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Reviewed by:
  • Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story
  • Martin Lund
Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story, by M. M. Silver. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. 266 pp. $29.95.

Many historians of American Judaism make a point to mention the importance and impact of Leon Uris' Exodus, and of the 1960 film adaptation starring Paul Newman, on the formation of American Jewish attitudes toward Israel. Few, however, dwell overlong on how or why this text came to be so important in that capacity. With the publication of M. M. Silver's Our Exodus, the need for such exposition might be a thing of the past.

In the introduction Silver writes that what little scholarly literature there is on Uris and Exodus is marked by a pedantic focus on details of historical accuracy—what Uris got right and what he got wrong. But is history what matters about the text? Silver answers with "a resounding 'yes and no.'" As he explains: "No, errors and truths contained in Exodus's telling of the history of the founding of the Jewish state are not crucially significant because Uris's novel was not ultimately about the 'real' Israel. Yes, the way history is presented in Exodus is crucially significant because the representations reflect needs, expectations, and aspirations of Jewish identity and culture in the post-Holocaust world" (p. 8). Without Silver's saying it in so many words, then, Our Exodus is a book more about collective memory than it is a book about history.

In line with this, Silver argues that Exodus is about Jewish empowerment more than it is a book "about" Israel. Or rather, the two are inseparable in Uris's work. The success of the book owes to the linking of Jewish history with Jewish future, through recasting the past in light of present needs. For Uris, Israel was founded because it had to be, after the Holocaust. The action-oriented narrative reflects, among other things, Uris's indictment of Holocaust victims' passivity. Not Anne Frank, but the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto uprising were the teachers of the wartime lesson. As a tool for promoting his "gun-barrel theory of Jewish redemption" (p. 92), Israel "figures ultimately as a means to a supreme end of empowerment" (p. 49).

In the first chapter, Silver places Exodus within a larger framework of texts about Israel. The book was similar to many narratives that had come before, while at the same time it was something wholly other. Zionist public relations work had, in the sixty years preceding the publication of Uris' text, been marked by what can at best be classified as limited success. Many Zionist organizers had experience in the field of journalism, they knew how to talk and how to write—and they most certainly had a message. Still, it was as though their longing for a homeland could not be convincingly articulated in print. In pageants such as Peter Bergson's A Flag is Born many of the same methods [End Page 156] employed by Uris were put to great use, but neither this nor any other work, whether political, literary, or theological, could have the effect Exodus would. In the same manner, Exodus is contrasted with Mordechai Kaplan's Reconstructionist reworking of Zionism and other related cultural phenomena of the time, all of which proved insufficient in ways that Exodus was not. Only Uris managed to blend the past with the present in a way that could conflate the two in a truly compelling manner.

Next, Silver discusses Exodus and Jewish history. The book is related to Uris' own biography, his oeuvre, and to contemporary Jewish history. Matters of historical interests in the Exodus narrative do not lie in the correspondence between story elements and "actual events," but rather in the convergence in theme and spirit between those events represented and the fictional narrative. For instance, while the real-world 1947 Exodus ship affair and the representation of a ship of the same name in the Uris version differ greatly in regards to historical accuracy, they nonetheless played the same role in political and public...

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