Chapter 5

An American Jew

I’ve asked myself many times what I would have liked to have been born and decided a long time ago that I was very glad I was born a Jew. Whether brought up as one or not, somewhere in the background there was a gift of being born a Jew.

—Lillian Hellman, 1981

As Hellman resisted being thought of as a woman playwright, so she resisted the idea that her Jewish birth and family origins shaped her view of the world. Jewish-born and southern-identified, she occupied complicated positions in both communities, but especially in the bifurcated world of twentieth-century Jews. She was not a Jew in the Yiddish-speaking, upwardly mobile, immigrant sense of the word. Nor was she a member of a close-knit southern community of Jews whose isolation lent itself to creating a public face of assimilation and cooperation. Rather, she imagined herself committed to a set of overarching values that included racial egalitarianism and political and social justice. These provided the framework within which she measured human dignity and judged what she called “decent” behavior.

But the twentieth century—notable for pogroms, migrations, the destruction of most Eastern European Jewry, and the creation of the state of Israel—placed enormous stress on the meaning of Jewish identity, twisting and shaping it in response to historical and personal circumstances.¹ For prominent cultural figures like Hellman, the times demanded more than a passive acquiescence to one’s roots. As the political climate changed, she sometimes found herself at odds with a divided Jewish community, struggling to reconcile her commitment to larger values with her sense of herself as a Jew, often unable to see why they should be in disagreement. She was, in this sense, an American Jew, her identity woven into the fabric of political debate.

Hellman took her first journey abroad in 1929, when she went with her husband to Paris. Bored, she traveled alone to Germany that summer. There she watched brown-shirted Nazis march and experienced her first taste of outright anti-Semitism. For the first time she felt herself part of a larger, specifically Jewish, identity. After she returned home, she followed Kober to Hollywood, where he found her a job as a studio script reader. There, as she had in New York, Hellman found herself among Jews of Eastern European descent, many of whom had already risen to prominence in the movie industry. These were not the Jews of her southern heritage, eager to assimilate into southern soil. Rather, they were the transplanted Jews of her New York acquaintance, proudly spreading the cultures and traditions of their parents to the American west while they discarded the spiritual impetus of the old religion. Lillian found their relationship to religion all too familiar. To the Hollywood moguls, as to the writer friends she was coming to know in her bicoastal life, Jewishness did not then, as author and critic Irving Howe would later recall, “form part of a conscious commitment; it was not regarded as a major component of the culture … It was simply there.”² Howe, in the thirties a young radical and later to become a chronicler of the Jewish tradition, did not imagine Jewishness as a religious impulse. It was “inherited, a given to be acknowledged, like being born white or male or poor,” something that “could be regarded with affection since after all it had helped shape one’s early years.”

In these years of the 1930s, when Jewish identity seemed more a matter of culture and style than of religious practice, Hellman adopted the manners and politics of her peers. She adapted her voice and her persona to the fractious and argumentative mode of her East Coast friends, and she grew into the opinionated and self-dramatizing self that persisted for the rest of her life. Though she was a southern Jew, a German Jew, she reveled in the vibrancy of the Eastern European literary and entertainment worlds of which she formed a part, and she enjoyed the freedom provided by the rich cosmopolitan lifestyles in which her friends participated. In that world, the success of Jews in the competition for upward mobility could be readily tied to attaining the American dream, and Jewish commitment to social justice could take many political forms, including the adulation of Roosevelt and adherence to communist ideals. In Hellman’s world of the 1930s and early ’40s, Jews tended to gravitate toward the political left, expecting to bury religious differences in campaigns for justice and fairness for all. Though the friends with whom she argued about left-wing politics and whom she enlisted in social causes tended to be Jews, she donned, like them, a cloak of religious invisibility. For all of them, the freedom to argue, the liberty to choose one’s political and social causes, seemed part and parcel of American life, as much a fulfillment of the dream as economic success.

The thirties was an odd decade in that respect, for if Jews were excluded from elite colleges and some professions, they found places in other arenas like teaching, medicine, and the new profession of social work. In Hellman’s world of theater and film, being Jewish constituted no barrier at all. Hellman was not hurt by the continuing febrile anti-Semitism that persisted in many sectors of American society. She did not find herself excluded by the admissions quotas deployed by elite colleges and professional schools, or face the closed gates of the higher professions.

But if she found no doors locked to her creative ambitions, Hellman could hardly have avoided noticing what we can only call the latent or casual anti-Semitism that surrounded her. This often took the form of simply attending to what was and was not Jewish, a practice common among her friends and acquaintances. Edmund Wilson, for example, who befriended Dash Hammett and with whom Hellman later had a close relationship, carefully noted the Jewish ancestry of his acquaintances in his diaries of the thirties.³Mary McCarthy, who would marry Wilson at the end of the decade and later go on to play a major role in Hellman’s life, recalls her “stunning surprise” as a young woman when she discovered that an early boyfriend was Jewish. It was, she says, “a disillusionment, like learning the real names of one’s favorite movie stars.”⁴ She went on to conceal the existence of her Jewish grandmother from her Vassar college friends and to participate in marginalizing the only student in her circle who acknowledged her Jewish parentage.⁵

