In his book And None Shall Make Them Afraid, Rick Richman provides eight portraits (parts of which first appeared in Mosaic) of courageous Jews who played a role in the creation of the state of Israel. Alongside such better-known figures as Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, Richman examines the playwright and screenwriter Ben Hecht, who turned his considerable talents and extensive show-business connections first to alerting Americans to the Holocaust and then to raising financial support for the nascent Jewish state—in ways that were far too bold for the American Jewish establishment. Seth Mandel writes in his review:

Hecht did not live an avowedly Jewish life, and that is important. . . . In fact, the Herzls and the Hechts were the perfect Paul Reveres for precisely that reason. The observant Jew could tell you that assimilation would not save you from anti-Semitic regimes, but the plight of the secular, integrated Jew proved it. A novella published by Hecht seven months after Kristallnacht features a “global pogrom,” after which its narrator says: “We who had gone to sleep the night before on the borrowed pillow of civilization woke in the Dark Ages. . . . We were Jews again.”

Hecht himself recounted a telephone conversation with Rabbi Stephen Wise, trying to talk him out of staging his 1943 pageant about the Holocaust, We Will Never Die. Wise, then the foremost representative of American Jewry, believed it poor taste for American Jews to call public attention to the mass-murder of their coreligionists in Europe:

Hecht hung up, annoyed and unbowed. Wise may not have liked the script, but First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, in the audience when the play came to Washington, was blown away. Perhaps Hecht knew better than Wise how to get the attention of those in power: not with meek flattery but by making “the free world” stare right into its own hypocrisy and using the money from ticket prices to make sure that the Jews fighting for their survival might have the necessary guns and ammunition to do so. Ben Hecht was not sorry to bother you.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.