Rita Gam, one of the last surviving cast members of a controversial 1940s Zionist play, passed away recently at age 88.
Gam made her theatrical debut as a minor character in “A Flag is Born,” a Ben Hecht play that opened on Broadway seventy years ago this fall. The play was intended to stir up American public support for the cause of creating a Jewish state in British Mandatory Palestine but it ended up also playing an unexpected role in promoting racial desegregation in the United States.
With Holocaust survivors languishing in European Displaced Persons camps and the British permitting just a trickle of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Hecht conceived of the idea of using Broadway to promote the Zionist cause.
The play was produced by the Bergson Group, a Jewish activist committee with which Hecht was active. The group’s leader, Hillel Kook (better known as Peter Bergson), would later become a member of Knesset.
The play featured Yiddish theater stars Paul Muni and Celia Adler as elderly Jewish refugees making their way across postwar Europe. In a cemetery, they encounter a fiery young Zionist, played by 22 year-old Marlon Brando in one of his earliest major acting roles. Brando’s impassioned monologues about the need for a Jewish state form the emotional centerpiece of the play.
American theater critics were for the most part strongly impressed. Walter Winchell, for example, wrote that “Flag” was “worth seeing, worth hearing, and worth remembering…it will wring your heart and eyes dry…bring at least eleven handkerchiefs.”
