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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 the art world finally ready to celebrate Diana Kurz?
Diana Kurz is on a roll. Last April, the 89-year-old, Viennese-born New York artist had a solo show of her abstract paintings, “Diana Kurz: A Journey of Discovery,” at the Lincoln Glenn Gallery in Chelsea. Motorists on the New York State Thruway can now see “The Hudson River Downtown, Triptych,” her large landscape reproduced as a permanent installation at the Ardsley Service Plaza, the first stop outside Manhattan. The US State Department recently chose two of Kurz’s still-life paintings for the US Embassy in Paraguay. And a series of Instagram reels featuring Kurz explaining aspects of her practice have earned her more than 24,000 followers. Kurz’s work will also be included in Lincoln Glenn’s “American Women Artists and the Century of Change,” opening later this summer.
“This is a time in New York to celebrate women artists of a certain age,” Kurz told me, mentioning that painters Joan Semel, Martha Edelheit, Lois Dodd and Judith Bernstein, all in their eighties and nineties, have been receiving renewed attention. “If you live long enough. But then, the work itself is what keeps you going.”
“Diana has been part of New York’s art culture since the early 1960s,” said Douglas Gold, co-founder of Lincoln Glenn, which focuses on artists who worked in New York between 1940 and 1980. “The women of this era continued painting despite an incredibly misogynistic culture. Dealers wouldn’t handle them or if they did, wouldn’t raise their prices, and the men of the period drank together and networked in downtown bars where women didn’t feel welcome. Historians, museums, people motivated to research this period, have taken note. It’s a moment to recognize the women who kept moving forward no matter what.”
‘One painting leads to another and another’
I first met Kurz in 1995 when I profiled her for the New York Jewish Week. Back then, the loft where she lives and works, a former doll factory in SoHo, had been taken over by a project both personal and enormous: larger-than-life paintings based on photos of men, women and children lost in the Holocaust, many of them her family members. She’d never intended to explore this material, had spent much of her artistic life avoiding the pain of her family’s narrow escape from the Nazis in 1940, when she and her parents boarded the last boat out of Southampton. Her father’s eyewear business had franchises beyond Austria, critical outposts that helped them flee.
When Kurz was growing up in Kew Gardens, Queens, in the 1940s and ‘50s, she was aware of family who’d perished in the concentration camps, but she also wanted to be an ordinary American and fit in. For many years, she denied her European background. Then, in 1989, on a trip to California, an aunt showed her a tiny photo of her uncle holding his baby daughter, both of whom died in the Holocaust (the family never learned the details of their fate) and she decided to make a painting based on the photo. “I never start out saying I’m going to do a big project, but sometimes one painting leads to another and another,” she told me.
A painter with roots in abstract expressionism, Diana is known for her dynamic use of color. “All that I learned painting abstractly, about composition, color, form and space, that’s in my figurative work too. It’s just as important to me as the image itself,” she said.
The luminous vitality of her palette and the depth it creates is what stays with me most in these works. In “Three,” which is nine-feet high, a father stands on crutches. He’s missing a leg, and on the lapel of his suit, he’s wearing the medal he earned in World War I. He holds the hands of his two small children, a little girl and boy each wearing the yellow star. The portrait is based on a photo of Eastern European Jewish war veteran Victor Fanjnzylber, whose heroic status exempted him from wearing the star but didn’t exempt his children. In the end, all three were still deported.
The little girl’s dress is a deep blue that almost glows, the boy’s shirt is apple green with yellow undertones (rhyming disturbingly with bits of the yellow star peeking out from under the suspenders of his short pants). The grey-violet of the father’s suit, with its folds and pleats, is deepened by its proximity to the daughter’s dress.
“Because of all the black-and-white photos we tend to associate with the Holocaust, people don’t realize how often the horrors took place on beautiful days, under clear skies,” said Kurz, “When reading people’s recollections, I was often struck by the irony of the fact that terrible, unspeaking things occurred while the sky was blue, with birds singing.”
‘I had no choice. I had to do that work.’
Kurz told me that she always knew she was an artist. “I remember my father saying to my mother that they’d better start frequenting museums because ‘if she’s going to be an artist we’d better know about it,’” she said. While working towards her MFA at Columbia in the late 1950s, she painted large, classically abstract expressionist paintings, and says she often learned more from her fellow students than from her teachers, who didn’t always take women seriously. Yet she persisted, and in 1966 won a Fulbright to Paris, where she was mentored by painter and art theorist Jean Hélion.
