Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Noleander (talk | contribs) at 15:02, 20 January 2010. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jews have played a major role in the development and success of the motion picture industry in the United States. The Hollywood film industry is responsible for producing films that gross over 50% of the worlds film receipts, and employs over 100,000 persons, by some estimates. Some estimates are that more than half of Hollywood producers are Jewish. The prevalance of Jews in leadership roles in the motion picture industry has given rise to some controversies, such as claims that Hollywood portrays African-American subjects in a negative light, or that non-Jewish workers are not given equal job opportunities. Jewish adovcacy groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, have condemned these suggestions as unfounded anti-semitism.

Allegations of negative portrayals of African-Americans

Leonard Jeffries

Leonard Jeffries is a professor at CUNY who claimed in a 1991 speech that Jews financed the slave trade and used the movie industry to hurt black people. Jeffries comments were widely reported, and led to his eventual reasssignment at CUNY.

Louis Farrakan

Louis Farrakan, leader of the Nation of Islam, has accused Jews in Hollywood of portraying blacks in a negative light. He said: “See, you so called Jews – I’m not gonna give you the credit for being one of those that obey God. You portrayed us, you know what images do, that’s why you jumped on Mel Gibson. But you painted us, big lips, red eyes, kinky hair, you put in the movies like that. You mocked our characteristics and made us to hate God’s creation of us. You did that. Hollywood did that….You take our strongest, more courageous black minds, you think we don’t see you? And you put us in Hollywood. You give us television shows, and then we gotta bug our eyes.”

In another speech in 2007, Farrakan said “Do you know some of these satanic Jews have taken over BET?... Everything that we built, they have. The mind of Satan now is running the record industry, movie industry and television. And they make us look like we’re the murders; we look like we’re the gangsters, but we’re punk stuff.”

The Anti-Defamation League has denounced Farrakan's statements.

Legrand Clegg

J. J. Goldberg, in his book "Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment" tells the story of Legrand Clegg, a deputy city attorney in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton and founder of the Coalition Against Black Exploitation, a pressure group that lobbies against negative screen images of African-Aemricans. In July 1990, during an NAACP conference, CLegg proposed that the black community leadership arrange a meeting with Jewish community leaders to discuss the role of Jewish film executive in Hollywood's degrading portrayal of blacks. Clegg said "If Jewish leaders can complain of black anti-Semitism, our leaders should certainly raise the issue of the century-old problem of Jewish racism in Hollywood.... No Jewish people ever attacked or killed black people. But we're concerned with Jewish producers who degrade the black image. It's a genuine concern. And when we bring it up, our statements are distorted and we're dragged through the press as anti-Semites."

Cleggs proposal for a meeting was attacked by the ADL as anti-semitism. A regional director of the ADL explained their opposition to Clegg's proposal: "When he says 'Jewish producers' he's talking about 'the Jews' controlling Hollywood. Its just not true". Clegg was mentioned in a 1992 anti-semitism booklet published by the ADL.

Clegg contended that a black-Jewish dialog on Hollywood was no more bigoted than the continuing black-Jewish debate on Louis Farrakhan. Clegg said: "When Spike Lee produced the movie Mo' Better BLues, the ADL released a statement saying the movie was anti-Semitic.... When I attacked stereotypical sitcoms and complained, I was dragged through the mud".

Controversial allegations

Marlon Brando

In an interview in Playboy magazine in January 1979, Brando said: "You've seen every single race besmirched, but you never saw an image of the kike because the Jews were ever so watchful for that—and rightly so. They never allowed it to be shown on screen. The Jews have done so much for the world that, I suppose, you get extra disappointed because they didn't pay attention to that."

Brando made a similar allegation on Larry King Live in April 1996, saying "Hollywood is run by Jews; it is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of — of people who are suffering. Because they've exploited — we have seen the — we have seen the Nigger and Greaseball, we've seen the Chink, we've seen the slit-eyed dangerous Jap, we have seen the wily Filipino, we've seen everything but we never saw the Kike. Because they knew perfectly well, that that is where you draw the wagons around." King replied, "When you say — when you say something like that you are playing right in, though, to anti-Semitic people who say the Jews are — " at which point Brando interrupted, "No, no, because I will be the first one who will appraise the Jews honestly and say 'Thank God for the Jews.'"

