandy ditches. It’s
best not to commit
directions to Nirvana
to paper: they could be
stolen or confiscated, or
worse: the place itself
obliterated. Forty
years is a long time
to get where you’re going.
Where are you promised?
In the end you spoke
of a boat ride, of
booking passage second-
class, on a vessel that lacked
a rudder, an engine, a sail.
Kaput, you said.
You were looking
for a solution.
Why now? someone
asked—less question
than demand. You
had to go. I
get it. We prepped
you for a journey,
because the mind
gets stuck on the speed
bumps of Fin, of Finito.
The mind insists
on one more
road, one more hello.
I get it: you won’t
be posting macaroons
this year. No problem,
mom. Just send the recipe.

—Andrea Cohen

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great
Paschal candle of the sun.

Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britains
As Thor’s and crazed Woden’s
Stain Thursday and Wednesday.

O fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery:
May the old Apollonian flayers
And Jovial raptors pass over us—

Those ordainers of suppers
Of encrypted dishes: bitter, unrisen,
Infants as bricks for the taskmaster
Quota. Fruit and nuts ground
In wine to recall the mortar:

On the compass platter, traces
Of the species that devises
The Angel of Death to sail
Over our legible doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

—Robert Pinsky, from Gulf Music, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007)

Refuge Event

was them in motion
beside the open cart on steel wheels
drawn by a tawny mule in the
modern day having bartered
for cart and animal in
motion beside orchards
bordering the receding town
receding crows on the roof and a boy watching
them above his shovel in his pose
animal poked with a stick
between lurid exhalations and
a finch flicking itself at
gnats in the air
in motion and the crate or cart
mounded with leathers
tools from the workshop
drill press/lathe/iron forms/dyer’s vat
them bartering in syllables
anonymously in August
in wool coats and hats in the
documentary evidence in stiff polished
boots laced high and
unbroken-in
spring rain
had rutted the road
with a gap in motion
in eventual summer
axle needed mending
bucket needed washing
with the wash and the boiling water
(good-bye mother with her bag of wash)
in a surge of details past
slumbering countryside
in a past tense
wing or cargo hold

—Mark Levine, from The Wilds, (University of California Press, 2006)

• Amir Mizroch lays out exactly why Israel is in deep trouble when the U.N. General Assembly rolls around in September. [Forecast Highs]

• Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit offers a biting rebuke to the Israeli left on the occasion of Juliano Mer-Khamis’s murder. [Haaretz]

• “What kind of kosher steakhouse is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 in the morning?” “Uh … the best damn kosher steakhouse on the Upper West Side!” [Vos Iz Neias?/DNAinfo]

• Orthodox Brooklyn Rabbi Mordecai Fish became the latest to go down in the Solomon Dwek sting, pleading guilty today to knowingly laundering $900,000 of criminal proceeds. [DOJ/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Baruch S. Blumberg did not only discover Hepatitis B and show how it could lead to liver cancer—he then helped develop the vaccine. He died Tuesday at 85. [NYT]

• An interesting take on how the logistics of reporting have helped foment anti-Israel bias among the media. [Standpoint/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• A study shows that the United States could learn much from Israel’s health care system. Of course, since Israel has universal health care for its citizens, that’s probably a lost cause. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen’s column on Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa—excuse me, his “volte-face”—is weird and kind of incoherent. [NYT]

• The keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel’s annual conference in July in Washington, D.C., will be soon-to-be-ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck. [JTA]

• Though abandoned, Lifta, just north of Jerusalem, is the last intact pre-1948 Arab village in Israel. The Palestinians want it to be an open-air museum; the Israelis want to build apartments there. [LAT]

• Worth re-reading Moshe Halbertal’s masterful takedown of the Goldstone Report from late 2009 in light of the week’s events. [TNR]

The Passover story, told through Google.

And then there’s Leon Uris. Uris, needless to say, was no Rashi; after reading Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, the new, distinctly unflattering biography by Ira B. Nadel (University of Texas Press, $27.95), one is tempted to say that he was not even Herman Wouk. But like it or not, Exodus, Uris’ 1958 novel, has earned its place in the history of the people of the book. It might, in fact, be the worst-written book ever to do so. Here, for instance, is how Uris introduces Kitty Fremont, the American Gentile love interest of the Jewish hero Ari Ben Canaan: “She was even more beautiful than he remembered. They stared at each other silently for a long time. He studied her face and her eyes. She was a woman now, soft and compassionate in the way one gets only through terrible suffering.”

Yet despite a style that Nadel describes as “melodramatic and mannered,” full of “repetitious phrasing, unimaginative language, and clumsy syntax,” Exodus became an enormous, worldwide best-seller. A thoroughly romanticized retelling of the Israeli independence struggle, the novel sold millions of copies and was turned into a movie that reached millions more. Nadel credits it with an “incalculable” effect on the way American Jews, and Americans in general, thought about Israel and Jewish history. Jews “were no longer victims but heroes,” Nadel writes. “The sheer number of copies sold meant that many experienced Jewish history and heroism dramatically and romantically.”

Such things are hard to measure, of course, and the turning point in American thinking about Israel is more often dated to the Six-Day War, a decade later. But there is no question that Exodus mattered to American Jews; and it mattered still more powerfully to Soviet Jews. Exactly how the first copy of the novel got into the Soviet Union is a matter of rumor and legend—one story has the Israeli consulate in Leningrad receiving copies in the diplomatic mailbag and handing them out in secret to Soviet Jews. Soon, Exodus became a kind of holy text among the Soviet Jewish refuseniks of the 1960s and 1970s, whose Communist education had left them totally ignorant of Jewish and Zionist history.

For them, Uris’ bold, broad strokes, colored by fervent Jewish pride, were the perfect way to fill in the gap. Samizdat translators spent months turning the book into Russian, and then painstakingly typed out copies to pass hand to hand—the dedication of monks in a scriptorium, lavished on an airport best-seller. Nadel quotes the story of one Soviet Jew, Leonid Feldman, who recalled the danger and secrecy that surrounded “the book”—the title was never spoken aloud. “He waited one night at eleven in a dark corner of a park. He was handed a heavy briefcase. ‘Take a taxi and go home, but you must return with the manuscript to this spot by seven a.m. finished or not,’ said the courier. ‘No one must know what you’ve done.’ ” (It all sounds rather like a scene from a Leon Uris novel, in fact.)

What did the American and Russian readers of Exodus get from it? First, there was the action-packed story of Ari Ben Canaan, a heroic Haganah commander who outwits the British to bring illegal Jewish immigrants into postwar Palestine. Ari has a lost love, Dafna—after whom he names a children’s kibbutz, Gan Dafna—and a new love, Kitty, whose heart he wins with feats like escaping from a British prison. At the same time, Uris introduces the history of the Holocaust through another character, Dov Landau, who survives the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Auschwitz to become an Israeli freedom fighter.

Most important of all, however, was the way Uris turned these unimaginably tragic and complicated events into a clear-cut and inspiring tale of good against evil—a Middle Eastern Western. Before writing Exodus, Nadel shows, Uris had spent time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, thanks to the success of his debut novel, the World War II saga Battle Cry. He was not nearly as successful writing scripts as he was with books: The directors he worked with, including Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock, complained of his inability to pare down his stories to the requirements of the screen, or work collaboratively.

Uris’ one unambiguous success as a screenwriter was Gunfight at the O.K Corral, a retelling of the Wyatt Earp story, and he learned its lessons well. “You can write westerns in any part of the world,” Uris remarked, and he did: Mila-18 was a Warsaw Ghetto Western, Topaz a Cuban spy Western, Trinity an Irish Western. Nadel shows how he adopted the genre’s themes: “brotherhood, heroism, the sacrifice of women to a greater cause, male stoicism masking anger,” and, of course, “heroes and antiheroes, strong men of virtue and weak men of anger.” If Uris never really mastered the screenplay, he did import many cinematic techniques into his novels. “Often, his novels seem storyboarded,” Nadel writes, “as if the plot had been rendered in a series of sketches with a line or two under each drawing expressing the main action.”

