Adina Hoffman

Adina Hoffman is an essayist and biographer. She is the author of four previous books, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. Ben Hecht was, according to Pauline Kael, “the greatest American screenwriter.” Jean-Luc Godard called him “a genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts—including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious— Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine’s Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared “child of the century” came to embody much that defined America—especially Jewish America—in his time.
In Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (Yale University Press) Adina Hoffman offers a vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. He was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman—biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics—is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes. David Denby wrote in The New Yorker that “Adina Hoffman’s superb [book]… loads Hecht’s staggering contradictions into a compact but abounding two hundred twenty pages…. She writes with enormous flair.”