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Dave Chappelle isn’t the first to suggest that Jews run Hollywood. Here are the origins of the trope.
(JTA) – On “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, Dave Chappelle really wanted his audience to know there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood.
“I’ve been to Hollywood, this is just what I saw,” he said during his widely dissected monologue. “It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.”
While suggesting that it might not be fair to say Jews run the industry, the comedian said that coming to that conclusion is “not a crazy thing to think.” Chappelle’s “SNL” episode drew a season-high 4.8 million viewers when it aired on NBC (eclipsing Jewish comedian Amy Schumer’s own hosting stint the week before), and his monologue had more than 8.1 million views on YouTube as of Wednesday.
The Anti-Defamation League was quick to denounce Chappelle’s act, calling it antisemitic. Other prominent Jews have followed suit.
“I was very disturbed to see him speaking, to millions of people, a lot of antisemitic tropes,” Pamela Nadell, a professor at American University who researches antisemitism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
But Chappelle, who was himself riffing on recent antisemitism controversies involving Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, wasn’t exactly breaking new ground by insinuating that Jews run Hollywood. The trope has been a part of show business since its earliest days — when, in a literal sense, Jews did run Hollywood. Or the studios, anyway.
Nearly every major movie studio was founded in the early 20th century by a group of first-generation secular Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. Carl Laemmle (Universal), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), William Fox (Fox), Louis B. Mayer (MGM), and Benjamin Warner (Warner) were all Jewish silver-screen pioneers, laying the groundwork for the size and scale of the industry to follow.
But the industry has diversified greatly in the century since, with studios largely swallowed up by corporate behemoths. And while individual Jews may be overrepresented in an industry that has long welcomed and rewarded them, the rhetorical danger, Nadell said, comes in conflating a large Jewish presence in an industry with ownership and control of that industry.
“Jews remain active in Hollywood in a variety of roles, but it would be impossible to say that they run Hollywood, that they own Hollywood,” she said.
“Whenever the Jews enter into any kind of position where they might have influence over people who are not Jewish, then all of a sudden it’s seen as some kind of conspiracy.”
Conspiracy theories dogged Jews in Hollywood from the industry’s beginning. Because so many Jews were in control in Hollywood in its early years, Joseph Breen, who for decades ran the industry’s Production Code office and tried to make movies palatable to Catholic morality groups, blamed “the Jews” for sneaking sex, violence and moral depravity into the movies.
But their rise to the top of the still-young motion picture industry wasn’t because they were a part of some secretive cabal; it’s because, historians say, Hollywood provided a low barrier to entry for enterprising businessmen, and was lacking the antisemitic guardrails of more established industries.
“There were no social barriers in a business as new and faintly disreputable as the movies were in the early years of [the 20th] century,” historian Neal Gabler writes in his landmark 1988 book “An Empire Of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood.”
In the book, Gabler notes that the movie business, which evolved out of other professions like vaudeville and the garment industry where Jews had already found a toehold, lacked “the impediments imposed by loftier professions and more firmly entrenched businesses to keep Jews and other undesirables out.”
As such, Jews (particularly recent immigrants) were able to thrive in show business in a way they couldn’t in most other industries. Once they were in, family ties or the general phenomenon of affinity groups often led to them elevating other Jews in the industry: For example, prolific Jewish producer David O. Selznick, whose credits include “Gone With The Wind,” “Rebecca” and a huge string of other hits in the 1930s and ’40s, spent many years at MGM, run by his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer.
Areas like the film, garment and publishing industries were attractive to Jews, Nadell said, “because there were so many other sectors of the economy where they were barred from.”
But in exchange, Hollywood’s prominent Jews had to effectively extinguish their Jewishness.
Yearning to assimilate into American society, the Jews who ran these studios were beset on all sides by antisemitic invective — first from Christian groups like the Legion of Decency, then by anti-Communist groups, both of whom accused Hollywood’s Jews of conspiring to undermine American society with their loose morals.
As such, the Jewish studio heads largely refrained from making any movies about Jewish themes, or snuffing out antisemitic content even within their own films, or otherwise exerting their influence in any obviously Jewish way, even as many of the Golden Era of Hollywood’s most acclaimed writers and directors (Herman Mankiewicz, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Billy Wilder) were also Jewish. “Gentleman’s Agreement,” the landmark 1947 film about antisemitism, didn’t have any Jewish producers, directors or major stars (though some of its credited writers were Jewish).
Famously, Hollywood’s Jews also went out of their way to avoid offending Hitler during the Nazi era, continuing to do business with Germany and largely avoiding featuring Nazis as villains in the prewar years.