This helps to explain why his books were so easy to read, even though they were so terribly written—and why they were critic-proof. One of Nadel’s section headings, “The Critics Are Again Unkind,” says it all. Indeed, reviewers seemed to treat each new Uris book as a contest to come up with most imaginative insult. (About QB VII, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times, “One can read it and simultaneously work out tables of actuarial statistics … or iron out the snags in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.”) Even David Ben-Gurion couched his praise of Exodus carefully: “As a literary work it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the best thing ever written about Israel.” Menachem Begin was less pleased by the way Exodus transformed the Irgun into a fictional underground group called the Maccabees: He wanted full credit for his exploits.

American Jewish intellectuals were frequently appalled by the way Uris turned the Israelis into fantasies of toughness—what one critic called “Jewish Tarzans.” To Robert Alter, Exodus was a clinical case study in “what Americans would like to think about Jews and what American Jewish intellectuals would like to think about themselves.” Yet as Nadel shows, this view doesn’t get Uris quite right. It’s true that Ari Ben Canaan was a wish-fulfillment figure, a clichéd expression of Uris’ lifelong admiration for tough, fighting Jews. But Uris’ whole emotional and mental life seems to have been animated by clichés, and he took this particular one seriously enough to become a fighter himself, for good and bad.

The good came early on, when the 17-year-old Uris enlisted in the Marine Corps just after Pearl Harbor. He was eager to escape a thoroughly miserable childhood, spent shuttling back and forth between his divorced, bitter parents. His father, William Uris—formerly known as Wolf Yerushalmi—was the bane of his existence, as he explained in a late, autobiographical novel, Mitla Pass. William came to the United States from Belarus by way of Palestine, but he did not find America a golden land. He drifted from job to job, had a half-hearted career as a Communist organizer, and married and divorced Leon’s mother, Anna Blumberg. His attitude toward his successful son was a mixture of narcissism and criticism. Freud would have had a field day with the story, told by William in all guilelessness, about how he autographed Leon’s name in a fan’s copy of one of his books.

Joining the Marines was a godsend to Leon—“the war came along at a time when I needed to go to war,” he said—and he identified with the Corps for the rest of his life. (His tombstone, in a military cemetery in Virginia, reads “American Marine/Jewish Writer.”) Uris’ experiences in the South Pacific, where he saw action on Guadalcanal and Tarawa, also gave him the subject matter for his first novel, Battle Cry. From the very beginning, Nadel shows, Uris saw it as his mission to offer an unambiguously patriotic account of the war, in contrast to writer-veterans like Norman Mailer and James Jones. He provided “patriotism not nihilism, heroism not cowardice.”

The secret to Uris’ success was that he applied this same uplifting formula to every conflict he treated, from the 1948 war (the Jews were good, the Arabs evil) to Northern Ireland (Catholics good, Protestants evil). To Jewish readers, Uris’ message of Jewish toughness, repeated in book after book—even Battle Cry featured Captain Max Shapiro, who dies heroically—was a welcome antidote to anti-Semitic stereotypes. And it was only because Uris genuinely believed in this cult of toughness that he could so earnestly create heroes like Ari Ben Canaan.

Yet as Nadel shows in his account of Uris’ private life, masculine toughness is generally a way of concealing insecurity and confusion. After hearing about Uris’ rages, bullying, grandiosity, and infidelity, it’s no surprise to learn that his first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife committed suicide just months after their wedding; his third wife, who was the same age as his grown children, also left him in the end. By the book’s close, when the aging Uris, no longer a best-seller, is seen bragging about getting beaten up by a prostitute (she apparently found him “too aggressive”) and asking his (female) editor to “procure him some women,” he seems a pathetic, ugly figure. It might be fun, or even therapeutic, to read about Jewish Tarzans once in a while, but you wouldn’t want to live with one—or be one.

• The flotilla-as-Exodus meme–which, developed by several commentators on Monday, notes the parallels between the British public relations disaster in Mandate Palestine and the Israeli p.r. disaster this week–gains more traction, this time from a former Mossad agent. [Wash Post]

• Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon held a conference call yesterday evening with “more than 700 heads of Jewish federations and Jewish community leaders,” according to a press release. Ayalon’s talking points included linking the flotilla to Hamas and other Islamist organizations, and calling for a refocus on Iran. [Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs]

• But even some staunchly pro-Israel American Jewish leaders are voicing criticisms. “Why did it take so long to get the films [of the ship-board violence] out?” asked Malcolm Hoenlein, executive head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “It appears [the soldiers] weren’t prepared for what they found, even though they knew what they were going to find.” [Jerusalem Post]

To honor the haggadah’s spirit of collage, we offer an interactive guide to learn about the origins of this Passover text. Click on the words and icons to learn more about the origins of the elements of the haggadah; their explanations appear underneath the graphic.

When Jews observed Pesach in the Second Temple period, roughly from the mid-sixth century B.C.E. to the first century C.E., there was no seder and no haggadah. Those who could make the journey would travel to the Temple in Jerusalem, bringing the paschal lamb as a sacrifice, and afterward take the whole roasted animal back to their homes across the city to eat with their families. Wine, matzo, maror, and charoset would accompany the festival meal, as would a recitation of Hallel, but without any substantial discussion of the Exodus. Only after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. were the rabbis of the Tannaitic era, which lasted until 220 C.E., forced either to re-imagine Passover observance or to lose it altogether. In that moment, they reoriented the holiday toward study and reflection, setting forth in the text of the Mishna a list of rituals and readings that still form the core of today’s celebration: the search for chametz, the four cups of wine, the four questions, the story of the Exodus told “from disgrace to praise.” It is at that moment that we see Rabban Gamaliel, standing on the threshold between the Pesach observance of the Second Temple era and what would come, declaring the haggadah into being by telling us: You are obligated to explain these symbols.

In the centuries that followed, the haggadah evolved as Jews migrated from Roman-ruled Palestine to Babylonia, to Europe, to Modern Israel, and the United States. In the Amoraic era (the time of the Talmudic rabbis, between 220 and 550 C.E.), the haggadah was formalized as liturgy and as a public occasion, with a leader and a script. In the Geonic era, between 589 and 1038, the text was consolidated and additional passages added. For centuries the haggadah was not written down: The seder leader would know the elements by heart and, at a crucial moment, give a substantial drash, or interpretation of biblical passages. In the Middle Ages, as Jews spread across Europe, and as Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s, printed haggadahs finally emerged, filled with illustrations and, to enhance the festivities, lively songs like Chad Gadya. The haggadah became one of the most common Jewish printed books, found wherever Jews have settled across the world.

(Sources include Shmuel and Ze’ev Safrai’s Haggadah of the Sages (1998), Joseph Tabory’s JPS Commentary on the Haggadah (2008), and Joshua Kulp and David Golinkin’s Schechter Haggadah (2009).

But she was no ghost. The organizers of my appearance had decided to surprise me by hiring Civil War reenactors to entertain the crowd. In addition to the woman from the restroom, I was introduced to two uniformed men “from the 7th South Carolina Infantry,” along with a 14-year old drummer boy. They had constructed an officers’ tent in the synagogue’s social hall to display their pigs’-hair toothbrushes and period weaponry, including gunpowder packs, revolvers, and muskets.

Like anyone with a passionate interest in something beyond daily life, Civil War reenactors strike many people as obsessive-compulsives, motivated by some obscure commitment that the rest of us know we ought to humor in public—even if we privately believe that they’re nuts. I laughed at their get-ups when I saw them in Harrisburg—then I went home and built a sukkah in my backyard. Maybe such passions ought not seem so strange to me, I realized, given that Jews practically invented historical reenactment.

