Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story (review)

Matthew M. Silver’s monograph investigates Leon Uris’s bestselling novel Exodus and the Hollywood feature film it spawned. Surveying American popular culture in the post-World War II era, Our Exodus explores how and why Uris’s creation helped effect a shift in American attitudes toward Zionism and Israel. Exodus was “a barrier breaker and cultural trailblazer,” Silver asserts (6). With a print run of five million, the novel landed the coveted number-one spot on the New York Times fiction bestseller list in 1959. It was, according to Silver, “the milestone gem in the fulfillment of the paperback revolution” (155). How Exodus was created, produced, and marketed reveals a great deal about America’s cultural predilections, middle-class fantasies, and consumer economy in the 1950s and 1960s.

Silver’s analysis is informed by scholarship on the interrelationship of ethnic identity, nationalism, and “imagined communities” (10). Noting that Exodus “is filled with historical untruths,” he probes the disjunction between popular misperceptions and the historical record of Zionism and Israel (7). Additionally, building on work by Andrew Furman, Aviva Halamish, Stephen J. Whitfield, and others, Silver explores how “an unaffiliated, assimilated American Jew” morphed over time into a bestselling author with a talent for conveying the modern drama of Jewish state-building in terms that had mass appeal (18). Uris “never deviated from his understanding that Exodus relayed the essential truths about 1948,” Silver states (188). Though his “grasp [of history] was often very loose,” Uris was intentionalist—“Exodus is about Jewish empowerment” (61). This insight animates Silver’s masterful decoding of Exodus’s plot, structure, themes, and characters.

An intriguing strand of Our Exodus is Silver’s strategic use of images to amplify the evidentiary record. Deploying well-placed photographs and movie stills, Silver showcases the interplay of visual texts and the larger cultural-historical matrix of his study. Consider, for example, the following captions that accompany two arresting images: (1) “Zionists used hunger strikes and other zealous tactics in the postwar immigration struggle against the British, and the Exodus narrative sought Christian approval for these do-or-die efforts. Here, the American Protestant, Kitty Freemont [Eva Marie Saint] is framed as a Madonna symbol, as she listens to Ben Canaan [Paul Newman] and [Displaced Persons] mothers plot a hunger-strike protest to foil the British” (77); (2) “Uris’s own photograph of a rifle salute at the funeral of slain kibbutz pioneer and IDF soldier Roe Rutenberg. In Exodus, Uris pictured Rutenberg’s murder as a symbol of Zionist marytrdom; ironically, in Israeli culture, the same funeral became famous due to IDF chief of staff Moshe Dayan’s unconventional references to Arab grievances” (172). As a college instructor, I think such moments will be helpful to students who may profitably read Silver’s book in courses on Jewish cinema and/or modern Jewish history.

Silver argues that Exodus “became the real Israel for millions” of readers and viewers (10). His argument is most fully developed in Chapter 3, where he blends a rich understanding of Uris’s mindset and biography with a sensitive and detailed reading of the novel/movie. He also shows how Exodus reflected the country’s postwar reality (in which Jews attained recognition as a significant minority) and its growing fascination with Israel’s War of Independence as a narrative of “cowboy-Americanization” (147). “With power and effect that far surpassed any Zionist public relations effort that preceded it,” Silver writes, “Exodus popularized the Jewish state story” and tapped “the prevailing cultural concern of his era, that is, the Judeo-Christian union in a post-Holocaust melting pot” (111).

Our Exodus, stripped to its bare essentials, argues that a seminal text can be understood as causing a tectonic shift in America’s collective psyche. Is this true? The answer may depend on one’s philosophical and historical vantage point. Silver’s assumption is evident in statements like...