William A. Donohue of the Catholic League

William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said in 2004: "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular". One Rabbi responded to Donahue's comments by saying: "Bill Donohue's comments in his debate with me on MSNBC's Scarborough Country last week have proven deeply shocking to decent Americans everywhere. "

Henry Ford

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford automobile company, held anti-semitic views in the 1920s, although he later renounced most of them. His journal, The Dearborn Independent included this quote in 1921:

"The motion picture influence of the United States - and Canada - is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.... the picture business, on its commercial side, is Jewish through and through.... This ill-concealed propaganda of the Jewish movie picture control is also directed against non-Jewish religions. You never saw a Jewish rabbi depicted on the screen in any but a most honorable attitude. He is clothed with all the dignity of his office and he is made as impressive as can be. Christian clergymen, as any movie fan will readily recall, were subjected to all sorts of misrepresentation, from the comic to the criminal. Now, this attitude is distinctly Jewish. Like many unlabeled influences in our life, whose sources lead back to Jewish groups, the object is to break down as far as possible all respectful or considerate thought about the clergy."

Also in 1921, Ford's journal wrote: "Jew-controlled not only in spots, not 50 percent merely, but entirely; with the natural consequences that now the world is in arms against the trivializing and demoralzing influences of that form of entertainment as presently managed.... As soon as the Jews gained control of the 'movies', we had a movie problem, the consequences of which are not yet visible. It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achive a majority."

Victor Marchetti

Author Victor Marchetti claims that discussions of the prevelance of Jews in Hollywood is taboo, and that such discussions often lead to unfair allegations of anti-semitism. Marchetti wrote in 1994 that "he Jews were, and remain, in control of Tinsel Town. To say otherwise is to lie. It is bad enough when a group representing less than three percent of the American population—and many of whose members have a self-proclaimed first loyalty to a foreign nation—should be in control of so many of America's cultural, financial and governmental institutions. But it is positively insulting for them to deny their influence and power—particularly when they themselves are continually boasting in their own circles about their 'overrepresentation' in these fields. And it is absolutely infuriating when this denial reaches the point that non-Jews are attacked by Jewish agitators and Zionist zealots for stating obvious facts and truth."

Institute for Historical Review

Anti-zionist Mark Weber, of the Institute for Historical Review, is a critic of the role Jews play in Hollywood, and wrote this about the Disney movie studios: "When Michael Eisner became the Disney company`s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, he moved quickly to install fellow Jews in top positions throughout the Disney operation, and soon Hollywood`s last gentile-run studio passed into Jewish hands."

Dolly Parton

Entertainer Dolly Parton - when responding to a question about why her television miniseries about a gospel singer was never produced - said: "Everybody's afraid to touch anything that's religious because most of the people out there are Jewish, and it's a frightening thing for them to promote Christianity."

Spectator magazine

The British magazine The Spectator published an article by author William Cash in 1994 in which Cash wrote: "But in one respect at least this particular combination of talents, or 'talent combo', in the local argot, will start out on the right foot. Like the old mogul founders of the early studios and unlike most other failed build-your-own studio merchants they are Jewish.... The significance of this fact cannot be simply met by the inevitable shrieks of 'anti-Semitism'. A rare glimpse of the feudal power structure of Hollywood at work was given by the Wall Street Journal's front-page report of the new studio launch. Before any contracts could be signed, a private 'blessing' was required from 81-year-old Lew Wasserman, the long-time chairman of MCA (which owns Universal) and the last surviving Jewish Founder-builder of a studio. To quote the Journal, he is treated in Hollywood 'like a tribal chieftain'... it has long been a standing joke in L.A that the way to get on is to convert to Judaism. Simon Kelton, an Eton-and Oxford-educated screenwriter friend with whom I used to share a house, and who was short listed last year for the Samuel Goldwyn film-writing award, always stresses his Jewish 'ancestry' whenever he gets a chance in LA; something few had ever heard about before. "

Commentaries on the controversies

Joel Stein

Author Joel Stein wrote an article titled "How Jewish Is Hollywood?" in 2008 in which he asserted that it was nearly impossible to find a non-Jewish movie producer in Hollywood. Stein said that Jews, rather than being ashamed of their prevalence in leadership roles in Hollywood should be proud of it.