When I learned that Civil War reenactors sometimes adopt an ancestor’s name and rank, I was reminded of the duchening, the high priests’ blessing, at my family’s synagogue—when my husband, a Levite, washes the hands of the Kohanim before they bless the congregation. The same physical reliving of events occurs when worshippers prostrate themselves on the floor during the recitation of the Temple service on Yom Kippur, or when celebrants light Hanukkah candles. The Passover haggadah tells us that we each must see ourselves as if we personally had come out of Egypt. While the words “as if” animate most text-based Jewish rituals, there is no “as if” in eating matzo any more than there is in eating hardtack. These rituals are not mere commemorations of the past. They are physical reenactments of it.

More fascinating still is the immediacy of the reenactment tradition. Far from being costume dramas of the distant past, historical reenactments in both Jewish culture and among Civil War devotees were already taking place during the lifetimes of people who had lived through the events being reenacted—people, that is, who ought not to have needed to be reminded of these events. In the Torah, the Israelites are commanded to reenact the night before the exodus from Egypt—not the joyous experience of the exodus itself, but rather the “night of watching” before the exodus, the terrifying experience of waiting for the angel of death to pass over their homes—beginning in the year after it occurred. Likewise, Civil War battle reenactments began with the Confederate veterans, who started congregating annually around the end of the 19th century to relive the most traumatic moments of their lives. And while Civil War reenactment may lack the spiritual complexity and purpose of Jewish ritual, it is nonetheless more than a hobby for many. It is, often, a way for participants to honor families, moved by a visceral connection to fathers and grandfathers for whom the reality behind the theater was that much closer to the lives they lived.

This parallel between Jewish ritual and Civil War reenactment reveals a deep, unexpected similarity in Jewish and Southern culture that distinguishes both from mainstream American public life. Jewish and Southern cultures are both post-traumatic civilizations—they are both built upon a sense of overwhelming obligation to the past.

For the South, the material devastation of a war that destroyed their economy and killed one out of every five white males was second only to the unbearable shame of losing their source of dignity and purpose—their belief in themselves as the true heirs to the American revolution, upholding the supreme American value of independence. For the Jews, the material loss of national sovereignty with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE was second only to the unbearable shame of losing their source of dignity and purpose—the Temple as the divine residence on earth. Both Jews and Southerners are people whose ancestors knew what it meant to lose. Unlike the bright official optimism of American life, both Jews and Southerners have cultivated cultures in which even children must be taught to live on the losing side of history and in which a sense of cultural dignity must be drawn from something other than triumph and success. While Jews and Southerners today no longer live their daily lives with their ancestors’ overwhelming sense of shame and defeat, the memory of that shameful loss and the community’s responses to it (manifested as an outsized sense of group pride, defensiveness, or both) have become part of each group’s identity. And therein lies the disturbing element of the reenactment traditions: the awareness, however hidden, that this former grandeur was lost because of one’s sins.

In Judaism, the sense that the community’s losses are deserved is built into the theological understanding of tragedy. The book of Lamentations unambiguously insists that the Temple’s destruction was due to the sins of the people. This idea, while problematic, is the animating force of much of Jewish civilization: the understanding that Jewish suffering is ultimately the people’s responsibility and therefore preventable. This ancient view pervades even secular Jewish life today on all points of the political spectrum, whether Jews claim that the community is attacked for being too kind to its enemies or for not being kind enough.

In the South, too, reenactments of the past owe their energy to an uncomfortable if unmentioned awareness of the theological understandings of the past. Northern Christian rhetoric at the time of the Civil War interpreted the total destruction of the South as divine punishment for slavery. While racism long outlasted the war, the upending of the world as white Southerners knew it demanded at least a tacit acceptance of the Northern view, even if it took 100 years to take root.

This does not mean that Jews and Southerners have reached the same conclusions about their losses. The unease that many Americans feel when seeing a Confederate flag comes from the fair suspicion that Southern devotion to the past, far from being a sophisticated replaying of trauma, is more akin to fantasy fulfillment—or a deliberate ignoring of the fact that the antebellum South was built on a foundation that can only be described as evil. There is no Southern equivalent of Lamentations, no public grieving for past sins. Yet if Southern culture does not blame itself enough, Jewish culture blames itself too much. And the only reliable eyewitnesses are ghosts.

In a ladies’ room at a Jewish community center in Richmond, Virginia, I encountered another ghost. I had just given a reading from my novel, which opens at a Southern seder during which all the food is served by slaves. In the restroom, a very elderly woman was waiting for me by the sinks. “I have something I need to say to you,” she said in a shaky drawl, and took my hand in hers.

“I grew up here in Richmond, and when I was a little girl, the elderly Jews I knew were people who lived through that time,” she said. “They had owned slaves. Maybe you’ll never find this written in a book, but I remember their faces at the seder when I was a child. And this is all I want to say to you: They were aware of the irony.”

Before I could ask her any more, she left, her 21-century perfume lingering behind her.

The first mention of the holiday that kicks off with a seder appears in the book of Leviticus, where it is referred to as the Feast of Unleavened Bread, owing to the fact that when the ancient Israelites left Egypt they hadn’t enough time to let their dough rise before fleeing. Indeed, the holiday commemorates and celebrates the flight of the Israelites, led by Moses, from Pharoah’s tyranny to freedom. Its Hebrew name is Pesach, which comes from the word pasach, commonly translated as “passed over”—a reference to the Exodus passage that tells of God passing over the blood-marked door of Jewish homes while he undertook to kill the first born sons of the Egyptians. Some scholars, however, suggest that a more accurate translation of the passage is that God “hovered over” the homes in question, signifying the Lord’s eternal protection of his chosen people.

With Shavuot and Sukkot, Passover is also one of the three harvest festivals in which the Jews of Ancient Israel historically trekked to the Temple in Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices and first fruits. Since the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, we are no longer obliged to make the journey, but we still honor its memory by including a recitation of the Hallel prayer during the seder.

In the Diaspora, Passover is observed for eight days with two seders, while in Israel it lasts for seven with a single seder.

ANY DO’S AND DON’TS?

Passover’s two major observations have to do with chametz, or unleavened bread, and the celebration of a seder.

The avoidance of chametz, referring to all grain products that have either already been fermented (bread, cake, some alcoholic beverages) or can cause fermentation (yeast), is at the heart of numerous rituals. Weeks before Passover, Jews embark on a serious spring cleaning. Although the halacha states no obligation to rid the home of any bit of chametz smaller than an olive, it is customary to clean out every nook, and tradition calls for a candlelight search of the premises on the morning of the first seder, a ritual called bidekat chametz, using a feather to inspect and sweep out even the hardest-to-reach corners. But tradition won’t have us looking in vain (that would be a bracha le’batala, a blessing for naught), so the head of the family must hide 10 small packets of chametz in different rooms; once they’re found, they are burned, a proceeding known as biyur chametz, and the house is considered kosher for Passover. Alternatively, chametz can be symbolically sold to a non-Jewish neighbor for the duration of the holiday, either by an individual or by a rabbi acting on behalf of an entire community.

The seder, which means order, is rich in meaning and in its aspiration for a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. Through Torah readings, midrashim, songs, and discussion, seder participants relive, as commanded, the events of Exodus.

