Are Hollywood’s Jewish Founders Worth Defending?

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On a recent Sunday afternoon, I visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which occupies a gleaming Renzo Piano building on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, in Los Angeles. As crowds filed in through the Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby, I passed a miniature replica of the Millennium Falcon and took the escalators up, past a floor containing Don Corleone’s desk from “The Godfather.” Beneath a hanging mechanical shark from “Jaws” is a red carpet leading to a room where you can get a video taken with a real Oscar statuette. Next to that is the entrance to “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” the museum’s first permanent exhibition—and its most controversial.

“Hollywoodland” is the product of multiple rounds of damage control. When the building opened, in the fall of 2021, it became L.A.’s most substantive museum dedicated to the town’s defining art form. It wasn’t just an upscale Planet Hollywood. On the heels of #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, the curators looked the industry’s historical blind spots head on. The multistory, ever-changing “Stories of Cinema” exhibition tackled misogyny in classic animation, the racist barriers overcome by Bruce Lee, Native American stereotypes in old Westerns, and the work of the early Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. There were rooms dedicated to Spike Lee and to Patricia Cardoso’s “Real Women Have Curves.” At a temporary display about the “invisible art” of the backdrop, viewers could gaze up at the painted Mount Rushmore from “North by Northwest”—and also read about how Mount Rushmore itself is “a desecration of sacred land taken from the Oglala Lakota.”

With all the attention to marginalized groups, people started asking: Where were the Jews? Specifically, where were the Jewish studio founders who built the industry, not to mention the Academy itself? In the Forward, Sharon Rosen Leib, whose great-grandfather was the Fox producer Sol M. Wurtzel, wrote, “If these long-dead Jewish moguls could speak, I imagine they’d say, What are we, chopped liver?” The concerns echoed those in David Baddiel’s book “Jews Don’t Count,” which had come out earlier that year and argued that contemporary identity politics has ignored the Jewish experience and antisemitism. A museum official told Leib that its goal was not to tell a “chronological” or “comprehensive” history but to interrogate and rethink the film canon—in other words, to tell a counter-narrative to the one enshrined by a century of Oscar wins. Nevertheless, after months of sustained critique—from Jonathan Greenblatt, the C.E.O. of the Anti-Defamation League; from Bari Weiss’s Substack and Bill Maher; from donors and Academy members; from a professor who likened the omission to “building a museum dedicated to Renaissance painting, and ignoring the Italians”—the Academy announced, in the spring of 2022, that it would add a new exhibition about the Jewish moguls, and that it would be there to stay.

It was at this point that a little voice in my head went, Uh-oh. I was steeped in my own book about Hollywood history, “Oscar Wars,” in which men such as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and the brothers Warner figure prominently, both as architects of a great American industry and as often ruthless bosses who treated their studios like fiefdoms. Mayer, born Lazar, in the Russian Empire, may have been the head of M-G-M and the prime mover of the Academy, but to the actor Ralph Bellamy he was “a Jewish Hitler, a fascist. He had no feeling for any minority, including his own. No feeling for people, period.” The well-known story of his punishing treatment of the teen-age Judy Garland during the filming of “The Wizard of Oz” had already appeared in the museum. In 1929, Mayer summoned the actress Anita Page for “special favors” and sidelined her after she rejected his advances. Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, was even more notorious for his casting couch—known as “King Cohn,” he was the Harvey Weinstein of the Golden Age. After Rita Hayworth refused his sexual demands, he stalked her and bugged her dressing room.

These stories received new scrutiny after #MeToo, but they were far from the only way that the moguls misused their power. The Jewish studio heads were immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe and faced pervasive antisemitism in America, where they longed to assimilate. (Mayer adopted the Fourth of July as his birthday.) Unable to rise through Wasp-dominated industries in the East, they created their own path to success out West. But that success made them conspicuous—the automaker Henry Ford warned of “the almost complete submergence of moviedom into the hands of Jews”—and some of their worst tendencies arose from a sense of vulnerability. Even as they lifted movies into the mainstream of American culture, they whitewashed the screen of minorities, including their own, in order to uphold a sanitized vision of the country. Apart from Warner Bros., they kept concerns about Hitler’s rise off movie screens in the thirties, worried that they’d be accused of pushing Jewish propaganda. In the late forties, as the House Un-American Activities Committee launched a (largely antisemitic) hunt for Communist infiltrators in Hollywood, the moguls insulated themselves by helping to create the blacklist, which targeted many leftist Jews in their own employ.