Michael Medved

Film critic and author Michael Medved wrote, in a 1996 article titled "Jews Run Hollywood - So What?" and in that article said: "It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names." The article then describes how the Jew Michael Eisner, the Head of Walt Disney studios only hires "highly paid Jewish moguls" as producers such as Jeffrey Katzenberg, Michael Ovitz, Joe Roth (former head of 20th Century Fox). Medved emphazises the point that, "The famous Disney organization, which was founded by Walt Disney, a gentile Midwesterner who allegedly harboured anti-Semitic attitudes, now features Jewish personnel in nearly all its most powerful positions."

Medved continues: "Men and women of Jewish background enjoy a vastly disproportionate - if not dominate - influence in Hollywood." He adds that even studios which were bought out by the Japanese Sony Corp. and by the Australian Jew Rupert Murdoch, still had to hire, "a Yiddish team of long-time industry leaders in all the most powerful positions. When Mitsushita took over MCA-Universal, they did nothing to undermine the unquestioned authority of Universal's legndary - and all-Jewish - management triad of Lew Wasserman, Sid Scheinberg and Tom Pollack."

Medved further writes that most of today's movie moguls graduated from Ivy League colleges, "where Jews are vastly over-represented - just as they are in Hollywood." He says that nepotism plays a role exemplified with Samuel Goldwyn Pictures being run by the son of founder Samuel Goldwyn and a third generation, Tony Goldwyn, is waiting in the wings to take over. He adds: "This dynastic tendency in American entertainment certainly is a factor in the continued prominence of the Jewish role."

Haaretz Journal

Columnist Bradley Burston wrote, in a 2006 article in Haaretz titled "So What if the Jews Run Hollywood?" wrote: "In fact, so what if Jews rule Hollywood? So what if they always have? ... Leave aside, for the moment, the historical context, the fact that immigrant Eastern European Jews, rejected and dismissed not only by the White Anglo Saxon Protestants that actually ran and still run things, but also by the German Jewish aristocracy of New York, sought - and built - a promised land in a direction opposite to this one.... They went to the very edge of the world, a semi-arid basin of orange trees and chicken ranches and, yes, anti-Semites. They remade the world from scratch. The invention of movies was the algebra of the 20th century.... Were they mercenary and money-grubbing, uncouth and ruthless, sappy and shallow and sentimental and insensitive? Were they ever. And why not? They were, after all, in a headlong hurry to become, for lack of a better term, Americans."

J. J.Goldberg

The book "Jewish Power: inside the American Jewish Establishment" by author J. J. Goldberg contains a discussion of the role of Jews in Hollywood: "Hollywood at the end of the twentieth century is still an industry with a pronounced ethnic tinge. Virtually all the senior executives at the major studios are Jews. Writers, producers, and to a lesser degree directors are disproportionately Jewish - one recent study showed the figure as high as 59 percent among top-grossing films.... The combined weight of so many Jews in one of America's most lucrative and important industries gives the Jews of Hollywood a great deal of political power. They are a major source of money for Democratic candidates. The industry's informal patriarch, MCA chairman Lew Wasserman, wields tremendous personal clout in state and national politics. So do Barbara Striesand, Norman Lear, and a handful of others. A few - very few - individual Jews in Hollywood have gotten involved directly in Jewish political issues: recording-industry executive Danny Goldberge in religious rights and civil liberties, actors Ron Silver and Richard Dreyfuss in Middle East politics."

But Goldberg asserts that, although Jews did occupy many leadership positions, they never used that position to exert control over the medium: "But the same could be said, to a much greater degreee, of other industries with significant concentrations of Jews: Wall Street, New York real estate, or the garment industry. In each of those industries, Jews make up a significant bloc - an important minority on Wall Street, near majorities in clothing and commercial real estage - and have translated their clout into a visible presence on the political scene.... The common impression of Jewish power in Hollywood - the ability of the group to create a desired image through control of the medium - simply never materialized. The Jews who went to Hollywood were not interested."

