Some books improve with time.

Others, written long ago, seem almost clairvoyant, as if they somehow projected themselves into our modern moment, in all its muddle and chaos.

One of these strange time travelers is Ben Hecht’s A Guide for the Bedevilled, written in 1943 and addressed to a world gone crazy. A sane, busy book, perfectly pitched between hope and despair, it seems to leap out of its own era directly into ours.

Hecht, a novelist, playwright, and screenwriting savant, followed the war, and Nazi atrocities, with deep anguish. His Jewish heart didn’t mourn, he said: “It has felt only outrage.” Equally enraging was the civilized world’s response, its indifference, complicity, and denial.

Hecht’s favorite weapon wasn’t invective, it was ridicule, and he used it fervently. Germans, politicians, students — all are impaled on Hecht’s pen. At one point, Hecht invents a new sport, competitive antisemitism, in which the best antisemites from Harvard compete against the best antisemites from Yale.

When he wasn’t lancing antisemitism, he was probing it, analyzing it. Historians focused on what and when. Hecht wanted to know why. Many of his hunches, while purely intuitive, have proved astute, reaffirmed by later thinkers who struck Hechtian chords in their writing.

One of Hecht’s darkest theories found expression in the stunning remark quoted by Henryk Broder: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Hecht saw that clearly. German guilt would fester. “They already have it, and are already engaged in the medical work of its exercising,” he wrote. “This is done by exchanging the guilt complex for a rage at the thing that produced it.”

The real scandal, he claimed, wasn’t antisemitism, but the world’s incurable waywardness. “And if you read this some day far distant,” Hecht wrote, predicting madness ahead, “credit my bones with having understood the two chief ingredients of human thought. They are poison and folly.”

A book that indicts the world risks undermining its other mission: to indict specific nations for specific crimes. Hecht wasn’t troubled by that, or by his rather unscholarly reputation. At the time, Hecht’s name still conjured Hollywood classics. People thought, His Girl Friday. They thought, Scarface. They didn’t think Jewish anti-fascist.

Hecht had grown up in New York City and Racine, Wisconsin, the coddled first son of Russian immigrants. As a younger writer, Hecht projected world-weary cynicism, a natural pose for a budding journalist. Before long, he earned his cynicism covering Germany’s bloody revolution. Yet Hecht contained multitudes. His pessimism masked an eager, adventurous spirit.

Over 20 years, Hecht married twice, made several fortunes, and won two Oscars. When he wasn’t serving Hollywood, he wrote books and plays — his true calling, he insisted. Yet he lived heedlessly, shuttling between coasts, spending lavishly on houses, helpers, and chauffeurs. When bankruptcy loomed, he returned reluctantly to Hollywood.

By World War II, Hecht had lived several lives, yet his Jewish life was mostly private. Quite quickly, it became public: Hecht wrote articles and screaming advertisements demanding “Action — Not Pity.” His friends were amazed. Hecht had always played a man coasting through life, cynically amused. Now every mask fell. “My tribe is called Israel,” he wrote.

It was this older, more earnest Hecht, concerned with living purposefully and outraged over Nazism, who wrote A Guide for the Bedevilled in 1943.

What qualified Hecht for his task? Nothing, really, except passion, wide learning, and a writer’s necessary vanity. At home in Nyack, New York, he hunkered down with his typewriter. Hecht had two secret helpers: his wife, Rose, a committed Zionist, and Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

The writing was, as his letters reveal, an ordeal. For weeks, Hecht wallowed in horrors — shootings, gassings. His anger was beyond words, yet words were all he had. At times he wondered what to write: a j’accuse? A polemic? Could his book be entertaining? Should it?

Hecht solved the final problem by ignoring it. Bedevilled is livelier and wittier than a book about prejudice has any right to be. It’s also more psychologically astute. On the whole, Hecht wasn’t interested in extreme cases. Most people weren’t Hitler. Rather, he focused on what we might call normal psychopathology: everyday prejudice, ordinary sadism.

Antisemitism involved projection — “transferring our own sickness to others.” It centered on power. The antisemite is a bully, and, like all bullies, is secretly weak. Venting his prejudice, he goes “from a mouse to a roaring lion.”

Reader beware: Freud lurks in the margins. Hecht’s antisemites are mostly misfits, anxious, neurotic types, sick with inferiority. They embrace what Sartre called the “poor man’s snobbery” and what Anthony Julius calls “the religion of the inadequate.”

Indeed, it’s Julius, the great jurist and antisemitism expert, whom Hecht often resembles. “Anti-Semitism invites us to take a moral holiday,” Julius has written. For Hecht, it was precisely this “thrill of lawlessness” that inspired antisemites “to break the laws of logic, sanity, and good behavior.”

Hecht’s central theory is that antisemitism isn’t just a disease. It’s also a treatment. Antisemites seek relief for some problem — and find it. Sadists find a victim (the Jews). Loners find a group (Jew-haters). Aimless people find a purpose (antisemitic activity). Prejudice, says Hecht, is a panacea: “so soothing, so enriching, so ego-inflating.”

Today, we understand antisemitism as complex and protean. Its hallmarks are malice and paranoia, but it takes myriad forms in myriad places. It’s so varied, we might speak of antisemitisms, plural.

These nuances aren’t absent from Bedevilled, which offers a typology of antisemites — leaders, followers, criminals, elites. Yet Bedevilled goes beyond psychology. It’s a genre of one, a beguiling mix of memoir, history, and attack that moves nimbly and unpredictably. Some sections are fortissimo; others are adagio. “This is an odd enterprise,” Hecht admitted. As for the reader: “I am a little alarmed at the disorder in store for him.”

