 Well, Kevin, looking forward to this show, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters, and we have a fantastic, fantastic guy with us, Julian Gorbach, assistant professor at the School of Communications, a journalism program, and he is so thoughtful, so philosophical. I really don't know anybody like you, Julian, honestly. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on the show, Jay. I thought you'd say that. That's what says it on the cue card. I'm just reading. I'm going to be reading the telephone. You can say it again and again if you wish. So Julian wrote a book about Ben Hecht, and I think the first order, and it's out, it's on Amazon. March 15th. Oh, March 15th. Okay. But you can buy it now. You can buy it now. You can buy it in Kindle, and you can buy it in Softcover, a pocketbook. Not Hardcover? No. No, there won't be a Hardcover edition. Okay. And it reflects 10 years of study and thought about Ben Hecht that Julian's put into it. And since he's a young man, that's a good percentage of his life, I'm sorry to say. There you go. But what strikes me, and there are many things to talk about on Ben Hecht, but what strikes me is that most people don't know who Ben Hecht is, and touched me to find out that he was part of the group that met in the Algonquin Hotel, back with James Thurber and all that. Yeah. That struck me, because those are the guys, the thought leaders of the 30s and the 40s, and they were very important. They were the aristocrats of thought in this country, those guys, and humor and wit and all that. And among them was Ben Hecht. So 10 years you put into this, why Julian? Oh wait, who was Ben Hecht? We need to know who he was. Okay well, Ben Hecht was very, very famous in his day, which is why it's somewhat extraordinary that he's been so forgotten. And he still pops up, but as you correctly point out, a lot of people still don't know who he is by name. But he was famous, I think, in two ways. One was that a lot of people consider him Hollywood's most legendary screenwriter. He's on a par in a way with Dalton Trumbo, who is another legendary screenwriter, slightly younger guy. And there was a film about Dalton Trumbo a few years ago with Brian Cranston, the guy who had started Breaking Bad playing Dalton Trumbo. Ben Hecht wrote Carmen with the Wind. Well he wrote the script for Gone with the Wind. The script doctor. Oh, not the book. Sure. Yeah, right. The script play. Yeah. And they say he invented the gangster movie. And when you say that, you have to understand. Scarface. Yes, well he wrote Scarface, which was, of course, remade with Al Pacino in the early 80s. But his version came out in 1932. And when they say he invented the gangster movie, it's because he was really the iconic figure who came to Hollywood right when movies started to talk. And that's when Hollywood brought in all the writers. And Hecht was the highest profile and highest paid of the bunch. And so we say he invented the gangster movie. This was a moment when you could invent a film genre like the gangster movie. He also was one of the inventors, one of the major inventors of the screwball comedy, which was kind of a trademark of the period that sort of fast talking, tacky kind of comedy of the era. And he was really important in film noir. He wrote one of his, maybe his greatest film, I think, was Notorious, which he wrote with Alfred Hitchcock. And then he was also famous because he was famous for his role in history, which is interesting. Because he's unique among someone who's a literary figure who also played this extraordinary role in history, which is that he broke the American media silence of the Nazi final solution to the Jewish question. Because it really wasn't breaking through in late 1942, early 1943, when the definitive information about it first reached the United States. It was buried in the press. And he really broke through to try and reach the public with this and call for the rescue of the Jews, an effort that tragically failed. And we ended up with the Holocaust. But one of the kind of the major story arc that I trace in my book that's also kind of gets to why he was really important is here's a guy who started in Chicago as a crime reporter, invents the gangster movie. And then because of this experience, the Holocaust gets essentially radicalized and ends up partnering with a Jewish gangster, Mickey Cohen, to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the struggle for Jewish statehood. Yeah, his life changes dramatically. And what I read was a fellow named Berkson, I want to say Peter Berkson. Peter Berkson, who changed him. And it's remarkable. And I'd like to hear about that from you, but what's remarkable is that here's a guy who's got everything going for him. And he's so what flexible and open minded that one day somebody could change the arc of his life, one conversation, one meeting according to what I read. Well, I mean, there's a few mysteries to Ben Hacked. I'd maybe identify three. And now because my book's coming out in another biography by coincidence, which is kind of a really interesting synchronicity and maybe says something about culture and history, that these things happen. And are they really coincidences or I mean, we can talk about that. But three things that I think now the press is starting to ask that these books are coming out. So there was just a piece about Adina Hoffman's book, which just came