Neal Gabler

Film critic and author Neal Gabler wrote a book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, about the role of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the formative years of the Hollywood film industry. Gabler concludes that the drive of these immigrants to assimilate into America, and to fashion their own destiny, shaped the film industry, and the films that it produced. Gabler asserts that Jewish producers, in the early part of the twentieth century, did not use motion pictures to promote Jewish interests, and in fact there were very few roles for Jewish actors in that time. Gabler also gives examples where what he termed "East Coast Jews" encouraged Hollywood to promote Jewish goals, but Hollywood resisted. Gabler cites the 1950s House Committee on Unamerican Affairs, where many Jews were unfairly black-listed by Hollywood (because of their purported communist affiliations). In the Epilog of his book, Gabler says that it is not until the 1980s that it became acceptable for Jewish characters to appear in feature films.

Anti-semitism

The Anti-Defamation League has condemned allegations of Jewish control of Holllywood as anti-semitism. The ADL points out that virtually all major motion picture studios are publically traded corporations, which are owned by a wide variety of shareholders.

See also

• Cinema of the United States
• Anti-semitism
• Anti-semitism in the United States

References

• Goldberg, J. J. (1997). Jewish power: inside the American Jewish establishment. Basic Books. ISBN 0201327988.</ref>

• Gabler, Neal (1989). An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.

• " Documentary movie: Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream".

Footnotes

1. ^ Gabler, Neal (1989). An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.
2. Goldberg, J. J. (1997). Jewish power: inside the American Jewish establishment. Basic Books. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0201327988 pages=279-304|0201327988 pages=279-304]]. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Missing pipe in: |ISBN= (help); line feed character in |ISBN= at position 11 (help)
3. ^ "So What if the Jews Run Hollywood?", Haaretz.com, March 6, 2006, online at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=690808&contrassID=2
4. "Jews Run Hollywood - So What?", Michael Medved, Moment magazine, August 1996
5. ^ "How Jewish Is Hollywood?", Joel Stein, The Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2008, online at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column
6. Goldberg, J. J. (1997). Jewish power: inside the American Jewish establishment. Basic Books. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0201327988 pages=286|0201327988 pages=286]]. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Missing pipe in: |ISBN= (help); line feed character in |ISBN= at position 11 (help)
7. ""Our Sacred Mission", speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, July 20, 1991". Archived from the original on 2007-09-27.
8. Saviours' Day Speech, Chicago, 29 Feb 2004, quoted by ADL at http://www.adl.org/special_reports/farrakhan_own_words2/on_jewish_con.asp
9. “Justifiable Homicide: Black Youth in Peril (Part 3)” speech at Mosque Maryam, 11 November 2007
10. http://www.adl.org/special_reports/farrakhan_own_words2/on_jewish_con.asp
11. http://www.adl.org/PresRele/NatIsl_81/default.htm
12. ^ Goldberg, J. J. (1997). Jewish power: inside the American Jewish establishment. Basic Books. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0201327988 pages=288-289|0201327988 pages=288-289]]. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Missing pipe in: |ISBN= (help); line feed character in |ISBN= at position 11 (help)
13. Grobel, Lawrence. "Playboy Interview: Marlon Brando." Playboy, January 1979, ISSN 0032-1478. Retrieved: April 3, 2008.
14. http://www.beliefnet.com/News/2004/12/Bill-Jews-Are-Not-The-Enemy.aspx
15. The Dearborn Independent, 19 February 1921, online at http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij32.htm
16. The Dearborn Independent, early 1921, Quoted by Neal Gabler in "An Empire of Their Own", p. 277.
17. "New American View", 1 April 1994.
18. "Subverting the Disney Legacy" The Journal of Historical Review, Vol 17, No 5, p. 10-13, Sept-Oct 1998. Online at: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n5p10_Weber.html
19. Interview with Dolly Parton, Vogue magazine, January 1994
20. "Kings of the Deal", The Spectator, 29 October 1994, p. 14-16. Online at http://www.lukeford.net/essays/contents/Hollywood_Jews.htm or http://www.olimu.com/Notes/KingsOfTheDeal/KingsOfTheDeal.htm
21. "Jews Run Hollywood - So What?", Moment magazine, August 1996
22. ^ "Jews Run Hollywood - So What?", Michael Medved, Moment magazine, August 1996

• Cinema of the United States
• Antisemitism