Sidney Lumet's Legacy of Zionism, Civil Rights & hasbara

Academy Award winning film director Sidney Lumet, who passed away on April 9 at age 86, is remembered for classics such as “Twelve Angry Men,” the courtroom drama that challenged racial prejudice and which Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has cited as a major influence on her career.


What is not widely known is that before he became a director, Lumet, as a young actor, was at the center of a 1940s controversy in Baltimore involving Zionist activists and the fight over racial segregation.

In the summer of 1946, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors languished in Displaced Persons camps in postwar Europe. The British refused to let them enter Mandatory Palestine, for fear of alienating the Arabs. In New York City, the Jewish activists known as the Bergson Group came up with a new way to publicize the survivors’ plight: a Broadway play. They called it “A Flag is Born.”

Ben Hecht, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter, was active in the Bergson Group. So were the Adlers, the “first family” of the Yiddish theater. Hecht wrote the script for “A Flag is Born.” Luther Adler directed it. Adler’s half-sister Celia and another ex-Yiddish theater star,Paul Muni, costarred as elderly Holocaust survivors straggling through postwar Europe. Their sister Stella, the statuesque actress and acting coach, cast her most promising student, 22 year-old Marlon Brando, in the role of David, a passionate young Zionist who encounters the elderly couple in a cemetery. Celia Adler’s son, Prof. Selwyn Freed, told me: “When my mother came home from the first rehearsal, she said of Brando, ‘I can’t remember his name, but boy, is he talented’.The actors all performed for the Screen Actors Guild minimum wage, as a gesture of solidarity with the Zionist cause.

“Flag” played for ten sold-out weeks at Manhattan’s Alvin Theater (today known as the Neil Simon Theater). British critics hated it. The London Evening Standard called it “the most virulent anti-British play ever staged in the United States.” American reviewers were kinder. Walter Winchell said “Flag” was “worth seeing, worth hearing, and worth remembering…it will wring your heart and eyes dry…bring at least eleven handkerchiefs.”


Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of the political weekly The Nation, was a teenage usher who collected contributions for the Bergson Group after each performance. “The buckets were always full,” he told me. “The audiences were extremely enthusiastic about the play’s message. For me, too, it was a political awakening about the right of the Jews to have their own state.”

After New York City, “Flag” was performed in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Baltimore (and, reportedly, in a DP camp in Europe). Brando’s contractual obligations prevented him from taking part in the out of town shows. He was replaced by Sidney Lumet.

Lumet was just 22 at the time, but as the son of Yiddish actors Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, he had been on stage since childhood and made his Broadway debut at age 11. Lumet told me that having grown up in the world of the Yiddish theater, it was “a special thrill” to perform alongside Paul Muni in “Flag.” (He did not know Brando well at that point, but Lumet would later direct him in the 1960 film “The Fugitive Kind.”)

When Lumet and the other cast members of the Broadway hit arrived in Baltimore, local reporters were clamoring for interviews. Lumet spoke to the Baltimore Sun about the inspiring struggle to rebuild the Jewish homeland. “This is the only romantic thing left in the world,” he said. “The homecoming to Palestine, the conquest of a new frontier, against all obstacles.”

On the eve of their performance at Baltimore’s Maryland Theater, controversy erupted when it turned out that the theater restricted African-Americans to the balcony. Neither Hecht nor the cast would tolerate such discrimination. The Bergson Group and the NAACP teamed up to protest: the NAACP threatened to picket, and a Bergson official announced he would bring two black friends to sit with him at the play. The management gave in, allowing African-American patrons to sit wherever they chose. NAACP leaders hailed the “tradition-shattering victory” and used it to facilitate the desegregation of other Baltimore theaters. Lumet, reflecting on the episode six decades later, told me was “very proud” of his part in the protest and “pleasantly surprised that it was so successful.”

For the Bergson Group and its supporters, the fight for civil rights in Baltimore was just as important as their fight for Jewish rights in Palestine. As Ben Hecht put it: “To fight injustice to one group of human beings affords protection to every other group.”

