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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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The first synagogue inside a U.S. prison reopens — no conviction required
As prisons go, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was unusually luxurious. For one, it had flush toilets — beating out even the White House in making the upgrade, museum exhibit developer Beth Tinker told me on a recent tour.
But if plumbing reflected the penitentiary’s commitment to prisoners’ physical well-being, its biggest innovation was more spiritual. Eastern State housed the first synagogue inside a U.S. prison, complete with a Torah ark and ner tamid, or eternal light. That restored sanctuary — a short walk from gangster Al Capone’s former cell — is now newly open to the public in a museum exhibit, Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond.
“It’s a place really of humanity, when you’re not getting a lot of humanity in this space,” Tinker said.
The synagogue, founded in 1922, hosted holiday celebrations and weekly Shabbat services. Outside volunteers brought in kosher meats. A circus performer visited and provided entertainment. After a prisoner gave birth to a baby boy, they brought in a mohel and held a bris.
Compare that level of institutional support with modern-day prisons, where there are often multifaith chapels, but a separate, dedicated space for a synagogue is rare, according to Rabbi Joseph Kolakowski, the first full-time Jewish chaplain in the history of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.
The exhibit comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling that makes it more difficult for prisoners to obtain a remedy when their religious rights are violated. Last month, the Court ruled that a Rastafarian man, Damon Landor, could not sue prison guards for monetary damages after they forcibly shaved off his dreadlocks, which he kept as part of his faith. When he entered the prison, Landor carried with him a copy of a 2017 court decision that required the Louisiana Department of Corrections to honor Rastafarian religious practices — which a guard threw in the trash, according to court records.
But while Landor couldn’t sue the guard, the Supreme Court did agree that Landor’s rights had been violated. His case led the Louisiana Department of Corrections to update its prisoner grooming policy to prevent similar violations.
Eastern State, meanwhile, was accommodating Jewish religious practice decades before those legal protections existed, Tinker said.
“That’s part of what makes this synagogue and this Jewish congregation so amazing, is because they didn’t have to do it, legally,” Tinker said. “It was able to not just sort of secretly start up, but thrive.”
The synagogue’s history
Eastern State didn’t exactly start as a model of restorative justice. Opened in 1829, the state-funded prison pioneered solitary confinement in the U.S., with the idea that solitude would force prisoners to reflect on their sins and find redemption.
That philosophy shaped the prison’s design. A wagon-wheel shaped, panopticon-esque layout allowed for centralized surveillance of prisoners. Skylights in each cell represented the “Eye of God,” suggesting to prisoners that they were always being watched. Cells were attached to small outdoor exercise yards, enclosed by high walls to discourage communication between prisoners. Guards placed hoods over prisoners’ heads whenever they left their cells to prevent them from seeing each other.
But overcrowding made isolation difficult to enforce, so Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement in 1913. That same year, Jewish prisoners gathered to pray for the first time together in the prison’s emergency hospital.
The idea for a more official synagogue came from the top: Alfred Fleisher, the Jewish president of the prison’s board of trustees, advocated for the construction of a sanctuary, partly over concerns that Jewish prisoners would be pressured to convert to Christianity, according to Tinker.
In 1922, prisoners and outside volunteers built the ornate sanctuary. Lights in the shape of menorahs surrounded the ark, and a gold Star of David was affixed to the ceiling next to a skylight.
“It was a chance for the Jewish congregants to have a space that really resonated with their religion, and was a little fancier than the rest of the prison,” Tinker said. “It has sort of the gravitas that you might really find in a synagogue.”
Most of the congregants were serving time for petty crimes, Tinker said, and their stays at Eastern State lasted no more than a few years. For instance, Sydney Bleecher, a prisoner and congregant at Eastern State, was serving time after pleading guilty to stealing 542 suits and overcoats from a store. But for many congregants, the synagogue’s impact lasted beyond the lengths of their prison sentences.
“It is not easy to find words that can say what we feel about you,” Bleecher wrote in a 1948 letter to Joseph Paull, one of the synagogue’s most devoted volunteers. “You have done so much for us that we are far and away indebted to you. Maybe we can repay in part by becoming decent citizens and, like you and your wife, reach out a hand to those who need help.”
