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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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‘Mr. Jambo’ is the sendup of Paul Simon that we need now
Paul Simon may be having his quiet celebration, but a viral music video refuses to let the musical icon go quietly for his classic, but often questionable, forays into Africa.
Jewish comedian and musician Kyle Gordon’s song “Mr. Jambo” is both tribute and critical sendup of 1986’s Graceland, Simon’s seminal ethnomusicology experiment, for which he controversially broke a cultural boycott of Apartheid South Africa.
While the music video starts with a spinning globe a la Toto’s “Africa,” the jaunty rhythm and Gordon’s appearance in a Mets cap leaves no doubt the artist he had in mind when he self-financed a trip to South Africa and Eswatini.
Gordon’s character is a wide-eyed and willing fetishizer of Africana, bothering a beleaguered man he calls “Mr. Jambo” (likely a misunderstanding — Jambo means “hello” in Swahili). Jambo responds to Gordon’s requests for enlightenment and wisdom in Zulu, and our protagonist admits “I couldn’t speak his language, I couldn’t even understand a word. But I knew the meaning was what I decided I had heard.”
The meaning leads us to the chorus, a litany of cliches about nature, love and “ancient scrolls,” which, admittedly, does sound a lot like Toto. (Jambo’s true words, visible if you watch with subtitles, translate as “I don’t speak English. Do you have a translator? Stop yelling at me.”)
Gordon’s satire, a collaboration with local African musicians, nails Simon’s sound while simultaneously poking fun at the use of decidedly non-African brass instruments as played by men in traditional garb.
Now Graceland is an iconic record and the work of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, whom the album elevated to international attention, is sublime. But there is undoubtedly a bit of weird anthropological tourism behind the endeavor. (Norman Mailer would have notes.)
I had the opportunity to see Simon live at Tanglewood last month, where he performed to a crowd composed in no small part of his demographic contemporaries. He played some songs from Graceland (following his soporific “Psalms”). When he broke into “Under African Skies,” the opening line of which is “Joseph’s face was as black as night/The pale yellow moon shone in his eyes,” it took a lot to suppress the cringe.
Gordon’s riff could, in fact, be a sort of antidote, acknowledging that yeah, the music is good, but also kinda messed up right?
As the “Planet of the Bass” star told Vulture, the Africans weren’t only in on Gordon’s joke, they were laughing at him.
That is both a miracle and a wonder.
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For this fashion-forward rabbi, shoes and scripture are intertwined
The rabbinate doesn’t have one look, and Reform Rabbi Arielle Stein’s version is chic, creative and fashion-forward. Stein, who serves as assistant rabbi at Rodeph Sholom, a congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has been using her Instagram to demonstrate the diversity of what being a rabbi can look like.
“We’re in a moment where so many people that wouldn’t have necessarily seen themselves on the Bima are in Jewish leadership,” she said.
Stein grew up in the Conservative movement as part of a very “intensely culturally Jewish family” with a lot of variation in practice and denomination. The rabbinate was a family tradition, filled with many Jewish academics; from a young age, Stein understood being a rabbi as “a job that exists that you can do.”
She studied Studio Art at NYU Steinhardt, exploring primarily drawing and sculpture. Initially, Stein had aspirations of working as a visual artist, and later worked as an artist’s assistant and in galleries, but upon graduating college, she realized the art world was “not going to be the best fit.” While trying out various jobs for the next few years, the idea of being a rabbi began to speak to her.
Stein sought out different kinds of religious egalitarian spaces to determine what kind of rabbi she wanted to be. She spent a year at the Hadar Institute, an egalitarian yeshiva where she intensively studied Talmud and other Jewish texts. Though she discovered she had a deep passion for learning, she also realized that a traditionally Halachic lifestyle wasn’t for her — “I’m not great with rules,” Stein told me. Ultimately, she was drawn to the interpretive nature of the Reform tradition and attended Hebrew Union College, interning at various congregations throughout her schooling.
Stein’s interest in art didn’t disappear with her new career; in fact, she sees it as deeply Jewish, and describes Judaism as “intensely spiritually creative.” For Stein, the process of creation allows her to enter into a different spiritual space, one where “the world of spirit or God feels the most accessible.” Across her Instagram, there are illustrations of pomegranates, long-haired women surrounded by Hamentashen, and other pieces both sensual and captivating.