out. It was basically out this week with Ben Hacked. Yeah, and so there's a major piece about Ben Hacked in The New Yorker and about her book, I guess they didn't know about my book. And there just was a piece Sunday in The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal, one was aptly called A Difficult Man to Pin Down. And I think the three questions that the press is starting to ask and query our books for is one, so here was a guy who maybe should have been a great literary figure but instead has this enduring reputation as like a Hollywood hack. That's arguably why you've never heard of Ben Hacked is that he was dismissed. He could have been a great literary figure and said he was dismissed as a hack writer for Hollywood. Even though he wrote a number of great films and I would argue he did a lot more than that. The second question to get to your point that you just raised is the phrase Hacked uses autobiography is I turned into a Jew in 1939. He said the Nazi murders of the Jews recently begun, brought my Jewishness to the surface. And that was the Berkson connection? Yeah, now Berkson came to him in early 41 or actually August 41, I think. And so there was a pivot, I mean he was already becoming active and involved. And I think a lot of that, well, there's a question about that. But certainly one factor was Hacked's wife Rose, who was more politically active and tuned in and encouraged him to get involved. But so the first question is why did Hacked become a hack? The second question is how is it that Hacked, who had never really made any kind of a deal about his Judaism, in the mid, in his middle age, suddenly turned into a Jew? I mean, his explanation was the Nazi Holocaust that woke me up by the late 30s, the rising Nazi menace and the crystal knocked and the persecution. Isn't that a credible explanation? I think that it is on a certain, if you just accept a pure political explanation. But I think there's a much deeper, both personal and professional, in terms of his literary career explanation that ties all of this together that we can get into. But the third question would be, and some of this isn't even really being asked, like I didn't feel like as capable a writer as David Denby is for the New Yorker, he even really approached this question. I think that the Wall Street Journal piece did. But does Hacked have a message for today? I mean, is it just kind of another book out or another couple books out that all of a sudden we're talking about Ben Hacked? I want to talk to you about that. But I want to go back to the question I started to ask at the very beginning. You have 10 years into this. That's more than the writers in the New Yorker. That's more than Hoffman who wrote the other book that came out recently. You are the past master of the subject, let me say. And your book is deep and philosophical and it asks a lot of questions about him. It tells us more about him than at least Hoffman does. And my question to you is why? That's a good part of your life. You've invested into this one study, this one book. Why did you get into this? Was it something about the Holocaust also? I mean, honestly, I didn't know what kind of a story I was onto at the beginning of it. There's a very personal reason, which I guess I'm not uncomfortable to share with everybody, which is that as a young man myself, I mean, and maybe this is why I find Hacks' discovery of Judaism so interesting. But when I was in college, kind of like my first love, in a way, was a young woman who left to go to Israel. And I had never really embraced my Jewish background. I had never really embraced the state of Israel per se as something I had much focus on. I consider myself kind of a rebellious, bohemian kid, and it didn't seem very hypocool to be Jewish or to be involved or interested in Israel. Israel didn't seem very cool. What school were you going to? I went to an alternative high school, so kind of an art school, where I'd met this young woman named the Cambridge School West, and then I went to Sarah Lawrence College, which was kind of a bohemian school for writers. And when we started to get together or when we were talking, and I was pursuing, or I guess would be the best way to put it, the first Gulf War broke out. And she was in Tel Aviv, and if anyone remembers, there was a January 10th deadline when George, H.W. Walker, or George, what is it, Walker I, had set a deadline for Saddam Hussein to get out of Kuwait. And if he didn't do it by January 10th, we were going to go to war. And Iraq had scud missiles that everybody feared were loaded with chemical warheads pointing at Tel Aviv. And up until early January, and as far as I knew it was going to be up past the deadline, this young woman was in Tel Aviv. And suddenly all of these questions about who I was and what I believed in came up, and I didn't have answers for them. I'd read actually James Joyce's portrait of the artist as a young man. I just read it where he argues, Joyce argues in the book, that your family, your religion, and your nationality are the nets that as an artist keep pulling you down to earth. And so Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of the Portrait of the Artist, has to break free of his family, his religion, and his nationality in order to be an artist. And he says, I will endure whatever consequences happen to come from that. He's a young man, you know, and doesn't know, but he says I'll