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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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India’s Modi Visits Israel, Expresses Support for Jewish State as US-Iran Tensions Mount
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attend a welcome ceremony upon Modi’s arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Shir Torem
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Israel on Wednesday for a two-day visit that both countries have cast as a chance to deepen relations, as regional concerns mount over the risk of military conflict between the United States and Iran.
In an address to the Israeli parliament, Modi told lawmakers that India stood with Israel “with full conviction” as he shared his nation’s condolences over the October 2023 Hamas attack.
“Like you, we have a consistent and uncompromising policy of zero tolerance for terrorism, with no double standards,” he said.
Both Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also addressed the parliament, spoke of terrorist attacks that their nations had faced, with Netanyahu saying India and Israel both faced the challenge of confronting “radical Islam.”
Some opposition lawmakers briefly walked out of the special session, protesting at the speaker’s decision not to invite the head of the Supreme Court, but returned for Modi‘s remarks.
Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which the speaker belongs to, has had a confrontational relationship with the court.
Modi, a Hindu nationalist, became the first prime minister in India’s history to visit Israel in 2017, during which he and Netanyahu took a barefoot stroll on a beach in the northern port city of Haifa.
Both still in power nearly nine years later, the two leaders, who describe one another as friends, are expected to hold talks on artificial intelligence as well as defense at a time when Israel is seeking to increase its military exports.
An Israeli government official said Modi‘s visit would “pave the way for new partnerships and collaborations across many fields.” Bilateral ties were on the cusp of a significant upgrade, an Israeli foreign ministry official said.
US MILITARY BUILDUP NEAR IRAN
Modi is visiting as the United States deploys a vast naval force near Iran‘s coast ahead of possible strikes on the Islamic Republic, with the two countries at an impasse in talks over Tehran’s nuclear program. The Pentagon has also deployed an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean, bound for Israel‘s coast.
A US attack on Iran could draw Iranian retaliation against Israel as well as US military facilities in Gulf Arab countries, where millions of Indians live and work and send home billions of dollars of remittances each year.
In his speech to lawmakers, Modi vaguely spoke about the challenges facing stability in the region, acknowledging that the landscape had become more challenging in recent years, but made no mention of the US military build-up, or of Iran.
He backed the US plan to end the war in Gaza, telling the parliament that it could lead to peace “for all people of the region, including by addressing the Palestinian issue.”
“The road to peace is not always easy. But India joins you and the world for dialogue, peace, and stability in this region,” Modi said.
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CIA Launches Fresh Social Media Push to Recruit Iranians as Trump Threatens Military Action
The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency is shown at the entrance of the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, US, Sept. 24, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The US Central Intelligence Agency has posted on social media new Farsi-language instructions for Iranians wishing to securely contact the spy service.
The CIA recruitment effort comes amid a massive buildup of US military forces in the Middle East that President Donald Trump could order to attack Iran if talks with the US set for Thursday fail to reach a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump began laying out the case for a possible US operation in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, saying he would not allow the Islamic Republic, which he called the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism, to have a nuclear weapon. Iran denies seeking a nuclear arsenal.
“They [Iran‘s leaders] want to start all over again, and are, at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he said, accusing Iran of restarting its nuclear program, working to build missiles that “soon” would be capable of reaching the United States, and of being responsible for roadside bombings that have killed US service members and civilians.
“The [Iranian] regime and its murderous proxies have spread nothing but terrorism and death and hate,” the Republican president said about 90 minutes into his annual address to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives.
The CIA posted its Farsi-language message on Tuesday on its X, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube accounts.
The message is the latest in a series by the CIA aimed at enlisting sources in Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia.
The agency urged Iranians wishing to make contact to “take appropriate action” to protect themselves before doing so and avoid using work computers or their phones.
“Use a new, disposable device, if possible” and “be aware of your surroundings and who may be able to see your screen or activity,” continued the message, adding that those who make contact, provide their locations, names, job titles and “access to information or skills of interest to our agency.”
Those individuals, said the message, should use a trusted Virtual Private Network “not headquartered in Russia, Iran, or China,” or the Tor Network, which encrypts data and hides the user’s IP address.
