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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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Tu B’Shvat, Conscious Eating, and the Jewish Call to Return
Orange trees in Israel’s northern Galilee region. Photo: פואד מועדי / Wikimedia Commons
Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish New Year for the Trees, is often celebrated simply: fruit on the table, blessings over figs and dates, and a nod to nature in the middle of winter. For those who do things a bit more lavishly, a ceremony or seder is conducted.
But at its core, the holiday of Tu B’Shvat is far more than a seasonal celebration. It is a day that offers a profound Jewish teaching about food, responsibility, and the possibility of return.
To understand that teaching, we have to go back to the very first act of eating in the Torah.
In the Garden of Eden, God gives Adam and Eve permission to eat freely from nearly everything around them. Only one boundary is set: there is one tree that is off limits. When Adam and Eve cross that boundary, the result is a rupture of faith between humans and God, which results in a series of other ruptures between humans and the earth — and humans and themselves.
One of the great Chassidic masters, Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen (1823-1900), suggested that the problem was not simply what they ate, but how they ate: without awareness, without restraint, and without consciousness. They consumed, rather than received.
Five hundred years ago, the kabbalists of Tzfat transformed Tu B’Shvat from a technical agricultural date into a spiritual opportunity. They taught that the world is filled with sparks of holiness, and that our everyday actions, especially eating, can either elevate those sparks or bury them further. This lesson has recently been discussed by the Jerusalem-based educator Sarah Yehuit Schneider.
Eating, in Jewish thought, is never neutral.
When we eat with intention and gratitude, we participate in tikkun olam, repairing the world. When we eat mindlessly, we reenact the mistake of Eve and Adam from the Garden of Eden.
The holiday of Tu B’Shvat invites us to try again.
There is another detail worth noting. The Torah’s first description of the human diet is explicitly plant-based: “I have given you every seed-bearing plant and every fruit-bearing tree; it shall be yours for food.” That diet, which was given in Eden, does not end with humanity’s exile from paradise. For generations to come, until after the great flood in the time of Noah, that diet continued in a world already marked by moral compromise.
On Tu B’Shvat, when Jews sit down to a table of fruit, we are quietly returning to that original vision of eating plant-based food that sustains life without taking it, nourishment that reflects restraint rather than domination.
That idea feels especially urgent today.
Our food choices now affect far more than our own bodies. They shape the treatment of animals, the health of the planet, and the sustainability of our food systems. Eating “without knowing” is something that carries grave consequences, which are all too visible in our society.
To observe conscious eating today means asking hard questions: Who is harmed by this choice? What systems does it support? What kind of world does it help create?
In my work as a rabbi and educator with Jewish Vegan Life, I encounter many Jews grappling with these questions, most of whom possess a desire to align their daily choices with enduring Jewish values of compassion, responsibility, and reverence for life.
Tu B’Shvat reminds us that Judaism does not demand perfection, but it does demand awareness. It teaches that repair is possible, not only through grand gestures, but through daily choices repeated with intention.
Redemption begins when a person makes a choice to eat their meal consciously. This is what the seder on Passover is for and what it reminds us of, and the same holds true for the seder on Tu B’Shvat.
The custom to eat fruits on Tu B’Shvat, the choice to have a seder or ceremony, reminds us of the consciousness that we must approach all of our meals with. On Tu B’Shvat, we are being asked to reconsider how we eat, how we live, and how we might take one small step closer to the world as it was meant to be. It is, after all, according to the Mishna in tractate Rosh Hashanah, one of the four New Years of the Jewish calendar.
Rabbi Akiva Gersh, originally from New York, has been working in the field of Jewish and Israel education for more than 20 years. He lives with his wife, Tamar, and their four kids in Pardes Hanna. He is the Senior Rabbinic Educator at Jewish Vegan Life. https://jewishveganlife.