endure it. And so these world events that affected me very personally came at a really critical moment in my intellectual development. And then I never resolved it. And I became a reporter, and then the 9-11- Did you ever know about HECK when you became a reporter? I was vaguely aware of the front page. I knew that that was an iconic play or comedy about reporters. And even that, I gradually grew into being a journalist and then became a full-time journalist. But I didn't know really anything about him or much. And then the first Gulf War, I mean, the 9-11 attacks happened. And I wanted to go cover the terrorism in the war in Afghanistan and a lot of things because that, again, kind of came to the surface for me. But right as I was planning to kind of go off on my own, kind of on my own dime into that area, Danny Pearl was captured and beheaded in the American Jewish court. And I just thought, I don't know if it's really sensible for me to go without any promise from any publication. I mean, I had a couple years under my belt as a staff writer for a couple of newspapers. But I didn't know whether it was really wise for me to go off to countries where war zones, where I didn't speak the language, where I was going to be dealing with all these shadowy things, and I didn't have the experience as a foreign correspondent. And I didn't even have a newspaper that I was connected to at home. So I didn't go. And I watched the entire thing of the war in Afghanistan, the whole war on terror kind of unfold while I stayed in the States and continued to cover kind of local news and to some degree national news as a reporter, feeling like I was kind of left on the sidelines. And so when I knew I wanted to get a PhD, I wanted to do it about the Middle East. I thought, well, maybe I'll go there. But I wanted to confront these issues that for all these years, these 15 years by that time, had I'd never addressed. An Israeli scholar had said, well, why don't you look into Ben Hecht? He was a reporter, and he played this important role in Jewish activism. He kind of woke up to his Jewish identity. I think you'd find it an interesting story. And when I got involved, there's so much to Hecht, and there's been so much written about him being a Hecht and him not really being worth remembering, that I was slow to kind of realize what a great story it was. First of all, it was a difficult thing to get your arms around as a young scholar because he wrote, you know, between 70 and, I mean, he had his hands in over 140 films. And there's about 30 plus books that he published. And then a whole run of Broadway hits. And then his entire output of propaganda that he did during the Holocaust and the kind of struggle for a Jewish state. And TV scripts and radio scripts. I mean, there's a massive archive of his work at the Newbury Library in Chicago. And getting through that took me a long time. And then realizing the breath of the story. And then, you know, you don't want to, especially when you're a budding scholar and you're doing a biography and you're focused on someone, you don't want to leap to the conclusion that they're so important or that they're such great writers. And so it was part of your scholarship was he in your dissertation? He was my dissertation. So my book was was my dissertation. And I should say that the book that the dissertations title, which wouldn't have worked for the book was Crying in the Wilderness, which you and I were talking about yesterday, which is the idea. That's a line from the prophet Isaiah, which is that the role of the Hebrew prophet is to preach not to not to the Philistines or the Babylonians, but to the chosen people, because they're the ones who should know better. And they're the ones who are failing to uphold their covenant with God. And I thought that was an interesting analogy to heck because he really took on the liberals in America. He took on Roosevelt, the Roosevelt administration and American liberals and American liberal Jews. It sounds to me like you were involved in the scholarship. You were involved in an epiphany of your own that you, you know, you came also from a background that wasn't necessarily religious or identified closely with Judaism. Yeah. And and just like just like Ben Hecht, you went down a path that took you closer, at least to Israel. Am I right? There's a comparison there. As a matter of fact, I want to ask you the bottom line question. Yeah. How much of this is you? I mean, I think that I learned a lot about myself, maybe from from writing the book. I certainly learned a lot about myself as a writer and scholar. Sure. You're remarkable. There are points of similarity. For example, my reading 10 years, he committed 10 years, Ben Hecht, to trying to get the story out about the Holocaust. He said, I'm going to spend 10 years doing this, and he did do it. And of course, it was an important part of his life. The same number for you to spend on him. Well, I guess he did spend 10 years in being involved in Jewish politics. And then you and I have talked about the off air. We've talked about the disagreements among Jews and it was the bitter fights between Jews that in 1948, because because basically there was there was an exchange of fire between Jews in the middle of the Arab Israeli war, where a number of Hecht's allies, you mentioned Peter Bergson before, a number of the people allied with Hecht and Peter Bergson in Palestine were killed