Jews and Hollywood Vincent Brook

Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Purdue University Press Book Previews Purdue University Press Winter 12-15-2016 From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood Vincent Brook Michael Renov Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews Part of the American Film Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Jewish Studies Commons Recommended Citation Brook, Vincent and Renov, Michael, "From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood" (2016). Purdue University Press Book Previews. 4. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews/4 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 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 CHAPTER 1 Still an Empire of Their Own: How Jews Remain Atop a Reinvented Hollywood by Vincent Brook o-host Steve Martin’s opening joke at the 2010 Academy Awards ceremony, as attested by its uproarious audience reception and YouTube preservation, stands out not only as that event’s entertainment high point. It also marks a turning point in Jewish-Hollywood Crelations. As part of the standard tongue-in-cheek introduction of celebrity nominees seated in the front rows, Martin turned to German actor Christoph Waltz and continued his spiel. “And in Inglourious Basterds, Christoph Waltz played a Nazi obsessed with finding Jews. Well, Christoph . .” Martin paused, then slowly spread out his arms to embrace the audience—which exploded with laughter, followed by a second explosion when Martin added, with arms still spread wide, “. the Mother Lode!” (“A Jew-y Moment at the 2010 Oscars”). Martin’s jab at Jewish uber-representation in Hollywood was nothing new. Indeed, getting the joke demanded prior knowledge of Jews’ nu- merical predominance in the industry, and at the highest levels, compared to their meager proportion (circa two percent) of the US population. What was groundbreaking was Martin’s light-hearted treatment of the phenomenon (by a gentile, no less), its buoyant reception by his (Jewish and non-Jewish) peers, and the lack of controversy it generated among critics, organized Jewry, or (as far as has been reported) the bulk of the telecast’s billion-plus viewers. What the joke provided instead was immense comic relief, which, as with the best 3 4 Vincent Brook humor, stemmed from its touching a cultural nerve whose tendrils, in this case, extended beyond the present moment to Hollywood’s early-twentieth-century origins as the world’s movie capital. Adding to the joke’s potency was its functioning on multiple levels. The site-specific aspect was a bonus, allowing the jokester to show rather than tell and to give tangible substance (the Oscar night audience) to an ab- stract concept (the “Jewish industry”). That Waltz’s SS character was the butt of the joke and Jews, for a change, got the last laugh, added poetic justice that both resonated with Inglourious Basterds’ Jewish revenge fantasy and carried historical weight. Hitler’s Führership had triggered a massive influx to Hollywood of Jewish film personnel. Their replenishment of the industry’s creative ranks (from directors, actors, and writers to cinematographers, editors, set designers, and composers) bolstered an executive structure already top-heavy with an earlier generation of Jewish émigrés (Brook, Driven to Darkness)—and which, a few generations removed, the 2010 Oscar night audience mirrored. Antisemitism, in other words, lay at the crux of Martin’s one-liner. And while a full understanding of the backstory wasn’t essential to slaying the Academy audience, it is required for appreciating the joke’s broader cultural significance. JUST DESSERTS Without antisemitism, of the European and American variety, Jews never would have “invented Hollywood” in the first place (Gabler). The masses of largely eastern European Jews who set sail for the United States in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, just as the movies were taking root, were driven to American shores by the latest violent eruptions of Jew-hatred in their erstwhile homelands. Here they met less virulent but mounting antisemitism, fueled by their largely lower-class immigration, which blocked their rise in more established industries and shunted them into what was then a lowly, if not wholly disreputable, motion picture business. Centuries of Old World antisemitism, meanwhile, which had barred Jews in Europe from owning land and joining guilds, forcing them instead into Luftmensch (airman) occupations such as salesman, agent and broker, primed their New World descendants for the similarly rag-tag, fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants operation “the flickers” initially represented.1 Still an Empire of Their Own: How Jews Remain Atop a Reinvented Hollywood 5 Jews, in other words, were at the right place, at the right time, with the right skill set. And American anti-Semites who soon began railing against Jewish “control” of Hollywood had only their ilk to blame. Of course, minus its conspiratorial overtones, the control canard was not without statistical support. Already during the Nickelodeon era (1905–15), Jews had secured a foothold in the exhibition side of the movies as theater owners and managers. When New York Mayor George McClellan closed all the city’s nickelodeons in 1908, allegedly in response to public concern over the “exhibition of de- pravity,” and local theater owner Jacob Weinberg was arrested, the Jewish im- migrant community perceived the actions as a form of pogrom (Hoberman and Shandler, “Nickelodeon Nation” 16; May 43–44). Nothing could stall the movie juggernaut, however, nor Jews’ involvement in all facets of it. By the 1920s, in addition to continued predominance on the exhibition side (Klein), Jews helmed all the major studios that would become household names, define Hollywood’s golden age, and still exist today: Paramount (Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky), MGM (Marcus Loew, Nicholas Schenck, and Louis B. Mayer), Fox (William Fox), Warner Brothers (Harry and Jack Warner), Universal (Carl Laemmle), Columbia (Harry Cohn), and United Artists (Joseph Schenck).2 Rather than showered with praise for their model American entrepre- neurship, however, no sooner had the moguls transformed a once scoffed-at business into a lucrative and core cultural enterprise, than the Jewish control canard took center stage (Brook, Driven to Darkness 73). The term mogul it- self, derived from the word “Mongol” and coined specifically for the immi- grant studio bosses, referred pejoratively to their “alleged Asiatic [read: alien] provenance and appearance, perceived boorish [read: uncivilized] behav- ior, and admittedly aggressive [read: unscrupulous] business practices” (68). The moguls’ selection in 1922 of Will Hays, current Postmaster General and a Presbyterian deacon, to head Hollywood’s newly formed public relations arm, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (now Motion Picture Association of America), sought only partly to stave off criticism over a spate of sex-and-drug-related movie-star scandals. It also clearly aimed to counter “increasingly anti-Semitic attacks on the film business, not only from fringe groups but also from respected religious and business leaders” (73). Auto magnate Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent newspaper in 1921 reprinted as fact the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion (concocted by Czarist agents in 1905 and purporting to document a Jewish conspiracy for world domination), singled out the movies for special opprobri- um. Hollywood, Ford wrote, was “exclusively under the control of the Jewish 6 Vincent Brook manipulators of the public mind,” whose producers, because of their “Oriental view [that] is essentially different from the Anglo-Saxon .

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