From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood Vincent Brook UCLA
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Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Purdue University Press Books Purdue University Press Fall 12-15-2016 From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood Vincent Brook UCLA Michael Renov University of Southern California Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks Part of the American Popular Culture Commons, and the Jewish Studies Commons Recommended Citation Brook, Vincent and Renov, Michael, From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood. (2016). Purdue University Press. (Knowledge Unlatched Open Access Edition.) This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood The Jewish Role in American Life An Annual Review of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood The Jewish Role in American Life An Annual Review of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life Volume 14 Steven J. Ross, Editor Michael Renov and Vincent Brook, Guest Editors Lisa Ansell, Associate Editor Published by the Purdue University Press for the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life © 2017 University of Southern California Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. All rights reserved. Production Editor, Marilyn Lundberg Cover photo supplied by Thomas Wolf, www.foto.tw.de, as found on Wikimedia Commons. Front cover vector art supplied by aarows/iStock/Thinkstock. Cloth ISBN: 978-1-55753-763-8 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-478-4 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-61249-479-1 KU ISBN: 978-1-55753-788-1 Published by Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana www.thepress.purdue.edu [email protected] Printed in the United States of America. For subscription information, call 1-800-247-6553 Contents FOREWORD vii EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION ix Michael Renov and Vincent Brook, Guest Editors PART 1: HISTORIES CHAPTER 1 3 Vincent Brook Still an Empire of Their Own: How Jews Remain Atop a Reinvented Hollywood CHAPTER 2 23 Lawrence Baron and Joel Rosenberg, with a Coda by Vincent Brook The Ben Urwand Controversy: Exploring the Hollywood-Hitler Relationship PART 2: CASE STUDIES CHAPTER 3 49 Shaina Hammerman Dirty Jews: Amy Schumer and Other Vulgar Jewesses CHAPTER 4 73 Joshua Louis Moss “The Woman Thing and the Jew Thing”: Transsexuality, Transcomedy, and the Legacy of Subversive Jewishness in Transparent CHAPTER 5 99 Howard A. Rodman Eastern-European Fatalism in Minnesota: The Mournful Destinies of A Serious Man CHAPTER 6 109 Jeffrey Shandler “If Jewish People Wrote All the Songs”: The Anti-Folklore of Allan Sherman PART 3: UP-CLOSE AND PERSONAL CHAPTER 7 127 David Isaacs Comedy and Corned Beef: The Genesis of the Sitcom Writing Room CHAPTER 8 137 Ross Melnick The Faemmle Business: Laemmle Theaters, Los Angeles, and the Moviegoing Experience—An Interview with Bob and Greg Laemmle CHAPTER 9 157 Michael Renov An Outsider’s View of Sixties America: Matthew Weiner Talks with Michael Renov about the Jews of Mad Men ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 185 ABOUT THE USC CASDEN INSTITUTE 189 Foreword For all its fame, the history of Jewish Hollywood remains underwritten. Who could have imagined that the strange brew of movies made by Jews and cen- sored by Catholics for a largely Protestant audience would change the world and have such a profound impact on the Jewish people? This issue of the Casden Annual, From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood, sheds fascinating new light on the roles—literally and figuratively—Jews and Judaism have played on the big and small screens, behind the scenes, and in running Hollywood. Despite the fact that most studios during the Golden Age of Hollywood were run by Jews, many actors and actresses—whether by choice or because of studio pressure—hid their Jewish identity well into the twentieth century. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Nazis and fascist Silver Shirts in Los Angeles, and even several US Senators, delighted in writing articles and giving speeches exposing the real names of many of the nation’s most famous Jewish film stars: Emmanuel Goldenberg was Edward G. Robinson, Betty Joan Perske was Lauren Bacall, Asa Yoelson was Al Jolson, and Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund was Paul Muni. As the volume’s Introduction notes, even after World War II and the revela- tion of the full extent of the Holocaust, many Jews inside and outside Hollywood continued to downplay their Jewishness. But, as several of the volume essays point out, Jews would eventually emerge from the shadows and make their ethnic identity very much part of their screen identity. From Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld to Jon Stewart to Amy Schumer, a new generation of performers celebrated what their el- ders avoided for decades, what Jon Stewart might call their “Jewy Jewsteiness.” Vincent Brook and Michael Renov, the volume’s