David Ben-Gurion: The Lost Interview
David Ben-Gurion: The Lost Interview
August 17, 2016
Israel Studies, Culture & Jewish Thought
The New York Times — A rare, intimate and reflective interview with Israel’s founding prime minister has been discovered, thanks in part to the Ben-Gurion Archives at BGU.
In 1968, Ben-Gurion, age 82 and five years out of office, spoke in the six-hour interview of state-building and the biblical prophets that guided him; the security imperative of his young nation; his battle with lower back pain; and his interest in Buddhism.
He also discusses his chosen retirement home in Sde Boker, a remote communal village in the Negev that is today home to BGU’s Ben-Gurion Archives and Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research.
“The most important thing which I learned, I learned by living here,” he says in the interview. “I want to live in a place where I know that my friends, and myself, we did it. Everything. It’s our creation.”
The interview, conducted in two-hour allotments over three days, had actually been done as background research for an unsuccessful film about the visionary leader. The reels of silent footage and the film’s soundtrack languished in separate archives for decades, until the footage was uncovered by a documentary filmmaker almost by chance in the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive in Jerusalem. The silent reel was intriguing, but needed its soundtrack.
That soundtrack was found in the Ben-Gurion Archives at BGU’s Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.
Ben-Gurion’s matter-of-fact voice resonates hauntingly, with its mix of pragmatism and philosophical prescriptions bordering on the prophetic.
The clips from the interview with the “Old Man,” as Ben-Gurion was called for much of his life, has now been made into a 55-minute movie by Yariv Mozer, which premiered last month at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
Read more and see clips from the uncovered interview on The New York Times website >>
More from Americans for Ben-Gurion University — The story of how the soundtrack wound up in the Archives is a fascinating one.
Dr. Adi Portughies
A member of the production team was Malcolm Stuart, a Jewish sound engineer from London. He recorded the interview. When it was all over, he donated the voice recordings to the Ben-Gurion Archives for safekeeping.
“This exciting story, almost a detective story, illustrates how important Malcom Stuart’s donation was to the legacy and history of the State of Israel,” says Dr. Adi Portughies, director of the Archives. “Without it, almost certainly six hours of an intimate interview with the founding father of the State of Israel might have been concealed forever.”
Additionally, since the communication with Stuart has been renewed, he has provided custody to the Ben-Gurion Archives of the voice recordings of tens of lectures from important and renowned scholars, including Prof. Ishayahu Berlin, Prof. Yosef Ben Shlomo, Prof. Amos Fonkenstein, and many others.
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