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Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story. By M. M. Silver. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. 266 pp.
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 shiftin 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 disjunc tion 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...