The seder is also a culinary celebration with foods symbolizing elements of the Israelites’ story. It originally revolved around the Paschal lamb, which was delivered to the Temple, sacrificed, roasted whole, and eaten. In the absence of a Temple, Jews are prohibited from animal sacrifice, removing from the seder its most prominent offering—though it endures on the seder plate symbolically in the form of a shank bone. There are plenty of other meaningful dishes: maror, bitter herbs, which symbolize the hardship of slavery in Egypt; the karpas, a root vegetable dipped in salt water to symbolize spring and the Israelites’ tears; charoset, a sweet paste made of fruits and nuts symbolizing the mortar with which our ancestors built the houses of Egypt; and, of course, the matzo. In addition to the fact that it hearkens to the haste with which the Israelites fled their oppressors—so fast they didn’t have time to wait for their bread to rise—it also is known as lechem oni, the bread of affliction, a reminder of humility.

Food aside, the seder’s other greatest hits include the recitation of the Four Questions, asked by children to encourage a discussion of the meal’s symbolism, and the search for the afikoman, a hidden piece of matzo which children look for after the meal and the consumption of which marks the end of the eating portion of the seder. Children often trade in their afikoman findings for a prize from their parents.

Another less-frequently-observed tradition is the fast of the firstborn: To commemorate God sparing the Israelites while the firstborn sons of Egypt were killed, males of bar mitzvah age and older are required to fast on the morning before Passover, traditionally until after the end of the morning prayers.

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

The haggadah, which tells the story of the Exodus, is the holiday’s key text. According to tradition, the haggadah was compiled sometime between 200 and 500 CE. The oldest complete manuscript is included in a prayer book compiled by Saadia Gaon in the 10th century, and the oldest printed version dates back to 1486, commissioned by Italy’s Soncino family. While most of the haggadah’s texts have remained unchanged since they were originally compiled, some—like the Aramaic Chad Gadya, for example—are later additions and are said to be drinking songs, with their repetitive refrains and crescendoes. Also, as the haggadah is, at its core, a compilation, many communities or families add their own traditions, rituals, and texts to the original, often pertaining to social or political issues such as women’s rights or the plight of African refugees.

Five More Things You Can Do:

• Take an audio tour of a matzo factory.
• Celebrate the seder in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq.
• Steep yourself in symbolism with a musical explanation of the seder plate.
• Dance to a Passoverized remake of a Miley Cyrus hit.
• Relive the Exodus through an extended Internet search.

Tweet the Exodus’s second entry reads, “In every generation, one is obliged to see oneself as if one personally came forth from Egypt.” In this age of online living, I can think of no more appropriate way to fulfill that demand.

Tweet The Exodus
Passover Meets Twitter [WSJ]

So where did the whole Jews-built-the-pyramids idea originate? (C’mon, you thought so, admit it!) Exodus refers to the Jews’ “backbreaking labor,” but does not specify what that labor was. You can blame Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who in 1977 said the Jews built the pyramids. Blame it on Orientalism, if that is your thing. But most of all, say experts? Blame it on Hollywood. Sure, why not!

Egypt Says Jewish Slaves Didn’t Build Pyramids [Christian Science Monitor]

Illustrations from The Golden Haggadah, courtesy British Library.

After forty years in the desert, Moses has had enough.

Coming in December: Episode IV.

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Sound engineering by Jesse Novak. Featuring the voices of Shek Baker, Todd Barry, Joe DeRosa, Jonathan Katz, and Livia Scott.

As soon as the visitors arrive in the city, they are instantly ringed by more than one hundred police officers, who buffer them from local Jewish settlers harassing the group.

“The gay pride parade isn’t here,” shouts a boy in a tee shirt, yarmulke, and tzitzit.

“You say you are humanists, but you’re fascists,” a bearded man screams into a megaphone.

Manekin and Shaul don’t answer; instead, Shaul keeps talking to his small group, his voice barely rising above the crowd of settlers heckling him.

The West Bank city of Hebron has long been notorious for the brutality between Jews and Palestinians, numbering 1,000 and 166,000 respectively. But lately the city has become a battleground between two groups of Israelis led by Orthodox Jews, waging what each sees as an epic struggle over the physical and moral borders of the future Jewish state. Instead of truncheons and guns, the weapons are tour buses and megaphones.

“Our state has to decide to be here or not,” say Shaul, who is twenty-five. “But one of the things we think can’t happen is this injustice.” He’s talking about the restrictions on Palestinian life, the focus of the eleven-dollar tours of Hebron, which depart from Jerusalem once a week, led by Shovrim Shtika.

After a walk down the main avenue of Jewish Hebron, a silent street that was once the commercial center of the city, Manekin and Shaul take groups to visit a Palestinian family, and then to the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American settler who, in 1994, shot twenty-nine Muslims in the city’s Tomb of the Patriarchs before being killed by a mob.

Mikhael Manekin of Shovrim Shtika in Hebron

I met Manekin in a café in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, where he lives with his wife and infant daughter. Earnest and quick to smile, Manekin, who is twenty-nine, wears a yarmulke over closely trimmed black hair and a neat, short beard. He grew up in Maryland, with an American father and Israeli mother, and moved to Israel in time to be drafted in 1998. He began to question Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during his four years as a soldier.

“You can’t be a benevolent occupier,” says Manekin. “Most of [Shovrim Shtika's] soldiers were the people who came in to do things differently, who had moral qualms. And all of them failed. We are not [in Hebron] to make the situation more calm, we’re in there to make it known.”

Manekin says his group tries to reach Israeli teenagers who will soon be drafted. The organization also caters to other Israelis – journalists, parliamentarians, and ordinary citizens, with additional days for foreign media and politicians. In 2007, Shovrim Shtika brought three thousand visitors to the city. “We target the Jewish audiences because we think they have a stake in this conflict,” he says.

Yet, to the settlers who choose to live in Hebron, these activists are putting sympathy for the Palestinians above the plight of the city’s Jews, past and present.

On a warm Wednesday in May, New York transplant Simcha Hochbaum speaks to a group of twenty-four tourists beside a yellow plastic jungle gym in Jewish Hebron.

“Let’s forget about politics,” Hochbaum, who is forty-one, tells the group, as behind him a settler leaves a caravan clutching a small boy, two bike helmets, and a machine gun. “Let’s talk about Abraham.” He speaks rapidly, peppering his spiel with jokes about Ruth collecting food stamps and young King David taking Ritalin.

Hochbaum guides these tours through the settlement’s fundraising body, the Hebron Fund. Tours cost forty dollars and depart from a Jerusalem hotel once a week during the year and twice a week in summer. But those aren’t the only differences from the tours led by Shovrim Shtika.

Hochbaum paints Hebron as a place where Jews have always lived, were brutally evicted, and finally bravely replanted themselves. His itinerary includes the Tomb of the Patriarchs, built on land Abraham bought in the Bible and said to contain the remains of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. The group also visits a memorial room for the 1929 massacre of Hebron, in which the city’s Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbors. And Hochbaum visits a wall dedicated to Shalhevet Pass, an infant shot by a Palestinian sniper in 2001, and says he named his daughter after the slain child.

Hebron is the only Palestinian city with an Israeli settlement inside it. In addition to being Abraham’s first purchase in Biblical Israel, Hebron also served briefly as King David’s capital, and Jews are said to have lived there peacefully since. However, after sixty-seven Jews perished in the 1929 massacre, the rest of the community left and in 1948, Hebron passed to Jordan.

When Israel won the Six-Day War, and with it Hebron, religious Israeli nationalists saw a chance to renew the Jewish community. They moved first to the adjacent town of Kiryat Arba, and eventually into the historic Jewish quarter of the city in 1979.

Noam Arnon, spokesperson of the Hebron settlers, protesting the Shovrim Shtika tour

Hebron Spokesperson Noam Arnon is a prime example of the pull of the city. As a twelve-year-old in a secular suburb of Raanana, Arnon was captivated by Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and the many religious artifacts dotting the newly-conquered West Bank. Six years later, he moved to Kiryat Arba, and finally settled in Hebron, where today he lives with his wife and eight children.

