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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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Is This Really a ‘Peace’ Agreement? History Says No
An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg
Whatever else is offered under the Israel-Hamas agreement, offering Palestinian statehood would undermine authoritative international law. To wit, beyond any reasonable doubt, both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas have been responsible for decades of barbarous anti-Israel terrorism. Moreover, the entities that operate this continuous criminality have never sought a Palestinian Arab state that would co-exist with the existing Jewish State. Always, its unhidden objective is to destroy Israel.
Corroborative evidence of this is abundant. In this “One-State Solution,” all of Israel would become part of “Palestine.” Already, on official PA and Hamas maps, all of Israel, not just Judea/Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza, is identified as “Occupied Palestine.” Cartographically, therefore, Israel has already been removed.
The PA and Hamas both remain clear about their commitment to terror-violence as the sole path to Palestinian “self-determination.” It follows that Palestinian prisoners now being exchanged for Israeli hostages will escalate criminal harms against the innocent. In all likelihood, the Trump-brokered agreement will set the stage for a force-multiplying encore of October 7 defilements. Significantly, previous prisoner releases by Israel produced new waves of anti-Israel terrorism.
In the future, what should Jerusalem say to new victim families of agreement-generated crimes?
Plausibly, over time, some freed terrorists will likely plan calibrated escalations to chemical, biological, or nuclear (radiation dispersal) terrorism. Also likely will be variously coordinated rocket attacks on Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona. Though generally forgotten, Hamas already launched such an attack in the past, but was not yet technically able to inflict serious levels of destruction. This earlier terrorist incapacity is rapidly disappearing.
Terrorism is a codified and customary crime under binding international law. Its explicit criminalization can be discovered at all listed sources of the UN’s Statute of the International Court of Justice. This signifies that whenever Palestinian jihadists claim the right to use “any means necessary” against an Israeli “occupation,” their arguments are unsupportable in relevant law.
After the “peace agreement,” the PA and Hamas will mirror their long-bloodied past. From the beginning, all supporters of Palestinian terror-violence against Israelis have maintained that the “sacred” end of Palestinian insurgency justifies the means. Leaving aside the everyday and ordinary ethical standards by which any such argument must be unacceptable, ends can never justify means under conventional or customary international law
Empty Palestinian witticisms notwithstanding, one person’s terrorist can never be another’s freedom-fighter.
While it is true that certain insurgencies can be lawful (for prominent example, “just cause” is at the heart of the US Declaration of Independence), even residually permissible resorts to force must conform to humanitarian international law. These resorts are distinction, proportionality, and military necessity — standards that were made applicable to insurgent armed forces by Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1977 Protocols to these Conventions.
Regarding the rule of “proportionality,” this does not demand equivalent or symmetrical force, only force that is measured against clearly-stated and legitimate goals.
Whenever an insurgent force resorts to unjust means, its actions become terroristic ipso facto. Even if ritualistic Palestinian claims of an Israeli “occupation” were reasonable, any corresponding right to oppose Israel “by any means necessary” would be false. Specifically, any openly unjust means would be an expression of criminal terrorism.
These unchallengeable or “peremptory” legal standards are also binding on all combatants by virtue of customary and conventional international law, including Article 1 of the Preamble to the Fourth Hague Convention (1907). This foundational rule, called the “Martens Clause,” makes all persons responsible for upholding the “laws of humanity” and the “dictates of public conscience.”
History deserves some pride of place. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964, three years before there were any “occupied territories.” What, therefore, was the PLO attempting to “liberate” between 1964 and 1967? There can be only one logical answer.
In law, terrorist crimes mandate universal cooperation in apprehension and punishment. As punishers of “grave breaches” under our decentralized system of international law, a system created after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, all states are required to search out and prosecute, or to extradite, individual terrorist perpetrators. In no circumstances are states permitted to treat terrorists as “freedom fighters.”
There is more. States are never authorized to support terror-violence against other states, whether by direct action or by acting within protective terms of an international agreement. This is emphatically true for the United States, which identifies international law as the “supreme law of the land” at Article 6 of the Constitution and at assorted Supreme Court decisions. The American nation was formed by its Founding Fathers according to timeless legal principles of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries and the Hebrew Bible.
If the Trump-brokered Israel-Hamas agreement leads to Palestinian statehood, Israel could expect tangible enlargements of terror violence. And because some of the new state’s assaults on Israel would be ones of direct military action rather than insurgency, international law would identify these actions as “crimes of war.” Here, the only decipherable changes would be linguistic.