Dashiell Hammett, who became Hellman’s lover and partner after 1931, participated in this culture of noticing, pointing out Hellman’s Jewish affiliation and simultaneously distancing himself from it by denominating Jews as “your people.” During the war years, from his remote posting in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, he plied her with loving, upbeat, and humorous accounts of his life on an army base. Amid his appreciation for her talents, her generous gifts of tobacco and warm clothing, and her love, Hammett casually reminded Hellman of her origins. Sometimes this came in the form of a joke, as when he repeated a comment to her from “one of your people.” A soldier by the name of Glick, he wrote, had remarked to him, “Thank God my people had sense enough to give me a good American first name, Irwin.”⁶ On another occasion, he wrote her that “one of your people just gave me the heel of a very fine hunk of salami.”⁷ Another time he told her that he’d just read a very good play written by “one of your people.”⁸ Once he asked her if in her “twisted oriental way, you look on Christmas as an extra day of atonement for your people.”⁹None of this seemed to be tainted with malice, for as he told her once, “your people are sometimes remarkable.”¹⁰

To her friends, and in letters to Arthur Kober, Hellman expressed a mixture of love and hate toward Jews, an acerbic irreverence that indicated both her identification with the talented core of literary and cosmopolitan people and an effort to distance herself from those Jews who did not share her values. She went to a bad concert, she wrote to Kober, where she was “sick and frightened at the homosexuals, rich Jews and refugees who were there.”¹¹ Later she described the repulsive behavior of another Jewish writer (Irving Stone) by telling Kober, “If you were not a Jew, I would be anti-Semitic.”¹² And yet she took comfort in claiming the bonds of family when it suited her. After one of her plays closed prematurely on Broadway, she sought solace with close friend Heywood Hale Broun, comforting herself by telling him: “We’re just two old Jewish failures.”¹³Notorious for her capacity to swear, she demonstrated her self-consciousness about what it meant to be Jewish by throwing around offensive words like goy and kike. She used these in the ways that African-Americans today sometimes use the n-word—as an affectionate and comradely attribution, a signal that she too was a member of the group. “I myself make very anti-Semitic remarks,” she would later claim when challenged, “but I get very upset if anybody else does.”¹⁴

Hellman’s associations with the left seemed merely natural in the thirties. Like her, many of Hellman’s creative and often Jewish friends entered the arena of politics through the twin gates of a search for social justice and a virulent opposition to fascism. At the same time, a new generation of men and women just a decade or so younger than Lillian dismissed their Jewish identities to find their places in the larger political world. Men such as Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and Alfred Kazin who would go on to found magazines, write novels, and become influential critics began their careers in the halls of City College in the thirties, where their political differences guided affiliation into the many left-wing factions of the decade. Mary McCarthy boasted a particularly sensitive streak for the relationship between Jewish origins and political impulses. Herself a “Trotskyist,” she recalled the guests at the little dinners she attended at the end of the decade as “mostly Stalinists, which is what smart successful people in that New York world were. And they were mostly Jewish; as was often pointed out to me with gentle amusement, I was the only non-Jewish person in the room.” It was at such a dinner that McCarthy recalls first meeting Lillian Hellman.¹⁵

It mattered little that some up-and-coming young men (Phillips, Bell, Howe, and Rahv among them) would change their names to meld more smoothly into the larger culture. Liberal or left-wing, they abandoned Jewish ritual and tradition for the religion of politics. Later some of these men would coalesce into “the New York intellectuals” and become powerful cultural voices in the postwar years. They would reorganize themselves along political lines, and Jewish identity would become one of many factors in their appraisals of left-wing politics. But in the 1930s and for most of the 1940s, their secondary attachment to Jewish descent resembled Hellman’s; she found herself firmly in the mainstream of the American Jewish intellectual and cultural tradition.

This remained the case even during the decade and a half when German Nazis and others invested their political capital in racializing those born or descended from Jews. Despite these campaigns, and even in the face of widespread rumors of extermination strategies, a 1944 survey of young Jewish literary figures found that few of them placed their Jewish identities at the forefront of their self-definitions. Lionel Trilling, soon to become the first Jewish professor of English at Columbia University, declared that he did not regard himself as a specifically Jewish writer.¹⁶ He described himself, rather, as a minimalist Jew. “For me,” wrote Trilling, “The point of honor consists in feeling that I would not, even if I could, deny or escape being Jewish.”¹⁷ Muriel Rukeyser preferred “more than anything else to be invisible.”¹⁸ Delmore Schwartz took a position closer to Hellman’s, insisting that “the fact of Jewishness was a matter of naïve and innocent pride, untouched by any sense of fear.”¹⁹ In the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel, and in the light of Cold War aspersions on “Commie Jews,” all this changed. Then many Jews who had been part of the left in the thirties became associated with being pro-Israel. Those who criticized Israel in any respect risked identification as Soviet sympathizers. It was then that Hellman faced disparagement about her refusal to meld her politics with her Jewish identity.

Was Hellman then simply one of those Jews who preferred, in Muriel Rukeyser’s memorable phrase, “more than anything else … to be invisible”?²⁰ Certainly her most famous work, The Little Foxes, supports this notion. Critics correctly identified the play (which opened in February 1939, at the height of anti-Semitic attacks in Germany) as a thinly disguised portrait of her mother’s family. Hellman avoided describing the rapacious Hubbard family as specifically Jewish, preferring instead to speak to a more general concern about the corrupting effects of money. Yet the family’s effort to profit from the industrializing new South could easily be interpreted as a depiction of the stereotypical money-grasping Jew. The Hubbards, two brothers and a sister, have since become symbols of how perverted ambition for money and power can ride roughshod over human feeling, discarding community and tradition along the way. At the time, Hellman insisted that the play was meant as satire, a lesson to illuminate the impact of greed on the lives of innocent people and their children. And surely its success is attributable to the way that message struck an America still struggling to get out of the Depression. Only later would she acknowledge its relationship to her own childhood—and even then it was class, not Jewish identity, to which she pointed. She had reacted to her grandmother’s wealth and the abuse of her class position with anger and self-hatred, she wrote in one of her memoirs. She resolved this conflict only “after The Little Foxes was written and put away.”²¹