Sidney Lumet’s admirers will remember his extraordinary talents as a filmmaker when they enjoy watching “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” or “Twelve Angry Men.” But it’s also worth remembering the role he played in the real-life fight for justice six decades ago.

Now all the plays being written for political purposes are anti-Israel.

We can learn a lot from the Bergson Group in the 1940s.
Elder of Ziyon

Civil Rights Progress

* In 1958, fully 94 percent of respondents to a Gallup Poll opposed interracial marriages.

* In 1959, 53 percent said that the Brown decision “caused more trouble than it was worth.”

* By 1964, 62 percent supported a law to guarantee blacks "the right to be served in any retail store, restaurant, hotel or public accommodation," according to a Harris survey.

* Only one in five said they sided with Alabama authorities when police broke up a protest march in Selma in 1965.

* By 1964, a majority of the U.S. population said they supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act and opposed segregation laws.

* By 2003, 73 percent said they approved of interracial marriage and 90 percent said they would be willing to vote for a Black presidential candidate.

Sharon Smith, Counterpunch

Is Al Sharpton the Last Standing for Civil Rights?

Al Sharpton: American

If three cops get their kicks by puncturing your tender pink body with 50 bullet holes, will anyone run riot to object?

The lunatic fringe right makes heroes of rogue cops and murderous high officials.

Only Al Sharpton presses for street demonstrations to oppose the right wing thugs. We must go to England for this story. The right lunatic fringe controls the US MSM.

Al Sharpton revs up for strike

Charles Laurence, FirstPost.co.uk

The Rev. Al Sharpton is back in his pulpit of the street, crying for justice and threatening to bring New York City to a traffic-snarled halt.

This is not the 1980s when Reverend Al made his name by - falsely - accusing the cops of abducting a black teenager named Tawana Brawley. This is not the 1990s, when he made his name a lot more credible by - rightly - accusing the cops of gross racism and brutality in the near-killing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. It is 2008 and a New York judge has just dismissed criminal charges against three cops who loosed-off 50 bullets outside a strip club to kill an unarmed 23-year-old black man, Sean Bell, as he left his bachelor party for his wedding day.

"This city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell!" cried Sharpton (above) to his congregation of dissent in Harlem. "We know strategically how to stop the city so people stand still and realise that you do not have the right to shoot down unarmed, innocent civilians!" The crowd swayed back and forth and clapped as they sang: "Shut it down! Shut it down!"

It makes an old-time New Yorker misty-eyed. Will Manhattan explode into the riots of Los Angeles after the Rodney King Verdict let its cops off in 1992? Will we get another chapter in the saga of Sharpton, always hilariously reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's Reverend Bacon, the Harlem preacher in Bonfire of the Vanities?

Things may have changed but Sharpton, 54, just keeps rolling on. Critics who call him a charlatan have no idea of how truly he reflects his culture. At 7 he was declared the 'Wonder Boy Preacher', ordained by the famed Pentecostal Bishop F.D. Washington of Brooklyn and toured as the warm-up act for gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. At school he organised student protests and was awarded the Martin Luther King medal he always wears. Then he worked as road manager for soul singer James Brown. He teamed up with boxing promoter Don King as an adviser to Iron Mike Tyson. In 1991, he survived being stabbed by a drunken white man. He has been investigated by the FBI for everything from skimming James Brown tickets to tax evasion to allegedly brokering a deal between Don King and the Columbian cocaine cartel.

Sharpton knows what it is like to be a black man in America. That is why he appeals to the street. In 2004, he ran as gadfly for the Democrat presidential nomination, but in this year's contest he has played an equally significant role. Sharpton is the man who Barack Obama is so determinedly not. Obama was the candidate not black enough to get the black vote until the Clintons blew it on race. Now he is the black candidate whose wife Michelle and preacher Jeremiah Wright might prove a little too black for the white vote.

Nobody ever had cause to doubt where Sharpton kept his heart. New York will find out this week whether its Reverend Al still has the clout to block the streets and shut the town. We can count on Barack Obama to stay as far away as possible. And that is why we sort of love Al Sharpton these days. He might well be the last person we'd vote for. But at least we would know why.