Our Exodus

Examines the phenomenon of Exodus and its influence on post–World War II understandings of Israel’s beginnings. Despite the dramatic circumstances of its founding, Israel did not inspire sustained, impassioned public discussion among Jews and non-Jews in the United States until Leon Uris’s popular novel Exodus was released in 1958. Uris’s novel popularized the complicated story of Israel’s founding and, in the process, boosted the morale of post–Holocaust Jewry and disseminated in popular cultur