in this exchange of fire. Friendly fire, so to speak. Well, it wasn't. I mean, if friendly fire means when you direct fire at your friends, then it was friendly fire. But it was one faction of it was the the newly minted IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, firing upon an armship that had Hecht's friends and his faction of of of Israelis or new Israelis aboard. And several of them were killed. I think something like 19 people were killed aboard that ship. And at that moment, Hecht turned his back on the state of Israel and never set foot in the country again. So that that put a book end on on Hecht's direct engagement with the state of Israel. He had a lot of, you know, the man was like all over the map, heberphrenic, if you will, jumping from one thing to another, to another, to doing journalism, to doing movie scripts, to doing books. I mean, I know I'm missing some things. And then he gets involved in in in the Holocaust and publicizing and he gets involved in the state of Israel up to his eyeballs. I mean, each one of these steps was he's all in. He was all in on everything. Well, I mean, I think one thing that that people would maybe help people as a way to understand Hecht as a writer was that and I'm going to I'm going to mangle the pronunciation of the word, but it's a sheherazade or whatever from the heroine, the fictional heroine of a thousand one Arabian knights, the woman who has to tell the sultan a different story every night in order to stay alive. And then that becomes all the, you know, the tales of legend, the Arabian tales of legend like Sinbad or whatever. Hecht was this person who could endlessly spin one tale after another. That's why he wrote over 70 films in all these different genres and all these books and everything else. He, you know, so he just had this incredible capability as a storyteller and then all of this involvement, you know, in all these different media, which made him a multimedia figure of the early 20th century. And then there's the whole political dimension and the whole question of his message. And I think that Hecht was such a frenetic, kind of protean, multidimensional figure that he overwhelms, you know, he overwhelmed the New Yorker critic trying to do a 2,500 word piece on him or the Wall Street Journal reviewer who's struggling to kind of try and figure out what its significance was or or any number of biographers who try to get their arms around this guy. And I think that in itself is kind of maybe one reason that we've forgotten him is that he sort of by his sheer sort of like who he was, his force of personality, he's kind of overwhelmed this and we don't know what to say or how to understand. Well, he also alienated people. I think that's part of. Well, he was a provocateur, but he had the British Film Association shut him out, boycott him from all the theaters for a while. Right. He he he was he at the same time as the Hollywood Blacklist, which, of course, happened because of you know, communism or or accusations during the McCarthy or accusations of communist affiliation among screenwriters. Hecht was boycotted by England, which cut off a major market. And so Hecht was able to he significantly reduced for for a period of time there his screenwork. But he also, to the extent that he did write films, he had to write under a pseudonym. And yes, it was I mean, to some extent, he's been sort of like embraced or taken up as an icon of the right. And and maybe to some degree, the pro-Israel right that sees him as very hawkish and unapologetically pro-Israel. And, you know, the fact is, is that he's a pretty complex figure. And we when we try and just graft him into our modern political contemporary political context, we do him a bit of an injustice. But he was very much a provocateur. And and the most the incident that sparked the the the British boycott and that was the most controversial was his infamous letter to the terrorists of Palestine. So in the late 1940s, the Ergun, which was the Jewish underground group that Hecht was affiliated with, which he was basically essentially funding or publicizing in America with the things he was writing, was was were bombing and and shooting the British in Palestine. And most famously or infamously, the bombing of the King David Hotel, which which killed 91 people. It took out the the central investigative unit of British intelligence, which was on one of the floors, but also killed quite a number of civilians of the Ergun. So we didn't mean to forget how violent those times were. That was violence everywhere in Israel then. So they were called terrorists and they were called gangsters, which is relevant. Like the the rhetoric of the era very much was to call the militant Zionists that Hecht was engaged with gangsters, Jewish gangsters. And Micky Cohen was it was part of that whole description. Well, I mean, not not yet, you know, during the period of the 1940s, when Hecht and the Ergun are being called gangsters, Hecht hasn't made his his partnership with Micky Cohen yet. But in Palestine, one of the spinoff groups of the Ergun is robbing banks to carry out assassinations during the war of British to carry on this armed struggle. But in any case, Hecht's kind of controversial role culminates in 1947, when he he says, you know, you're going to call us terrorists, I'm going to embrace the label. And he puts out as was their want. They did this throughout the 1940s