“We came here to Palestine only because of the history,” says Arnon, who is fifty-three and has a master’s in Jewish history from Hebrew University. “And history begins in Hebron.”

“All the Jewish sites were destroyed. The Jewish quarter was a dump and public toilet and a cattle path,” says Arnon, who led excavations in the synagogue. “Everything stank. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed, and on it was a garden for trees, and grapes and vegetables.”

The settlers of Hebron rededicated the synagogue and moved into formerly Jewish buildings. But the animosity from 1929 never wore off, and Jews and Arabs continued to inflict such brutal casualties on each other that in 1997, Israel and the Palestinians divided the city, assigning eighty percent to Palestinians, twenty percent to Israel, and forbidding each side from entering the other.

But this plan has a serious catch: the Jewish section’s borders included thirty-five thousand Palestinian residents. Since 2000, the IDF has declared parts of this area “sterile,” meaning Palestinians cannot drive, open shops, or sometimes even walk on sections of the main road”known to Jews as King David Street and to Arabs as the Street of the Martyrs”in the place where they live.

Although he has seen it hundreds of times, Manekin says the Street of the Martyrs still shocks him. It’s a long, dusty road, lined on either side by old stone two-story apartment buildings, where rusting green steel awnings hang over shuttered green steel doors that are spray-painted with Jewish stars and the Hebrew word for revenge. Up above, Palestinians sit on second-story balconies enclosed with metal netting, which Manekin explains is defense from settlers who throw rocks their way. Because the IDF welded their front doors shut, these families must clamber out their windows and walk across rooftops until they reach the section of the street where their feet may touch the ground.

“There’s something about that Star of David on that door which is very sickening,” says Manekin. “The idea that [Jewish] people walk around freely and other people are caged up on their second floor and that’s being upheld by the Star of David . . . That’s the point where no excuse can excuse it.”

Arnon doesn’t see things that way.

“The rebuilding of Hebron is the most right and just idea in the world,” Arnon says, and mentions that he regularly gets stones thrown at his house and car, including one that shattered his living room window three months ago. For him, evacuating Hebron is not option.

Anyone who tries to evacuate Jews from the city “will not get out alive,” Arnon says. “And they don’t have the right to do it. The Jewish community of Hebron had existed here before the state of Israel. Jews lived here under Herod and under the Crusaders and under Mamluks and under Byzantines, and Jews will live here anyhow and anyway under any condition.”

Street of the Martyrs/King David Street, Hebron

On his tours, Hochbaum refers to Palestinian Hebron as “the eighty percent unfortunately given away,” and laments that Jews must share the other twenty percent with thousands of Arabs. Manekin and Shaul, for their part, speak of Hebron’s slain Jews, but mostly on the bus ride in.

The target audience for the settler tour is North Americans who are sympathetic to the Jews of Hebron. One Christian minister says she is outraged by large Palestinian homes within a stone’s throw of cramped Jewish caravans. A Jewish father and daughter are regulars to the city’s annual Passover celebrations; the family’s thirteen-year-old girl recently asked Bat Mitzvah guests to contribute to Hebron. Hochbaum’s tour is in English, and emphasizes this fundraising aspect.

“We are here every day putting ourselves on the line as messengers and emissaries and it’s not easy,” he says to his group.

The Shovrim Shtika trip, by contrast, is in Hebrew. Although there are a few Americans, the majority of participants are young Israelis from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, mostly well-dressed and erudite. Several Israelis are home on vacation from European universities.

“You can’t help being shocked and disgusted by the violence that is present in every sentence [the settlers say],” says Itay Snir, 33, a high school philosophy teacher from Tel Aviv. “It’s racism all the time toward the Palestinian residents.”

Hebron is just one part of the rift between Israel’s right and left, who are carrying out a modern-day incarnation of a decades-old debate about how to be a Jew.

The first Zionists who moved to Israel were eager to shed their weak and pale personas in favor of a strong New Jew, embodied by the charismatic, fictional Ari Ben Canaan in the film Exodus. Ben Canaan helps defeat Arab enemies and shepherds Holocaust survivors to safety in the new land, operating in a world of clear right and wrong. Arnon sees the world in a similar way.

“To make propaganda against the Jewish people and against the Jewish community in Hebron, and against the army, which is the Jewish state, and to make this propaganda and to bring here foreign journalists and diplomats, this is anti Jewish,” he says of Shovrim Shtika.

“I know the Jewish history from the beginning, and I know that every generation is writing a new page in this very old book,” Arnon adds. “I try to do my best that the page our generation writes will be a page of continuing the heritage and not a page of betrayal and abandonment of our roots and nationhood and history.”

But Manekin, who refuses to give his ideas for how to solve the problems of Hebron, sees a world with fewer clear answers.

“I don’t feel like what bothers me is nationalist questions,” he says. “Religion is very much a part of my life, and being a Jew is very much part of my life. And it bugs me. It bothers me that Judaism is used to promote hate, forcefulness, and callousness. The Judaism of my family is one of being gentle.”

And the fact that he and Yehuda Shaul are Orthodox only exacerbates the conflict between them and the settlers. “We’re all religious zealots,” he says. “We all think that we know what’s right.”

Egypt wants the Hebrews to finish building the pyramids, but it’s time to move on.

Coming in October: Episode III, “Getting There Is Half the Fun.”

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Featuring the voices of Julie Klausner and Sean Modica.

Earlier this year, as Israel celebrated its sixtieth anniversary, the country’s journalists, pundits, and bloggers amused themselves by nominating individuals for the title of the quintessential sabra. Ariel Sharon, ur-warrior, was in the running, of course, as were Yitzhak Rabin, prince of peace and the nation’s first Israeli-born Prime Minister, and Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space. No fewer than five leading cultural critics named a fictional character as Israel’s most representative son: Ari Ben Canaan, the protagonist of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, immortalized on screen by a young, virile, and shirtless Paul Newman. The adoration of Ben Canaan culminated in a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Exodus, held in June at Jerusalem’s prestigious Cinematheque.

That a fictional person—even one based on a real man, Yossi Harel, commander of the actual Exodus, the ship that carried 4,500 survivors of Nazi death camps toward Palestine in 1947—should exercise such a strong grasp on the collective imagination of a country never short on real heroes may seem strange. Ari, however, is just too good to resist: handsome and daring, defying the British and defeating the Arabs, romancing a beautiful American blonde even as he helps guide a ship full of illegal immigrants to shore and a country full of war-weary Jews into existence. A few years before inventing Ben Canaan, Uris, then making a living as a Hollywood screenwriter, wrote Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, depicting Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday with a mixture of myth and melodrama. Take away the Stetson, and it’s not hard to see Ari as a rugged Western hero transplanted to the Middle East.

But was Israel ready for such a character? Could a nation still busy being born sustain the tremendous impact of a larger-than-life, ready-made hero? And could that hero age gracefully alongside the country he’s come to personify? As Ari turns fifty, these questions are hard to avoid.

For the uninitiated, the story of Exodus is one best told with numbers. After reportedly reading three hundred books about Jewish and Israeli history and traveling more than twelve thousand miles within Israel and the Middle East, Uris (who was born in Baltimore in 1924) wrote a 626-page novel about the birth of Israel, from the struggles to overcome the British mandate’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine to the battles that followed the creation of the Jewish state. It was published by Doubleday in 1958, and spent nineteen weeks at the top of The New York Times’s best-seller list. The paperback quickly sold well over twenty million copies. In the annals of American publishing, this puts Uris just ahead of Margaret Mitchell: Exodus unseated Gone with the Wind as the fastest-selling American novel of all time, and held the record until the publication of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls in 1966.

