
Hollywood and Israel: A History by Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman
In 1982, I attended a lecture by the renowned Middle Eastern historian Malcolm Kerr. During the question-and-answer session, a student asked him why he thought Americans had so little sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Kerr replied, "There's no Palestinian film equivalent to Exodus." Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman's history of the relationship between Hollywood and Israel answers that question obliquely by tracing how and why most Holly-wood celebrities, directors, producers, screenwriters, and studio owners have portrayed Israel favorably, and supported it philanthropically and politically despite periods when the country's image was temporarily tarnished by episodes of excessive force against neighboring Arab countries and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Prior scholarly monographs have analyzed how the American public's perceptions of Israel have been shaped by the mass media. Michelle Mart's Eye on Israel (2006) examined the representation of Israel in American cinema and literature from its creation through the release of Leon Uris' novel, Exodus (1958).1 Although Shaul Mitelpunkt's Israel in the American Mind: The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958–1988 (2018) begins with discussing the publication [End Page 342] of Uris's Exodus and the impact of the eponymous film, it primarily explores the influence exerted by commentators in the press and Israeli hasbara (Israeli public relations) on American public opinion into the 1980s.2 Amy Kaplan's Our American Israel (2018) provides broader chronological coverage about the cultivation of Israel's image in the US than either Mart and Mitelpunkt; however, she devotes more attention to print sources than to movies or television programs with the notable exceptions of Exodus (1960), Holocaust (1978), Schindler's List (1993), and Homeland (2011–2020).3 What distinguishes the Shaw and Good-man volume is its scope (from the 1920s until the present), its exclusive focus on both documentary and feature films, and its extensive primary research into film production archives.
Shaw and Goodman explore Hollywood's relationship with Israel from four different angles. The first chronicles celebrity advocacy for Jewish settlement and statehood in Palestine before 1948 and for Israel thereafter. During the thirties, Eddie Cantor emerged as the most active American spokesman for the Youth Aliyah program. Toward the end of that decade, David O. Selznick and Jack Warner joined Cantor in efforts to pressure the British to keep the doors to Palestine open for Jewish refugees. In 1943, Ben Hecht penned the stirring pageant, We Will Never Die, reenacting past instances of Jewish resistance and adding a scene about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising after it was suppressed. Featuring Hollywood stars like Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, and Frank Sinatra, the pageant toured the US explicitly calling for America to rescue European Jewry and implicitly justifying the need for a Jewish state. Following the postwar revelations about the death camps and the displaced persons' crisis, a myriad of Hollywood actors, directors, producers, and writers called for increased Jewish immigration to Palestine. Whereas most Jewish movie moguls couched their appeals on humanitarian grounds to dissociate themselves from the anti-British animus emanating from the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine) out of fears they might hurt the marketing of their films in England, some, including Dore Schary, ideologically agreed with the Zionist struggle for independence.
Despite its impeccable scholarship, the book's exhaustive litany of the stars backing Israel for diverse reasons after its independence reads like a Jewish version of Variety magazine. The following are only a few that the book mentions. Having previously effaced his Jewish identity, Danny Kaye overtly embraced it after his first visit to Israel in 1956. On that and subsequent visits, he eventually [End Page 343] earned the reputation as Israel's number one celebrity diplomat for performing concerts throughout the world on behalf of the nation. As an Italian American who had experienced discrimination, Frank Sinatra sympathized with the suffering of Jews and saw Israel as a haven for them from oppression. His personal largesse and fundraising culminated in the building of the Frank Sinatra International Student Center on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem campus. Unlike Kaye, Barbra Streisand flaunted her Jewish background and frequently sang at pro-Israeli events. After the release of Yentl (UK and US, 1983), she and her friends made substantial donations to fund Hebrew University's Emanual Streisand School of Jewish Studies which afforded women the opportunity to study Judaic texts. Nevertheless, she has voiced her disapproval over Haredi attitudes toward women and Israeli policies on the West Bank. Composing the lyrics to the theme song from the movie Exodus, crooner Pat Boone has consistently mobilized Evangelical Christian support for Israel.
