Uncategorized
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.
—
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.
Uncategorized
The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion
(JTA) — Britain’s Green Party on Sunday adopted a policy equating Zionism with racism, a move that immediately drew condemnation from the Israeli government and sparked concerns among some Jewish party members and the broader Jewish community.
The motion has also caused divisions within the party itself, with leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, skipping the vote and the party’s five sitting members of parliament issuing a statement on the policy.
Passing with 1,022 votes to 813 votes at the left-wing party’s annual conference, the motion argues that Zionism as an ideology is racist as it promotes “ethnonationalism,” and “privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others.”
It also declares the Greens to be an “anti-Zionist party” and that Zionism, the movement to develop and protect a Jewish state in Israel, will be “treated as any other form of racism.”
The motion also supports the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press statement, “Today, the Green Party in Britain ceased to act as a political party and became a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism. The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle.”
“The shocking resolution adopted today legitimizes armed struggle, calls for a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ – meaning the destruction of the State of Israel – and labels as ‘racist’ the aspiration of the Jewish people for self-determination,” the ministry statement said, adding that it “goes far beyond the boundaries of legitimate political debate.”
The ministry called on other political parties in Britain, particularly the ruling Labour Party, to reject the resolution.
In a letter to Polanski ahead of the vote, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust said they had “acute concerns” about the motion and called on the party leaders to oppose it. They wrote that urgent action was needed to address growing antisemitism within the Green Party. Such a motion, they wrote, “fuels hatred of Jews.”
The five representatives of the Greens who sit in Parliament – MPs Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer and Hannah Spencer – issued a joint statement condemning the actions of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but emphasizing, “We know there is no conflict between supporting the rights of Palestinians and the rights of Jewish people.”
A clause was proposed to protect Jewish Greens by clarifying that the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline” those affiliated with synagogues or other Jewish groups that describe themselves as Zionist. The clause was voted down.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion appeared first on The Forward.