But Hellman invoked her Jewish identity under other circumstances without a moment’s hesitation. After she returned from Spain in the spring of 1938, she called the New York Times (which she described as owned by Jews) to task for not featuring antifascist articles about Spain on its front page. “It stands to reason,” she wrote, that “every Jew must be an anti-Fascist to be either a good Jew or a good American.”²² As fascist regimes increasingly fastened on the salience of Jewish heritage as a cause of conflict, she wielded her identity like a weapon. “I am a writer, and I am also a Jew,” she told an audience of twelve hundred at a 1940 book luncheon. “I want to be quite sure that I can continue to be a writer and that if I want to say that greed is bad or persecution is worse, I can do so … I also want to go on saying that I am a Jew without being afraid that I will be called names or end in a prison camp or be forbidden to walk down the street at night.”²³

As the fight against fascism escalated and the Second World War loomed closer, Hellman increasingly perceived anti-Semitism and racism as of a piece. Her position in those years paralleled that of the Communist Party, which, during the Popular Front period from the mid-thirties to the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, promoted the values of brotherhood and recognized suffering as a universal condition engendered by capitalism. But the party also advocated acculturating “nationalities,” including Jews, in order to create solidarity across group lines. It supported activities like mandolin orchestras, folk singing, and summer camps that encouraged young people to take pride in their Jewish identities not for their own sake but as vehicles for social change.

In the spring of 1939, Hammett became the editor of a new Communist Party–sponsored monthly journal called Equality, whose masthead proclaimed its mission “to defend democratic rights and combat anti-Semitism and racism.” The bold purpose of the journal, on whose editorial board Lillian Hellman was listed along with Bennett Cerf, Moss Hart, Louis Kronenberger, Donald Ogden Stewart (of the SWG), and Dorothy Parker, was to “combat every expression of defeatism among the Jews, to expose all fascist conspiracies in the United States and to defend the rights of labor and all minorities in this country.”²⁴ Inspired and funded by the Communist Party, the journal was nevertheless praised by leaders of the Jewish community, who normally kept their distance from communism in any form. With the U.S. entry into war, Hellman’s efforts on behalf of racial justice escalated. Like other progressives, she sought “to use the outsider experience and the experience of discrimination to make common cause with other outsiders.”²⁵Hellman became particularly active in the struggle to end racial discrimination in the armed services, appearing on platforms with Paul Robeson to promote that cause and chairing luncheons to raise money for it. The FBI kept close track of her efforts on this score, deeming them subversive.²⁶

Hellman’s generalized condemnation of racism and anti-Semitism in all their forms got her into trouble when she wrote her only overtly antifascist play, Watch on the Rhine. Produced in 1941, the play focuses on the tensions generated in an American family when a German anti-Nazi fighter bringing his American-born wife and children to safety in the United States confronts a family guest who threatens to reveal his presence to German intelligence. The play forcefully advocated abandoning passivity to enter the war in order to defend the freedoms Americans valued. The argument ran counter to the policies of both the Soviet Union (which was still allied with Germany in a peace pact) and the United States (which was still formally neutral). Hellman chose not to comment on the specifically anti-Semitic activities of Germany at the time; she pleaded instead for people to join in resistance to anti-democratic regimes, for courage and bravery in the face of abusive power. Consistent with her resistance to racism wherever it appeared, she depicted the Nazis as bullies, their attack directed against freedom everywhere.

In the context of the moment, Watch on the Rhine resonated differently with different groups. The play appeared at a time when, fearing outbursts of anti-Semitism, influential American Jews made little public noise about Hitler’s atrocities. Some Jewish critics distanced themselves from its message, wondering if it was a critique of their stance, while others attacked Hellman for neglecting to name Jews as pivotal targets in the fascist dream of an ethnically cleansed world. To Hellman, the larger morality involved in the brutal assertions of fascist power over many forms of human life seemed more important than identifying specific victims. It was wrong, she argued, to humiliate and beat up people in the streets, to take away their livelihoods and deport them—wrong no matter whether they were communists, gypsies, homosexuals, or Jews. In this sense, Hellman understood her identity as a Jew as deeply entwined with her commitment to human freedom and democracy. The White House recognized this sensibility when it scheduled the play for a command performance that the president and Mrs. Roosevelt both attended. The performance took place less than two months after the United States entered the war.

Hellman’s decision to speak to the universal theme of human brutality rather than to name Jews as particular victims in Watch on the Rhine tells us something about the politics of the moment. To her, Jews certainly constituted victims of fascism, but they were not the only victims. She devoted many hours during the war to specifically Jewish causes, to be sure, but just as many to the victimization of others. Among her commitments, she raised money for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a creature of the Soviet Communist Party intended to generate money and support for the Soviet Union when it went to war against Germany. In 1943, the JAFC sponsored the visits of Itzik Feffer (a beloved Yiddish poet well known in the American Jewish community) and Solomon Mikhoels (actor and director of Moscow’s distinguished Yiddish-language theater). Hellman, along with notables like Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall, and Charlie Chaplin, served as part of a welcoming committee.