The synagogue was also unusually integrated with the outside community. Fleisher attended every service at the synagogue until his death in 1928. Sabato Morais, the spiritual leader at Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, simultaneously served as a chaplain at Eastern State.
All that support occurred despite the prison’s small Jewish population, which never rose above 80 in a prison that held roughly 1,800 people in the 1930s.
Yet according to Tinker, the synagogue never faced much pushback from people of other faiths.
“When they started it, it’s also World War I, World War II, and all that antisemitism that’s happening,” Tinker said. “It could have easily gone another direction.”
Jewish life behind bars
Most prisons today hold Jewish services in multi-faith chapels rather than separate Jewish sanctuaries — a practical arrangement that allows facilities to accommodate prisoners of many faiths in a shared space.
After Eastern State closed in 1971, its successor, Graterford Prison, also featured a dedicated synagogue. But after Graterford closed in 2018, its replacement, SCI Phoenix, opened with a multifaith chapel instead.
Today, Kolakowski, chaplaincy program director at the State Correctional Institute at Waymart, Pa., conducts services in a multifaith chapel or, when it’s occupied, a classroom shared with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There, he leads regular services and holiday celebrations, including Passover seders and Hanukkah candle-lightings. During Sukkot, he hosts services in a makeshift sukkah.
“It’s meaningful to every inmate that practices a religious tradition,” Kolakowski said. “I remember one inmate in particular — he expressed how much he appreciated having the opportunity to have the lulav.”
But accommodating religious practice inside a prison often requires balancing spiritual needs with security concerns. When Kolakowski advocated for a Sikh prisoner to be able to wear a turban, for example, prison officials had to consider that the traditional head covering could be used to hide contraband, he said. Kolakowski ultimately got the item approved by suggesting a small turban with less fabric.
Modern-day prisons are legally required to accommodate prisoners’ religious practices unless they can demonstrate a compelling reason not to, such as a risk to staff or other prisoners’ safety. How those accommodations are carried out, however, can vary from prison to prison.
In 2023, for example, Jewish inmate Riley Benjamin sued the D.C. Department of Corrections after officials required him to produce outside proof of his Judaism before providing him with kosher meals. The jail later agreed to change its policy.
“Today, it’s really prison by prison, warden by warden, how they are defining religious freedom,” Tinker said. “One thing those laws really do is they sort of let the prison decide and the staff decide what it means to a certain extent.”
Still, there have been some successors to the Eastern State synagogue — including at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, where Rabbi Irving Koslowe convinced the prison administration to let him convert a basement storage room into an exclusively Jewish place of worship in 1959.
Koslowe died in 2000. But his great grandson, Benjamin Koslowe, visited the prison years later and wrote about the experience for Yeshiva University’s student newspaper.
In an interview with the Forward, Koslowe recalled one of his great-grandfather’s favorite jokes: “They’re the only synagogue that hopes that they don’t have a quorum.”
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I’m a left-leaning Zionist Jew in Maine. I still can’t make sense of the Graham Platner mess
It’s a very strange time to be a left-leaning Zionist Jew in America. It’s an even weirder time to be a left-leaning Zionist Jew in Maine.
Graham Platner, who suspended his ill-fated Senate campaign last week, electrified my friends and neighbors with his grave, light-blue-collar eloquence. He got them excited to vote for someone — not just against President Donald Trump and Sen. Susan Collins. In a state known for delivering temperate and sagacious senators, including George Mitchell, Olympia Snowe and Angus King, Platner brought a fire and passion that more befit our times.
Part of his appeal, and what allowed Mainers to slalom past so many red flags, was the aura of brave truth-teller he cultivated. He seemed unafraid to name our true enemies: billionaires, mega-corporations, Republicans, corporate Democrats, and yes, AIPAC.
The railing against AIPAC as the source of all evil made me uncomfortable, even as it’s become normalized. Add in that infamous Nazi tattoo, and the throngs of people cheering his every word, and any Jewish Mainer had a right to feel they were in a strange new wilderness.
On the one hand: How could I vote for someone who I feared might make this country less safe for my Jewish children? On the other: How could I vote for someone who supports Trump, whose policies also makes this country less safe for my children?