Hélion, a survivor of a German prison camp, encouraged her to try incorporating figures into her abstract work; he was the one who first gave her the photo that would become the painting “Three” two decades later. During residencies at Yaddo in 1968 and ‘69, she met Philip Guston, an important influence, who was remaking himself in those years, moving from the abstract to the tangible. Back in lower Manhattan, she became part of a group that included Mercedes Matter, Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd, all of whom were exploring figurative art and drew and painted from live models.
Solo shows followed, including three at the Green Mountain Gallery in the 1970s, and three at the Alex Rosenberg Gallery in the 1980s, highlighting her still life and portraiture. “Then I took on the Holocaust paintings and had no major shows for many years,” she said. “But I had no choice. I had to do that work.”
Kurz said she knew these paintings would be difficult to sell. “These are not portraits to hang over the couch or whatever,” she told me. Thus far, there have been 13 solo shows featuring the work, mostly in college and university galleries. “It’s allowed me to tell the history to newer generations, many of whom don’t know it.”
In 1998, the Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt in Vienna showed the “Remembrance” series in total as it existed then. Wien Museum (formerly known as the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien) purchased two of the paintings. Another small canvas is at Yad Vashem. A major American museum has never done a comprehensive exhibit of all 18 portraits. This would seem the time for it.
Meanwhile Kurz continues to paint. “For me, inspiration comes through working,” she said. “You can’t sit there and wait for it.” Since 2005, she’s been painting a series of “small portrait heads,” mostly of actors, musicians, and dancers, young people from every possible background and ethnicity who are now filling up the same walls where “Remembrance” once dominated. The sitters are mostly under 30, and “I can look at them and see all this potential.” There are 43 so far, though she hopes one day to reach a hundred, and perhaps do an installation.
“I tell the models just to sit and look at me, and everyone puts such different energy into it. I find it fascinating,” said Kurz. “I love painting from life.”
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A Jewish soldier died saving a Christian friend. Eighty years later, a grave reunited their families.
At a cemetery outside Florence, Italy, two families gathered around the grave of a young American soldier. For decades, they were unknown to each other. Yet they had been connected for 80 years.
Private First Class Frank T. Kurzinger was born in Germany and arrived in the United States with his family in 1938 after fleeing Nazi persecution. A few years later, he returned to Europe in an American uniform as a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division.
During training, he became close friends with a soldier from Wisconsin named Del Riley. The two met in 1943.
In February 1945, the division was preparing to assault Mount Belvedere in northern Italy. The attack would take place at night. Soldiers climbed in silence. Even their weapons had been unloaded to prevent an accidental discharge.
Ahead of Riley, a scout stepped on a landmine. The explosion tore through the darkness, severely wounding both men.
Riley called for a medic, and Kurzinger responded. He took several steps toward his friend, stepped on another landmine, and was killed. He was 21. Riley survived.
For the rest of his life, he wondered whether Frank Kurzinger might have survived the war had he never shouted for help.
“It really pained him,” said Shalom Lamm, co-founder and chief historian of Operation Benjamin. According to family accounts, Riley lived with survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life.
For a time, it seemed possible that Kurzinger himself would slowly fade from memory.
His family was small. The Holocaust had left gaps in family memory and silenced many conversations about the past. In remarks delivered at the 2025 dedication of Kurzinger’s new headstone, family member Michael Stern reflected that Frank had become little more than a distant name.
“There were no photographs,” Stern said. “No yahrzeit to observe, no role for him in stirring the longings for the warmth and intimacy of the larger family.” He might have remained, Stern said, “an anonymous stranger.”
Instead, a grave brought his life into relief.
The ceremony at Florence American Cemetery was organized by Operation Benjamin, a nonprofit that identifies Jewish servicemembers and veterans buried beneath incorrect religious markers and helps restore headstones that reflect their faith.
Kurzinger had been buried beneath a Latin Cross. Aware of the danger a German-born Jew would face if captured by the Nazis, he identified as Catholic on his dogtags.
Eight decades after he was buried, a Star of David was placed above his grave.
Yet the headstones are only part of the work. There is also the responsibility of restoring stories before they fade.
Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstructed Kurzinger’s story. They traced descendants and gathered family memories. They also located the family of Del Riley, the Wisconsin soldier whose life Kurzinger had tried to save. The two families met for the first time in Italy ahead of the ceremony.
