When Celebrities Endorsed a Different “Free Palestine”

The rapper Macklemore is not the first cultural celebrity to champion the cause of “Free Palestine.” But when many of America’s leading celebrities called for a “Free Palestine” eighty years ago this week, they were talking about freeing Palestine from British occupation, in order to establish a Jewish state.

The pro-Zionist play “A Flag is Born” debuted on Broadway in September 1946, starring a sensational young actor named Marlon Brando. The play was organized by the American League for a Free Palestine (AFLP), a political action committee better known as the Bergson Group.

Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors were languishing in postwar Europe in the autumn of 1946, and the British were preventing them from reaching the Holy Land. Academy Award-winning screen writer Ben Hecht authored “A Flag is Born” to promote the cause of Jewish immigration and statehood.

The story centers on two survivors who, in a Jewish cemetery in Europe, encounter a young Zionist on his way to fight for a free Palestine—a free Jewish Palestine. In a series of emotional conversations, they talk about the biblical Jewish kingdoms, the ages-old Jewish yearning to return to the Holy Land, and the British suppression of Jewish freedom.

Brando, 22, played David, the young man. Paul Muni and Celia Adler, stars of the Yiddish theater, played the elderly couple, Tevya and Zelda. Stella Adler, the statuesque actress and acting coach, was the narrator.

In the stirring final scene, Tevya collapses and dies. David takes the prayer shawl covering his body and fashions it into a Zionist flag, symbolizing the rebirth of Jewish nationhood after the Holocaust.

“When the Zionist flag was raised in the final scene, with Kurt Weill’s music in the background, it sent a chill through the audience,” the late Miriam Chaikin, author and Bergson Group activist, told me. “It sounded a note of hope, it stirred feelings of pride and strength that had lain dormant in Jewish hearts for too long.”

Chaikin said her brother Joseph, later the founder of New York City’s famous Open Theater, was inspired to go into acting and directing after accompanying her to a performance of “Flag.”

As a gesture of solidarity, Brando and his colleagues performed in “A Flag is Born” for the minimum Actors’ Guild wage. Brando championed the Jewish cause offstage, too. He became, as he put it, “a kind of traveling salesman” for the ALFP, giving speeches around the country about the international community’s abandonment of the Jews during the Holocaust and the need for a Jewish state.

Brando was just one of many stars of stage and screen who were active in the American League for a Free Palestine. Among those whose names appeared on the many full-page newspaper ads that the AFLP sponsored, or who took part in the group’s other activities, were:

— comedians Harpo Marx, Carl Reiner, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers;

— actors Vincent Price, Jimmy Durante, Charles Blackmer (“The Great Gatsby”), Cedric Hardwicke(“The Ten Commandments”), Canada Lee (“Cry, the Beloved Country”), Harry Davenport (“Gone With the Wind”), and Katherine Warren (“The Big Sleep”);

— singers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and conductor Leonard Bernstein;

— David O. Selznick, producer of “Gone With the Wind”; Edward Buzzell, director of the Marx Brothers movies; and famed Broadway producer Max Gordon.

The British hated “A Flag is Born.” The London Evening Standard  called it “the most virulent anti-British play ever staged in the United States.” American audiences felt differently. Due to popular demand, the four-week opening run at Manhattan’s Alvin Theater (today known as the Neil Simon Theater) was extended to ten weeks.

“Flag” then hit the road for performances in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore. The latter became the subject of controversy when the theater tried to restrict African-Americans to the balcony. The ALFP and the local NAACP teamed up to force the Baltimore theater management to drop its discriminatory policy.

Exuberant NAACP leaders hailed that “tradition-shattering victory” and used it facilitate the desegregation of other Baltimore theaters in the years to follow. Hecht said the fact that it was a pro-Zionist play which dealt a blow to racism in America proved that “to fight injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group.”

There was a time when America’s leading cultural luminaries understood that Jews should be included among the minorities who deserve justice. Today, sadly, too many celebrities seem to believe that fighting injustice requires annihilating the one, tiny Jewish state and replacing it with a twenty-third Arab dictatorship.