1943: Hellman was thinking about what it meant to be a Jew. (Photofest)

But other incidents suggest that Hellman was thinking about what it meant to be a Jew. As she moved between worlds, some of them rich, narrow-minded, and reactionary, others cosmopolitan, intellectual, and feisty, she developed a more specific concern for anti-Semitism. Hellman’s script for The North Star—a prizewinning film about the brutal invasion of a peaceful Ukrainian village by German troops—includes an otherwise inexplicable exchange between two German military physicians that reveals the anti-Semite as the more brutal of the two. As the superior, Von Harden, is about to draw blood from helpless children, he is confronted by a subordinate who challenges his medical ethics. The superior defends himself, boasting that he was the most famous pupil of Dr. Freedenthal at the University of Leipzig.

DR. RICHTER:    Freedenthal, the Jew?

VON HARDEN:    Yes, Freedenthal the Jew.

DR. RICHTER:    You did not mind his being a Jew?

VON HARDEN:    Mind? I never thought about it in those days.²⁷

This episode, along with Hellman’s wartime diary documenting her trip to Russia toward the end of the war, suggests just how much the question of what it meant to be a Jew permeated her consciousness. Her diary notes the Jewish identities of those she encountered along the way and comments critically on their dress, behavior, and generosity. One of her dinner companions, she noticed just a week after her arrival on November 7, 1944, was an American she described as “vicious with anti-Semitism.”²⁸ A short time later, she attributed the absence of engaged political conversation to the scarcity of Jews among her companions. She had spent the evening conversing with Russians who spoke about leading Western artists such as Sargeant, Titian, and DaVinci in the most abstract terms. The experience led her to ask not about the stifling of political curiosity but “is the Jewish Intellectual anywhere?”²⁹ On her way to the front on December 26, 1944, she reacted negatively to a New York Times reporter who accompanied her for part of the trip: “Mr. Lawrence scared me as all who aren’t afraid and aren’t Jews I guess, always do. Then I’m like the Jewish shopkeeper during a pogrom rumor.”³⁰ When, toward the end of her trip, she met a sympathetic young man whose sister, an army doctor, was killed in Sevastopol, she added a parenthetical comment to her notes about the meeting: “Joseph was a Jew, I think.”³¹

Once home, Hellman maintained her interest in Jewish causes supporting refugees, accepting honors from groups like the American Jewish Congress, Women’s American ORT, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. As late as 1950, she accepted a Woman of Achievement award from the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations.³² And yet Russian anti-Semitism remained invisible to Hellman long after she should have begun to notice it. She did not distance herself from the Soviet Union when, after supporting the creation of the state of Israel, the Soviets changed their line and refused to recognize the distinctive claims of Jews as special victims of genocide. Nor did she see Stalin’s increasing paranoia against Jews in his regime. To her everlasting shame, she did not comment when Jewish writers and artists, many of whom she met and admired, were singled out for persecution. She uttered no public word when the poet Itzik Feffer and the director of the Yiddish theater, Solomon Mikhoels—whom she had warmly welcomed to the United States in 1943—died in Soviet prisons.³³

Hellman’s blindness to Soviet anti-Semitism in the late forties and early fifties and her continued faith in the possibilities of a Soviet state in spite of its persecution of Jews contributed to the sense that she was a non-Jewish Jew, even an anti-Semitic Jew. If before the war to be a Jew had meant to be against fascism, and a claim to invisibility gone unremarked upon, the wartime extermination of millions of Jews, among others, brought issues of identity to the fore. Jews, especially intellectual Jews, in the words of Alfred Kazin, now lived “at the edge of the abyss,” vulnerable because they had put their faith in the life of the mind, which had failed them.³⁴

At the time, the latent anti-Semitism of the prewar period seemed to lift. New educational opportunities and home mortgages provided by the GI bill resulted in a dramatic expansion of the middle class, of which Jews took full advantage. They moved into the new suburbs, entered universities and the professions, and acquired respected political positions at a rapid pace. This did not mean an end to gentlemen’s agreements that denied Jews admission to the best clubs or law firms. But it did mean an increasing willingness on their part to fight for access. Many Jews who had willingly shed religion and tradition before 1939 began to protest their exclusion, to question the meaning of being Jewish, and to identify once again with their Jewish roots. Magazines like Partisan Review and the new Commentary spoke for this group. Men like Philip Rahv and William Phillips turned from more left-wing positions to a Jewish-identified stance. Arthur Miller commented later that he had been surprised by the numbers of his generation who, after the war, “began to contribute to something called temple.”³⁵

The fight over the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 aided and abetted a new consciousness by producing a healthy debate over a Jewish homeland as Jews of all kinds began to wonder whether their identity did not ultimately reside in identification with the new and vulnerable state. Hellman, along with many on the left, supported the creation of the Jewish state, though she quickly lost interest in it. But now the Jewish left fragmented once more. A surge of Zionist enthusiasm led some to fight in Israel’s war for independence: to them the new state represented both a home for persecuted Jews and a haven for restorative justice. To partisans of the left, Israel constituted hope for a social-democratic option. As Zionism attached itself to liberal and anticommunist Jewish opinion, those like Hellman who remained unconvinced of its centrality in creating a better world became suspect.³⁶