Stein says she is drawn to the concept of Hiddur Mitzvah, or the ‘beautification of the commandment.’ She loves Jewish material culture, she told me, and “helping people find the Jewish objects that help facilitate their Jewish life.” In one video, Stein talks through the preparation of a mezuzah.
“I hope to one day work on a project where we are making real Judaic objects in a serious, fine art way,” she said.
Stein also finds a creative outlet through fashion. Her shoe collection has been the subject of several videos and inspired an article in Vogue last November. Her selections are eclectic, yet tasteful and religiously meaningful: a shoe for a Bris with an egg-like heel to symbolize the circle of life, Tory Burch shoes clad with a toe ring for weddings. She sees fashion as a conversation starter, one that humanizes her.
“It also helps people feel like they can have these interests and still be Jewish,” she told me.
As a rabbi today, Stein believes it’s important “to integrate all the parts of yourself,” and for her, fashion is “an important piece that can have spiritual significance and creativity.” With the help of her friend, Rabbi Rafi Ellenson, Stein has established a “Rabbinic Fit Check” Instagram account, which showcases the diverse style of rabbis across the country.
Stein stumbled upon content creation when she met a woman who previously worked for TikTok, who suggested that Stein share about her career — it was a “niche that isn’t really being filled outside of the Orthodox world.” Initially, she wasn’t interested, but after the woman followed up a few times, she decided to try it out.
Stein’s videos showcase her “freaky” shoe collection, but also delve into lessons on scripture and Jewish things she finds incredibly boring or chic (boring: a fixed idea on how rabbis should dress; chic: intentionality about eating). Recently, she’s been working on a “Two Minutes of Torah” series with the Reform Judaism Instagram. Stein describes her account as a “vehicle” that allows people to “stumble upon Jewish knowledge and Jewish content and Jewish culture in a way that you don’t necessarily need to be looking for it.”
Stein told me that her content has been especially helpful for Jews interested in progressive Judaism, who might not have a welcoming synagogue accessible to them. “It’s a way for people to find community and learn,” she said. According to Stein, many viewers have “followed the rabbit hole” and ended up attending services at her congregation or contacting Stein to officiate life cycle events.
Her content has also been met with confusion from some non-Jews and those of other denominations. Though most people ask questions with “positive curiosity,” some viewers have responded negatively to Stein being a female rabbi and not dressing particularly tsnius, or modest. Stein believes this is because “they had actually never encountered a rabbi that was different from their childhood rabbi or the images they had been taught.” In response, she likes to draw on the example of Osnat Barzani, a woman from 16th century Kurdistan who is often said to be the first female rabbi.
“She’s an amazing character for people to learn about, to say, yes this has not been the norm for most of our history, but it is actually not solely a 20th, 21st century phenomenon,” Stein said.
For Stein, teaching has become a deeply meaningful activity, whether that be adult Jewish education or guest classes at universities. She recalls a memorable moment at a class she taught at Colby College on the Song of Songs. The course was open to Jewish students and non-Jews alike, and explored the text through visual art.
What makes the college classes especially worthwhile for Stein is the ability to shape the next generation of rabbinical leaders. The rabbinate isn’t a career that often comes to mind, and Stein told me that she loved “being able to suggest it to students.” She believes that, through her content and practice, a new generation might see themselves reflected in the rabbinical field — realizing not only that it’s “a job, but it’s maybe a job that I could do.”
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French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch is defiant after concert disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters
(JTA) — The popular French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch is striking a defiant tone after pro-Palestinian activists disrupted her concert in Grenoble, France, vowing not to be cowed from performing.
Butch has also drawn support from Jewish activists who demonstrated outside the office of the far-left party whose top Grenoble official called for her performance to be canceled and has since doubled down, drawing support from anti-Zionist French Jews in the process.
Butch, who came to prominence after appearing at the opening ceremony of the 2024 summer Olympics in Paris, had to be escorted off the stage at the Cabaret Frappé festival on Saturday, barely 20 minutes into her set.