A second but related thread running through Hollywood and Israel discloses how less widely known personages within the movie industry advised American leaders about US policies toward Israel and lobbied their colleagues in the film industry to endorse pro-Israeli positions. Arthur Krim transitioned from being an entertainment lawyer to a movie producer and belonged to several Israeli cultural and educational organizations. His business expertise, Hollywood ties, and liberal activism elevated him to important offices within the Democratic Party. As a trusted confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson, he counseled LBJ to abandon US neutrality in the Six Day War. Behind the scenes, Krim helped procure American weapons for Israel a year later. Producer Haim Saban immigrated from Israel to the US in the 1980s but never jettisoned his loyalties to the Jewish state. After achieving success with the Power Rangers franchise, he became a major donor to the Democratic Party and forged close ties with the Clintons. He regularly conferred with Hillary Clinton on issues regarding Israel during her tenure as Secretary of State. Saban founded the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy as a think-tank to educate policy makers about the benefits of a two-state solution and the US-Israeli alliance. Producer Arnon Milchan fell under the sway of Benjamin Netanyahu and invited him to speak to a bevy of Hollywood luminaries to convince them to oppose President Barack Obama's nuclear treaty with Iran.
The third and most prominent theme of the book surveys how Israel has been depicted in American films and contextualizes shifts in the aspects of [End Page 344] Israeli society they have emphasized. During Israel's first two decades, motion pictures like Sword in the Desert (1949), The Juggler (1953), Exodus, and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) portrayed Israel as a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors or metaphorically as a plucky David fending off hostile Arab Goliaths. These movies often compared the democratic and pioneering spirit of Israelis to that of the cowboys and homesteaders in the American West and drew parallels between Israel's struggle for independence from England and that of the Thirteen Colonies. In the fifties, the spate of biblical epics fostered a sense of scriptural kinship between Christians reenforcing the era's greater acceptance of Jews and Judaism by American Catholics and Protestants. The massacre of Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics, a wave of airplane hijackings, and Israel's daring raid to free hostages held at the Entebbe airport inspired action films like the fictional Black Sunday (1977) and several dramatizations of the Entebbe foray, including the Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus movie Operation Thunderbolt (Israel, 1977) which incidentally was co-financed by the American-owned Cannon Group that the Israeli cousins purchased in 1979. For Americans worried about being vulnerable to such violence, Israeli prowess in foiling terrorist plots in movies and the real world was extremely appealing.
Until the 1980s, American filmmakers rarely criticized Israel. The exception was Vanessa Redgrave, who derided Israelis as "Zionist hoodlums" at the 1978 Oscars ceremony. Israel's bombing of Beirut and tacit complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinians in 1982, as well as its suppression of the First Intifada five years later, provided grist for negative characterizations of Israelis and Israeli policies. The movie, Hanna K (France and Israel, 1983) attempted to attract American audiences by using English and featuring American actress Jill Clayburgh in the leading role. Clayburgh played an Israeli lawyer defending a Palestinian who entered Israel illegally to reclaim the house where his family lived prior to 1948. The Little Drummer Girl (1984) rendered a Mossad (Israeli intelligence and secret service agency) commander as ruthless in his pursuit of Palestinian terrorists who briefly articulate their grievances. Both films were commercial and critical flops. In the same decade, Israeli films like Hamsin (1982) and Beyond the Walls (1984) helped legitimate films that exposed the injustices Israelis perpetrated against Palestinians. Outrage over Israel's disproportionate response to the Intifada (Palestinian civil uprising) triggered Woody Allen's op-ed in the New York Times denouncing its "state-sanctioned brutality and even torture" (218). The Lebanese invasion and crackdown on the Intifada [End Page 345] motivated the hitherto quiescent Casey Kasem, a popular radio host and television actor of Lebanese descent, to speak out against what Israel had wrought in his parents' homeland and in the Occupied Territories.