Director Steven Spielberg speaks at the Academy Awards in Hollywood, Feb. 9, 2020. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
With the demise of the studio system in the 1960s, Jewish creatives ranging from Mel Brooks to Steven Spielberg to Natalie Portman no longer had to hide their identity from audiences, but instead made it an essential part of their public personas. Earlier this week, in a New York Times interview, Spielberg acknowledged that Hollywood was a welcoming place for Jews when he arrived as a young filmmaker.
“Being Jewish in America is not the same as being Jewish in Hollywood,” he said while promoting “The Fabelmans,” a loose retelling of his own Jewish upbringing. “Being Jewish in Hollywood is like wanting to be in the popular circle and immediately being accepted as I have been in that circle, by a lot of diversity but also by a lot of people who in fact are Jewish.”
Still, such ethnic affinity has often been deemed conspiratorial. “Hollywood is run by Jews” and “owned by Jews,” Marlon Brando declared in a 1996 interview with Larry King, further claiming that Jewish studio executives prevented antisemitic stereotypes from being depicted on screen while allowing stereotypes of every other minority group “because that’s where you circle the wagons around.”
(Despite this outburst, which prompted intense backlash from Jewish groups, Brando was known for having close relationships with Jews and demonstrating a strong understanding of Jewish theology and culture throughout his life, and apparently spoke Yiddish quite well.)
This general air of suspicion around Jews in show business has continued into the modern day, as evidenced by Chappelle and West’s comments. In the tweets that precipitated the collapse of his businesses, West singled out Jewish producers and managers in the entertainment industry he had affiliations with, echoing how believers in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control tend to fixate on Jews in leadership positions outside of the public eye.
Attorney Allen Grubman, left, and rocker John Mellencamp speak onstage during the 37th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Los Angeles, Nov. 5, 2022. (Amy Sussman/WireImage)
Ignoring the many industry leaders who are not Jewish, such conspiracy theorists tend to focus on the successful managers and lawyers in Hollywood who are, including Jeremy Zimmer, Ari Emanuel, Allen Grubman — and Harvey Weinstein, whose decades of sexual abuse, scorched-earth targeting of his accusers and eventual downfall are the subject of the new movie “She Said.”
And in a similar fashion to Brando, Chappelle suggested that there is a double standard in talking about ethnic groups, with jokes about Jews being seen as taboo in a way that jokes about Black people and other groups are not: “If they’re Black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. If they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”
At the same time as Jews in and out of the industry are fighting such perceptions, they are also pushing for greater visibility. The unveiling of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year almost entirely omitted Jews from Hollywood’s founding narrative, leading to backlash from Jews in the industry and, ultimately, the guarantee of a new permanent exhibition space focusing on Jews.
And there was one other way in which the Chappelle episode hearkened back to the age-old dynamics of the relationship between Jews and Hollywood: “Saturday Night Live” executive producer Lorne Michaels, who presumably allowed the monologue on the air, is Jewish.
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The post Dave Chappelle isn’t the first to suggest that Jews run Hollywood. Here are the origins of the trope. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush
In the thick of 31 Candles, a cockeyed rom-com about a 30-something’s ploy to become an adult bar mitzvah to get closer to a childhood crush, a one-night stand observes a jar of pickles in the kitchen of our hero’s Brooklyn apartment.
“Really?” she asks.
“I’m embracing cultural stereotypes,” he tells her, “What do you want me to do?”
To speak for myself: less.
Entering a now crowded field of rabbinically-inspired romantic comedies, the film — written, directed and edited by Jonah Feingold who also stars — wears its influences on its snide sleeve. A Nora Ephron autumn. Woody Allen-esque narration and titles. New York is a character!
Feingold plays Leo Kadner, a director for Lifetime and Hallmark Channel-coded Christmas films (Feingold, in real life, helmed the 2023 streamer EXmas). When he reconnects with an old flame from camp at his nephew’s bris, and learns she tutors b’nai mitzvah, he decides it’s finally time to become a man and make falling in love his bar mitzvah project.
There’s only one snag, beyond the obvious ick of the subterfuge: Feingold’s tutor, Eva (Sarah Coffey) is not the least bit interested. While the two have some kidding chemistry, it’s not a love match. The movie knows it — but the audience catches on quicker than it does.
There’s an element of subversion in Feingold’s approach, but the humor is packed in the same old schmaltz.
Leo’s mom (Jackie Sandler) somehow orders an off-the-menu martini at Barney Greengrass, while his father mentions a great uncle who invested with Jeffrey Epstein. Zabar’s black-and-white cookies play a featured role. Caroline Aaron (who already starred in a much better adult bar mitzvah film) as Leo’s grandmother, listens to his spiel on dating apps and the etiquette of Instagraming with your “situationship” at a shiva.
Watching Feingold confide in Aaron, I wondered who this movie was for. Its weekday screenings at Quad Cinema in the Village and at Movies of Delray in Florida would suggest an older crowd. A seminal discussion of an OTPHJ (over the pants handjob) and the celebrity dating app Raya suggests a younger audience that would likely groan at this sub-Apatowian dialogue.
