Like indigenous Americans in the settler imagination, the existing people in Palestine aren’t treated well in Exodus. “As its title proclaimed, Exodus grounded its narrative of revolution in an equally familiar biblical story of restoration to the Promised Land.” “ Exodus transformed a particular project of Jewish nationalism responding to anti-Semitism in Europe into a familiar American tale of fighting for freedom against a tyrannical old-world empire,” Kaplan explained. “By recognizing their own revolutionary origins in Israel’s recent history, American readers retrieved both the myth of the frontier and a mirror of national exceptionalism.” Like movie westerns that portrayed the American frontier as either empty or savage, Exodus was also an epic struggle for national liberation by settlers from Europe. While this focus made Exodus very much of its time-the era of global anti-colonialism following World War II-Americans could also get behind it due to Cold War politics. origin story, the dominant interpretation of Israel’s founding emphasized battles against British colonial overlords. She argued that a shared assumption of historical exceptionalism-in which both countries saw themselves as blessed by God-helps explain the close political, cultural, and religious bonds between the United States and Israel. Kaplan examined Exodus as an Americanization of the Zionist narrative of Israel’s origins. It did so “by telling a story of Israel’s founding that resonated with myths of American origins.”

Both book and movie “significantly contributed to the construction” of a “ shared heritage (or ‘special relationship’)” between the United States and Israel, wrote the late scholar Amy Kaplan.

Written by an American for Americans, it became the basis of a Hollywood blockbuster of 1960. Leon Uris’s bestselling 1958 novel Exodus, about the founding of the state of Israel, was a very American story.

The book exodus by leon uris