The City of Grenoble filed a complaint against what it called “persons unknown” following the incident. Mayor Laurence Ruffin said authorities had evidence of violence and sabotage of electrical equipment. She rejected arguments that the protest was peaceful.
“There were actions that are unacceptable,” Ruffin said, adding that while Grenoble has consistently supported the Palestinian people, demonstrations “must be peaceful and democratic.”
According to Butch, protesters shouted insults and threw objects, including glass bottles that shattered near her DJ console. In a video statement posted to social media on Monday, she said she had been frightened and described the attack as “the next stage in a campaign” that, she said, had sought for months to exclude her from artistic and public life. She added that legal complaints had been prepared and she vowed: “I will return to the stage.”
The attack on Butch came after pro-Palestinian activists called to boycott or cancel her appearance, citing her support for legislation widely viewed as pro-Israel and her travel to Tel Aviv.
A leader of the effort was Allan Brunson, the Grenoble chair of the far-left party France Unbowed, which has a pro-Palestinian platform. (Its leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, has been accused of echoing antisemitic stereotypes and dismissing the threat of antisemitism.) After politicians from other parties called for him to be sanctioned over his calls, Brunon tweeted ahead of the concert, “What a pleasure it would be for me to be sanctioned for calling on activists supportive of the Palestinian people to organize against the arrival of B. Butch.”
After its disruption, he posted a video of pro-Palestinian activists rallying in Grenoble and said he would next take aim at the city’s formal relationship with the Israeli city of Rehovot.
The legislation, known as Yadan after the French lawmaker, Caroline Yadan, who proposed it in 2024, aimed to combat “new forms of antisemitism” by expanding terrorism-related offenses and criminalizing calls for the destruction of a state recognized by France — a provision widely understood to be aimed at calls for Israel’s destruction, although the bill did not explicitly name Israel.
Supporters argued the legislation was a necessary response to the rising antisemitism following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Critics said the bill risked restricting freedom of expression by blurring the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The proposal divided public opinion and the bill was withdrawn in April, a month after a group of artists signed a March 2026 essay in Le Point supporting it. Butch, who has cited her participation in the French Jewish scouting movement as formative, was among the signatories.
Following the Grenoble incident, Butch and her lawyer, Audrey Msellati, co-authored an op-ed in Le Monde arguing that the protest had crossed the line from political disagreement into intimidation and violence — “the one separating protest from coercion, disagreement from intimidation, speech from violence. We were no longer responding to an artist: we were chasing her off the stage.”
They wrote that while people are free to criticize an artist or disagree with Butch’s views, “one cannot organize her disappearance,” arguing that campaigns to pressure venues into canceling performances threaten artistic freedom and democratic principles.
Yonathan Arfi, the president of CRIF, France’s communal Jewish body, said in a statement that the demonstration against Butch is part of a worrying pattern, which he attributed to France Unbowed, of intimidation of Jewish artists that he said was “turning cultural stages into political tribunals.” He called on the French government to “urgently” create a plan to combat boycotts in the arts.
The European Jewish Congress, too, expressed support for Butch, saying, “We stand in full solidarity with Barbara Butch. No one should be intimidated, threatened or targeted for being Jewish or for speaking out against antisemitism.”
The Union of French Jewish Students, along with a handful of other liberal Jewish groups, rallied near France Unbowed’s Paris headquarters on Monday in support of Butch. Brunon has drawn support, on the other hand, from anti-Zionist French Jews who say the Yadan bill represents an exploitation of antisemitism concerns to silence criticism of Israel.
The Grenoble incident is the latest in a series of controversies involving Butch, who became internationally known after performing in drag during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
She filed criminal complaints after receiving death threats and online abuse after the ceremony. Four men were later convicted in connection with the online harassment campaign against her.
The latest incident has also drawn attention from abroad, eliciting support for her from fellow artists and followers on social media.
One widely shared Instagram post by @YiddishFeminist described Butch as “a proud, loud queer Jewish woman” who had faced “antisemitism, homophobia and fatphobia.”
“No one should ever be forced to leave a stage because a hateful crowd resorts to intimidation and violence,” the poster said. “Today, we are all Barbara Butch.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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