I had trouble squaring the fear so many of my Jewish friends felt at Platner’s candidacy with the exultation of my non-Jewish friends. There is a great Maine saying for when you need more information before you commit to a stance: “Hard telling not knowing.”
I didn’t know enough, so I couldn’t tell how much to worry. So I endeavored to speak to the guy about it.
Maine is a small state, and you can actually do that kind of thing. I went to the Passover Seder that Platner’s campaign put on, and I parlayed that into a conversation. I came out of that experience cautiously optimistic that Graham Platner is not an actual Nazi, or even an antisemite. But I was still relieved to see him step back from the race — even though I took no joy in it.
Troubled Jewish bona fides
There were plenty of reasons to have some faith that Platner wouldn’t be as disastrous for Jews as many of my friends feared. I met the lovely Jewish family in whose Bangor home a young Graham shared many a Shabbos dinner. His campaign staff who I met would have set off even the least sensitive Jewdar. He was clearly comfortable at the Seder he hosted, and it clearly was far from his first.
When we spoke on the phone, he talked about the deep love he has for his Israeli family members, including his step-brother: a serious, hawkish Israeli security analyst with Maine roots. That gave him a human connection to the conflict that few Mainers have. He believed he’d spoken out forcefully against antisemitism.
But his language about Israel was reckless, I told him, and I implored him to be more careful. While he knew and loved individual Jews, most Mainers did not: our community in this state is very small. The impact of his insistence that Israel was committing genocide might not match his intent. Criticism of Israel is valid, but the recent increase in its intensity has been paralleled by an increase in attacks on American Jews.
Platner’s response concerned me. He told me that it was the policies of the Netanyahu government that were most responsible for that spike in violent antisemitism — not the people actually trying to kill us. I asked him to use his platform and his unique perspective to move people away from hatred. He repeated that Israel was committing genocide, and that he would continue to speak out against antisemitism.
We ended the call and I thought about Yehuda Amichai’s wise line: “From the place where we are right/ flowers will never grow/ in the spring.”
An aborted story of redemption
Somehow me saying “I told you so” to my friends left saddened and angered by Platner’s withdrawal from the race following an allegation of sexual assault didn’t make them feel better.
And even I wasn’t sure exactly what the “I told you so” would mean. I’d been clear that he wasn’t reliable, that his political vision didn’t make up for a lack of personal judgment or record. But I myself had tried to see my way past those concerns, too. To be quite honest, although it’s probably anathema to say so given the charges against him, I kind of liked the guy as a person. His clunky, tearful exit video hurt to watch.
The story of redemption that Platner and his campaign told was a welcome antidote to the turbocharged version of manhood pushed by so many on the right. That his downfall came from a revelation of an act that felt like the embodiment of how toxic that vision can be only contributes to the overall feeling of brokenness.
Now several other viable candidates with half of the charisma will try to gather all of the energy he created. And I wonder: in these furious, truncated weeks of campaigning — the Democratic party must select a candidate by July 27 — which of them will take the shortcut to the progressive heart by bashing Israel the most? If one says Israel is bad, must the next say it is worse?
It’s for the best — but also alarming — that we’re about to have new insight into how much of Platner’s coalition was built upon this rhetoric. Already Shena Bellows, a top candidate and former head of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, has hesitatingly taken to using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. Who will be next up to take a swing?
What terrifies me about Platner, and many others on the anti-Israel left, is that they seem to be casually playing with a darkness they do not understand. (The same could be said of Platner’s erstwhile Nazi tattoo, if we’re to believe he truly didn’t understand its meaning when he got it.) They risk building a permission structure for hatred of Jews, whether they intend to or not.
I will be looking for the candidate who refuses to add another brick to that structure, although I don’t know if any of them have the courage to abstain.
Meanwhile, ICE just killed an innocent man in Biddeford, Maine in front of his daughter. This madness, too, has to stop. Which madness do we prioritize? And how much of one madness will we accept in order to stop another?
This is the place of confusion that many of us are in. The only answer I have is that it’s hard telling not knowing.
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Bagels are hanging from the trees in Beijing. Is China bagelmaxxing?