By 1960, when Otto Preminger adapted the novel into a three-and-a-half-hour film and cast Newman as Ben Canaan, the book’s status as one of Zionism’s most sacred texts was secure, with some scholars arguing that Uris had written nothing less than Israel’s founding myth. George Washington University professor Melani McAlister, the author of Epic Encounters, a 2001 history of America’s cultural perceptions of the Middle East, claimed that when Exodus was published “most Americans still knew little about Zionism or Israel,” making Uris’s story “a foreshadowing of what Israel was to come to mean to Americans.”

But with all the attention paid to Exodus in America, little has been written about the impact Exodus has had on the society whose birth it sought to depict.

Israel has not, until recently, kept official book sales records. But growing up in Israel in the 1980s and ’90s, I was always aware of the book’s ubiquity. It was in my high school’s library, where works by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were frowned upon for representing the wrong kind of Jew—the neurotic and vulnerable American. It was in my local scouts’ den, where as teenagers we would often spend rainy afternoons spellbound by Ari’s heroics. And it was on the shelves in the houses of all my friends, a staple of Israeli domesticity.

But it was television that solidified its standing. In Israel’s first five decades, with a single, state-run television station serving as the tribal campfire, the small screen was hailed as the most sacred of Israel’s cultural altars. Any program shown on Friday evenings was watched with a sense of duty, and any program shown on a national holiday was exalted.

Such was the status of Exodus. For years, the film’s oversaturated colors and expansive frames appeared on television sets across Israel each Passover. By regularly screening Exodus on the eve of Judaism’s celebration of freedom, the stewards of Israeli television sent a clear message to viewers: Ari is not just about Israel’s history; he’s about Jewish history. He’s a hero, and should be revered accordingly.

And revere him we did. Ari’s name—not Moshe Dayan’s, or Sharon’s, or Rabin’s—became an idiom for everything we Israelis admired about ourselves. His concluding plea for peace between Arabs and Jews, we imagined, was our very own; in fact, when Yitzhak Rabin addressed the U.S. Congress in 1994 with a similar speech, commentators in Israel dubbed it an “Ari Ben Canaan moment.” They were not being ironic. We saw Ari’s face in each of the men and women of the Israel Defense Forces, which, we boasted, was the most ethical army in the world.

Around that time we began seeing another kind of Israeli soldier. The kind that allowed the slaughter of civilians at Sabra and Shatila. The kind that fired rubber bullets—and sometimes, live ammunition—at Palestinian protestors during the first and second Intifadas.

And so Ari himself was trotted out to protest what many Israelis, especially on the left, considered a decline in the nation’s morality. I remember one afternoon, a decade or so ago, at Tzavta, a dank basement-turned-performance-space considered the Mecca of Tel Aviv’s intelligentsia. A well-known intellectual was holding court. His topic, as usual, was the immorality of Israel’s soldiers, and the destruction of Israeli society as a result of their behavior. As he spoke, an image quivered behind him on a makeshift screen: Newman, smirking, bathed by moonlight, a large Star of David dangling on his chest. Ari, he kept repeating, wouldn’t have recognized the Israeli soldiers of today.

Many Israeli historians disagree. Ari, they claim, is not so much a paragon of purity as a symbol of senseless sacrifice, an atavistic vessel designed to drain history of its contexts and complexities and recast it instead as a single-minded story of Jewish exceptionalism.

Evidence for this is everywhere in Exodus, both book and film. In a scene in the movie, Ari loses his temper at a Cypriot businessman who is involved in the efforts to smuggle Jews into British-controlled Palestine. A fellow member of the Jewish resistance asks Ari to apologize to the man, and Ari, of course, refuses. “All over the world, they work for us and tell us how terrible it was that six million Jews went into the ovens,” Ari says. “But when the showdown comes, we always stand alone. . . . We have no friends, except ourselves. Remember that!”

In reality, the Exodus had all the friends it needed. After its 4,500 passengers were refused entry to Palestine by British authorities, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann persuaded his friend, former French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to shelter the refugees in France for as long as was necessary. But David Ben Gurion, the de facto leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, refused to endorse the deal: At the time, the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine was holding discussions on the future of the contested land, and Ben Gurion realized that few things would attract more international sympathy for the Jewish cause than a boatload of Holocaust survivors caught in a watery limbo. Ben Gurion torpedoed Weizmann’s efforts, thereby stranding the men, women, and children aboard the Exodus for more than seven months.

Most Israelis, however, never got to hear the true story. The one Uris wrote—haunted Holocaust survivors hunted by the British authorities as an apathetic world looks on, with no one to defend them but Ben Canaan—was simply too good to disrupt with facts.

Inconvenient, too, was the actual behavior of Harel, the ship’s real commander and a man every bit as sensitive and mild-mannered as Ari was brash and bold. When the British attacked the Exodus upon its arrival in the port of Haifa, Harel ordered his men to offer no resistance. He was severely criticized at the time by Jewish leaders, but there is little doubt that his decision to surrender saved thousands of lives.

Ari, of course, would never tolerate such level-headedness; his was the worldview of the martyr. In the novel, David Ben Ami, Ari’s brother-in-law, delivers a speech that captures this worldview precisely: “At Masada,” he says, “we held out against the Romans for four years and when they entered the fort they found us all dead. . . . We have not had much opportunity to fight as a nation for two thousand years. When we had that opportunity at the Warsaw ghetto we did honor to our tradition. I say if we leave this boat and willingly return to barbed-wire prisons then we will have broken faith with God.” At Ari’s command, the children aboard the Exodus begin a hunger strike, collapsing one after another on the ship’s deck, arranged in ghastly, lifeless piles. When this fails to move the British authorities, Ari threatens mass suicides.

Needless to say, any talk of suicide as politics strikes an uneasy chord with contemporary Israelis. And yet martyrdom remains an irresistible political elixir. Above the blackboard in my elementary school classroom hung a bright blue sign on which a teacher had written in green letters the alleged last words of Yosef Trumpeldor, a legendary Zionist hero who died in 1920 while defending a northern Jewish settlement from Arab combatants. “Never mind,” he reportedly said. “It is good to die for our country.” My classmates and I, like generations of Israeli children before and since, spent our days staring at this slogan. It’s only natural that many of us came to take its message of self-sacrifice at face value.

Such thinking still plagues Israel. In her 2005 book Death and the Nation, a stunning and irreverent study of Israel’s obsession with martyrdom, the historian Idith Zertal argues that this fixation has come to define the way Israelis understand themselves and their country. “Ancient graves,” she writes, “produce fresh graves.” As Israelis seek to move away from the deeply rooted complexes of a small nation surrounded by sworn enemies, we look in the mirror and, too often, still see Ben Canaan. Too many of us are still proudly convinced that the Jewish people should never trust anyone, that Israel’s only hope lies in its strength, and that certain death is a noble thing. And this dissonance may just be driving Israelis insane.

The late Baruch Kimmerling, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, mused about this idea in a 2005 article in The Nation, devoted to, among other things, the Exodus myth and its omnipresence in Israel’s collective consciousness. “The obsessive commemoration of the Holocaust and of Jewish victimhood,” he wrote, “has blinded much of the Jewish community to Israel’s real position in the world and to the humanity of the Palestinian people. . . . To be sure, there are periods in the history of a nation when ultimate sacrifices are necessary, and a cult of death unavoidable. The question in Israel today is whether this heroic period has come to an end or whether the prevailing ideology of the 1948 war will last another hundred years.” To adopt the former worldview, he states, is “to grant priority to the lives of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab. To adopt the latter is to remain a community of victims, joined in a mythical communion of Jewish sacrifice in an eternally hostile gentile world.”

By continuing to revere Ari, we Israelis concern ourselves less with reality as it unfolds around us and more as it unfolded for Uris half a century ago.