is their publicity campaign. He puts out this full page newspaper ad, this headline, Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine. And it runs in the New York Times. It runs in all these major national newspapers. And it says every one of the the lines in it is every time you to the to the terrorists of Palestine, the Jewish terrorists, every time you blow up a British train or shoot a British troop, the Jews of America have a holiday in their hearts. I mean, this is shocking. That's provocative, man. Yeah. And and and so so part of the fallout of that was the boycott. But it also it also raises all these questions of was this guy just great. I mean, imagine, you know, when we have a responsible rhetoric now, the way just people, you know, come down on it. And the person is immediately discredited and dismissed and everything in what happened to him to some extent. And I think, again, these are these are sort of reasons why people wanted to dismiss hack and forget about it. But, you know, I would argue that this whole story, I mean, you were asking about the message that it had for me and it very much doing all this research did have a message for me. It did change the way I look at our media and the way I look at our society very much so. And it's been reflected in the conversations I've had with you on air before here. But it also it's a message for today. It's I think it's a message for our society. What's the message? Can you can you? I know there's a lot in the message. Right. Can you give us a handle on how it changed you? How it how it changed, you know, your way of looking at the world as your way of looking at the world exists today? Well, I mean, I would say that that if you really want to get what I ended up coming to the conclusion that if you really want to get to the root of it, Hett says in his autobiography, there's this phrase that I got from Joseph Conrad and I think it's from the heart of darkness, the soul of man and that that phrase he says has been haunting me all my life and Hett basically had came to a very dark conclusion about human nature. He began to develop this dark conclusion about human nature as a crime reporter in Chicago, the years leading up to the rise of Al Capone. He became a foreign correspondent right on the heels of his tenure as a as a crime reporter in Chicago in Germany right in the in the immediate aftermath of World War One. And this confirmed his dark view of mankind. And then the rise of Nazism further kind of validated for him this dark view of humanity. And and I would just say that if you have a certain read of human nature, if that's your philosophical position that you start from, that it flows, it has all of these resonances in terms of how you understand the media, how you interpret democracy and its prospects, and how you interpret the law and order, how you interpret the role of government. And so, you know, Hett had a very consistent, I mean, there are there are contradictions that Hett wrestled with throughout his life. And he was not a simple one dimensional thinker. He didn't come to a simple conclusion that humanity is bad and go from there. But he he did come to this very these very dark and and I'd say more in that more rather specific views about why humanity is bad. And then he had a very coherent through all his overview is his plays, his films, his his prose. This was his the theme of his life was it was the dark view helpful in terms of the finding the success he found? Would he have been as successful with another view? I don't think that he would have had as, you know, the word the word David Denby is which I had to go find a synonym for when I when I had to kind of address it was he said his blistering attacks during the 1940s. He had these, you know, at least he's scalding attacks on society and politics and I don't think they would have been as caustic and as penetrating. And maybe he would not have had the same success. Well and I'll say this. As a provocative tour whatever. You know when we talk about the title my book Crying of the Wilderness the original or the title of the dissertation the idea that Hector had this almost prophetic side to him. Hector wrote a short story called The Little Candle and it was published in June of 1939 in his book called Book of Miracles and he arguably wrote it right after Kristallnacht but it describes in horrifyingly vivid terms the Nazi Holocaust the complete genocide of the Jewish people and when he wrote it there was no Holocaust the Nazis themselves didn't have a final solution He foresaw before the Nazis themselves foresaw their final solution. And again that prophetic nature and also when you talked about Berkson and whether Berkson changed him and you know the moment that he had this critical moment that he had in 1939 caught up in that was his dark view of mankind and so the role Hector ended up playing in history kind of This is so interesting. So I mean you know a lot about it and you wrote a lot in this book and it's not a small book it's not a small book in size or in scope. Yeah and I wonder if with all modesty I wonder if you could compare your book in terms of incisiveness against the Hoffman book on Ben Heck and the New Yorker article and the what was the other one the... Well I think that's it for now that's come out. Well there was an original book you know in nineteen there was there was a biography in the seventies that called for