Nonetheless, the book gains momentum. On page 156, Hecht blasts Nazi “excrescences.” Soon he broadens the indictment. It wasn’t just fascists who deserved scorn, it was bystanders, silent witnesses. “It is these Nice People who make all horror and wretchedness possible — by their unfunctioning Niceness.” Through their connivance, they became accomplices, enablers.

Hecht wasn’t finished. A final, sweeping judgment follows. What was antisemitism but a form of mass delusion? It was the “backwardness and stupidity of the world” that fostered genocide; it was “the human genius for prejudice.” In Hecht’s era, theories of “human nature” were popular. Hecht’s was suitably grim.

At such moments, Bedevilled is a genuinely troubling book. What makes it so vital, so shocking, is Hecht’s violent mind, his blazing anger. At times the reader leans back, as from the thermal force of a nuclear blast. Bedevilled might even be considered a dangerous book for readers inclined to adopt Hecht’s pessimism.

And yet, for all its darkness, Bedevilled refuses despair. It’s too energetic for that. Reading it, one recalls that writing is an act of hope — for progress and thinking. “Without hope!” Hecht writes toward the end. “Have you also misunderstood my violence
and pessimism?”

Indeed, a battered hope prevails. Hecht’s assault on humanity is also a defense of humanism — the belief in human potential and dignity. “I once lived in a good world,” Hecht wrote in 1941, daring to wish that “it will be good enough to live in again.” That spirit — hope in unhopeful times — infuses Bedevilled, giving the reader ballast.

That Bedevilled reads smoothly is an amazement. Modesty borders anger. Hope abuts despair. How does Bedevilled survive its contradictions? In short, it’s the writing. Bedevilled is beautifully composed. And it’s beautifully composed — calm and unruffled. The mind is on fire, but the pen is steady.

However powerful, the laws of physics still applied. A book can’t defeat fascism. It can’t rescue Jews. It can’t cure prejudice. “Such investigations as this are as powerless as a wind blowing at a mountain base,” Hecht sighed. But it could hearten allies. And it could certainly offer guidance.

Much of Bedevilled addresses the question How should a Jew be? For Hecht, Jewish morale — pride, self-respect — mattered most. “I felt that the Jews have been trying to arouse all kinds of emotions in the world — pity, compassion, horror, guilt,” Hecht told a friend. No more, he said firmly. No pleading. No virtuous poses. “Jewish diplomacy has been wasting its time in this fashion for almost twenty centuries,” he says in Bedevilled. It was undignified — and useless.

Nor should Jews remain shtum. Bedevilled is a 240-page argument for Jewish assertiveness. In an emergency, American Jews should forget civility and politeness. Such postures offered “a way out from uncomfortable Jewish emotions — pain and vengeance.” So accept your anger. Better yet, harness it.

Hecht’s anger, a terrific muse, soon gave way to anxiety. To Maxwell Perkins, Bedevilled was “a magnificent piece of fiery writing,” but Hecht shied from publicity. “If my book is a bomb,” he told a friend, “I don’t want it detonated in any way.” He couldn’t smile and charm interviewers. He wouldn’t “cash in” on Jewish suffering.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. A PR blitz was on. “Ben has dipped his pen in blood and punched as only he can punch when he’s mad,” his friend Billy Rose told Walter Winchell, the popular gossip columnist. The book was doomed to succeed. “I am tossing back all my royalties from the book into its promotion,” Hecht told Winchell.

The dark book about dark times was a crowd-pleaser. Readers loved Hecht’s enlivening company, his fierce, anarchic mind. But his appeal went deeper. In a way, Hecht’s bomb was also a balm. At a fearful moment for American Jews, Hecht’s confident pride, his moral certainty, was consoling. As the world unraveled, Hecht’s clarity and sanity were a tonic.

No wonder Bedevilled feels current. In our own dark times, bad ideas flourish, ignorance feeds cruelty, and cruelty is seen as courage. Hecht would recognize the face of zealotry, would see it, literally, in people’s faces. The pleasure of contempt. The excitement of hating. The bliss of easy virtue. Hecht never imagined “Queers for Palestine” or calls to “globalize the intifada,” but he wouldn’t be surprised. Prejudice, he once wrote: “so soothing, so enriching, so ego-inflating.” In campus radicals, Hecht might see the human craving for community, for purpose, for importance.

He might note — again — how malice and pristine ignorance seem to go together.

The author of Bedevilled was an apostle of common sense. “I had only one objective in my book,” Hecht told a friend. “It was to communicate to any readers the health I have always felt in my mind.” The world was sick with hatred and ideology. (“Ideas seem to make monsters out of people,” Hecht noted.) The antidote was sanity and skepticism.

After the Holocaust, Hecht’s activism focused on Israel’s independence. He wrote a popular pageant, A Flag Is Born. He hosted Menachem Begin in Nyack. He continued preaching Jewish pride and dignity.

After 1949, the old Hecht, the individualist, reasserted himself. Hecht even claimed, preposterously, that Jewish causes “[never] entered my bloodstream, glands, nervous system or memory box.” His wife was astonished. “You forget all you did for the Jews already,” she told him.

In truth, Hecht never moved on, not for long. He would recall his activism proudly, and with good reason. In writing Bedevilled, he found a noble mission and gave the best of himself to it. His greatest weapon — his writing — was put to the greatest use. He even found a community.

“Your book has swelled my head and given me new strength,” a rabbi gushed, thanking Hecht and blessing Bedevilled.

“At last,” he wrote, saluting a landsman and kindred spirit.