By the early fifties, Israel had become something of a litmus test among Jews. Jewish nationalism required primary allegiance to the imperiled refuge of a beleaguered European Jewry. Hellman, never a Zionist, withheld enthusiastic support. Her stance diverged from that of the Eastern European intellectuals with whom she had allied herself on many issues before and during the war. Liberal, anticommunist, and pro-Israel: their Eastern European Jewish culture and origins worn proudly on their sleeves, New York intellectuals, in the postwar years, came to depart from their former stance as minimalist Jews to understand themselves as distinctively Jewish-Americans. New and sparklingly successful writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth soon came to root their work in refugee and immigrant cultures, drawing their heroes and their stories from the Bronx and Brooklyn and Newark, New Jersey, and from the children these cities produced. Their position with respect to Israel became a decisive factor for identification of a brutally destroyed minority. Hellman never passed the test. As Norman Podhoretz noted later, he broke relations with Hellman because he was violently offended by her “extreme hostility (or perhaps hatred would be a better word)” to Israel.³⁷

The Cold War mentality, too, helped to highlight the particular role of Jews in politics—almost universally identifying their stance as communists, fellow travelers, or, in the jargon of the period, “pink.” To be sure, in the thirties and forties Jews constituted a disproportionately large and visible segment of the country’s small number of organized communists. Some thought the committee hearings and investigations of the McCarthy period sought not only to unmask secret communists but to test the patriotism of Jewish radicals as well.³⁸ The procedures of the McCarthy period did little to ameliorate suspicion. The House Un-American Activities Committee that subpoenaed its first victims in 1948 went after Hollywood, according to most accounts, because the movie industry was heavily staffed by Jews who were identified with left-wing causes.³⁹ Six of the famous Hollywood Ten who were blacklisted and sent to jail were Jews. One committee member, John Rankin, was an avowed anti-Semite who had once referred to Walter Winchell as “a little slime-mongering kike.”⁴⁰ It didn’t help that there were Jews on both sides. Martin Gang, the Hollywood lawyer who became the clearance agent for Hollywood celebrities, was also a Jew. Nor did it help that Jews were implicated in some of the famous spy cases of the period. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg constitute only the best-known examples.

Around the same time, word of the trials and subsequent executions of Jewish poets and artists in the Soviet Union reached the West, shattering what remained of the image of the Soviet Union as a tolerant nation. Jewish intellectuals who had once thought of themselves primarily as socialists of one kind or another turned a painful gaze onto the nature of authoritarian personalities and totalitarianism of the left as well as the right. We began to recognize, says Irving Howe, that “there was now a greater enemy by far—the totalitarian state, sometimes of the Right, sometimes of the Left.”⁴¹ But, as Howe notes, in 1952 a “totalitarianism of the left” seemed “the harder to cope with and, thereby, in a sense, more terrifying.” Howe handled the dilemma by becoming a democratic socialist. But many others shed any hope for socialism and turned sharply toward what would become known as free-market democracy.

Hellman, not yet ready to make the break and not convinced that her Jewish identity should impinge on her politics, faced a set of difficult choices. During all this turmoil, Jewish community leaders feared an outburst of anti-Semitism. Leaders of national Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Anti-Defamation League, and many others responded to McCarthyism not by demanding that the hearings stop but by cleansing their own houses of communists and joining in the attack on communists in general. Leading Jewish intellectuals split, many of them not only recanting their former beliefs but branding those who could not or would not do so as Stalinists. A horrified Hellman, herself banned from the film industry, immediately labeled those who would not speak up “cowardly bastards.” Just a few years later she would tell her friend Bill Alfred that she no longer cared “about those so-called friends who never lifted a finger to protest the ban.”⁴² But now she was an outlier. The lions among the intellectual Jews (people like Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, and Barbara and Jason Epstein) founded or became active in magazines such as Encounter and Commentary. Some of these organs became vehicles of a new politics, unashamedly Jewish, pro-Israel, anticommunist, and moralistic.

In this context, whether or not one was a Jew mattered, and to be a Jew who did not denounce Stalin, whose murderous purges many now equated with Hitler’s slaughter, immediately drew suspicions of being a self-hating Jew.⁴³ Hellman, who took a brave position for civil liberties and freedom of speech in 1952, took no public position in the debate over totalitarianism. She simply dropped out of it. Her silence as well as her hostility to Zionism fueled suspicions about a possible hostility to Judaism. In the context of the postwar turn toward Jewish identity, Hellman’s brand of “international” antiracism seemed particularly suspicious. While the intellectuals around Partisan Review, Commentary, and other influential journals adapted to the postwar environment, Hellman appeared increasingly rigid. By the mid-1950s, whispers of Hellman’s continuing Stalinism mingled with allegations about whether she too might be a self-hating Jew.

This was the background behind attacks on Hellman around the publication and stage adaptation of the diary of Anne Frank, a subject worth exploring because it enacts the alliance of heightened Jewish nationalism and anticommunism. Together they created a political vortex in which Hellman found herself spinning, turning what might have been a trivial conflict into one with a much larger significance. The enormously popular diary, written by the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Dutch Jewish family who had hidden in an Amsterdam loft, appeared in Dutch, German, and French before it was finally published in English in 1952. Journalist and author Meyer Levin read the diary in French and contacted Otto Frank (Anne’s father and the only surviving member of the family) to see if he might play a role in its English-language publication. In the event the book was published by Doubleday, without Levin’s intervention.⁴⁴

Encouraged by Otto Frank and hoping to reach a larger audience, Levin then prepared a theatrical treatment of The Diary of a Young Girl. His purpose, he would later write, was to bring to the public “the voice from the mass grave.”⁴⁵

In Levin’s mind, Anne Frank’s diary spoke to the specifically Jewish suffering engendered by the Nazi policy of extermination. He and many others read the diary as a tribute to the six million Jews who had died and as a memorial to their brutal executions. In contrast, the diary was read by many, including Anne’s father, as a more generic tribute to human suffering. The Soviet Union, still wounded by the loss of twenty million civilians and soldiers, took a similar line around the Jewish question. It acknowledged Jews as a symbol of universal suffering but did not focus on them alone. These differences led Levin to target Lillian Hellman as the architect of the rejections that would follow.

