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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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Germany’s antisemitism czar says slogans like ‘From the river to the sea’ should be illegal
(JTA) — Germany’s antisemitism czar has urged a law to ban pro-Palestinian slogans such as “From the river to the sea,” renewing a fraught debate over the country’s historic allegiance to Israel and freedom of speech.
Felix Klein’s initiative would ban chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction. His proposal has the support of German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and is now being reviewed by the Justice Ministry, he told Haaretz on Wednesday.
“Before Oct. 7, you could have said that ‘From the river to the sea’ doesn’t necessarily mean kicking Israelis off the land, and I could accept that,” said Klein. “But since then, Israel has really been facing existential threats, and unfortunately, it has become necessary here to limit freedom of speech in this regard.”
Klein, the first holder of an office titled “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism” since 2018, added that he believed the law must be passed even if it is challenged in court for violating free speech.
Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent and devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza tore at the seams of Germany’s national doctrines. The war triggered a sharp rise in antisemitic and Isalmophobic incidents across the country. It also exposed charged questions about when Germany prioritizes its responsibility toward the Jewish state, which became central to German national identity after the Holocaust, and when it upholds democratic principles.
The legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech are already far from clear-cut. Currently, courts decide whether a person chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in support of peacefully liberating Palestinians or in endorsement of terrorism. In August 2024, the German-Iranian activist Ava Moayeri was convicted of condoning a crime for leading the chant at a Berlin rally on Oct. 11, 2023.
Shortly after the Hamas attacks, local authorities across Germany imposed sweeping bans on pro-Palestinian protests. Berlin officials authorized schools to ban the keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian solidarity, along with slogans such as “Free Palestine.”
Jewish and Israeli activists were caught up in the crackdown. In October 2023, a woman was arrested after holding a poster that said, “As a Jew and Israeli: Stop the genocide in Gaza.” And police prohibited a demonstration by a group calling themselves “Jewish Berliners against Violence in the Middle East,” citing the risk of unrest and “inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations.”
Earlier this year, German immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Three of the orders cited Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or “reason of state,” a doctrine enshrining Germany’s defense of Israel as justification for its own existence after the Holocaust.
But that tenet is not used in legal settings, according to Alexander Gorski, who represents the demonstrators threatened with deportation. “Staatsräson is not a legal concept,” Gorski told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in April. “It’s completely irrelevant. It’s not in the German Basic Law, it’s not in the constitution.”
Jewish leaders such as Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, have argued that anger toward Israel created a “pretext” for antisemitism. “It is sufficient cause in itself to fuel the hatred,” Knobloch said to Deutsche Welle in September.
In recent months, two German establishments made the news for refusing entry to Jews and Israelis. A shop in Flensburg, which posted a sign saying “Jews are banned here,” is vulnerable to German anti-discrimination law. Not so for the restaurant in Fürth whose sign read, “We no longer accept Israelis in our establishment,” according to anti-discrimination commissioner Ferda Ataman, who said the law does not apply to discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Klein said he has also initiated legislation to expand that law to protect Israelis and other nationalities.
He has a longstanding relationship with Jewish communities in Germany, starting with his Foreign Office appointment as the special liaison to global Jewish organizations. In that role, he helped create a “working definition” of antisemitism for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016. That definition has sparked contentious debate, as critics argue it conflates some criticisms of Israel with antisemitism.
Klein believes that anti-Zionism does largely fall in the same bucket as antisemitism. “I think in most cases it is — it’s just a disguised form of antisemitism,” he told Haaretz. “When people say they’re anti-Israel, what they really mean is Jews.”
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There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel
There may be no senator who has committed more fervently to supporting Israel, at a greater personal cost, than Sen. John Fetterman.
In the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the Pennsylvania Democrat began taping hostage posters to the wall outside his office and wearing a symbolic dogtag necklace. He embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a pariah to many Democrats. As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, he posted constantly on social media to defend the war.
The position has cost him followers, friends, staff and perhaps in the future his seat. But it has also made him a hero in parts of the Jewish community. He received awards from Yeshiva University and the Zionist Organization of America and he was brought onstage as a panelist at the national Jewish Federations of North America convention.
Given the centrality of Israel to his focus in office — he was sworn in only 9 months before Oct. 7 — and how often he posts about it on social media, one might anticipate Fetterman giving it a lengthy treatment in his newly released memoir, Unfettered. The title of the memoir, too, seems to promise candor.
Instead, Fetterman dedicates all of three paragraphs to Israel in a book that largely rehashes lore from before his time in the Senate and discusses his struggles with mental health. These paragraphs — which even pro-Israel readers will read as boilerplate — appear in the book’s penultimate chapter, which is about his declining popularity since taking office.
Some have suggested that the reason some of the media and former staffers turned on me was because of my stance on Israel. Others imply that my support of Israel has to do with impaired mental health, which isn’t true. My support for Israel is not new. I was quoted in the 2022 primary as unequivocally stating that “I will always lean in on Israel.”
There’s a paragraph here about sticking to his morals even if it means defying his party, then:
There was no choice for me but to support Israel. I remembered the country’s history — how it was formed in 1948 in the wake of the murder of six million Jews. Since then, the rest of the Middle East, harboring resentments going back thousands of years, has only looked for ways to eradicate Israel. It took less than a day after the formation of the Jewish state was announced for Egypt to attack it. Every day in Israel is a struggle for existence, just as every day is an homage to the memory of the Jews shot and gassed and tortured.