The CIA declined to comment. Iran’s delegation to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are scheduled to meet Iranian officials led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi in Geneva on Thursday for a new round of negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Trump has threatened military action if the talks fail to reach an agreement, or if Tehran executes people arrested for participating in nationwide anti-government demonstrations in January.
Rights groups say thousands of people were killed in the government crackdown on the protests, the worst domestic unrest in Iran since the era of its 1979 Islamic Revolution.
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UK Green Leader Backs Proposed ‘Zionism Is Racism’ Party Platform
A Green Party march in London. Photo: Alan Stanton/Flickr
The top official in the United Kingdom’s Green Party has come out in support of a “Zionism Is Racism” motion to be debated at the party’s March conference which could shift the leftist political organization’s official position to full-scale removal of Israel off the map, to be replaced with “a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Lubna Speitan, a British-Palestinian Green Party member who serves in the Greens for Palestine Steering Group and the Greenwich Palestine Alliance, on Tuesday announced she had submitted Motion A105, creatively titled “Zionism Is Racism,” for debate at the UK Green Party’s Spring Conference on March 28.
The measure has received the support of Green Party Leader Zack Polanski.
“I’ll wait to hear the debate, but absolutely, if the definition of Zionism is what is happening right now by the Israeli government, then yes, absolutely, that’s racist and I’ll vote for it,” he said on Times Radio.
However, Speitan’s proposal goes much further than condemning Zionism — the national movement of the Jewish people to reestablish a state in their ancient homeland — as an allegedly racist ideology, a slander which the Soviet Union’s espionage agencies began promoting in the 1970s, most notably and successfully at the United Nations General Assembly with the passage of Resolution 3379 on Nov. 10, 1975. The infamous measure, which asserted that Zionism was “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” was ultimately overturned in 1991.
The Soviet Union’s effort to link Zionism to racism drew arguments from the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and argued that Judaism’s concept of “the chosen people” promoted racial superiority.
“This deliberate slur interpolated and distorted the real meaning of Judaism which explains the Jewish people are ‘chosen,’ or set apart, for special and burdensome religious and social obligations,” according to the American Jewish Committee.
Speitan’s measure calls for the Green Party to adopt Hamas’s position of eliminating Israel from the map, to replace the Jewish state with a Palestinian state.
The motion offers eight points, the third of which appears to call for either the mass expulsion or genocide of the Israeli people: “Following from Motion E05, which affirmed that Israel is an apartheid State committing genocide, and Motion E07 supporting reparations and accountability, the Green Party supports the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants.”
Speitan connects this call for “the right of the return” with announcing an end of a Jewish state. This longstanding Palestinian demand insists that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to many pro-Palestinian activists, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
The measure also advocates explicit support for terrorism against Israel, with point four stating that the Green Party would affirm “the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination, including the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation, and acknowledges that the struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under international law is legitimate.”
This apparent advocacy of violence aligns with statements made last year by Speitan in support of terrorism against the Jewish state.
“The only way forward for the liberation of any people is going to be by force, what was taken by force must be returned by force and this comes with military intervention, and for me I support our right to the armed struggle. We must never deny that,” Speitan said in a September 2025 speech. “I will refuse to condemn the resistance of any repressed or occupied people because we have that right. Only we can claim self-defense, not the occupier.”
Speitan continued, “The moment we rise, we call for resistance, [they say] ‘you terrorist.’”
John Mann, the UK government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, labeled Speitan’s anti-Zionist proposal “support for terrorism and overt racism against Jews. There is no ambiguity. It’s from the extreme margins of politics.”
He went on to invoke former UK Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose time at the helm of the party was marked by a succession of scandals involving antisemitism, to show how extreme the Green Party has become.
“This is well beyond anything that happened during Labour under Jeremy Corbyn,” Mann declared. “This makes Corbyn look like a moderate. The crank element that even Corbyn was worried about has entered the Greens en masse.”
Speaking to Britain’s Daily Mail, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel labeled the motion “one of the most hateful and racist documents I’ve ever read.”
