Brown Bag Biography: Julien Gorbach

"The Ben Hecht Story: Lessons of the Holocaust for the Age of Trump"

What does America’s response to the Holocaust have to do with the controversies we face today in the Trump era, over white supremacy, immigration, fake news, threats to democracy and “America First”? Dr. Gorbach will discuss the life, work and current relevance of Ben Hecht, the legendary “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” a Chicago crime reporter and leading Hollywood screenwriter who played a critical role in history by shattering the American media silence about the Nazi’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Hecht’s calls to save “the soul of man” is the focus of his recently published biography, The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue University Press, 2019).

Julien Gorbach, author of The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist Boston native Julien Gorbach is an assistant professor of journalism in the School of Communications at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Gorbach earned his doctorate at the Missouri School of Journalism, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years. His book The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist was published by Purdue University Press. His essay “Not Your Grandpa’s Hoax: A Comparative History of Fake News,” appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of American Journalism, and his studies about Hecht have been published in Journalism History and Literary Journalism Studies.

Ticket Information
Free and Open to the Public

Event Sponsor
The Center for Biographical Research, The School of Communications, The Department of History, and Composition and Rhetoric , Mānoa Campus

More Information
Janet Graham, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

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