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Article Excerpt
On a frigid February morning in 1947, hundreds of weary, anxious Holocaust survivors trudged up the gangplank of a reconstructed yacht in the French harbor of Port de Bouc. They hoped to reach Palestine; they knew they might end up in a detention camp in Cyprus or even back in Europe. What they could not imagine was that the ship and its sponsors would soon affect political and social developments on three continents, from the struggle of the survivors in Europe to the fight for a Jewish state in British Mandatory Palestine, to the battle over racial segregation in America.
In the aftermath of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors crammed the Displaced Persons camps established by the victorious Allied forces in occupied Europe. Most of the DPs longed for Palestine, but England's 1939 White Paper, still in force, kept Jewish immigration to a trickle.
A battle against Britain's closed-door policy was underway on several fronts. Since early 1944, the Irgun Zvai Leumi underground militia, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, had been carrying out guerrilla attacks against the British authorities in Palestine. The rival and much larger Labor Zionist militia, the Haganah, initially declined to join the revolt, hoping the British would, at war's end, open Palestine to Jewish immigrants. When England's new Labor Party-led government declared, in mid-1945, that it would continue its predecessor's policies in the Holy Land, the Haganah joined forces with the Irgun and anti-British attacks escalated sharply.
At the same time, Haganah emissaries in postwar Europe began smuggling shiploads of Holocaust survivors to Palestine, something the Irgun had done extensively during the late 1930s. These efforts, known as aliyah bet, or "alternative immigration," met with mixed results. Most of the 64 ships sent between 1945 and 1948 were intercepted and their passengers interned in detention camps in Cyprus. But the clashes between British soldiers and distraught refugees, taking place in full view of the world media, gave London a public relations black eye and increased the pressure on the British to relent on Palestine.
The dramatic and intensifying struggle between the Jews and the British increasingly became a factor in U.S.-British relations. With mid-term Congressional elections approaching in November 1946, President Truman and his advisers feared Jewish voters would support Republican candidates if the administration failed to confront the British on Palestine. The April 1946 report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, a joint commission set up by the U.S. and British governments, recommended the admission of 100,000 DPs to Palestine. The Truman administration's endorsement of that proposal infuriated London.
British officials added fuel to the fire with acerbic comments that ignited waves of condemnation and negative media attention in the United States. In November 1945, Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin declared that "if the Jews, with all their sufferings, want to get too much at the head of the queue, you have the danger of another anti-Semitic reaction through it all." The following June, Bevin again sparked outrage when he claimed that American officials favored admission of Holocaust survivors to Palestine only because "They did not want too many Jews in New York."
Into this volatile mix leaped the irrepressible Ben Hecht. By the 1930s, Hecht was the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood. His credits included such hit films as Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Gone With the Wind. As a young man, Hecht exhibited little interest in Jewish affairs, but the Nazi persecution of German Jewry transformed him. First it drove him to join the Fight for Freedom Committee, which advocated pre-emptive U.S. military action to oust Hitler. Then, in late 1941, he hooked up with a group of militant Zionists from Palestine.
The group's leader, Irgun activist Hillel Kook, used the name Peter Bergson in the United States in order to shield his uncle, Palestine Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, from unwanted publicity. Sent to the U.S.--in 1940 by the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Kook and a handful of colleagues created a series of political action committees: the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews (1941-1943), which lobbied for a Jewish army until the news of genocide was confirmed, and then transformed itself into the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe (1943-1945); and two groups to promote creation of a Jewish state, the American League for a Free Palestine (1943-1948), and the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation (1944-1948). They were often referred to collectively as the Bergson Group.
The group's tactics raised eyebrows in the American Jewish community. The Bergsonites staged dramatic rallies at a time when many Jewish leaders preferred to keep a low profile. They sponsored more than two hundred newspaper advertisements, in an era when many considered it untoward for American Jews to splash Jewish causes across the pages of the daily newspaper. They openly took issue with the Roosevelt administration's policies on European Jewry and Palestine, while most of the Jewish leadership either fervently supported FDR, or feared accusations of disloyalty if they criticized the president.
None of those worries bothered the brash Ben Hecht. The role of dissident and provocateur suited him just fine. Putting his powerful pen at the service of this new cause, Hecht authored the Bergson Group's sensational newspaper ads, adorning them with headlines such as "Time Races Death: What Are We Waiting For?" and "How Well Are You Sleeping? Is There Something You Could Have Done to Save Millions of Innocent People--Men, Women, and Children--from Torture and Death?"
Congressman Will Rogers Jr., one of the Bergson Group's strongest supporters on Capitol Hill, later described the power of Hecht's ads:
I think the most effective of all of the methods we used was the ads ... They were hard-hitting and they had simple typography ... They carried tremendous impact ... I can remember when they appeared in the paper; even around the halls of...
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