a reevaluation of Hector and said that So where do you fit in the landscape? I mean with all modesty the level of incisiveness a philosophical understanding of the man of his inside and his corners outside. Well I mean I'm still you know kind of reading and and looking into what Hoffman has to say about it so I don't want to say anything too conclusive about her book and even if really I had something to say I might hold my tongue you know although I think it's an excellent book I could say that right now I mean she's amazing writer and this is I think her fifth and but to give some context so that this book comes out in the seventies and kind of argues that Hector's been overlooked that he he needs to be reevaluated and that book's been long forgotten. A book comes out in 1990 or so by someone who is a real film buff that ends up getting I think a little bit I mean it was a real labor of love this book it took the guy many many years and he interviewed a lot of the important filmmakers that worked with Hector like Howard Hawks and these other folks and so it's kind of an important contribution but the book kind of fails and it never really addressed Hex role in Israel like Hex role with the Jews which is the most actually looking back was the most important thing in Israel. So then we have 30 years of silence where Hector's you know kind of is drifting into obscurity and then by this bizarre coincidence which is really all you can call it a synchronicity we have two books by Hector my book and hers which I think are neither of them are insignificant efforts that happen to come out within a month of each other. Is it just an accident a coincidence or is there is there something here where the art runs a parallel to what's going on in Washington what's going on in the world. You think there is something to be said about how these books help explain or criticize what's going on. Well I mean you know maybe maybe for those of us that study literature and study history there's a part in the back of our minds that always says this this stuff is really just paper and can just drift into the wind whether we're talking about our history all history really is is our conjecture about the past it's not the past is gone and that that with literature that that it's we we may tout people but you know at the end of the day so much of it just seems to drift into the past but this to me is is kind of a really strange piece of evidence that that maybe literature and history almost like have a life of their own and that they will come knocking that Hector was kind of out there in our sort of collective unconscious and it was it's just like we have like the way you might have a Freudian slip when you're with the lover or you know a politician may have a gaffe and actually say the truth of what they say you know there's these more or when you have a dream and suddenly something in your life that you were that was bothering you it's like an epiphany that you that you have to have the dream to have that there's this that there's things going on in our collective unconscious that come up to the surface like critical just moments yeah collective unconscious and and so maybe history talks to literature and literature talks to history both ways yeah I mean it or maybe both independently have a force I mean it's interesting because Hector was both a figure of literature and a figure of history and it's almost like we're hearing a knock at the door we opened that we didn't we didn't invite anybody but all of a sudden there's a knock and Ben Hector's here and I would argue that you know regarding the things that his take on human nature and his take on politics and the media he speaks very powerfully to the Trump era yeah and he also has I you know you and I have discussed a lot to say about Israel as well well so yeah I want so I wanted to ask you this you know here we are and you know him as well as any man alive and any woman alive what would you distill from what you know about him to be the message he would give were he with us here today well I mean I drew a message I you know I think the thing about doing a biography is that as sort of brilliant or you know for all that's virtues and they're not insignificant I mean we can talk about what a horrific thing it was to make the statement that he made in 1947 but you also have to say this was the guy speaking loudest to demand Jewish rescue at a time when nobody else had his kind of clarity and that's a story in itself that I don't know if we'll have time to get into but he did have this kind of role as a hero at a certain point but for all of his many significant virtues we have the benefit of hindsight and so I think I have kind of a message about his life I think his message was about mankind's darkness and it was this idea that he thought that that that some of the very strong impulses that people have are their fears and resentments of their other their their tribalistic impulses their prejudice we're seeing that and and that and and so that he at one point when he was talking about Germany right after World War one he said the decency of mankind is a small mask you know and he so he often had this very dark view and he felt that that there was this dark potential that it all it took was the wrong person or you could say the right person that the demagogue like a Trump to come in and stir that up and all of a sudden it would rise to the to the