In other words, the studio moguls weren’t just enterprising, talented men with private flaws. They created and enforced a system of power which had real victims, which entrenched marginalization in American popular culture, and which contemporary Hollywood was still grappling with as the museum opened its doors. Like America’s Founding Fathers, they’re complicated historical figures, not ready-made Jewish heroes—which is why I saw the Academy walking into a minefield.

“Hollywoodland” opened this past May, curated by the film historian Dara Jaffe, with consultation from Neal Gabler, whose 1988 book, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” is the definitive history of the subject. But the world that the show entered is not the one in which it was demanded. The war in Gaza, and the protest movement it has aroused, have raised the temperature around Jewish life in America. Antisemitic incidents have spiked, while the line between antisemitic speech and legitimate criticism of Israel has become a scorching-hot zone of debate. On the very day I visited “Hollywoodland,” a protest outside a synagogue in Pico-Robertson, a heavily Jewish neighborhood some two miles west of the museum, devolved into violent street fights. The protesters were opposing a seminar taking place inside promoting real estate in Israel. The incident upset and frightened many L.A. Jews, and President Biden condemned the intimidation of congregants at a place of worship as “dangerous, unconscionable, antisemitic, and un-American.”

In Hollywood, where Jewish success has inspired antisemitic conspiracy theories for a hundred years, Jews in the industry have been on high alert. Speech has been carefully watched, and, at times, penalized. Last fall, Susan Sarandon was dropped by her agency after she said, at a rally for Palestine, that Jews were “getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.” The actor Melissa Barrera was fired from the “Scream” franchise for referring to the war, on Instagram, as a genocide. At this year’s Oscars, the Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, accepting an award for the Auschwitz drama “The Zone of Interest,” gave a seemingly evenhanded speech about the dangers of dehumanization, which drew applause in the auditorium but was soon denounced in an open letter signed by more than a thousand Jewish film professionals. The letter was organized by a group called United Jewish Writers, which was formed last fall to protest the W.G.A.’s lack of comment on the Hamas attack of October 7th.

In this heated climate, “Hollywoodland” opened to a rocky reception. Last month, a version of that same group sent a letter to the Academy decrying the exhibition, with signatories including the executive Casey Wasserman, the actor David Schwimmer, and the showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino. “Using the words ‘tyrant,’ ‘oppressive,’ ‘womanizer,’ ‘predator,’ ‘offensive,’ ‘racial oppression,’ ‘nepotism,’ and ‘prejudices,’ it is the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate,” the letter argued. “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, antisemitic.” The “Pulp Fiction” producer Lawrence Bender called the show “a hatchet job on the Jews.” Even before the letter was delivered, the museum had been besieged by complaints. The Academy, ever swift to backtrack amid a P.R. crisis (remember the aborted Oscar for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film?), quickly revised the offending wall text.

Reading the letter, you might imagine something in the vicinity of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” But, when I was shown the original wall text, I couldn’t believe how mild—and how historically sound—it was. One display described Hollywood’s Golden Age as “a period of oppressive control” that gave film artists “little power.” Anyone who’s read a book about the studio system knows that this was not only true but a source of high-profile legal and union battles for decades. The studio system governed its actors down to their private lives, and stars such as Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland fought their draconian contracts by dragging the studio heads through the courts. Anyway, “oppressive” is gone: the wall text now says merely that artists were “kept under contract to individual studios” and mentions the 1948 Supreme Court case that “challenged the studio system under antitrust laws.”

