I began research on this post thinking I was going to write about Otto Preminger’s 1960 film adaptation of Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958) as a biblical epic. The case is not that hard to make: the title is a pretty strong clue, as is the setting—the “Holy Land.” And two extraordinary scholars have already essentially made this case: Melani McAlister in her pathbreaking Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (2005; 2001) and Amy Kaplan in “Zionism as Anticolonialism: The Case of Exodus” (2013).[1] But in browsing through IMDb, I began wondering if the Read more