Many moviegoers failed to realize that Exodus was not fact but fiction adapted from a 1958 Leon Uris novel, the biggest bestseller since Gone with the Wind. Directed by Otto Preminger and starring a young Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, the film featured Lee J. Cobb, Rat Pack member Peter Lawford and Italian crooner Sal Mineo, a teen heartthrob who received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a Jewish émigré.
Then as now, Americans are easily swayed by sympathetic portrayals of an extremist enclave granted nation-state recognition by Harry Truman. A Christian-Zionist who had famously read the Bible cover-to-cover five times by age 15, Truman was a True Believer in the prophecy that the Messiah could not return until the Israelites returned to their ancestral home.
