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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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Jewish Americans Shouldn’t Be Shocked by Scott Wiener’s Genocide Lie
California State Sen. Scott Wiener. Photo: Screenshot
At first glance, California State Sen. and Democratic candidate for US Congress Scott Wiener is representative of what many consider a genuine American Jewish success story: a Jewish boy from New Jersey whose childhood memories were shaped by parents who helped build a local Conservative synagogue.
Wiener possesses the boy-next-door charm and familiarity of a Jewish American who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, was academically gifted, and later graduated from Harvard Law School.
The budding lawmaker soon found his footing in politics and eventually rose to become a state senator in the nation’s most populous state.
The youthful-looking Wiener, who calls himself “one of the strongest LGBTQ civil rights champions in the nation,” also co-chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
The one critical wrinkle to Wiener’s path to Jewish political prominence is that the 55-year-old politician recently promoted the disgusting blood libel that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
After enduring jeers from left-wing attendees at last week’s candidate debate featuring Wiener and two other Democrats vying to succeed retiring Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Wiener pivoted from his initial refusal to characterize Israel’s actions as genocide and made the decision, days later, to turn against the Jewish state in a 90-second cringe-inducing video unveiled Sunday on the social media platform X.
For those following evolving attitudes toward Israel within liberal Jewish spaces, where Zionism is increasingly disassociated from Judaism, Wiener’s comments condemning Israel are perhaps the least shocking development in the progressive Democrat’s political career.
Jewish communities across America have spent decades nurturing ideological identities that focused on cultivating loyal liberals rather than strong Jews.
Moreover, when support for Israel is passed down from one generation to the next, with little explanation of the moral, legal, and historical rights undergirding the Jewish people’s right for self-determination, Zionism is treated as another dispensable political movement.
It’s a phenomenon that leaves people like Wiener susceptible to the anti-Israel animus entrapping a rising cohort of Jewish Democrats. It’s why anti-Zionists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be quick to denounce a swastika plastered at a Jewish school in Brooklyn but grant a pass to violent pro-Hamas mobs descending on New York City synagogues that aim to disrupt Israel-related events.
Absent a firm framework explaining why it is a Jewish imperative to advance a pro-Israel narrative, the strategy to widen the wedge between Zionism and one’s Jewish identity will yield more Jews like Wiener who cave to the whims of keffiyeh-wearing voters.
Wiener is not alone.
In New York, 25-year-old Jewish progressive Cameron Kasky was, until this week, running for Congress in the state’s 12th district and recently returned from a Palestinian-led trip to Israel.
In a nod to his deep hatred of the Jewish state, Kasky, who grew up in South Florida attending Hebrew School, lists “Stop Funding Genocide” as his first policy priority on his website.
It was only 10 years ago when such overt antisemitic positions would have earned a candidate a place on the political sidelines.
Since then, the landscape has changed dramatically. A Washington Post Jewish Americans poll conducted in September revealed that the distorted views espoused by Israel’s detractors in the diaspora align with a significant portion of American Jewry.
In the study, 61 percent of American Jews responded that they believe Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, with nearly 40 percent accusing the Jewish state of “genocide.”
The troubling spike in anti-Israel attitudes among American Jews became more conspicuous over the last several years, as social justice movements surrounding climate change, the women’s march movement, and George Floyd gave Jews who harbor little interest in following the traditional tenets of Judaism an avenue through which to wield their cultural Judaism.
In an effort to keep sanctuaries full and congregants satisfied, non-orthodox institutions coalesced around cultural issues that accelerated a liberal and increasingly secularized world order.
Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, has repeatedly demanded that Jewish leaders meet the “historical demands of our time” and is among several leaders calling for a course correction within the Reform movement.
Still, since Wiener has now planted himself on the side of the Democrats’ anti-Israel faction, the Jewish organizations Wiener was so eager to frequent as a guest speaker in the past released a joint statement that was charitable in their repudiation of the candidate’s use of the term “genocide.”
The truth is that Wiener has long fashioned himself a progressive who rarely shies from admonishing Israel.
