Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Purdue University Press Book finalist for National Jewish Book Award

January 27th, 2020

We are proud to announce that The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach has been selected as a finalist of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award, in the category of Biography. The National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 69th year, is the longest-running program of its kind in North America.

The Notorious Ben Hecht is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. Known widely for his roles in writing films like Scarface (1932), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), Hecht’s activism has often been overlooked. This book gives this part of the subject’s life its due, detailing the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at a pivotal moment in history, and about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media.

Julien Gorbach is an assistant professor in the School of Communications at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and an award-winning journalist and media historian.

You can get 30% all Purdue University Press titles by ordering from our website and using the discount code PURDUE30.