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Jewish Survival Depends on the Existence of a Jewish State
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
“The past is never dead, it is not even past,” a quotation from William Faulkner’s novel, Requiem for a Nun, is frighteningly apt today in relation to antisemitism.
Many of us are wondering if the antisemitism we are witnessing now is comparable to the antisemitism our parents or grandparents experienced during the 1930s, almost 100 years ago.
The parallels are obvious — the hatred and demonization of Jews/Israelis (especially on social media), boycotts of Jewish and Israeli businesses and products, and the aggressive public protests that include genocidal language and target Jewish neighborhoods and houses of worship.
There are also the increasingly common violent physical attacks on Jews, including murder, often carried out to coincide with Jewish festivals and religious observances.
There are also differences, of course.
Nothing like the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping German Jews of their rights, and designed to separate Jews from German society, have been enacted anywhere. But this point may not be as comforting as it sounds, because today, the most antisemitic countries in the world are not in Europe. They are in North Africa and the Middle East and, with the exception of a few thousand Jews remaining in Iran, these countries have virtually no Jews left to threaten. A majority of those Jews who once resided in that part of the world, and their descendants, are safe in Israel.
The existence of a Jewish State is the primary difference between the Jewish predicament today, and the situation that existed in the 1930s.
An episode such as that of the S.S. St. Louis, when 937 Jews fleeing Europe before the outbreak of World War II were denied sanctuary and sent back to almost certain death, would never happen today.
The Évian Conference is another example of Jewish powerlessness during the 1930s. Held from July 6 to July 15, 1938, representatives of 32 countries met in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to search for a solution to the Jewish refugee crisis precipitated by the intense antisemitism unleashed by the Nazis.
The conference achieved very little, and today the Évian conference is widely believed to have been a cynical ploy to deflect attention away from the refusal to raise US immigration quotas, or even fill existing quotas, to save Jews.
With the exception of the Dominican Republic (in the end, only a little more than 700 Jewish refugees found sanctuary there), no country agreed to accept Jewish refugees.
In a shocking example of indifference to Jewish concerns, representatives of a number of non-governmental organizations, including several Jewish ones, could observe but not participate in the proceedings. Golda Meir, an observer representing the Jewish Agency in Palestine at the Évian Conference is quoted as saying, “I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through it, can understand what I felt at Evian — a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror.”
In April 1943, American and British representatives met in Bermuda to discuss what to do with the Jewish refugees, both those liberated by the Allies as the war progressed, and those who might still be alive in Nazi-occupied Europe. The venue, Bermuda, a remote location in the midst of World War II, was chosen to minimize press coverage.
As in the case of Évian, no Jewish organization was allowed to participate. At the time the conference was held, there was no doubt about the full extent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Yet, once again, nothing was achieved. As in the case of the Évian Conference, the Bermuda Conference was a public relations event, and not an actual effort to protect Jewish lives.
All of these events — and hundreds more throughout history — emphasize the importance of a sovereign Jewish state for Jewish safety and survival. But what really makes this point stand out is a history that is often overlooked; the role that Mandatory Palestine played in saving Jews from the Holocaust.
Aliyah numbers show that despite restrictions limiting Jewish immigration imposed by British officials, and widespread opposition to Jewish immigration by Palestinian Arabs, approximately 200,000 to 250,000 Jews, mainly from Germany and Eastern Europe, were able to find sanctuary in the Mandate during the 1930s. How many more would have been saved had there been an independent Jewish state?
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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Did the Bondi Attack Actually Change Australia?
Grandparents of 10-year-old Matilda, who was killed during a mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday, grieve at the floral memorial to honor the victims of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeremy Piper
The Bondi terrorist attack on December 14, 2025, changed Australia.
But in many ways, it also didn’t.
The shock of watching a murderous rampage unfold at one of our most iconic sites, in what Australians long believed was a safe, peaceful country, shook the nation to its core.
Fifteen innocent people being murdered at a peaceful Hanukkah event is something so foreign to the experience of Australians, that it shattered the country’s sense of security overnight. Most Australians believed this kind of hatred was something that occurred elsewhere, not here.
