by Bruce Feiler
The Ten Commandments
I have gathered details about The Ten Commandments from The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille and Cecil B. DeMille by Charles Higham. Katherine Orrison’s two books were extremely helpful, Written in Stone and Lionheart in Hollywood. The connection between the final shot of the film and the Statue of Liberty was first made by Michael Wood in America in the Movies. The box-office statistics come from www.boxofficemojo.com.
A number of scholars have explored the link between The Ten Commandments and the culture of the 1950s. These include Alan Nadel, “God’s Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War ‘Epic’” (PMLA, vol. 108, no. 3, 1993); Melani McAlister, “‘Benevolent Supremacy’: Biblical Epic Films, Suez, and the Cultural Politics of U.S. Power,” published in her Epic Encounters; Ilana Pardes, “Moses Goes Down to Hollywood: Miracles and Special Effects” (Semeia 74, 1996); and G. Andrew Tooze, “Moses and the Reel Exodus” (Journal of Religion and Film, vol. 7, no. 1, April 2003). Additional information comes from Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own. The 20th Century-Fox DVD of Brigham Young contains an extremely helpful commentary by James d’Arc.
My survey of Mosaic comparisons in twentieth-century letters was shaped by Moses in Red by Lincoln Steffens, as well as The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens and Lincoln Steffens by Justin Kaplan. I also quoted from The Man Nobody Knows and The Book Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton and benefited from Richard M. Fried’s biography of Barton, The Man Everybody Knew. Other evocations of Moses came from The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit by Charles Reynolds Brown and Moses, Persuader of Men, issued by the Metropolitan Casualty Insurance Company.
Civil Rights Movement
Anyone who writes about Martin Luther King, Jr., is indebted to Taylor Branch’s magisterial series, Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge. The extended quotation describing the final moments of King’s mountaintop speech comes from page 758 of At Canaan’s Edge. I found three other books extremely helpful: Voice of Deliverance by Keith D. Miller, which contains the similar passages in King’s and Phillips Brooks’s sermons on Egyptians and evil; To the Mountaintop by Stewart Burns; and Prophetic Politics by David S. Gutterman. I also drew from An Easy Burden by Andrew Young and Singing in a Strange Land by Nick Salvatore.
The quotation from Zora Neale Hurston is taken from the introduction to her novel Moses, Man on the Mountain. My portrait of the relationship between King and Abraham Joshua Heschel was informed by Susannah Heschel’s essay “Theological Affinities in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.” in Black Zion, edited by Yvonne Chireau and Nathaniel Deutsch. Charlton Heston’s quotation about why he was chosen to speak at the March on Washington appears in Emilie Raymond’s From My Cold Dead Hands.
Passover
Two books explore the fascinating history of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism—Freud and the Legacy of Moses by Richard J. Bernstein and Freud’s Moses by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. My discussion of the political influence of Moses benefited from Moses as Political Leader by Aaron Wildavsky. David Geffen’s delightful compilation of American Passover stories is American Heritage Haggadah. The Jewish Publication Society has recently republished an edition of A Survivors’ Haggadah, written, designed, and illustrated by Yosef Dov Sheinson.
My conclusion also draws from The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine and The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. The Henry David Thoreau quote comes from Walden; the W. E. B. Du Bois quote from The Crisis, November 1918; the Langston Hughes quote from “Let America Be America Again.” The evocative phrase that America is a “synonym for human possibility” is from Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent.
Final Word
I am grateful to the many people who provided the images that appear in this book. Reproductions of some of those images, as well as additional material I’ve collected during my research that does not appear in the final book, can be viewed at www.brucefeiler.com. The site also contains discussion materials, a homemade film about Moses and my family, a film of Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his Mountaintop speech in Memphis, video clips of Moses in film (including DeMille’s speech at the opening of The Ten Commandments, as well as Moses splitting the Red Sea), and a way to e-mail me directly. I welcome comments, queries, and reports from discussion groups, as well as stories about how Moses continues to inspire fresh generations to renew the story of freedom.
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