Midway through The Man Who Would Be King, his new biography of the producer-director Otto Preminger, Foster Hirsch relates the story of the turbulent production of Exodus, Preminger’s 1960 epic (based on the leaden best seller by Leon Uris) about the founding of the state of Israel. Preminger, a Viennese Jew who’d had an aristocratic upbringing and a classical education, was first and foremost a canny businessman; he knew that a four-hour epic about such recent history was a risky project, especially for an independent producer. But he was also a great—perhaps even reckless—showman with a fabulous talent for generating publicity, and he knew that he wanted Exodus to be gigantic, controversial, groundbreaking, even essential.

With a mixture of opportunism and fearlessness, Preminger hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay and immediately announced to the world press that he had broken the Hollywood blacklist. (Kirk Douglas soon followed suit, announcing that Trumbo had also written Spartacus.) Preminger was no less daring when dealing with international politics. As Hirsch tells it, Preminger secured permission to shoot in Israel by promising that a chunk of the revenues would go to the influential Weizmann Institute of Science (and by giving the Institute’s head an on-screen cameo as David Ben-Gurion). Once on location, he used his access to the Israeli state apparatus to its fullest—staging scenes with thousands of extras, employing huge numbers of Israeli soldiers for verisimilitude, and shooting in prohibited locations. He had an entire village built in the desert and, on a whim, had a field of clover repainted for pictorial effect. He argued script points with Menachem Begin. And he kept the press informed of his every move.

Somehow, Preminger brought it all off on time and under budget, though in the process he bullied the cast and antagonized the crew, fired several key players, and made permanent enemies of his leading actors, including Paul Newman and Lee J. Cobb. Preminger’s temper was already legendary by 1960, but during the making of Exodus he reached extraordinary heights of vituperation and bile. The film itself is alternately showy and wooden, noisy and empty, under-acted and overwritten; like so many of Preminger’s superproductions, it is nearly interminable. In a typical Hollywood move, Preminger placed the blonde Eva-Marie Saint at the film’s emotional center, as a Midwestern nurse who falls in love with a thinly veiled Moshe Dayan (a squinting, frowning Newman), and surrounded her with a rogue’s gallery of improbably cast actors, including Sal Mineo as a tortured munitions expert. Audiences loved the movie, but the critics were savage. According to Tinseltown legend, the comedian Mort Sahl stood up halfway through the premiere and shouted, “Otto, let my people go!” As the film’s set manager would say of Preminger many years later, “Otto was a great producer, but he didn’t have the patience to be a great director.”

Indeed, when he died in 1986 at the age of eighty-one, Otto Preminger was remembered in Hollywood more for his volatile temper and his imperial showmanship than for the movies he made. There’s no doubt that Preminger was a monster (although he had a courtly side); according to Hirsch, Preminger routinely drove his collaborators to tears—laboring, apparently, under the familiar delusion that torture reveals truth—and over the years he managed to get himself into countless near-physical altercations with journalists, rivals, literary celebrities, studio moguls, and a parade of actors great and small. He fired technicians for the slightest infraction, only to rehire them the next day, and caused more than one nervous breakdown. There is a certain tradition of this kind of thing in Hollywood, from Erich von Stroheim to the Weinsteins, but Preminger exemplified it. He knew how to be loving and generous, but it was not his default mode.

The Hirsch biography—along with a twenty-three-film career retrospective currently unspooling at Film Forum in New York City—represents the latest attempt to rehabilitate Preminger’s legacy. (The director Peter Bogdanovich and the critic Andrew Sarris have long been flagbearers.) As Hirsch sees it, the most striking aspect of Preminger’s life was his willingness to go where no other director would dare to tread. In his films, he broke every taboo he could reasonably break, going head-to-head with the Production Code Administration on a half-dozen occasions over almost every conceivable kind of transgression. He built mainstream entertainment out of heroin addiction (The Man With the Golden Arm), put a gay bar on the American screen for the first time since the rise of the Hayes code (in the Washington procedural Advise and Consent), decried rape, poverty, and the misdirection of justice (Anatomy of a Murder), explored black sexuality (Porgy and Bess), took on the Ku Klux Klan in their own territory (in the Louisiana-shot interracial romance Hurry Sundown)—and, of course, he broke the blacklist, which may be his greatest achievement.

Preminger’s sense of outrage was undeniably personal: Growing up in Europe after the First World War, he certainly knew anti-Semitism firsthand, and later—having left Austria for the United States in the mid-1930s—he had to pull every string he had to save his parents from the Anschluss. (His father’s political standing—he had been attorney general of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was no defense against the tide of blood sweeping through Vienna.) Perhaps for these reasons Preminger placed American racism front and center in several films, and in the ’50s made two Technicolor musicals with primarily black casts: Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess. He truly didn’t care if he made enemies on the Right—or anywhere else, for that matter.

But despite the elegance and efficiency of his best work, Preminger left only a handful of truly remarkable films—and many bad ones, most of them late in his career. It’s almost impossible not to enjoy the early noir films Preminger made at 20th-Century Fox, starting with the 1944 murder mystery Laura (a bona-fide instant classic which made his career, as well as that of the lead actress, Gene Tierney) and ending in 1951 with the tense, strange Where the Sidewalk Ends. Laura wasn’t Preminger’s first film as a director (that would be The Great Love, made in Austria in 1931), but it might as well have been: from the opening whip pan that reveals Clifton Webb in the bathtub to the outrageous shotgun ending, Laura achieves such a dreamy, perverse atmosphere that Preminger, spurred on by its success, would spend the rest of his time at Fox trying to better it. (Working with Tierney again in 1949, he achieved an even greater pitch of hysteria in the exuberantly stupid Whirlpool, a psychiatric thriller.) While at Fox, Preminger developed a heated, paranoid way of using the camera; he liked to bring sweating, pained faces—especially men’s—into extreme, screen-filling close-up, and he favored long, complicated tracking shots that kept the viewer continually off balance. It was a style that worked equally well in extravagant costume pictures (like the rarely seen Forever Amber) as it did in seething urban nightmares like Where the Sidewalk Ends. And his eye for wordless, sexually loaded details was the equal of Hitchcock’s: watch for the downward glance and smirk that Dana Andrews gives Clifton Webb when he gets out of that bathtub.

After he left the confines of the studio system and reinvented himself as a one-man production house, Preminger lost something. It certainly wasn’t discipline: He shot Exodus in thirteen continent-hopping weeks, when any film of comparable scale shot in the same decade would have taken twice as long, and cost twice as much besides. A good producer can keep a director moving, no matter how trying the circumstances, and in that sense Preminger was his own best asset. But the price he paid for speed was precision. Even those pictures that succeeded at the box office—Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm, The Moon Is Blue, Advise and Consent—are sloppy, overburdened entertainments, with little of the fleetness or grace that typified his work as a contract director. Perhaps only the striking posters and inventive title sequences created by Saul Bass, the graphic designer whom Preminger discovered, set these films apart from the other “topical” dross, like On the Beach, that Hollywood was producing in the 1950s and early ’60s.

In his youth Preminger was trained as an actor, and while still in his twenties he built a considerable international reputation as a protégé of the legendary theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt. No matter how hideously he behaved on set, Preminger got good work from his actors during his time at Fox, and made stars out of some of them. (When he stepped in front of the camera, he always played villains—a German commander in Stalag 17, a Nazi consul in Margin for Error, a purple-faced Mr. Freeze in the Batman TV series. Typecasting, some said.) Nevertheless, by the mid-1950s, Preminger’s direction of actors had become increasingly aberrant; for every good performance in a late Preminger picture, such as Laurence Olivier’s relaxed appearance in Bunny Lake Is Missing, there’s a spectacular miscalculation, the kind that can kill a movie in one scene. Combined with his weakness for stunt casting, Preminger’s misdirection sank a good dozen of his projects; the most notorious may be the 1957 howler Saint Joan, with its wide-eyed, elocutionary performance by an unknown, untrained Jean Seberg as Joan of Arc. (She’s easily upstaged by Richard Widmark’s wiggly, giggling turn as the Dauphin.) But nothing else in Preminger’s career—perhaps nothing else in American cinema—can compare to Skidoo, a crisis-mode hippie musical from 1968 that features, in its most alarming scene, the sight of Carol Channing undressing for a stricken Frankie Avalon. (In a slightly less alarming scene, the protagonist, a retired gangster played by Jackie Gleason, drops acid.)

