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H

erman Wouk, the famed 
novelist who first became a 
household name for his 1951 
Pulitzer Prize winning The Caine 
Mutiny, died on May 17, 2019, nearly 
70 years after achieving fame. Besides 
his long career as a 
writer, he was also a 
lifelong Zionist. This 
fact of Wouk’
s love 
affair with the State 
of Israel has been 
completely absent 
from the many articles 
celebrating his literary 
career and marking his 
passing, less than two 
weeks before what would have been 
his 104th birthday. 
Again and again — from his 1959 
first nonfiction work This is My God: 
The Jewish Way of Life through his 
pair of books about modern Israel 
The Hope (1993) and The Glory 
(1994) until his second nonfiction 
book, published in 2000, The Will 
to Live On: This is Our Heritage — 
Wouk focused much of his literary 
abilities on Israel.
Perhaps no line in any of his books 
demonstrates his love of Israel more 
than this one from This is My God: 
“The first time I saw the lights of the 
(Israeli) airport in the dusk from the 

descending plane, 
I experienced a 
sense of awe that 
I do not expect to 
know again in this 
life.”
Wouk, an 
Orthodox Jew, 
synthesized his 
love of Torah 
with his love of 
the reborn Jewish 
state. And his 
view of Zionism 
is also clearly laid 
out in This is My 
God: “Zionism is a 
single long action 
of lifesaving, of snatching great 
masses of people out of the path of 
sure extinction.”
Forty years later in The Will to 
Live On, Wouk, as he interwove 
Jewish history and shared stories of 
his personal interaction with David 
Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, and 
other leading Israeli generals and 
politicians, showed that his love of 
Israel was clearly undiminished. 
“The resurgence of Jewry in the Holy 
Land is nothing but phenomenal,” he 
wrote.
Wouk had been a U.S. Naval officer 
during World War II and his love of 

the Israeli military 
and respect for its 
accomplishments 
was a large part of 
his Israel novels The 
Hope and The Glory.
Those two books 
can be juxtaposed 
with his pair of 
famous World War II 
novels The Winds of 
War (1971) and War 
and Remembrance 
(1978).
In his Israel novels, 
the heroine Natalie 
Jastrow undergoes 
a long and tortured 
journey from American Jewish girl to 
Holocaust victim to Zionist.
Herman Wouk penned the 
introduction to the 1980 English 
version of Self Portrait of a Hero: 
The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu. 
Yoni’
s brothers, Benjamin and 
Iddo Netanyahu, put together the 
book. “My parents, like his, were 
Zionists,” writes Wouk. Later in 
the introduction he explains his 
connection to Israel. “Like most 
American Jews, we believe in Israel 
and support it, buy Israel Bonds, 
make frequent trips there; I give 
speeches for Israeli causes and so 

forth,” and then relates how the book 
allowed him to better understand his 
own son’
s desire to make his home in 
the modern Jewish state.
The Washington Post, the New 
York Times, the Jerusalem Post 
as well as wire services and other 
newspapers all managed to leave 
Zionism out of their summations of 
Wouk’
s life. Whether deliberate or 
not, this missing piece of his life 
surely matters as one simply cannot 
understand Wouk without realizing 
the central place Zionism occupied 
in his life, no less than his love of 
Torah and his deep faith.
Wouk’
s passion for the well-
being of his fellow Jews and for 
Israel should serve as a reminder to 
American Jews of how the Greatest 
Generation also bore witness to the 
horrors of the Holocaust and the 
rebirth of Israel. Those who reflected 
on what they saw were forever 
changed. Wouk loved Israel and 
America, and we should emulate that 
attachment to the Land of the Free as 
well as to the reborn Jewish State. ■

Moshe Phillips is national director of Herut 

North America’
s U.S. division. Herut is an 

international movement dedicated to the 

ideals of pre-World War II Zionist leader Ze’
ev 

Jabotinsky. 

commentary
Herman Wouk’s Love Aff
 air with Zionism 

Moshe Phillips

Herman Wouk in 2014

BSWLA, WIKIPEDIA

