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By Root 380 0

flag, then exits, presumably to carry on the fight to make a homeland in Palestine. At the beginning of the second act I had a speech during which a sharp light came down from above and two other lights hit me from the side. It was a fiery, accusatory speech that began with a pause. I waited a long time after the curtain went up, then quietly said, “Where were you?” I paused again and said, “Where were you, Jews?” Another long pause, and then I started to yell at the top of my lungs, “Where were you Jews when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens? Where were you?” It sent chills through the audience, which was almost always all-Jewish, because at the time there was a great deal of soul-searching within the Jewish community over whether they had done enough to stop the slaughter of their people—some argued that they should have applied pressure on President Roosevelt to bomb Auschwitz, for example—so the speech touched a sensitive nerve. At some performances, Jewish girls got out of their seats and screamed and cried from the aisles in sadness, and at one, when I asked, “Where were you when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?” a woman was so overcome with anger and guilt that she rose and shouted back at me, “Where were you?”

At the time, I was outraged along with most people, Jews and gentiles alike, that the British were stopping ships from carrying the half-starved survivors of Hitler’s death camps to a new life—people with little food, nothing to go on except a few dried-up handfuls of hope, including children still suffering from typhus and bleeding internally. That people fresh out of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz should be stopped on the open sea by British warships and interned again behind barbed wire on Cyprus was enraging. I did not know then that Jewish terrorists were indiscriminately killing Arabs and making refugees out of them in order to take their land; nor did I understand that the British had taken it upon themselves to authorize the forced removal of millions of Arabs who had lived on that land as long as the biblical Jews had.

The play, as well as my friendship with the Adlers, helped make me a zealous advocate for Israel and later a kind of traveling salesman for it. I explained my plans in this letter to my parents shortly after the play closed:

Dear Folks:

I am now an active and integral part of a political organization, i.e., The American League for a Free Palestine. My job is to travel about the country and lecture to sympathetic groups in order to solicit money and to organize groups that will in turn get money and support us. The work will be approximately for two months. I don’t know just exactly when I’m to be sent to Chicago.

The facts concerning the Palestine conflict are little known but nonetheless shocking. You wouldn’t believe the injustices and cruelties that the British Colonial Office are capable of. I’m not being rash. We have had an intensive training period—three weeks—at the end of which there is no viewpoint that has not been presented fairly and unbiased. I am sending you some literature on the subject. We will be leaving in about a week’s time.

I am not slighting my career nor am I slacking on my job. The work that we’ll be doing won’t be easy by any matter of means. It is a tougher and vastly more responsible job than anything the theater could offer. I’m going to do my best to add my little bit. I’m really stimulated more than I’ve ever been. I must rush away now. I will write in detail later.

After volunteering to raise money, I realized that the American Jewish community was divided over the issue of just how militant Jews should be in pursuing their aspirations for a homeland. Some supported David Ben-Gurion, who while publicly seeming to acquiesce to Britain’s insistence that Jewish refugees be interned on Cyprus and other places, was secretly smuggling boatloads of them into Palestine. Others were more impatient and supported Jewish underground groups such as the Stern Gang and the Irgun