Levin’s dramatic treatment got short shrift. Herman Shumlin, Hellman’s now-estranged longtime producer, refused the play because he thought audiences wouldn’t come to a play about “people they know to have ended up in the crematorium.”⁴⁶ Cheryl Crawford, an equally distinguished producer, considered the play at length. She turned it down after she asked for the opinion of good friends, including Hellman. Asking Hellman’s advice should have surprised no one. She was then a dominant figure in the literary world, her critical judgment highly valued. Writers as talented as Saul Bellow turned to her for criticism and advice, which she generously gave. Bellow commented at one point that he was reduced to misery by Hellman’s judgment that what he had written was “admirable, but not a play.”⁴⁷

Hellman read the play and didn’t like it, commenting only that it had little dramatic content. Crawford turned it down but suggested that Kermit Bloomgarden, producer of Hellman’s most recent play, The Autumn Garden, might be willing to produce it; Bloomgarden, too, refused. In the face of all these rejections, Otto Frank backed out of his commitment to Levin. Grateful to Levin for resurrecting the diary in English and reluctant to offend him, he nevertheless turned to other avenues to ensure that a play based on the diary would finally see the light of day. Bloomgarden took a new option on the diary and asked his old friend Lillian Hellman to suggest new writers. Soon the newspapers announced that Albert and Frances Goodrich Hackett had been commissioned to write a new play.

Meyer Levin now began to wonder whether he had been somehow blacklisted. He was convinced that the diary should be produced as it existed, with Anne’s consciousness of suffering as a Jew intact. He could not imagine any better interpreter of the diary than himself. Only an anti-Jewish conspiracy, he believed, could account for his dismissal; only a “merciless critical cabal” of communists was powerful enough to explain the play’s rejection.⁴⁸ Now he began, publicly, to talk about “possible ideological intrusion in the handling of the Jewish content of the Diary.”⁴⁹The implication was clear. He blamed anti-Semitic communists for suppressing his version of the diary.

The Hacketts had been Lillian’s companions during her early days in Hollywood. Well known in Hollywood circles, they had successfully brought Hammett’s Thin Man stories to the screen and had since written a range of prizewinning films including It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Easter Parade (1948), and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), which was then in production. To Levin, however, they had two serious flaws: they were not Jews, and they were closely associated with Hammett and Hellman, in his mind two of Hollywood’s leading communists. It did not help that the Soviet Union was, at this moment, persecuting and executing Jewish writers. Levin, putting together his own interpretation of events, accused Hellman of blindly following a communist party line that denigrated Jewish suffering in deference to the human tragedy that the Holocaust represented. Hellman, he insisted, had exercised undue influence over Bloomgarden: she was a communist and an anti-Semite.⁵⁰

In desperation, Levin began what would become a lifelong campaign to produce his version of the diary. He wrote endless letters to Otto Frank begging for a chance to try his play out in Buffalo or other small venues; he took an advertisement in the New York Times claiming that he had been ousted by those who disliked his Jewish approach and accusing those who had suffered from McCarthyism of using innuendo to smear him and his reputation. He consulted distinguished lawyer Ephraim London (who reappears in our story later as Lillian’s lawyer in her suit against Mary McCarthy), who told him he had no grounds for legal action and no rights to the diary.

The Hacketts’ play, which reached Broadway in 1955 to rave reviews and an almost two-year run, presented Anne as a teenager who identified with all of suffering humanity rather than as an Anne whose Jewish God had allowed her people “to suffer so terribly up to now.” Levin could not be controlled. Anne’s words had been altered to omit any hint of her Jewish identity and consciousness, he argued; the family’s commitment to Judaism had disappeared; one could hardly tell why they were in hiding. And the Hacketts were, in his view, guilty of plagiarism. They had quoted some of the same words from the diary that he had selected for his play. Small matter to him that by now Otto Frank wanted the play to provide a message that would embrace its audience, nor that the director Garson Kanin, agreed with the playwrights that removing most of the Jewish ritual, as well as references to Nazis and concentration camps, would yield a play whose audiences didn’t have to be Jewish to identify with it. The play’s heartfelt critical and popular reception suggests that it spoke effectively to its 1950s audience, affirming the accuracy of Hellman’s commercial instinct. In a decade when few were ready to come to terms with the Holocaust—indeed the word did not yet exist in the common vocabulary—the play hit the right note. Whatever the morality of the Hackett’s decision to de-emphasize the Jewish theme, it is plausible that any other interpretation would have failed to reach its mark.

Tortured by the successful production, Meyer Levin first sued the Hacketts for plagiarism, and when that proved unsuccessful, he launched attacks on Bloomgarden and Hellman. To explain his rejection, Levin settled on the notion that he had been victimized by nothing less than Stalinism, and that Hellman (whom he characterized as an assimilationist German Jew) was at the center of a conspiracy against him and all Jews of his ilk. From the start, he later wrote, he “had suspected that some doctrinaire formulation rather than pure dramatic judgment had caused Miss Hellman’s attack on my play and after the substitute work was written, I became convinced that I had been banned because my work was in her political view ‘too Jewish.’”⁵¹ Neither the fact that others (including Otto Frank) shared Hellman’s view nor that Hellman had been only marginally involved deterred Levin. And the commercial success of the Hackett play infuriated him. In his eyes, Hellman had simply followed a party line that obfuscated Jewish suffering in a shroud of more generic hatred that was also directed at gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, and communists.