“Hollywoodland” takes up a third-floor gallery the size of a smallish house or a biggish apartment. Along the back wall is a long display with primers on each of the major Golden Age studios and their founders, which has now been shorn of most negative descriptions. The Warner brothers were originally represented by a short blurb that read, in part, “Polish-born Harry was a rigidly conservative family man. Brash and irreverent, womanizer Jack rebelled against Harry. Though their personality clash made for a difficult alliance, they agreed on the frugal approach that shaped the Warner Bros. aesthetic and workplace culture.” As a concise character study, it does the job; calling Jack Warner a womanizer is like calling a banana yellow. (According to the historian Scott Eyman, he would say to a woman waving at him at a party, “Hiya, honey! Didja bring your douche bag?”) As far as I know, “womanizer” isn’t a Jewish stereotype, but the word has been excised, as has “frugal,” which does bear some relation to the idea of the “cheap” or “penny-pinching” Jew. It also happens to be accurate. The Warner brothers, sons of a Polish cobbler, pooled their money to buy their first projector, in Youngstown, Ohio, and their movies specialized in the urban working class. Their frugality was key to how they built their business, and it stands in contrast to Mayer’s “reputation for spectacle” at M-G-M, where, we learn from his wall text, “no expense was spared.” In any case, “frugal approach” has been replaced by “smaller budgets.”

The original Harry Cohn blurb stated that the Columbia Pictures president, a former furrier and vaudevillian, “ruled the production arm in Los Angeles, earning a reputation as a tyrant and predator; he modeled his office on that of Benito Mussolini, built to intimidate anyone who entered.” That’s putting it mildly. In the fifties, Cohn threatened a mob hit on Sammy Davis, Jr., to force him to break up with Kim Novak (another star whom Cohn harassed) and marry a Black singer instead. The actress Geraldine Brooks recalled meeting Cohn to discuss a role when she was a teen-ager; he tore her blouse from her shoulders, grabbed her, and, as she fled, yelled, “You’ll never work in this town again!” Cohn’s character wasn’t retroactively tarnished by modern-day scolds—his star filmmaker, Frank Capra, nicknamed him His Crudeness. Nonetheless, the phrase “tyrant and predator” now reads “authoritarian.” Standing in front of the expurgated version, I felt sad and angry, thinking about the women who’d been subjected to the casting couch at his Mussolini-inspired office, where he kept shelves of perfume and stockings as “payment” for coerced sexual favors. (Darryl Zanuck, the starlet-pawing head of Twentieth Century Fox, eludes scrutiny here by virtue of being a gentile.) Erasing those women, in the name of celebrating Jewish accomplishment, feels like a tragic step backward.

But wait, you say! Why does “Hollywoodland” dwell on these men’s sins without acknowledging their achievements? Weren’t they victims of persecution themselves? Those topics are addressed in the exhibition. Behind a black curtain, a half-hour documentary, “From the Shtetl to the Studio,” plays on a loop. Narrated by the TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, himself a descendant of ingenious Jewish filmmakers, it describes the moguls as “visionaries” with “lofty ambitions and wide-ranging imaginations.” Soaring, schmaltzy music plays as we learn about how these “struggling Jewish outsiders” turned movies “from technical novelty into an entertainment art form” on the strength of their “pluck, creativity,” and knack for reading public taste. (Not mentioned is Cohn’s famous rule of thumb when screening movies: “If my fanny squirms, it’s bad. If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good.”) Over sepia footage of tenements, Mankiewicz explains how the studio founders overcame “religious and ethnic persecution” and remade themselves into “captains of industry, people of note, the American Dream personified—despite their Jewishness.”

The video also details the anti-Jewish propaganda—including hook-nosed caricatures—that drove the moguls’ urge to project an idealized nation onscreen, from the “small-town Americana” of M-G-M’s Andy Hardy movies to Columbia’s David-versus-Goliath parables directed by Capra, himself a Sicilian immigrant. As a result, Golden Age films “generally excluded, stereotyped, or vilified people of color and L.G.B.T.-plus characters,” Mankiewicz explains—and that exclusion “extended to a lack of Jewish representation as well.” The moguls, the video concludes, possessed an “idealism motivated by fear—the fear of antisemitism that drove and never left them.” Far from a hatchet job, it’s a considered look at the insidious nature of hate.

A central argument, for the exhibition’s critics, was the idea that these figures are held to a “double standard”—that they’re made to answer for their transgressions, while the rest of the museum is celebratory. It’s true that other parts of the museum take a rosier tone. I’m sure that the letter writers were vexed by the positivity of the top floor, which has pillars named after such boundary-breaking women as Hattie McDaniel, Rita Moreno, and Sophia Loren, as well as a “Barbra Streisand Bridge” leading out to a panoramic view of L.A. But these women didn’t sit atop vast power structures that beg accountability—and what would you bust them for, anyway?

