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Israel in 1960 and again in 1968, for Dan’s bar mitzvah, possessed a more aggressive and admittedly paranoid streak. He revealed this side of himself in a long, discursive interview with Women’s Wear Daily in 1971. In it, he said he believed all Jews around the world were in danger of imminent genocide. “Six million went up with a snap of the finger last time, and there is little reason to assume anybody’s going to protect the other 12 million still extant,” he said, adding that the risk was especially great in the United States: “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism in America, real gutter Munich stuff. You hear it in the New Left: ‘Kill the kosher pigs.’”
    “Somebody wrote it—a Jew is a man with one bag packed in the hall closet at all times,” Chayefsky went on. And, he said, “Israel is that place you go when you have to grab the bag.”
    During this period, Chayefsky changed the title of his personal company from Sidney Productions, reflecting his given name, to Simcha Productions, in honor of its Hebrew equivalent. On a visit to Washington to see a performance by the stand-up comedian David Steinberg, Chayefsky heard someone in the audience call Steinberg a “mocky,” an obscure Jewish slur. At the end of the night, Chayefsky and Steinberg found themselves in an elevator with the man who Chayefsky presumed was the heckler.
    “I don’t know that it’s that guy,” Steinberg would later recall, “and Paddy recognizes the guy immediately. And he says to him, ‘Are you the guy that was heckling him?’ This is a big guy, and he starts stammering. Paddy goes, ‘You call him a mocky, you call all of us a mocky.’ And he didn’t put him up against the wall like you do in the movies, but he had his finger right in this guy’s chest.
    “This guy was bigger than Paddy,” Steinberg added, “and [Paddy] just was at him.”
    Privately, Chayefsky channeled his fervor into uncredited advertisements for the Anti-Defamation League, such as an announcement published at the height of the 1973 oil crisis that warned, “These Arabs would like you to believe that if we give in to their blackmail and change our Mid-East policy everything will be just like it used to be.” After an earlier trip to Israel in 1971, he had started writing a screenplay set in the West Bank about a pair of police officers, one Israeli and one Arab, whose amicable partnership collapses as they investigate a murder case. Then he dropped this idea and started over with a different scenario.
    For the screenplay he called The Habakkuk Conspiracy , Chayefsky opened his story in the autumn of 1947, during the final, anarchic days of the British Mandate in Palestine. A prologue introduces a young scholar named Yakov Amiel, a Palestinian Jew who is traveling to Jerusalem in possession of three ancient leather scrolls. He is harangued on a bus (“There is a Jew dog here! Jew dog! Jew dog! I shall slice his Jew head off!” screams one excitable merchant), is beaten by Arab men, and finally has his throat slit “from ear to ear” by an assassin who makes off with his priceless artifacts: these turn out to be no less than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    The action then shifts to two other characters. One is Yakov’s younger brother, Micha, a nineteen-year-old militant who is hungry to avenge the murder and reclaim the stolen treasures. The other is Yakov’s widow, Elizabeth, a twenty-five-year-old British woman torn between her loyalty to her dead husband and her desire to escape the Middle East entirely. She is gradually won over to the Jewish cause by violent circumstances and the passions of Micha, who argues like a man more than twice his age. In a speech he delivers as “his ascetic passion explodes,” he tells Elizabeth:
    I’ll tell you about your civilized world! For two thousand years, we Jews have depended on the civilized world for our survival. And for two thousand years, Jews have been crucified, burnt at the stake, thrown to the