Overview

This book establishes the profound significance of MGM’s 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust. Based on Phyllis Bottome’s best seller, also titled The Mortal Storm, the film was made amidst the bitter debate that occurred between 1938 and 1941 over whether the United States should involve itself in another European war or remain an isolationist country, as Charles Lindbergh among others urged. In 1941, the film triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of Hollywood where the studios were accused of allegedly propagandizing for war. Lindbergh had secretly urged the Hollywood hearings, inspired by his own growing antisemitism, as his unpublished diary reveals. Hollywood studios, in turn, regarded the growing European crisis with ambivalence. They feared being accused in a film like The Mortal Storm of using the movies to represent the fate of Europe’s imperiled Jews. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, insisted the word “Jew” be removed from the film and “non-Aryan” be used instead, hoping to confuse American audiences about the film’s real intent. Jimmy Stewart, who starred in the film, took it on the road to urge American aid to Britain, while Lindbergh prepared his own campaign to denounce American Jews for luring the country into war. The book reveals how closely Hollywood and politics were entwined on the eve of war. It also reveals how closely the plight of Europe’s Jews and American antisemitism were entwined at the same time.

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This is a wonderful book, a compelling book, a scholarly book that reads like a suspense novel or tragic drama. Its riveting historical-political analysis of rarely seen archival documents reveals a hidden tale of two British women writers' heroic work on behalf of truth and Nazi Germany's persecuted Jews within the often brutal, masculine American institutions of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, government, and politics. * Kristin Bluemel, Professor of English and Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Monmouth University, US *

Author Information

Alexis Pogorelskin is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, USA, where she was the department chair for nineteen years. She has published in Slavic Review and Oxford Slavonic Papers. She has taught History of Hollywood at the Russian State University for the Humanities while on a Fulbright. She was Rhodes Visiting Fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, UK, and in 2015, she was the first Vera Brittain Scholar on Women and War at the University of Southampton, UK.

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