Elsewhere, the museum is neither apolitical nor uncritical. Down a flight from “Hollywoodland,” the “Godfather” gallery displays the taxidermied horse’s head, with text that apologetically describes it as an “unsettling relic prop” reflecting outdated sourcing methods. The Oscar Micheaux display, which has been rotated out, touched on the white supremacy of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” which bolstered a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. On a good-for-the-Jews note, the “Casablanca” gallery highlights how the movie, set against the refugee crisis of the Second World War, was itself made, in large part, by Jewish refugees.

Nowhere is the museum more unsparing than in sizing up the Academy’s own history. A text leading into a rotunda of Oscar statuettes notes that the awards “often reflect and perpetuate the greater societal issues and concerns of their time.” In the next room, a wide platform displays mannequins dressed in vintage Oscar outfits (including Francis Ford Coppola’s green velvet tuxedo, from 1973), with a ten-decade time line running along its perimeter. Among the fun facts, we learn that the Academy’s founding members were “white” and “overwhelmingly male”; that the first Academy Awards honored “The Jazz Singer,” which is “infamous” for its use of blackface; that the white actress Luise Rainer won Best Actress for playing a Chinese woman, a role denied to Anna May Wong; that Hattie McDaniel’s breakthrough award for “Gone with the Wind” was “complicated by overt, continuing racism,” including segregated seating at the ceremony; that it took decades for the Academy to properly award blacklisted screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo; that the makeup artist William Tuttle was given a special honor for his work on the Tony Randall film “7 Faces of Dr. Lao,” despite its “overt use of ‘yellowface’ ”; and that Sacheen Littlefeather, who declined the 1973 Best Actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando (for “The Godfather”) was “booed” and “effectively shunned from Hollywood.” Even in its modern era, the Academy takes itself to task for the “glaring” omissions that inspired the #OscarsSoWhite uproar, for the “awkward snafu” of the 2017 Best Picture envelope mixup, and even for the Academy’s “debated” handling of the Will Smith slap.

It’s impossible to walk through this ritual self-flagellation and conclude that the Academy is reserving blame for Hollywood’s “problematic past” for the Jewish founders alone. But an honest reckoning with history is not what the outcry is really about. For one thing, it’s a metaphor for how we talk about Israel, whose advocates similarly assert that the world’s one Jewish state is held to a “double standard” in its right to defend itself. Unlike most other forms of persecution, antisemitism often metastasizes around perceptions of Jewish power, whether that of the Rothschilds or George Soros or the Jews who supposedly control the banks and the media. To critique Jewish abuse of power is to sidle up to nefarious tropes. The exhibition’s detractors, I’d imagine, were reacting from genuine anger and fear, but the backlash is not about Harry Cohn—and it’s not victimless. Even after the museum’s capitulation, a group calling itself StopAntisemitism called for the firing of Dara Jaffe, the Jewish curator of “Hollywoodland,” and questioned her husband’s immigration status on Instagram. If that’s “stopping antisemitism,” no thanks.

Who knows how much these undercurrents translate to the average museumgoer. As I walked through “Hollywoodland,” most of the visitors were entranced by a snazzy topographical 3-D map showing early-Hollywood landmarks. “This is neat!” one woman exclaimed to her companion. Nearby, a man and two bored-looking boys leaned on a wall photo of Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre (Sid Grauman—a fine Jew!) and watched a few minutes of the documentary, before moving along. Downstairs, in the gift shop, I found a copy of “An Empire of Their Own” and flipped to the index; one of the subheadings under “Cohn, Harry” was “as sexual predator.” Like Ron DeSantis attacking the 1619 Project, the campaign against the museum was an attempt to restore the myth to Hollywood’s troubled origin story, and the mangled final result retrofits history into a feel-good tale that the truth simply can’t sustain.

But there was probably no way for the museum to give its critics what they wanted, which was less a history lesson than a moment of pride. The irony is that Hollywood’s past is full of menschy Jewish talents worth celebrating. If I could turn back the clock, I’d urge the Academy to sidestep the moguls and their mishegoss altogether and mount an exhibition on Jews in comedy, with the likes of Groucho Marx, Judy Holliday, and Mel Brooks. Instead of having a meltdown, we could be having a laugh. ♦

Sourse: newyorker.com