There is one final observation. As the Israel-Hamas agreement coincides with President Trump’s new mutual security pact with Doha, Palestinian terrorists and war criminals who flee to Qatar would be granted immunity from law-based punishments. Very quickly, such immunization could lead Hamas and other jihadi fighters to implement new and more insidious cycles of terrorist assault. None of these agreement outcomes could reasonably be called “peace.”
Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).
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Mamdani Parrots Hamas Talking Points — Where Is the Outrage?
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
On the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani published a post describing Israel’s actions as “genocidal,” recycling Hamas talking points and unverified casualty figures.
Mamdani also emphasized Palestinian suffering while downplaying and even erasing Hamas’ role as aggressor, its torture of Israeli hostages, and its vow to strike Israeli civilians “again and again” until the Jewish State is destroyed.
This is far more than political rhetoric. It is a dangerous rewriting of reality that legitimizes antisemitism and endangers Jewish lives.
When a politician poised to lead America’s largest city repeats Hamas propaganda and cloaks lies in moral language, the harm reverberates far beyond New York.
The Anatomy of Distortion
Minimizing the aggressor
Mamdani acknowledged Hamas’ attack but quickly pivoted to the “scale” of Israel’s response — as if the size of a defensive response is the sole moral measure –and to the supposed illegitimacy of Israel itself.
Mamdani spent most of the statement attacking Israel, and implied that the Jewish State somehow “deserved” October 7. This framing turns deliberate mass murder into an abstract policy debate, concealing the fact that Israel defended itself against an openly fascist theocracy with a genocidal mandate.
Moral inversion
Calling Israel’s defensive war “genocide” isn’t an exaggeration — it’s a lie with a purpose. It turns the attacker into the victim and the defender into the villain, echoing ancient antisemitic tropes: Jews as aggressors, Jews as bloodthirsty, and Jews as deserving their own destruction.
In truth, Israel has maintained one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in modern warfare — lower than that of the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet Mamdani brands this restraint and effort to avoid civilian casualties as “genocide.” Such rhetoric inflames ignorance and hate; it does not inform.
The “apartheid” libel
Mamdani also invokes another favorite fiction of the far-left — accusing Israel of “apartheid.” The charge is as false as it is cynical.
Israel’s Arab citizens vote, serve in parliament, sit on its Supreme Court, and hold senior roles in medicine, academia, the military, and business. There is no apartheid in a country where Jews and Arabs share city councils, courtrooms, universities, and hospitals.
The term wasn’t coined to describe reality but to delegitimize Israel’s existence — to brand the Jewish State as irredeemable. Mamdani’s repetition of this libel isn’t human-rights advocacy; it’s moral warfare.
Refusal to confront extremism
Despite repeated calls, Mamdani has never condemned violent slogans like “Globalize the Intifada.” On the streets, that phrase isn’t a metaphor — it’s a call for violence against Jews everywhere. His silence, in a city home to 1.6 million Jews, is not neutrality; it’s perilous complicity.
When Lies Inspire Violence
On October 7, 2025 — the second anniversary of Hamas’ barbaric invasion, a day when terrorists and mobs of invading Gazans murdered more than 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 — major cities from New York to London, and Paris to Melbourne hosted demonstrations steeped in rage and antisemitism. Protesters waved terror flags, vandalized synagogues, and taunted Jews with chants glorifying the massacre.
At the very moment of these rallies, Hamas was weighing President Trump’s proposed deal to end the war — the same deal it would soon accept after sustained US pressure and Israel’s advances in Gaza City forced its hand.
If those protesters — and Mamdani — truly believed a “genocide” was taking place, they should have been the loudest voices demanding Hamas accept the ceasefire and free the hostages. Instead, they were silent. Their outrage was never about protecting life, but about vilifying the Jewish State. Mamdani’s refusal to urge Hamas to accept the 21-point peace plan shows his alignment with this moral inversion. If he genuinely believed a genocide was unfolding, how could he not welcome the very agreement that stopped the war and freed the captives?
This Is More Than Local Politics
When a leading mayoral candidate declares the world’s only Jewish State evil and illegitimate, he sends a message to those who already hate Jews: your narrative is valid.
The training ground for violence is narrative. Extremists start with slogans and lies long before they pick up weapons. Once those narratives are mainstreamed by politicians and pundits, the path from speech to violence becomes terrifyingly short.
In New York — home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel — synagogues, schools, and Jewish community centers are part of the city’s fabric. When people in power frame Jews as oppressors and the Jewish state as uniquely monstrous, that visibility becomes vulnerability.
The Historical Pattern
Jewish history records what happens when racist lies go unchecked. Lies about Jewish power, guilt, or collective blame have never stayed theoretical; they’ve always ended in blood. The pattern is consistent: lies take root, the public grows numb to it or mainstreams it, and violence follows.
