Whether brought up as one or not, somewhere in the background there was a gift of being born a Jew. —Lillian Hellman, 1981 As Hellman resisted being thought of as a woman playwright, so she resisted the idea that her Jewish birth and family origins shaped her view of the world. Jewish-born and southern-identified, she occupied complicated positions in both communities, but especially in the bifurcated world of twentieth-century Jews. She was not a Jew in the Yiddish-speaking, upwardly mobile, immigrant sense of the word. Nor was she a member of a close-knit southern community of Jews whose isolation lent itself to creating a public face of assimilation and cooperation. Rather, she imagined herself committed to a set of overarching values that included racial egalitarianism and political and social justice. These provided the framework within which she measured human dignity and judged what she called “decent” behavior. But the twentieth century—notable for pogroms, migrations, the destruction of most Eastern European Jewry, and the creation of the state of Israel—placed enormous stress on the meaning of Jewish identity, twisting and shaping it in response to historical and personal circumstances.1 For prominent cultural figures like Hellman, the times demanded more than a passive acquiescence to one’s roots.