His regurgitation of the genocide lie reflects less of a shift and more of a sharpening of previous statements where he publicly charged Israel’s government with deliberately starving Palestin
Wiener also has a history of treating Hamas and Israel as “moral equivalents” and has gone on record saying that he will not accept donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Put simply, it was obvious long ago that Wiener would not emerge as the Democrats’ next John Fetterman, a US senator from Pennsylvania who, amid criticism from his own party, has remained a steadfast supporter of Israel.
The seeds of Wiener’s disgraceful break with the Jewish state were planted long ago.
Raised with a scant appreciation or understanding on the importance of a Jewish homeland, the state senator fell under a secularized umbrella of “universal human rights.”
Sadly, his views on Israel are symbolic of what constitutes the path to political success in today’s Jewish Democratic Party orbit.
Irit Tratt is a writer, an American and pro-Israel advocate. Follow her on X @Irit_Tratt.
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Iranian Regime’s Deadly Crackdown Quells Protests, Residents and Rights Group Say
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran‘s deadly crackdown appears to have broadly quelled protests for now, according to a rights group and residents, as state media reported more arrests on Friday in the shadow of repeated US threats to intervene if the killing continues.
The prospect of a US attack has retreated since Wednesday, when President Donald Trump said he’d been told killings in Iran were easing, but more US military assets were expected to arrive in the region, showing the continued tensions.
US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, conducted intense diplomacy with Washington this week to prevent a US strike, warning of repercussions for the wider region that would ultimately impact the United States, a Gulf official said.
Israel’s intelligence chief David Barnea was also in the US on Friday for talks on Iran, according to a source familiar with the matter, and an Israeli military official said the country’s forces were on “peak readiness.”
The White House said on Thursday that Trump and his team have warned Tehran there would be “grave consequences” if there was further bloodshed and added that the president was keeping “all of his options on the table.”
The protests erupted on Dec. 28 over economic hardship and swelled into widespread demonstrations calling for the end of clerical rule, which culminated in three days of mass violence at the end of last week.
According to opposition groups and an Iranian official, more than 2,000 people were killed in the worst domestic unrest since Iran‘s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Some media reports have said the death toll was as high as 12,000-20,000, with thousands of additional demonstrators arrested.
But several residents of Tehran reached by Reuters said the capital had now been comparatively quiet for four days. Drones were flying over the city, but there had been no sign of major protests on Thursday or Friday. Another resident in a northern city on the Caspian Sea said the streets there also appeared calm. The residents declined to be identified for their safety.
As an internet blackout eased this week, more accounts of the violence have trickled out.
One woman in Tehran told Reuters by phone that her daughter was killed a week ago after joining a demonstration near their home.
“She was 15 years old. She was not a terrorist, not a rioter. Basij forces followed her as she was trying to return home,” she said, referring to a branch of the security forces often used to quell unrest.
The US is expected to send additional offensive and defensive capabilities to the region, but the exact makeup of those forces and the timing of their arrival was still unclear, a US official said speaking on condition of anonymity.
The US military’s Central Command declined to comment, saying it does not discuss ship movements.
PAHLAVI CALLS FOR INCREASED PRESSURE
Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of Iran‘s last shah who has gained increasing prominence as an opposition figure, on Friday urged the international community to ramp up pressure on Tehran to help protesters overthrow clerical rule.
“The Iranian people are taking decisive action on the ground. It is now time for the international community to join them fully,” said Pahlavi, whose level of support inside Iran is hard to gauge.
Trump this week appeared to downplay the idea of US backing for Pahlavi, voicing uncertainty that the exiled royal heir who has courted support among Western countries could muster significant backing inside Iran. Pahlavi met US envoy Steve Witkoff last weekend, Axios reported.
Iranian-Kurdish rights group Hengaw said that there had been no protest gatherings since Sunday, but “the security environment remains highly restrictive.”
“Our independent sources confirm a heavy military and security presence in cities and towns where protests previously took place, as well as in several locations that did not experience major demonstrations,” Norway-based Hengaw said in comments to Reuters.