One could contend it is for young Jews with old souls or older people who are young at heart. I kinda consider myself both and rolled my eyes throughout.
That it belongs to a growing school of self-aware comedy writing wherein every character seems to have taken at least a level one improv class, is irksome, but its use of Judaism is perhaps most objectionable.
Nothing in the film is glaringly wrong — though how Leo could struggle with basic brachas after having spent many summers at a Jewish sleepaway camp raises eyebrows — but it resists its natural endpoint of finding the rite of passage meaningful for its own sake.
Leo learns a lesson on love, and offers it in the form of his drash on his Torah portion, Jacob and Rachel’s meet cute at the well, but he finds no deeper significance in his tradition, beyond a largely played-for-laughs visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust with his situationship.
A connection to peoplehood is not Leo’s consolation prize. The bar mitzvah process turns out to be a vehicle for his pathetic epiphany that she’s just not that into him. (The logic of 31 Candles calls to mind a better treatment of manhood and entitlement on an episode of Seinfeld where the bar mitzvah boy has eyes on Elaine.)
If there were now a dearth of Jewish content, Feingold’s film might be a refreshingly frothy entry to the American Jewish pantheon. As it stands, though, it feels like we’re being served Shiva Baby and Bad Shabbos’ reheated leftovers with more jokes about product placement and AI.
Like 31 candles glowing on a cake, the film is eye-catching and ultimately excessive. And, like the cake itself, it’s a confection that goes down easy enough — even if it may give you a stomachache.
The post In ‘31 Candles,’ a manchild becomes bar mitzvah to court his crush appeared first on The Forward.
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In Gaza, It’s Déjà vu All Over Again
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
Eleven years ago, the 2014 Hamas rocket war against Israel ended in a ceasefire.
In the ensuing years, Israel and the United States should have learned something about “ceasefires” as opposed to “peace.” President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan, however, has the flaw that every single such plan has had (in the territories and in Lebanon): the failure of anti-terror forces to control territory and enforce the rules. In the absence of that, Hamas has reemerged and is rearming in Gaza.
As I wrote in 2014:
The Hamas rockets have, for the time being, stopped; the current cease-fire is holding. The tunnel threat, a strategic one most Israelis had not understood until several days into the war, has been alleviated; many Hamas rocket manufacturing facilities have been destroyed; a substantial percentage of the Hamas arsenal has been used up; and Hamas achieved none of its strategic goals — not large-scale Israeli casualties or physical destruction, an airport, a seaport, or the opening of border crossings. Israeli children have returned to school and, after a brief dip, the Israeli economy is expected to grow for the year.
Those were the days of “mowing the grass.” Eliminating the visible threats.
As I asked at the time:
To the extent that the Israeli public wanted the destruction or elimination of Hamas, or an end to the rocket threat, it was doomed by its unreasonable expectations. Americans suffer similarly. Having understood the Islamic State [IS] as a threat not only in Syria and Iraq, but also to our interests and potentially to our own country, they want it gone. The question for the American government, as it is for the Israeli government, is: “How do you defeat an armed ideological movement with a territorial base if you are unwilling to fight in that territorial base?”
President Barack Obama spoke of “degrading, dismantling, and destroying” ISIS. He never said how — and neither has President Trump.
Try this:
Control of territory and the ability to subject one’s enemies to enforceable rules is the only known mechanism for ending, rather than managing, a war. Despite the Western propensity for “peace processes” and negotiations, it is hard (impossible?) to find a historical example of one side simply agreeing to give up its mission, arms, ideology, or interests without a forcing mechanism — military defeat.
We don’t like to talk about “winners” and “losers,” preferring to “split the difference” or find a “win-win” formula. But “peace” itself was defined by Machiavelli as “the conditions imposed by the winners on the losers of the last war.” There are different iterations of “peace,” depending on whether the winners institute good or bad conditions. There can be a cold peace, a warm peace, or the peace of the dead. The peace that followed WWI contained the seeds of WWII; the peace after WWII produced the German economic miracle.
Even when wars aren’t “won,” control of territory and enforceable rules can make the difference between long-term success and failure – the US military has been in South Korea since the 1953 Armistice, allowing a democratic, technologically advanced society to emerge despite the continuing threat from the impoverished, heavily armed, and dangerous North. The withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam within months of the armistice there allowed North Vietnam to capture territory and impose a communist government on a single Vietnamese entity. Although NATO faced Russia across the Fulda Gap, there is no denying that the Allied presence also enforced anti-Nazi rules in West Germany.
October 7, 2023, brought about a change in Israeli military thinking. A ceasefire is no longer enough. Hamas, in Israel’s view, has to be disarmed and ripped out of the territory in a verifiable and enforceable manner. The IDF is making plans to reassert itself across the yellow line. The US appears more interested in bringing Turkish troops into Gaza, a move rejected not only by Israel but, oddly, by Egypt. Qatari troops are no better. Both are Muslim Brotherhood partners of Hamas.