Little evidence supports the notion that Hellman was central to the diary’s transition to the stage and then to the screen.⁵² At the height of the McCarthy period, Hellman could hardly have been a major player, even had she wanted to be one. Hellman did suggest the Hacketts as writers, and she read their script toward the end, offering some suggestions for staging. As was her habit, she invested a small sum (in this case $750) in the company that staged the play. The play, and the movie that emerged four years later, were so successful that over the years she managed to make a tidy amount from them. The total (about $25,000 over fourteen years) suggests the validity of her instincts about what made a good dramatic story.⁵³

Despite Hellman’s tangential association with the play, its producer, and its playwrights, Levin continued to attack Hellman both as a self-hating Jew and as a Stalinist. Over the course of two decades he brought one unsuccessful lawsuit after another and signed agreements to desist from accusations that he routinely violated. He accepted compensation not to seek productions of his play, then claimed exemptions; he agreed to stop talking publicly about the diary and continued to do so. The campaign drew many supporters in the Jewish community. Norman Podhoretz would say later that one reason he stopped speaking to Lillian Hellman was her “de-Judaization” of the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Hellman responded to these attacks wearily. She could not, she wrote to her friend Bill Alfred in 1959, sue Levin, because she lacked the money. And she did not know if she would, even if she had the resources. “Now I just think he’s crazy and I take my beating.”⁵⁴ Arguing that the damage had been done once Levin’s accusations were printed, she would not accept invitations to respond to them in writing: “They all know full well the harm that has been done me on this and other grounds, and they can go fuck themselves before I defend myself from the Levins of the world.”⁵⁵ As late as 1974, she complained to her lawyer that “Mr. Meyer Levin has begun the red baiting all over again.”⁵⁶

The Meyer Levin experience suggests something of the complexity of living as a secular Jew in the Cold War moment. As Hellman became caught in Levin’s obsession with his particular view of Jewishness, so the idea of what it meant to be a Jew became the subject of larger conversations and debates. Hellman’s reluctance to accede to the primacy of identification as a Jew, her recalcitrance in the face of the successful politics of the new Jewish nationalism, made her a perfect target. To her, a literature rooted in the Jewish immigrant tradition appeared to be only a momentary fad. Though she admired Arthur Miller and read Philip Roth, she did not see their work as great literature, nor believe that its use of Jews successfully captured the larger social meanings she thought important. When, in the early sixties, she tried to play in this ballpark by adapting Burt Blechman’s novel My Mother, My Father and Me into a stage play, she failed miserably. The play, like the book, meant to satirize the purposeless new middle class, whose lives contained no trace of old-world values of caring and community. But the satire is rooted in a Jewish family, and when it turns into a multipronged attack on the aimlessness of children, on business practices, on old-age homes, Hellman exposes her own bitterness about the failure of family life in general and Jewish family life in particular. Lacking empathy for Eastern European immigrant communities and without patience for the self-centered aimlessness of young people, Hellman turned family relationships into a parody of racism and materialism. What she had intended as comedy emerged as vulgar parody.

The play she wrote featured a businessman husband who flirted daily with bankruptcy as he tried to control a spendthrift wife. Their twenty-six-year-old son lacks external or internal constraints. When the wife’s elderly immigrant mother briefly joins the family, she exposes their inauthentic feelings about the importance of kin. As she treads on the toes of the African-American helper, she also challenges the shallow liberal ideals of those for whom status and comfort are final goals. Retreating to a nursing home, the grandmother cashes in her funeral policy to support the youth’s effort to find himself. Hellman skewers his search in a final scene where, masquerading in Indian costume, he is shown selling doodads to tourists. Filled with black humor and rife with casual racism, the play offered such a barren and hopeless portrait of Jewish family life that it closed after only seventeen performances. Its lead player, Walter Matthau, himself a Jew, told Hellman the play was anti-Semitic.⁵⁷

As American Jewish identity shaped itself around nostalgia for the Eastern European past and pinned its hopes on Israel, so it also encompassed a growing antagonism to the Soviet communism that now added anti-Semitism to its other sins. In the Cold War years, intellectuals rushed to join the ranks of anticommunism, claiming fervent opposition to the Soviet Union while insisting that they had not abandoned the humane values of their younger days. But the vortex of anticommunism allowed little space for maneuvering. Hellman, still committed to the larger values of social justice, egalitarianism, and antiracism, seemed to give comfort to Soviet-style communism, to aid and abet enemies of democracy and the free market. Hellman’s decision to remain loyal to values that had seemed self-evident before the war negated the new Americanism of the postwar period. To be pro-American meant signing on to free-market democracy. For Jews, this meant a movement away from the goals of shared responsibility and economic security that characterized the Roosevelt period; it meant a pull toward the new liberalism of individualism, consumption, and philanthropy. The old values, so consistent with the Americanism of the 1930s, became, in the context of the fifties, outdated. Hellman was out of step, her claims to decency, honesty, and loyalty to friends now confronted by the animus of a newly influential group of Jewish intellectuals.