I was strolling through a gleaming new mall complex in Beijing beside a couple walking their robot dog when I stumbled upon the bagel tree. Its branches, though bare of leaves, bore giant bagel sculptures, hanging from its boughs on translucent string. In front was a sign proclaiming, “Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum.”
Beigel Tree by New York Bagelous Museum, it turned out, was a new offshoot of the viral New York Bagelous Museum, a growing bagel chain with five shops across three Chinese cities.
The New York Bagelous Museum would seem, at least in name, to be a nod to New York Jewish culture. These days, China isn’t so hot on either of those things. The Chinese government sees America as a country in decline and often points towards visible poverty in major American cities, like New York, as a sign of this. While China used to be nearly free of Jew-hatred, there has seen a rise of antisemitic posts and rhetoric on Chinese social media platforms. The government tightly controls what is posted on these platforms, but there has seemingly not been censorship of antisemitic posts.
In this environment, the proliferation of New York Bagelous Museums was surprising. I’d been living in China for nearly a year pursuing a Masters in Global Affairs, and I couldn’t help but wonder what this new development in Beijing-New York relations was all about. I went to see for myself.
Inside, the shop was decorated less like a New York bagel shop and more like a New England bed and breakfast. Instead of sturdy linoleum, it has hardwood floors. Customers sat on benches with green velvet pillows, noshing on bagels and sipping coffee. The shop’s exposed brick walls are hung with oil paintings, photos of New York City, and one tapestry depicting a famous 1963 photo of John and Jackie Kennedy’s family at Hyannisport. I found myself thinking, wouldn’t a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg be more appropriate?
Well, yes, but the shop isn’t exactly meant to be a faithful duplicate of a New York bagel shop. The likely inspiration for the store comes not from New York but from Seoul. In 2021, Seoul experienced its own bagel craze when a store called London Bagel Museum opened up, drawing two-hour-plus lines.
The Bagel Museum is, in no way, a museum. Besides the bagel part, the rest of the name is arbitrary. According to a Korea Times article, the store’s name simply “combines the founder’s favorite words.”
Two years later, in 2023, New York Bagelous Museum opened its first location in Shanghai. Like many Chinese companies, it was welcomed into this world with copycat allegations. The two shops are nearly identical, even including the font on the marquee, the interior design and the artwork on the packaging. The main difference is that one features a Union Jack while the other features the Statue of Liberty.
The mission statement on the shop’s page on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media application, says that the founders started the company because they wanted “to create a unique American museum-style bagel shop” and for their customers “to enjoy and feel the atmosphere from the American 50s and 60s.”
Though the menu did feature a lox and cream cheese bagel, the rest of the options were unrecognizable to this New Yorker. The signs were written in both English and Chinese. Some bagels were pre-made sandwiches. One featured sweet red bean paste and a slab of butter. Another was stuffed with cream cheese and topped with sticky syrup and rose petals. The sandwiches were artfully put together, unlike the slapdash constructions you find in New York. Other bagels had fillings rolled into the dough, like the Mexican pepper bagel, stuffed with asiago and salami. My friends and I got these, as well as a blueberry sandwich and chocolate bagel, to try.
Notwithstanding the unorthodox flavors, upon taking a bite, I realized that these were bagels in name only. While they did have some of the chewiness of a bagel, they didn’t have the density or the hard exterior. This is likely because, in making the bagels, New York Bagelous Museum doesn’t boil them, something I learned while watching bakers make them through a window into the kitchen. Besides the shape, there wasn’t much separating the bagels from a bread roll.
At the New York Bagelous Museum, I found few traces of New York, bagels, or museums. But the average Chinese customer probably wouldn’t realize the difference between this shop and the real deal, just like the average American eating Chinese takeout wouldn’t realize the gulf between the Chinese food in America and that in China.
It doesn’t seem like those who visit New York Bagelous museums are all that attracted by New York, much less New York Jewish culture. Instead, judging by the myriad posts from Chinese social media about the shop, it’s merely because the shop is viral. Many reviews mention the bagels, but a lot mention another fact: the shop, with its approximated Americana and absurdly stuffed sandwiches, is a great place in which to take photos.
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