Nonetheless, Shaw and Goodman observe how Israel's standing in the US improved in the wake of attacks orchestrated by Islamic radicals against the US on American soil and abroad commencing in the 1990s and persisting into the twenty-first century. This was emblematized by a cycle of Hollywood films that elicited the American public's empathy for the threats Israel faced. Movies such as Executive Decision (1996) and True Lies (1997) vilified Arabs or Muslims and enhanced the admiration the majority of Americans exhibited toward Israel for implementing stringent security measures and harsh reprisals to avert or punish terrorist plots. Although The Siege (1998) exacerbated these sentiments too, it pointed out that overreactions in combating terrorism easily degenerated into egregious violations of civil rights.
The authors discern that there were repercussions for tackling the subject of Israeli counterterrorism from a balanced perspective. Steven Spielberg's Munich (Canada, France, and US, 2005) illustrated how mixed the reception could be for attempting to do so. For Palestinians and other Arabs, the film's representation of their cause defamed them. On the other hand, the movie criticized the cycle of violence that Israelis perpetuated and contained dialogue justifying why Palestinians resorted to violence. Major American Jewish organizations and publications roundly censured Spielberg for discrediting Israel's campaign of targeted assassinations. Even Adam Sandler's innocuous comedy You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008) was not immune to such criticism. Its premise of a Mossad agent so tired of fighting terrorists that he flees to the US to become a hairdresser and then falls in love with the Palestinian owner of the salon where he works, struck Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the US at the time, as a repudiation of Zionism.4
The fourth reoccurring topic throughout Hollywood and Israel delves into the diplomatic, economic, political, and religious considerations in production decisions. Countless scripts deemed potentially controversial for American, Arab, Israeli, Jewish, or Muslim audiences have been shelved out of concern they would offend certain countries or religious groups, diminishing profitability. The loss of distribution in Arab countries due to the Arab League boycott of Israel doomed many a prospective screenplay about Israel from ever being made. Israel lured American studios to shoot films about the country on location to attract [End Page 346] foreign investment, create jobs, and train local filmmakers, but expected these films to serve as hasbara and demanded the deletion, not always successfully, of scenes perceived as unflattering to Israel and Judaism. Studios' compliance facilitated the granting of permission to film at contested sites and the placing of Israeli military equipment and soldiers at their disposal for movies dealing with Israel's wars. Shaw and Goodman emphasize that the bottom line, rather than Israeli official line, usually prevailed in determining which scripts ended up being greenlit. Whatever cancellations and compromises American filmmakers have made to maintain a cordial relationship with Israeli authorities should not disguise that for much of the period covered in the book, Hollywood possessed more clout in these interactions. The advent of premium cable stations, such as HBO, and streaming networks, however, has witnessed Hollywood adapting concepts from Israeli television programs for their American counterparts such as In Treatment (2008–2010, 2021) and Homeland (2011–2020).
While I applaud the meticulous attention Shaw and Goodman pay to the cultural and political influence of cinema, I surmise that the celebrity activism and pro-Israel slant of most American films reflect American foreign policy and public opinion as much as they shape it. The authors never fully disentangle the real cultural, diplomatic, political, and religious bonds that exist between Israel and the US and the predominantly positive images of Israel which the American film industry and those associated with it have disseminated. Although historians and political scientists tend to underestimate the impact of the latter, film studies scholars should be wary of overestimating its effect.
Notes
1. Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006).
2. Shaul Mitelpunkt, Israel in the American Mind: The Cultural Politics of US-Israeli Relations, 1958–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
3. Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
4. Michael B. Oren, "Zohan and the Quest for Jewish Utopia," Azureonline, no.24 (Autumn 2008): https://azure.org.il/article.php?id=472 (Accessed October 26, 2022).