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THEME: HOLLYWOOD'S JEWISH QUESTION Jewish involvement in America's movie industry has been the subject of public discussion ever since Hollywood emerged as the national — and international — center of movie-making. |
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| The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive (click images for more) |
    The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive (top & middle) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (above) |
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Although dating from the end of World War I, this discussion is itself rooted in a broader, older discourse, driven by a modern, political anti-Semitism that first emerged in late-nineteenth-century Europe. The "Jewish Question," as this discourse came to be known, challenged the place of Jews in Western society, raising suspicions of their loyalty as citizens and promoting slanderous accounts of Jewish conspiracies. At its most extreme, the Jewish Question became the discursive foundation for the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Although initiated by anti-Semites, the Jewish Question has also prompted responses from Jews and philo-Semites. In America this discourse took a distinctive shape by scrutinizing the Jewish presence in Hollywood, thereby initiating one of this nation's most extensive discussions of the relationship between identity and culture. Over the decades, various attempts to ask or answer Hollywood's Jewish Question have shifted focus and changed tenor in response to events in both the movie industry and American politics. Periodically, Hollywood has been represented as a source of moral corruption or political subversion. Some have attacked the movie industry for its internationalism, others for being the instrument of American cultural imperialism. Consequently, Hollywood's Jews have been stereotyped as both seditious radicals and cynical capitalists. Although often implicit, an awareness of popular entertainment's significance as a force for social change has been central to Hollywood's Jewish Question. |
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The Movie Moguls Hollywood's first generation of studio executives — notably William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Marcus Loew, Louis B. Mayer, and Adolph Zukor, all of whom were Jews — were the most visible symbols of America's dynamic, expanding motion-picture industry, other than the movies' stars themselves. These movie "moguls," who would be followed by younger men like Jack and Harry Warner, Harry Cohn, Irving Thalberg, David Selznick, and the non-Jewish Darryl F. Zanuck, were frequently represented as autocratic, alien figures who owed their success to a ruthless ambition and shrewd business sense. From the early 1920s to the present, observers have argued that the Jewishness of the studio heads explained certain characteristics — seen as both virtues and vices — that were instrumental in enabling Hollywood to create a new and seemingly universal form of public entertainment. |
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