Such trauma can prompt genuine reflection — which in turn may lead to genuine change.
In the aftermath of the attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese struck a markedly different tone than he had previously, showing an empathy with Australia’s Jewish community that many of us felt was often sorely missing in the months following October 7, 2023.
On January 22, 2026, Albanese initiated a National Day of Mourning, observed across the country. Fifteen sites were illuminated to commemorate the 15 victims, Australians were encouraged to light candles in their windows, and — strikingly — the government even urged citizens to perform a mitzvah — yes, it used that word — in the victims’ memory, publishing a list of 15 suggested acts of kindness.
In a nationally televised address at the Sydney Opera House — the very site where, on October 9, 2023, crowds had gathered to celebrate the Hamas massacre in Israel — the Prime Minister offered a direct apology to the Jewish community, acknowledging that “we could not protect your loved ones from this evil.”
Five days later, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Albanese released a statement commemorating the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, describing “the immense multitudes of Jewish lives and futures stolen with a pitiless cruelty that remains scarcely fathomable in its evil.” To be fair, he issued a similar statement on the same day last year.
This moral clarity contrasted starkly with the BBC and US Vice President JD Vance, who both failed to even mention the word “Jew” in their statements marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Albanese’s apology for the Bondi massacre was a sharp departure from what had often been a strained and acrimonious relationship between his government and the Jewish community, driven by persistent and often disproportionate criticism of Israel during its war against Hamas and other terrorist groups, alongside a series of concrete policy decisions widely perceived as hostile toward a longstanding democratic ally.
In the weeks following Bondi, the government moved swiftly to legislate, recalling parliament early in order to pass a package of new federal hate and extremism laws, including the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill. These measures criminalize participation in designated hate groups, impose penalties of up to 15 years in prison for directing such organizations, expand visa-cancellation powers for individuals promoting hate, and tighten controls on extremist symbols and propaganda. A provision to criminalize extreme racial vilification was dropped in the face of the Opposition’s objections to it.
New South Wales, where the attack occurred, also introduced state-level laws granting police broader powers around protests linked to declared terrorist events.
A Royal Commission has also been commissioned to investigate antisemitism in Australia in the lead-up to the Bondi attack, following pressure from broad sections of the community after Albanese was initially opposed to holding one.
These steps were welcomed by the Jewish community, yet it remains far too early to declare them transformative. After all, hate-speech laws already existed across Australian jurisdictions, but were only rarely used.
History therefore suggests that legislation alone is rarely enough; the true test is whether authorities are willing to enforce the laws consistently, especially when doing so becomes politically uncomfortable.
And that discomfort may arrive very soon.
The upcoming visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in early February, at Prime Minister Albanese’s invitation, will serve as a critical test of whether the empathy shown after Bondi represents a lasting shift or a fleeting political moment.
Already, Labor Friends of Palestine have called for President Herzog to be blocked from coming and investigated for alleged incitement and complicity in war crimes. Multiculturalism Minister Dr. Anne Aly initially declined to confirm whether she would welcome the Israeli President on his state visit, before later offering a notably lukewarm endorsement. There are also mass protests planned against his visit by anti-Israel groups. How the government deals with this will be telling.
These are the same kind of groups that supported Hamas after Oct. 7, and appeared on Australia Day, the national celebration of identity and unity, with calls for “intifada.”
Australia is currently at a crossroads in its relationship with Israel and also the Jewish community here. How it navigates that relationship could well determine the future of Jewish life in Australia. Hopefully the solidarity now being shown will be maintained and enhanced. But if it proves to be temporary, and the hostility being drummed up by the local anti-Zionist movement resurges, then the long-term feelings of belonging and security that underpin Australia’s long thriving Jewish community will likely erode further.
That, tragically, could echo the same sad and tragic path of many past Jewish communities throughout history.
Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).