In the 20th century, that pattern didn’t protect Jews — it empowered fascism. Today, rebranding old antisemitism in the language of “social justice” won’t protect anyone either. Moral confusion doesn’t end violence; it guarantees it.
Bottom Line
Zohran Mamdani isn’t merely expressing a bad opinion about Israel. He’s advancing a worldview where truth is expendable, terror is excusable, and Jews are once again cast as villains in their own story.
Mamdani’s post became even more grotesque in hindsight, coming just hours before Hamas finally accepted a ceasefire that freed the hostages and required it to cede power in Gaza — terms he still hasn’t endorsed.
When power protects falsehood, safety is the first casualty. When truth is sacrificed for ideology, history always repeats itself. And for the Jewish people, those echoes are never far behind.
Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.
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UN Human Rights Experts Want More War in Gaza
Illustrative: Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
Political leaders around the globe, including the United Nations’ Secretary-General, have enthusiastically endorsed President Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan. But there is one UN affiliated group, at the pinnacle of the international law and human rights movement, that is bitterly opposed. These are thirty-odd Special Rapporteurs — experts appointed by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council to investigate specific areas of human rights.
They released a statement detailing no less than 15 ways that they claim the ceasefire agreement violates international law. Their main objection is that it doesn’t create a Palestinian state right away, which in their view must happen no matter what.
Having foreigners as part of a temporary Gaza government, they say, “is regrettably reminiscent of colonial practices and must be rejected.” They claim that the international stabilization force “would replace Israeli occupation with a US-led occupation.” They simply ignore the harm a Palestinian state in Gaza with Hamas back in charge would cause Israel, let alone the further oppression it would bring to Gaza residents.
The UN experts also add purported international law violations that go much further. They object to Gaza being demilitarized, claiming that doing so could leave it vulnerable to future Israeli aggression. There is no worry about how if Gaza was to rearm with rockets and tunnels, Hamas or other Palestinian factions might launch a repeat of the Oct. 7 massacre.
On the other hand, according to the UN officials, since Israel “has committed international crimes against the Palestinians and threatened peace and security in the region through aggression against other countries,” Israel should be demilitarized instead.
Even setting aside whether those accusations against Israel are true, the rapporteurs express no concern for how a demilitarized Israel would be liable to destruction at the hands of Iran or Hezbollah, and of course also be vulnerable to future Hamas massacres.
They are also upset that President Trump’s plan does not order Israel to pay Gaza reparations for the recent war. They ignore that paragraph 10 calls for Gaza investment and redevelopment. Perhaps they are disappointed because their true aim in reparations is not to find resources to rebuild Gaza, but rather to pose ruinous demands they can use to punish Israel and sabotage its economy. The group conveniently leaves out reparations that Gaza should pay to Israel for the Oct. 7 attack, and their thousands of illegal missile strikes targeting civilians going back years.
The rapporteurs solemnly note that, “Imposing an immediate peace at any price, regardless of or brazenly against law and justice, is a recipe for further injustice, future violence and instability.” This statement aims to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The statement itself lays the groundwork for future violence by claiming that the current ceasefire is illegal and unjust.
And sure enough, the rapporteurs’ statement is being quoted extensively in the anti-Israel press to claim that in spite of the ceasefire, Palestinians are still aggrieved victims entitled to resist. For example, Israel-Palestine News used the rapporteurs’ statement as a basis for an article blasting the peace plan. Middle East Eye did the same, along with the Oman Observer and the Pakistani website Jamaat-E-Islami Foreign Affairs.
It’s inevitable that Palestinian or human rights advocates may be concerned or disappointed with the terms of the ceasefire, just as many Israelis have concerns and misgivings as well. But the agreement has received nearly unanimous international acceptance because it represents the reality of what is militarily, politically, and economically attainable. Outrageous demands such as that Israel give up its army or bankrupt itself through reparations only serve to undermine negotiations and prolong the conflict.
Anyone who clings to maximal, impossible demands and refuses to make reasonable compromises becomes an enemy of peace. That’s true even if they believe those demands are based on justice.
Now is the time to tell protestors and activists around the world to tone down their rhetoric, turn towards building a better future, and accept that in order to do so, both sides will have to let go of many past grievances and accept that some wrongs will never be righted. It’s appalling that some of the world’s most esteemed human rights experts are trying to perpetuate the conflict, using unreasonable demands to justify more violence instead.
Shlomo Levin is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah, and he uses short fiction and questions to explore human rights at https://shalzed.com/