The next day they stood together at the cemetery.
For Lamm, Operation Benjamin is not simply about correcting the historical record. It is about zachor, the Jewish obligation to remember. He points to an unexpected moment in the Book of Exodus. As the Israelites leave Egypt, Moses fulfills a promise made generations earlier: “And Moses took with him the bones of Joseph.”
Joseph asked the Israelites to swear that when God redeemed them, they would carry his remains with them.
Lamm sees Operation Benjamin’s work as a series of “Moses moments.”
“No matter what’s going on in the world,” he said, “never forget your heroes.”
The stories beneath the stones
The organization’s work grew from a simple question. In 2014, Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter visited the Normandy American Cemetery and remarked that he expected to see more Stars of David among the graves. The observation led researchers to discover cases in which Jewish servicemembers had been buried beneath crosses because of wartime paperwork errors, mistaken records, or decisions made under extraordinary circumstances.
Since then, Operation Benjamin has reviewed thousands of cases and helped facilitate dozens of headstone corrections.
But a new headstone is only part of the story. Operation Benjamin’s researchers reconstruct lives that might otherwise be forgotten. “We will not forget you,” Lamm said. “We go back. We tell your story.”
In his remarks at the graveside, Stern reflected on what the journey had meant to his family. “Through the unlikely context of death and burial,” he said at the ceremony, “he has become a tangible link to life, to our roots, our history and the lineage from which we come. A second cousin once removed no longer feels as distant or abstract.”
In prepared remarks released by the U.S. Mission in Italy, U.S. Consul General Daniela Ballard noted that Kurzinger’s name was one of 4,392 at the military cemetery.
“Every name represents a young life lost and a family left behind,” she said. “But today, we are all Frank’s family. We are the ones who carry his memory forward.”
In remarks shared by Operation Benjamin after the ceremony, members of the Riley family described climbing Mount Belvedere with a commemorative challenge coin. One side bore Del Riley’s name and a Christian cross. The other bore Frank Kurzinger’s name and a Star of David.
The two men had set out for the mountain together in February 1945. Neither completed the mission. Frank was killed. Del was wounded. Eighty years later, the Riley family carried both men to the summit. They buried the coin at the 10th Mountain Division memorial.
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Israeli citizen Michael Mizrahi killed in Montreal shooting
(JTA) — Michael Mizrahi, an Israeli citizen and longtime member of Montreal’s Jewish community, has been identified as the civilian killed in Monday’s shooting involving a gunman and Canadian police officers in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood.
The suspected gunman was killed during the incident, the investigation of which is ongoing. Police have not publicly released the suspect’s identity or provided details about a possible motive. They also have not confirmed who shot Mizrahi.
The Israeli Consulate in Montreal confirmed Mizrahi’s death, saying in a statement that he was an Israeli citizen and extended condolences to his family “on behalf of the people and the State of Israel.” The consulate said his family “knows all too well the horrors of terror and violence, making this tragic loss even more painful.”
Montreal police Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, 34, was also fatally shot responding to the incident, according to police.
The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal said Benredouane died in the line of duty while protecting the public during an intervention in Côte-des-Neiges, a heavily Jewish neighborhood. He had served with the force since 2021.
A second officer, who is female, was also shot and remains in critical condition, police said.
Quebec’s Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, the province’s police watchdog, has opened an independent investigation into the use of a firearm by a police officer in a fatal confrontation.The Quebec police watchdog group states that it is “mandated to fully investigate the facts surrounding police interventions. The BEI investigates all cases where a person, other than a police officer on duty, dies, suffers serious injury, or is injured by a firearm used by a police officer during a police intervention or while in police custody.“
A number of Canadian Jewish groups published statements assuring the Jewish community that they were not in danger. The UJA-Federation of Toronto put out two statements explaining that the Jewish community did not appear to be a target.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the advocacy arm of Canadian Jewish Federations, also put out a statement mourning the loss of a community member.
“We mourn the tragic loss of Michael (Michel) Moshe Mizrahi z”l, a beloved member of Montreal’s Jewish community, an innocent victim of today’s events,” the group posted on X on Monday night. “Our thoughts and our deepest condolences are with his family, friends, and loved ones during this time of unimaginable pain.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar wrote on X that he had called the Chabad Rabbi of Montreal Mendel Raskin to extend his “deepest condolences to the families of the victims, to the Jewish community of Montreal, and to all Canadians mourning this terrible loss.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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