Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Risky Business: Hollywood and Israel

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

In their new book  Hollywood and Israel, film scholars Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman take us behind and beyond the screen to show how the world’s entertainment capital is an important player in international affairs and how profit always trumps propaganda.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Whiskey Business. When it comes to exploring the relationship between Israel and Hollywood, the 1960 film Exodus is usually the starting point. Before you have a country, you have to have people. And that's the job that we've done. Tens of thousands of people smuggled in with a whole British navy blockading the coast.

Population. The population we've built is our most valid argument we have for independence. The Israeli government actually had an operational plan for this movie called, of course, Operation Exodus. I don't know of one nation, whether existing now or in the past, that was not born in violence. The story of how Exodus got made

and what its supporters hoped to accomplish commercially and ideologically fills a key chapter in a new book about Hollywood and Israel from a pair of film historians and scholars. I'm Tony Shore. I'm professor of contemporary history at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. I'm Giora Goodman. I'm a historian at Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee in the north of Israel.

Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman's Hollywood and Israel is not your typical film studies book. They use archival materials to take us behind and beyond the screen. The book does, of course, look at a lot of the movies that Hollywood produced about Israel. But we're as interested in what film stars, producers, agents, rabbis even, were doing away from the screen in trying to build a relationship between Hollywood and Israel. We were also very interested to see what Hollywood wasn't making and why wasn't it making it. And I think that you can understand a lot about the media in general and the relationship between a film industry and a particular subject, in this case a state, from what gets on screen as what doesn't for financial, commercial, ideological reasons.

Since its inception, Hollywood has faced accusations ever greenlit any film simply for its propaganda potential. All these government or non-government who try to use it for their own political interests because first and foremost, of course, it's a business and a highly risky business which is there and can only go on existing if there's a profit there. Exodus was a crowning achievement for both Israel and Hollywood because commercial and ideological interests were in alignment. This story about brave fighting men and women determined to create and defend their own homeland resonated with American audiences,

whereas The Juggler did not. So The Juggler was the first full Hollywood production made in Israel, which came out in 1953. It's the story of a Holocaust survivor who comes to Israel and finds a new life. It's a difficult life. It's not a smooth transition he makes from Europe to Israel. But eventually he finds Israel as a haven for himself and as a place for redemption. How long have you been here?

Three months. Kirk Douglas plays Hans Muller, a Jewish-American entertainer who lost his entire family to the Nazis. And while Douglass brings some of his trademark toughness to the role, the juggler is a sad and beaten man. Don't you recognize me? I'm afraid you are mistaken. When we first meet him, when he arrives in Israel, he hallucinates that a family of refugees is his own. If you tell me a little more, perhaps I can help you.

And he sees menace in a police officer who only wants to help him. Nazis. That's what you are. Nazis. I'm only trying to... After he beats down the police officer, Hans goes on the run,

convinced he's accidentally committed murder. But this is absolutely a Hollywood movie. run, convinced he's accidentally committed murder. But this is absolutely a Hollywood movie. There's no real message, just a feel-good ending. Help me. Someone, I'm sick. I need help. The film ends with tough guy Kirk Douglas admitting and accepting that he needs help.

The Juggler allows us to spot the difference between filmmaking and propaganda. The Juggler is wholly the creation of an American Jewish supporter of Israel who was also very progressive in his political outlook in the United States. That's Michael Blankford. It was his project. And Michael Blankford was supposed to actually direct the film himself, but couldn't come out to Israel, because he appeared in front of the House Committee of Un-American Activities, and the State Department denied him a visa because he wasn't helpful enough, appearing in front of the committee just a few months before he was about to direct the film. In his juggler novel, Michael Blankfort tackles the issue of Arab displacement head-on. There's even an attempt to address progressive guilt,

whereas the film, directed by Edward Dmytrych, has none of that. Well, almost. You're going somewhere, can't I leave with you? I'm going to a damaged Arab village some distance away, to see if it can be lived in. A pivotal scene in the movie takes place in an abandoned Arab village. Frightened by a Syrian border patrol, the juggler and Yael from the kibbutz hide out in one of the village's ruined houses. Using archival materials,