surface and I did in Europe and I think to some extent you know we've been arguing the wall the wall the wall the wall for weeks and a lot of times they will say you know the pundits will come on and I don't know that any of them are forgetting this maybe they don't say it clearly enough but they'll say he's lying it's not true he's lying it's not true that's not what's important what's important is that he is using an age-old tactic which is to find a scapegoat to find someone to invent an enemy and to draw on our hate in an opportunistic way to whip up power for himself you know that that's what you know Trump is doing and that that's what's horrifying about the wall and that that's what's meaningful about the moment that we're in so yeah then the second part of that is so as we discussed Ben Hect criticized the press for failing to cover the story of the Holocaust and dedicated years of his life to try to tell that story despite the unwillingness of the press in general to cover it so the same kind of thing exists today there are certain things that are not being covered what would Ben Hect tell us today about that in journalism in the press in the media well I mean I think you know first of all to clarify so that because I think if we were a little vaguely say oh the press wasn't coming the Holocaust people say that's not true again you say that but you know when the final solution to the Jewish question when they when they when the Nazis organized and rolled out a systematic plan to commit genocide when they had the train system and the killing centers and the gas all of that the the state department played a role in suppressing that information okay and and then to the extent that the press was getting wind of it they didn't like the news that that the Nazis were promising so by the late 1942 two million Jews were dead and the Nazis promised another four million dead Jews by the next Christmas as a Christmas present to the world during 1943 and that did not make headlines and and so that was when we say Hect punctured the media silence of the Holocaust quote unquote we're saying he he brought the news of the final solution he created this massive pageant at Madison Square Garden called we will never die in in early March of 1943 to to you know any the cast was full of the Hollywood celebrities that were hex friends and allies and you know 20,000 people there was 40,000 people they had to have two shows the night of the performance because they filled it to capacity and then it went on a tour which by the way the other Jewish groups tried to suppress but it did it brought the news of this of the final solution to the front pages finally and when we say that that what I what I've asked you and what I've pondered I don't I don't ask it in the book but because the book stays with the history but what I've asked whenever I've had the opportunity to talk about it is if Hector alive today and or if we're just talking about what is the great story of our lifetimes or of the century that he's missed because arguably you know the Nazi solution of the final question was one of the great stories of the 20th century that the media that the American press fumbled okay so what what would be the great story of that today and I say it's it's gotta be I wouldn't even say it's climate change because it's bigger than climate change it's the you know Elizabeth Colber one the who's a writer for the New Yorker one these the 2014 Pulitzer prize for nonfiction for a book called the sixth extinction in which he argued that there have been five major extinctions in the history of life and that we that mankind the last one was created by an asteroid right hitting the planet creating the ice rage and making the dinosaurs extinct and she's saying we are now creating a sixth extinction and with this extinction we are the asteroid we are hitting the planet and we are we are creating a massive global extinction and that's a complete collapse of the global system that's even bigger than global warming and that that is an unfolding within our century and people might say well how how does like the Holocaust relate to this environmental story I don't get it's two two completely different things and this is where I think again the nature of man comes in because I grew up during the Cold War so one of the big basket of events that changed the world of that critical era that Hector was part of was the Holocaust you know and obviously the Second World War itself but it was also the atomic bomb right and I grew up during the the Cold War the High Cold War I guess the late Cold War under Reagan with the arms race the first time I ever went to a political rally was a no nukes rally in the early 80s and I remember my consciousness my political consciousness was was was woken up by this idea of oh my god people mankind is so crazy that we're going to kill ourselves and then you know the Cold War ended and there were the were the nuclear talks and disarmament which Hector's now by the way just pulled out of and so even though actually the nuclear threat never completely went away that kind of intense consciousness that we had about it in the popular culture of the 1980s that formed kind of my you know young years has shifted a little but it's you know it's it left me thinking what what is like that now was kind of a worldview if if I was 16 now when I was listening to the clash and London calling and it was all