It’s too bad that Film Forum has left Skidoo out of its retrospective, along with all the other films Preminger made after 1965. Some directors become most interesting when their art begins to disintegrate, and there are few better examples than Preminger, most of whose later works—Hurry Sundown, Such Good Friends, Rosebud—are so loony and off key you’d think they were directed by teenagers. His legacy has two sides, just as he did; his demonic impulses were integral to the groundbreaking, near-visionary choices that he made throughout his career. “I’m not sweet, I’m vicious,” Clifton Webb tells Gene Tierney early in Laura. “It’s the secret of my charm.” For all we know, he might have been speaking for Preminger himself.

It’s hard now to imagine a time when Israel wasn’t “the most despised and also the most unattractive country in the world,” as Doron Rosenblum recently put it in a satirical piece in Ha’aretz. Hard to imagine a time when anyone really believed that just telling the facts of history straight would be enough to persuade the people of liberal Europe that Israel not only had the right to exist, but that the nation’s origins were not rooted in an ancient Jewish longing to perpetrate genocide on the Palestinian inhabitants of this stony land. Hard to imagine a United Nations that voted for Partition instead of passing yet another resolution against Israel, with the United States the lone voice of dissent.

JJ Feild as Bobby Goldman

Amazingly, into this unforgiving, forgetful contemporary landscape storms French film director Elie Chouraqui, complete with fabulous Jewfro and what some might consider a widely off-the-mark optimism. Last month, nearly thirty-five years after the publication of O Jerusalem, Chouraqui’s film version hit French screens. Okay, it didn’t last for more than a fortnight, got lukewarm reviews, and hardly anyone went to see it. But the film was made—and, perhaps more interestingly, France being a country generally known for its strong anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian sentiment—the book has been glossily reissued here as a tie-in.

Chouraqui has several romantic comedies and dramas to his name—like Harrison’s Flowers, a glossy Hollywood flick about the wars in former Yuogslavia—but has never made such an ambitious historical film before. In interviews he’s said that he wanted to make an “impartial” film about the birth of Israel. The film sets out to show the horrendous suffering and the heroism of both Jews and Arabs in that intense and fraught period following the Second World War, the friendships that overrode religious barriers, the sacrifices made by individuals, the ruptures of families, the hopes and dreams that were shattered by death and destruction and war. It’s an admirable ambition on Chouraqui’s part and to that end he frames the action by having two leads, New Yorkers Bobby Goldman, a Jew (JJ Feild), and his friend Saïd Chahïn, a Palestinian originally from Jerusalem (Saïd Taghmaoui), both of whom dash off to the Holy Land to fight against their respective enemies and thus determine the future of their peoples.

JJ Feild and Saïd Taghmaoui

The story opens just before the UN vote for Partition and unfolds during the ensuing War of Independence. Chouraqui flashes back and forth between scenes of Bobby and Said’s friendship in post-war Manhattan, the hustle and bustle of Mandate Palestine, and Saïd’s traditional family in Jerusalem. And, while Bobby and his Haganah friends are portrayed as an earnest, morally irreproachable bunch, Chouraqui is careful to remind us that there are also very bad Jews in their midst, like the Jabotinsky lot, who are introduced just after having slaughtered the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin (today the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul), leaving behind a monument to the Palestinian catastrophe and evidence that Jews are capable of comporting themselves shamefully during wartime.

Like the book, the film makes valiant claims to show both sides of the story, but like the book it ends up showing the Jews in far more detail than the Arabs, rendering the Arabs little more than textured background—women who ululate and cook and men in kafiyehs looking fierce. There are Arabs with guns and Arabs who live in picturesque villages and tend goats. There are murdered Arabs. But there are no three-dimensional characters aside from Saïd, who has to incarnate all possible sides of the Palestinian Arab character. He is both decisive and uncertain, Arab nationalist and citizen of the world, an Arab who has to avenge the death of his uncle (this is not a film to rise above cliché) and a man for whom friendship, even with a Jew, overrides all else. Saïd Taghmaoui does a terrific job incarnating Saïd the Ur-Arab, though Chouraqui refuses to let him relax. JJ Field’s Bobby and the other Jews come across as more jolly since there are lots of girls for them to have lots of 1940s fun with (no hanky panky, but plenty of soulful looking into each other’s eyes).

Ian Holm as David Ben Gurion

Good intentions only go so far. The film never manages to stop feeling like Exodus without Paul Newman, messily dubbed into French (Chouraqui made the film in English, presumably aiming for success on the other side of the pond). Its rose-tinted realism, its tedious impulse to tell both sides of the story, and its obsession with the chimera of impartiality bloat the film, while draining it of anything resembling real pathos as Chouraqui crams in detail upon endless detail. Even the wedding between Bobby and the mortally-wounded Hadassah, with Saïd as one of the witnesses (Of course! Even as Hadassah has been shot by one of his fellow Arab fighters!), while the hardy amateur fighters take shelter in a church in the Old City, is so labored that this potential moment of real drama ends up drowning under the weight of its own touching significance.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this kind of cinema—like this kind of history—is simply no longer fashionable. We have learned to crave the fragmentary truth of multiple viewpoints, of jagged unfinished narratives. We recognize that our heroes are complex, ambiguous figures. We need them thus, in our complicated world. Exodus, if made today—even with Paul Newman—would not be the same film that it was when it was made in 1960.

But, cinematic fashions aside, does anyone really believe today that there is an “impartial” tale to be told about the Middle East? The story that Collins and Lapierre dispatched 30 years ago has been revised many times since by historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, and Benny Morris (to name just the Israelis). O Jerusalem (the book), while sympathetic to the Palestinians, did not challenge any of the foundation myths of the State of Israel—the notion of Israel as the weak David, set upon by the mighty Goliath of the combined forces of all the surrounding Arab countries who, with the Palestinian Arabs, were determined to destroy the fledgling state. At the end of the book Collins and Lapierre dealt briefly with the question of the Palestinian refugees. Chouraqui’s film echoes the major tropes of the Collins-Lapierre narrative, and then he closes with an historical account that could have been written in the 1970s, blaming the dispossession of the Palestinians on “Arab propaganda” and making a direct link with the Arab-ordered Palestinian exodus and the suicide bombers of today.

Yet since the 1980s, access to material in declassified archives has fundamentally changed our understanding of that specific question and demolished much of the narrative innocence that infuses Chouraqui’s anachronistic, naïve film. Benny Morris was the first to challenge the official Israeli claim that the Arab leadership ordered the Arab population of Israel to flee in his seminal 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, in which he demonstrated convincingly that no such orders were given. Yet Chouraqui repeats the long-debunked official Israeli line. His failure to recognize that the state of knowledge has fundamentally changed makes the critical viewer realize that the film, for all its proclaimed impartiality, is no less political than today’s vicious anti-Israel rhetoric. Chouraqui isn’t so much trying to rewrite history as to unwrite it—to return to the prelapsarian knowledge of 1972, when such troubling issues had yet to be raised. None of this is to say that there were no heroes and idealists and villains as Chouraqui portrays them. As in any period of history, they existed. But today we recognize that history has as many truths as it has versions, and that the most truthful histories are not always—are never—impartial.