Shah and Goodman inform us that this scene was shot in Akrith. In November 1948, the Israeli army had ordered Akrith's Arab Christian inhabitants to evacuate and to move for security reasons further south. On Christmas Eve 1951, the Israeli army blew up all the houses in Akrith, making them uninhabitable and creating an international scandal. It is therefore all the more remarkable, Goodman and Shaw write, and testimony to the importance with which Hollywood was regarded in Israel,

that less than a year later, in October of 1952, the Israeli authorities would allow filming of The Juggler to take place at Akrith. The Israeli government is trying to help as much as they can. And once the film is completed, there's one film critic who writes in an Israeli newspaper, this film is going to have a much more important effect, doesn't matter what we think about it, in propagating the case of Israel than all the propaganda films, the Zionist propaganda films of the Zionist movement made up to now because it's Hollywood. And when Hollywood makes a feature film, people are interested to watch it and it will just have a much, much larger impact

than Israel's poor film industry until then that could just produce half-hour documentaries. But the question which is even more important is what kind of a profit can you make? And the juggler fails in the box office. He doesn't make enough money for another film about Israel for a whole decade. So many of the films that you write about in your book have both economic and ideological motivations behind them. And sometimes these forces are in alignment and sometimes they're not. But if I'm following you correctly, it's the economics you're saying that are really determining what films are getting made and which ones aren't. How then does a box office disappointment like The Juggler help us see that? In the broader picture, let's say over the 70

years of the life of Israel, Hollywood hasn't actually made that many films directly about Israel like The Juggler or Exodus. And I think part of the reason to explain that is that maybe Israel just wasn't a sexy enough subject as far as many Hollywood producers were concerned. But there's another side to your question, Benjamin, about money and Hollywood and Israel. And that is to look away from the screen and to look and try and excavate in many ways what some major movie stars and major movie producers are doing to help Israel, whether it's ideologically, whether it's through advocacy, or whether it's through finance. And an extraordinary number of famous people, whether it's through

Israel bonds or whether it's through making trips to Israel, encouraging other movie stars to make trips to Israel and to generate income for Israel. So there's that economic side of things. So Hollywood might have been reluctant to an extent to make movies about Israel for economic reasons. But Hollywood didn't hold back in supporting Israel in lots of other ways, especially economic ways through this sort of star power. Perhaps the best example of the off-screen power of Hollywood is what happened in 1967. Israel's supporters in Hollywood couldn't get a single studio interested in making a movie about the Six-Day War. But on June 1st, 1967, they held a rally for Israel at the Hollywood Bowl. The rally's chief speaker was then governor of California, former actor Ronald Reagan. And on stage, star after star, including Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Barbra Streisand, read out dramatic letters sent from Israel or pleaded with the audience to back their

love for the country with donations. All of this publicity that Hollywood's luminaries brought the Israeli cause, Goodman and Shawstress, was priceless. It is quite clear that Hollywood attached itself emotionally in support of Zionism and Jewish statehood as a result of the Holocaust. This is a trend in which Hollywood reflects also the interests of the American Jewish community as a whole. I'm talking about here the large number of Jewish producers and actors and filmmakers in Hollywood, but also the United States as a whole. And then, at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1978, Vanessa Redgrave upended everything.

And the winner is Vanessa Redgrave and Julia. So this is 1978, Israel's 30 years of age in 1978. Vanessa Redgrave, who's a prominent political activist in Britain. She's a Marxist. And she makes a movie she stars in and funds and produces in 1976-77 called The Palestinian, which is a very anti-Zionist and supports the Palestinian cause. And she meets a lot of opposition from Zionists in the United States. She suffers a number of death threats.

And outside the Academy Awards auditorium, there are demonstrations, pickets amongst these radical Zionists who are opposed to Vanessa Redgraving receiving the Oscar. My dear colleagues, I thank you very, very much for this tribute. And I salute you and I pay tribute to you. And I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you've stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the statue of Jews all over the world. Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for her performance in a movie called Julia, in which she portrayed an anti-Nazi resistance fighter. Her victory seems to amplify her sense of self-righteousness and moral clarity.

Before I get on to the writing awards, there's a little matter I'd like to tidy up. But soon after her speech, screenwriter Patty Chayeski slapped back. I would like to say, personal opinion of course, that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple thank you would have sufficed. And in the party afterwards, the Oscars party, she's ostracized. Nobody will speak to her. No one in Hollywood supports her, both that night or afterwards, for doing what she did. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the afterwards, because as you write in your book,

Vanessa Redgrave makes a claim in a lawsuit concerning the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who had hired her for a performance and then fired her after the Oscars. Her claim was that this was because of her political beliefs. Now, how do you as historians weigh in on something like this? Well, first of all, this is one of the most problematic things for a historian, certainly using archive material. Because often what does get made you find correspondence about but what doesn't get made or is not offered it's hard much harder to find out but there is an interesting lawsuit there and that of course allows us to examine the issue and the claim of the symphony that it

wasn't for any other reason but security so it wasn't because what she said or because of her opinions but because the fact that she would work in this project raised security concerns now you can take this argument as you want and of course the the court decided what it decided. But I think that it's interesting to notice that just after the Oscars controversy, she is given the role of playing a Holocaust survivor despite protests and remains in the role, despite Brotis from Jewish organizations, but even more so by the person she was actually playing her. If I recall, a French Jew said, I don't want, I don't think she should be the one playing my,

you know, playing my role during the Holocaust. So for us as historians, the jury is out on this one. One will never know if some studio boss wasn't sitting in his office and saying, you know, let's have a list of actresses or actors to play this role, but we can't take this one because of that or that one because of that. What might be the response? But certainly it just shows the whole episode, and this is not the only one in our book, the emotional investment of being pro or anti-Israel. to Israel.