It’s also clear that war in Gaza [sic] has been a humanitarian disaster. At the time of this writing, roughly sixty thousand people have been killed in Israel’s air and ground campaign, over half of them women, children, and the elderly. I grieve the tragedy, the death, and the misery.
Satisfied with this examination of the hypothesis for his growing unpopularity, Fetterman then moves on to another possible reason: his votes on immigration.
It’s strange to read the Israel passages in light of Fetterman’s full-throated advocacy on any number of issues related or connected to the Israel-Hamas war, including the hostages, campus protests, and rising antisemitism. Even if he did not reckon more deeply with his support for a war that brought about a “humanitarian disaster,” he might have talked about meeting the hostage families, or visiting Israel, or his disappointment that some voices within his party have turned against it.
The production of Unfettered was itself a story earlier this year, and may explain the book’s failure to grapple with a central priority.
Fetterman reportedly received a $1.2 million advance for it, roughly a third of which went to Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger to ghostwrite it. But the two apparently had a falling out at some point, according to the sports blog Defector, which wrote in June that “in the process of having to work with Fetterman, Bissinger went from believing the Pennsylvania senator was a legitimate presidential candidate to believing he should no longer be in office at all.”
Bissinger is not credited anywhere in the book, and does not appear to have contributed. (He refused to discuss the book when a reporter called him earlier this year.)
But the mystifying section about Israel may have nothing to do with a ghostwriter or lack thereof. It may instead be explained by a letter his then-chief of staff wrote in May 2024, in which he said Fetterman “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.”
The post There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother
For as long as I can remember, the golden samovar — a Russian teapot of sorts — has rested somewhere high in our home. In our first house, it sat imposingly on a shelf above the staircase. In our current home, it tops the boudoir in our guestroom. When I was growing up, I didn’t actually know what it was and, until a few years ago, I didn’t think to ask.
Spurred by some unknown impulse — possibly a quarter-life crisis or my mom and dad entering their 60s — I decided to interview my parents on the origin of every object and piece of furniture displayed in our home, gathering information that would otherwise die with them. Some of my questions yielded three-word answers (“It’s a lamp”); others evoked longer stories, like that of my black market-dealing great-great-grandmother.
Rivka Silberberg brought the samovar with her when she and her family — including my great-grandfather — immigrated to the United States from the Pale of Settlement sometime before World War I. According to my grandfather, while Rivka’s neighbors were fleeing religious persecution, she was evading authorities after a neighbor ratted her out for illegally selling items — some say tea, others tobacco — without the proper taxation. My mom thinks it was probably a combination of antisemitism and legal peril that motivated Rivka to leave.
Samovars were an important part of Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University and former Forward columnist, wrote, “The samovar loomed large in Jewish immigrant culture” and “a hefty proportion of Russian Jewish immigrants … lugged the heavy and bulky contraption to the New World.”
They acted both as a comforting, familiar sight and as something that could be pawned when money was tight, Joselit wrote. Clearly, my great-great-grandmother valued her samovar enough to drag it across the Atlantic.
Learning about the items in my house has given me a new appreciation for the objects that were always just a part of my background. Since the samovar is one of the only pieces of my family’s old world life we still have, it’s imbued with a certain sacredness. This samovar is not simply a vessel for brewing tea; It is a symbol of my ancestors’ forced migration, a testament to their ability to make the hard choices necessary for survival.
I am the only grandchild on my mother’s side. My grandfather was also an only child, meaning I am the only great-grandchild of his parents. I alone carry this history. Like the samovar, I am a physical testament to my family’s survival.
It’s a lot of weight to have on your shoulders — or on your shelf.
Being an only child is what made me feel such an urgent responsibility to capture my parents’ stories; if I didn’t save them, no one else would.
But objects are impermanent. They tarnish (as our samovar has). They shatter. They get lost.
As these sacred objects become more enchanted, we also become more vulnerable to their loss. Any damage to them would feel like a devastating blow.
Since my grandmother passed away in 2020, I have been the owner of her wedding band. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve worn it, primarily on occasions when I want to feel like she’s near, whether on Rosh Hashanah or my college graduation. Otherwise, I keep it in my jewelry box where it can stay safe.
My mom takes a much more relaxed approach. One Passover, a friend set down one of our dessert plates with too much force, and it cracked. My mom, in an effort to reassure the friend, said probably the last thing one wants to hear after breaking someone else’s belongings: “It was my grandmother’s.”
After the friend panicked for a moment, my mom realized how the words had sounded.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean that it’s so old.”
Old things break. It’s part of their natural course of existence. For my mom, this was just an inevitable fact of life. Even without the dessert plate, she has memories of her grandmother to hold onto.
It’s taken me longer to accept the impermanence of objects. Only recently has the loss of a cheap earring not felt like the end of the world.
Luckily, because of its size and shape, the samovar would be a hard thing to misplace. In the future, if it needs to be moved, I’ll make sure I do so with care. But if for some reason something should happen to it, I am comforted to know that the story of Rivka and her smuggling ways lives on within me.
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