this nuclear imagery and everything this apocalyptic imagery what would be that would there be any of that imagery today or is everything just you know wine and roses now and I think that my if I was a kid now or or me now actually frankly it's it's this environmental destruction and but again it's mankind it's humanity as this destructive this self-destructive engine I mean if we wipe out now it's bigger than us just wiping out other people now it's about us wiping out everything that's alive but it's the same big story and there's the same risk of us and I think this also goes to human nature the notion of denial that I think that the reason why you know as media critics we say oh well is it the money in politics are the media people chasing the profits you've sort of theorized that you know and there's another thing which is to say because people are the way they are and they can't part of the reason why we're so self-destructive or destructive is that we are often so deep in denial about our destructiveness and the media is the incarnation of that denial so with all of this Julian do you do you adopt the dark view the generally dark view that Ben Hect had of the world do you think for example just one small point do you maybe a larger point you think that climate change will be resolved you think that humankind will save itself or would Ben Hect say no not mankind humankind is in imperfectible in the old lock hobs dichotomy and that we will not be able to do it because it's not in the way we as a community operate where are you on that today after all of this well I would say yes and no I mean I you know that that's the whole thing right and and I mean I could oversimplify Ben Hect and I could say that Ben Hect had this dark view of mankind and that Ben Hect you know was was too wasn't sophisticated enough to embrace any kind of complexities about that that he just had this cynical view and that's it that's the story Ben Hect he was cynical but that's not true if you read his great work like like or if you if you really look at it like notorious you see that he he was fascinated by paradox the thing that made him a great Hollywood screenwriter and made him the bane of the studios was that he would create these contradictory paradoxical paradoxical characters right and so he understood you know with with the nature of man I don't think he would write off mankind but the story I tell in my book is the way his cynicism kind of blinded him I mean it it led him to make to do something like the letter to the terrorists of Palestine which were when we're outside of the way he saw the world we say my god what a what a nut you know and then it what it led to was this friendship that he had with Mickey Cohen that went on for 10 years and then what I argue in my book or it kind of narrate as a story is the way Mickey Cohen was able to manipulate Ben Hect because Hect because Hect's cynicism essentially blinded him to the how what a psychopath Mickey Cohen really was because Hect was so cynical about government I mean to speak to the the times we're in now Hect saw government and we can get into this but as as uh criminal conspiracy as a crime syndicate because you know remember this is the guy who kind of came of age in the Chicago of Al Capone you got to be cynical yeah so it's not an abstract idea I mean Al Capone did run Chicago he was the government of Chicago during prohibition so the idea of government as syndicate or the Nazis being a gangster regime these are not such metaphors these these are these are actual things and we talk we talk about this investigation going on into our own government now and what's happening so you know Hect had these cynical views so that so that he he wasn't necessarily making the station between a real gangster and say the American government of law in order that was supposed to be cracking down and that that kind of cynicism I think I argue kind of blinded him and and what I would say that yes and the no the reason why I say no I do not agree with that I do not think it's hopeless is that as much as I could think you could say okay the rise of Nazism is evidence of the nature of man okay the the nuclear arms race is evidence of the of the of the nature of man the the havoc that we are wreaking on every living thing on the planet right now the way we are exhausting it all and with no apologies and no contrition and no plan to change is is uh evidence of the nature of man I think that in life personal life and in politics it is deadly to surrender to that kind of cynicism because the moment you surrender to those conclusions is the moment you lose your moral compass that's that's when you become fascistic or whatever that's that's when you become the beast that you're you're fighting and you know you and I have talked about Israel and and all I'm trying to say when we when we when we debate that is I do not want Israel to surrender to Israel has to do everything it can to it's had to for for its entire existence to fight for its survival but it cannot lose a space for its idealism as a democracy and as a country or it will lose its way it will stop being the kind of Jewish kingdom that people from Theodore Herschel the David Ben-Gurion built it in the darkest years of Jewish history to be we're out of time Julian okay thank you so much Julian Gorbach as always a wonderful brilliant discussion yeah thank you can we do it again yeah sure all right