Now, I almost didn't do this interview with Tony Shaw and Gira Goodman, because I knew it meant that I would have to watch Steven Spielberg's film Munich, a key movie in their book, a movie I most definitely skipped back when it came out in 2005, mostly because I was still scarred by Schindler's List. When that movie came out in the 90s, Serbs were committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, and yet Spielberg was out there promoting his film as a testament to the idea that genocide would never happen again. Anyways, dear listener, that was a formative experience for yours truly. But I did it. I watched Munich. And I was very surprised to learn from Goodman and Shaw just how much pushback Steven Spielberg,

Israel's most famous friend in Hollywood, got for making it. Because it shows Spielberg's doubts about Israeli policies and Israeli actions. Not about Israel itself, but the film is this depiction of how the Israeli intelligence and the Israeli government reacts to the Munich massacre of 1972. Let's go. I got you. Come on.

Munich begins with Black September, a Palestinian terror group infiltrating the Olympic Village and storming the Israeli compound. Spielberg artfully mixes in real news footage with reenactment. The violence is terrifying and final. They've now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone. Israel decides to respond.

We want to ask you, will you undertake a mission? With an off-the-books assassination mission led by Avner Kaufman, played by Eric Bana. You can't talk about it to anyone, not even your wife. Kaufman and his men then embark on a European killing tour You've got a sight, huh? Yes, and how are you? using guns

and bombs. Oui? But by halfway through the movie, he's got doubts about whether this is the right thing that Israel should be doing. He's questioning his own morality. And one comes out at the end of the movie of Spielberg essentially saying, look, is a knee-jerk violent reaction to terrorism, is that really going to lead to any sort of peaceful relations in the long term? Ask for a reassignment if this is so distasteful. It's not distasteful to you? No, because the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood.

This argument is lost on some of Kaufman's assassins, and to be honest, it lost me too. But what really confused me is why Spielberg chose not to include the biggest blunder of the whole operation. In 1973, the squad mistakenly killed an innocent waiter in Norway. Certainly that's a scene that could have fueled Kaufman's doubts as to what he and Israel were doing. But it's not

in the film. The world has been rough with you, with your tribe. My only guess why is because it would have ruined the entirely fictional subplot about the nice, sweet, French farm family that sells Kaufman information about the terrorist whereabouts.

You pay well and you pay promptly, so we'll continue together. But that said, I have absolutely no idea why this subplot is important or what kind of emotional payoff Spielberg hoped it would provide. Spielberg said himself, this was a plea for peace. He called it, Munich, his movie, was a plea for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. But many Jewish Americans saw this in many ways as a betrayal of what Spielberg had previously said about his support for Israel. I want you to give me proof that everyone we killed had a hand in Munich.

I don't discuss such things with people who don't exist. You want to discuss, come back to existence. You want your daughter to grow up in exile. I want evidence. And to have the hero, an Israeli, leaving Israel because he can't take morally what he was asked to do is, of course, something which challenges, beyond the specific subject of Munich, it challenges also the way the Zionist movement has presented. So I went online and found a box office ranking for all of Spielberg's 30 plus movies.

And Munich is pretty much at the bottom. What are we supposed to make of that? Munich, again, is a film that, of course, it won't have the box office appeal of Jaws or E.T. or Jurassic Park because it's not a universal subject. It's about a conflict which a lot of people see as a headache and you know it's not their immediate choice for entertainment. So when you're making films about political issues for an industry which is a high-risk industry like Hollywood. There's always a big risk there. Now, still people decide to make these films. And Steven Spielberg is an example by making both Schindler's List and Munich. And of course,

he has the power and the clout to do that. But politics is not the best way to ensure making money, certainly not as like all the authors of Hollywood and Israel. It's a new film studies book that helped me think differently about mass media and propaganda. Thanks to both of them for taking the time out to talk with me. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and if you visit theoryofeverythingpodcast.com, you can find a show page for this

episode with links to all of the movies we talked about. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.