As I wrote:
The enemies of Israel and the West are similar. Ideological similarities aside, both are vicious and absolutist, and neither plays by Western rules regarding women, children, religious diversity or war crimes. Both rely on the relative gentility of their adversaries — Israel and the West — to protect them from ultimate defeat. Thus far, theirs is the correct bet.
Or at least it was.
The difficulty now will be bringing the US and Israel to the meeting point. President Trump was there. He called for ,“Hell to rain down on Hamas.” But now he appears to have changed his mind. Talk, negotiate, promise, offer, talk some more. This simply provides time for Hamas to rearm and reassert itself among the people of Gaza. And Hamas is using the time.
The US and its allies have to acknowledge the original flaw in the plan — both in 2014 and 2025. Without a military presence determined to uproot and destroy Hamas in whatever manner the military deems necessary, “peace plans” and “ceasefires” are simply wishes and, with due respect to Yogi Berra, “Déjà vu all over again.”
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly magazine.
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Bias and Distortion: When the BBC Becomes the Story
The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
“Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” (Micah 4:3).
That is unironically the official motto of the British Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as the BBC. And yet in recent weeks, the world has watched the opposite unfold: a state-funded broadcaster selectively edited footage to falsely imply that President Trump was actively inciting the January 6th Capitol riot. Presumably done because they believed the “truth” of their worldview mattered more than the truth of the footage.
This rightfully ignited an international scandal and a crisis of legitimacy. The BBC has offered a terse apology — but that apology rings hollow, given that the BBC has engaged in this behavior for decades — especially when it comes to covering the Jewish State.
The same editorial scalpel that carved Trump’s words, has for decades, performed cosmetic surgery on Middle Eastern reality. This stems from their belief that narrative truth supersedes factual truth — and that the BBC are the arbiters of all things truth.
The BBC represents the old-school institutional brand of nuanced antisemitism: never say explicitly what can be more effectively implied.
Israel is forever the aggressor and villain. Anything that contradicts that reality in any way whatsoever — from Palestinian terrorism, to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’ constant rejection of an Israeli state — is simply ignored.
Things simply happen, without agency, causality, or perpetrators — at least for one side of the conflict.
This is antisemitism through narrative staging. Israel is the intentional actor; its enemies are organisms responding to their environment. Israel’s choices are scrutinized; Hamas’ choices are naturalized.
To the BBC, Israel becomes a narrative accelerant while its enemies are granted the dignity of inevitability. The BBC does not invent the facts; it simply removes context. In the absence of evidence, it encourages audiences to “draw their own conclusions” — because, after all, the network is “just asking questions.” The result is reflexive antisemitism, an atmosphere rather than an argument.
According to a recent report in The Telegraph, the BBC has been forced to correct, on average, two anti-Israel Gaza stories a week since October 7th. This is not journalism; it is groupthink manipulation funded by the British public.
The ancient Greeks had a word for speech that abandons truth while avoiding outright lies: sophistry. Protagoras defined this worldview when he said, “Man is the measure of all things.” Truth becomes subjective, determined by what you want your audience to believe. Sophists mastered narrative manipulation and engineered entire populations with it.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle held a unanimous antipathy for all things sophistry. They believed the sophist class posed a greater threat to the republic than foreign invasion.
Plato warned that democracy becomes theatre when society loses the ability to distinguish between truth and plausibility. He could have been describing the 21st-century BBC.
The BBC has become the global engine for adjusting the Overton window — not just disparaging President Trump and American relations, but normalizing sympathy for terrorist groups, and delegitimizing Israel’s sovereignty. What are the effects of these manipulations on world events and British relations? The BBC is no longer a news organization; it is a mood architectural firm.
The Greeks understood the peril to democracy when sophistry overwhelmed truth. Throughout history this pattern has repeated itself for civilizations that ignored the early warning signs. Those signs are flashing again — and not merely at the fringes, but at the very apex of Britannia’s most trusted institution.
There is always a moment before the point of no return when better angels can still prevail. This is that moment. If “Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation” is to retain any meaning, it must begin with truth. Peace built on sophistry is merely sophistry.
Britain’s closest ally is the United States, and its most besieged ally is Israel. The BBC chose to malign both, not accidentally, but institutionally.
You cannot claim moral authority while eroding the foundations of your own alliances. You cannot claim neutrality while waging narrative warfare. And just as the Greeks warned — so it begins.
Philip Gross is a London-based American businessman and writer whose work focuses on politics, culture, and Jewish history. Born in New York and living in Britain for three decades, he writes from a transatlantic perspective shaped by a career in global commodities and a lifelong engagement with Jewish thought and contemporary affairs.