REPORTS OF SPORADIC UNREST
There were, however, still indications of unrest in some areas. Hengaw reported that a female nurse was killed by direct gunfire from government forces during protests in Karaj, west of Tehran. Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.
The state-affiliated Tasnim news outlet reported that rioters had set fire to a local education office in Falavarjan County, in central Isfahan Province, on Thursday.
An elderly resident of a town in Iran‘s northwestern region, where many Kurdish Iranians live and which has been the focus for many of the biggest flare-ups, said sporadic protests had continued, though not as intensely.
Describing violence earlier in the protests, she said: “I have not seen scenes like that before.”
Video circulating online, which Reuters was able to verify as having been recorded in a forensic medical center in Tehran, showed dozens of bodies lying on floors and stretchers, most in bags but some uncovered. Reuters could not verify the date of the video.
The state-owned Press TV cited Iran‘s police chief as saying calm had been restored across the country.
A death toll reported by US-based rights group HRANA has increased little since Wednesday, now at 2,677 people, including 2,478 protesters and 163 people identified as affiliated with the government.
Reuters has not been able to independently verify the HRANA death toll. An Iranian official told the news agency earlier this week that about 2,000 people had been killed.
The casualty numbers dwarf the death toll from previous bouts of unrest that have been suppressed by the state, including in 2009 and 2022.
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The Department of Labor told us to embrace ‘Americanism.’ What’s that?
“Embrace Americanism,” reads a graphic shared by the U.S. Department of Labor on X, featuring a photo of George Washington’s bust on Mt. Rushmore. “America is for Americans,” the accompanying post says.
What, exactly, is Americanism? Though it may sound like a made-up term that Donald Trump might sling in his speeches off the cuff, in fact it has been around for at least two centuries, since the early days of the U.S.
Yet its definition has never been clear. While the word connotes some ideology of adherence to American values, a unified culture or an idealized vision of the nation, the exact vision of what that set of values or culture is remains so vague that the term has been used by Theodore Roosevelt, the American Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
Early American figures, including John Adams, simply used Americanism to mean a belief in a new republic defined by Democratic ideals and freedom of religion, a commitment to the culture of America. But that culture had not yet been defined — was it white and Christian, or was it a diverse melting pot?
Since its first use, the term has been claimed most often by the KKK. A 1926 paper by Klan Imperial Emperor and Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, published in The North American Review, is titled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” In it, Evans says that the KKK arose as an answer to an influx of “aliens and alien ideas” in the country — namely that of Jews, Catholics and Black people.
Evans does not define the Americanism he’s fighting for. But he’s clear about what it isn’t. He praises the Klan’s work fighting “radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds” — “rootless cosmopolitanism” being a pejorative regularly levied at Jews — and says that “racial instincts” are essential to preserving Americanism.
Those racial instincts are necessary, Evan writes, because anyone who is not an “old-stock American” of “Nordic blend” is fundamentally incapable of understanding or upholding Americanism. (The article largely avoids the term “white” to exclude groups like Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as Jews and Catholics, who today we might consider white.)
The 1920s were a time of great debate over Americanism, but the term has largely fallen out of use in the modern day. So is this the Americanism the Department of Labor is telling people to embrace one that excludes Jews, Black people, Asians, Catholics and anyone who isn’t a white Protestant — is it a dog whistle for the nativist, KKK ideology that defined the term when it was last popular? The DOL did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication, so we can’t know how the government came to adopt the word. But without specifying which Americanism they mean, it will be easy for white nationalists to see a post from the government using a term with a long racist history, and feel emboldened.
Still, maybe the values of Americanism they meant are something new entirely, synonymous with the Trump administration’s fight against trans people and DEI, or perhaps a simple declaration of patriotism.
Or maybe the DOL used Americanism in the sense that Earl Browder, president of the American Communist party in the 1900s, did when he attempted to reclaim the term and proclaimed that “Communism is 20th century Americanism.”
Probably not, though.
The post The Department of Labor told us to embrace ‘Americanism.’ What’s that? appeared first on The Forward.