There was a repressed tension in this debate about what it meant to be a Jew. Martin Peretz, then still a graduate student at Harvard and soon to become editor of the New Republic, described himself as “Jewish Jewish” in the years when he and his wife befriended and remained close to Hellman. Commenting to her on his relief that blacklisted writers began writing again for the movies less than fifteen years after the blacklists, he noted to her, “It wasn’t like the Soviet Yiddish writers who were all shot.” He remembers Hellman replying, “Always, always the Jews, Marty.”⁵⁸

Years later, Norman Podhoretz confirmed the tension between himself and Hellman on the subject. Recalling their relationship in the sixties—when Podhoretz was the newly appointed editor of Commentary magazine—he declared himself to have been disturbed by “Lillian’s attitude toward Jews in general and toward Israel in particular. She never denied being Jewish herself … But she also had a streak of Jewish anti-Semitism which came out … in cracks or sardonic comments about the vulgarity or the tastelessness of some ‘kike’ or other.”⁵⁹ He attributed this to her German-Jewish background and to her “radicalism.” In the end, he tells us, it was her “blind and blinding hatred of America” that led to the end of the relationship. What Podhoretz described as a blinding hatred of America seemed just the opposite to Hellman. When the students of the 1960s began to organize and become political, Hellman applauded their efforts. What she described as spunky, Commentary called “Anti-American.” Hellman’s strenuous objection to the use of this vocabulary—she said it reminded her of “un-American”—led to a final break. At the core of the tension between her and Podhoretz lay their very different perceptions of what it meant to be a Jew in America. Hellman’s identity as a Jew melded into a larger cultural commitment to Americanism that most definitely included the capacity to dissent. Podhoretz placed a Jewish identity in the forefront of his value system.

The difference between Hellman and the group of Jewish intellectuals who lived in an uneasy truce with her came to a head in 1976 when Hellman published her account of her painful experience before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The book attributed the silence of intellectuals at the time to nineteenth-century immigration. “The children of immigrants are often remarkable people: energetic, intelligent, hardworking; and often they make it so good that they are determined to keep it at any cost,” she wrote in Scoundrel Time.⁶⁰ To make her meaning absolutely clear, she singled out the Partisan Review, Commentary, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Kristol, and others for having “made no protest when people in this country were jailed or ruined.”⁶¹

Hellman spoke out of a sense of betrayal that she could not shake. These were her people who had not spoken up, her people—as intellectuals and as Jews—who had abandoned her. “I had no right to think that American intellectuals were people who would fight for anything if doing so would injure them,” she wrote in Scoundrel Time. To the outside world this sounded like, and was, an attack on liberals writ large. But the now-disintegrated New York intellectuals heard in the words the recriminations of the German Jew. Children of immigrants, long uncomfortable with Hellman’s outsider stance, they took her to task for many things, among them her effort to label them as the frightened children of immigrants. They accused her of snobbishness, of using her privileged German-Jewish background to obscure political differences. As Sidney Hook noted, caustically, her attack on “anti-Communist liberals … betrays the priggishness of the unconsciously would-be assimilated 100% American whose ancestors had reached American shores a few boatloads ahead of other immigrants.”⁶²

Hellman insisted that she “meant nothing snobbish” by the statement. “My family were immigrants once upon a time, too. We all were,” she told an interviewer.⁶³ But her defenses made things worse. In the seventies, as in the thirties and the fifties, she found herself in a different camp from many of her fellow Jews. Then as earlier, the notion that “Jews” constituted a coherent political or identity group appalled her. She thought of them as neither particularly liberal nor radical. Southern Jews, in particular, had a wide variety of political opinions: “I find no solid liberal strain in the Southern Jew, East or German, or in the Southern goy, French, Scottish, or English,” she wrote. And she added, “The South made for many good things—maybe the best writers of our time—but it made very few rebels or reformers, then or now, Jew or non-Jew.”⁶⁴ Self-interest, she was convinced, played as great a role in the racially egalitarian commitments of Jews as did humane inclinations. She once described herself as a “toilet-trained Jew,” and therefore acceptable to some who despised “just plain Jew.”⁶⁵

Sadly for Hellman, this stance turned out to fan the flames of a defensive and torn post–World War II American Jewry. In a period when claims to Jewish nationalism and particularism vied with assertions of the representative and universal nature of Jewish suffering, Hellman found herself on one side of a struggle whose meaning she never fully understood. Except under the threat of fascism, she had never flaunted or announced her Jewish identity. But the 1950s witnessed the emergence, as key players in the intellectual and political life of the nation, of Jews who identified strongly with a particular Jewish heritage and with Israel. When she maintained her prewar stance, insisting that her Jewish identity was merely part of a larger, more universal humanism, Hellman turned into the perfect lightning rod, attracting widespread criticism among Jews who believed that universalism was merely a cover for continuing loyalty to the Soviet Union. She was neither the first nor the only Jew to be accused of being an anti-Semitic and self-hating Jew. Influential art critic Clement Greenberg, novelist Philip Roth in the early sixties, and philosopher Hannah Arendt, a little later, all came under scrutiny.⁶⁶ But in Hellman’s case, her continuing refusal to denounce the Soviet Union—the growing public sense that she remained a fellow traveler—lent fuel to the fire. From another perspective, Hellman’s stance suggests that her world remained that of the southern Jew, for whom religion was a peripheral part of her life and her identity. Her live-and-let-live attitude—the attitude she had absorbed as a child in New Orleans—turned her into a vehicle for channeling the frustrations of those who demanded a different standard. It also affirmed a political stance that Hellman understood as quintessentially American.