co-editors, have brought to- gether a series of original, informative and provocative looks at the transformation of the film and television industries from their early days to the present. They divide their mosaic of evolving Judaism into three parts: Histories, Case Studies, and Up- Close and Personal. Taken together, these nine essays offer us fresh and exciting new looks at the ways in which Jews have shaped the nature of American entertainment. Steven J. Ross, Myron and Marian Casden Director vii Editorial Introduction by Michael Renov and Vincent Brook, Guest Editors Jews’ outsized contribution to American entertainment precedes their rise to prominence in the Hollywood movie studios. Spurred by their mass migra- tion from Eastern Europe and Russia in the late 1800s, just as mass culture was emerging, immigrant and second-generation Jewish business owners, pro- ducers, and artists had already established themselves at the forefront of live theater and popular music by the time motion pictures caught on in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not until the paradigm shift in film produc- tion from the East Coast to Los Angeles in the 1910s, however, and cinema’s ascendance from lowbrow fare to cultural phenomenon and big business, did Jewish “control” of Hollywood become an open secret. Once the “Jewish question” was broached, the movie moguls (the term “moguls” itself of antisemitic origin) reacted defensively, diverting attention from their newly mounted catbird seat while also making concessions to it. The avoidance included altering stereotypical Jewish stars’ names and appear- ances and eschewing, especially with the spike of American antisemitism in the 1930s, Jewish characters and themes; the concessions included appointing non-Jews to head in-house public relations and content-policing agencies.1 The insecurity and defensiveness extended to organized Jewry, which from painful past experience, reasoned that flaunting Hollywood’s Jewishness, behind or on the screen, much less griping about antisemitic attitudes towards the industry or Jews in general, would only make matters worse. Even with their overall increased entry into the US mainstream after World War II and the lessons of the Holocaust, Jews inside and outside Hollywood continued to downplay Jewish industry influence, which now extended to the new medium of televi- sion as well. ix x Michael Renov and Vincent Brook In the wake of the identity politics movements of the 1960s and ’70s, which Jews joined with renewed vigor after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six- Day War, Jewish intellectuals began to tip-toe toward open acknowledgment of their co-religionists’ seminal place in popular culture. A few journal articles in the mid-1970s, by Howard Suber on Jewish characters in television, and by Tom Tugend on the early Hollywood moguls, were the first short-form pieces to crack the code of silence. They were followed a decade later by the first full- length books on the subject: Sarah Blacher Cohen’s anthology From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen (1983), Patricia Erens’ The Jew in American Cinema (1984), and Lester D. Friedman’s The Jew in American Film (1987). All these early “exposés,” however (except for Tugend’s four-page article), focused on Jewish representation on screen, leaving fuzzy the elephant in the room: the astonishing number of Jews (given their mere two percent of the US population) behind the scenes, creatively and most cru- cially, in ownership and executive positions. With the publication in 1989 of Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the genie was finally out of the bottle—a refreshing end to the taboo for many Jews, renewed cause for alarm for others. After all, here was a Jew unabashedly admitting, and documenting, what the anti-Semites had claimed all along. Moreover, in ascribing “imperial” designs to Hollywood’s Founding Fathers and crediting them with peddling an American Dream of their own concoction, Gabler seemed to be playing into the Jew-haters’ conspiracy-mongering hands. What he was actually doing, of course, was beat- ing the bigots at their own game. Following the lead of identity political groups that had begun strategically turning pejorative labels into badges of honor—gay, black, even eventually Heeb—Gabler was owning, and proudly proclaiming, the profound imprint Jews, via Hollywood, had made on American society. Dissension in Jewish ranks remained, however. In 1993, David Desser and Lester Friedman followed Gabler’s opus with an exploration of contempo- rary American Jewish directors. In a survey of over 170 presumed Jewish film- makers (a remarkable number in itself), several of those contacted deemed the project “divisive because it separated Jews from the rest of American society.”2 One accused the authors of providing “great ammunition for anti-Semites,” and a particularly annoyed respondent “expressed hope that he would not have to look forward to studies of American-Jewish physicists, harpists, pizza-makers, bookies, and pederasts” (34, 35).