“It calls for the destruction of Israel and seeks to justify terrorism against Israel,” Haskel added, referring to the proposal. “Its intent is to justify the destruction of the Jewish homeland and deny the right of Jews to a national home. The double standards are extraordinary as they demand a national home for Palestinians but not Jews.”
Haskel added, “I completely condemn this horrific document and hope the people of the UK see the Greens for what they are – a racist and hateful political party.”
The group Jewish Greens has urged voting against Speitan’s proposal.
“This is not your run-of-the-mill motion opposing Israel’s actions (something that Jewish Greens would have no problem with), but something much more problematic that is likely to make Jews feel unwelcome in the Green Party,” the group stated. “We urge Green Party members to listen to their Jewish comrades within the party, and consider whether this motion is appropriate for the type of party they want to be in.”
The statement urged for a broader understanding of Zionism, explaining that “calling all forms or interpretations of Zionism ‘racism’ is painting a very diverse group of people with a very broad brush and in effect, it accepts the most extreme right-wing version of Zionism (aka – Kahanism) peddled by the far right as definitive. This is like accepting the EDL’s definition of Englishness. Or like banning all forms of USA nationalism based on the horrendous crimes of the Trump administration.”
Reflecting on the degree with which the party had shifted in recent years, Mann called Speitan’s measure “about as far away as from Green politics of the past as is possible. Greens used to be about stopping fossil fuels and nuclear power and building wind farms. Now hate is bringing members surging into the Green party.”
On Oct. 19, 2025, the Green Party of England and Wales announced that “membership has surged past the Conservative Party, making the Greens the third largest party in the UK. From this position, and with Labour’s clear shift to the right, it’s clear that the Greens are now the Party of choice to counter Reform and their brand of divisive politics.”
The party stated that “membership now stands at over 126,000. This latest milestone marks an 80 percent increase since Zack Polanski was elected Leader of the party last month. The Greens now have more than double the reported members of the Liberal Democrats.”
Polanski said then that British politics “is changing and support for old-style parties built on privilege and power is shrinking. Increasing numbers of people are walking away from the politics of austerity, inequality and division and choosing a new kind of politics that offers a bold, hopeful vision of prosperity, equality and unity. Our membership boom reflects growing public frustration with the political status quo and a hunger for genuine alternatives.”
According to the UK’s Jewish News, Polanski has faced mounting pressure to support the latest anti-Zionist motion from a new group of hardline anti-Israel activists within the party. “Supporting the motion would effectively mean declaring his own mother and other members of his Jewish family — staunch supporters of Israel who have criticized pro-Palestine marches — as racists,” the outlet noted.
A YouGov poll of UK party preferences conducted Feb. 9-10, 2025, placed the Greens as the fifth most popular party in the country coming in at 9 percent support compared to the Liberal Democrats (14 percent), Conservatives (21 percent), Labour (25 percent), and Reform UK (26 percent). A total of 21 percent of Britons polled said they would consider voting for a Green candidate with higher levels of support among those 18-24 (36 percent) and 25-49 (27 percent).
In Britain’s House of Commons, Green politicians currently occupy four seats compared to 404 controlled by Labour, 116 to the Conservatives, 72 to Liberal Democrats, 13 independents, 9 members of the Scottish National Party, and 8 members of Reform UK. Pollsters in the UK have found considerable crossover between the Liberal Democrats and the Greens with 51 percent of the members in each party supporting a merger with the other.
The Jewish Greens explained the practical implications of what adoption of the “Zionism Is Racism” position would entail for the party, noting that any member supporting Zionism could then potentially be expelled, a position which the Democratic Socialists of America (a group with 78,000 members) explicitly adopted last year.
“Most Jewish institutions in the UK have some sort of connection to Zionism. Some closer, some less so. The motion proposers – in a response to a question from Jewish Greens – have made it clear that they will expect the motion to proscribe Zionists,” the Jewish Greens stated. “This gives the party the option to expel almost any Jew involved in organized communal life or who has ever been, including our party leader. Meaning that most Jews in the party – whether they define themselves as Zionists or not – are one grudge away from being dragged through the disciplinary process on spurious charges of ‘Zionism.’”