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Click on this text to watch: A Modestly Priced Weapon (Our JEWISH Controlled Press) Jewish
Control of the Media
Do Jews Control the Media? – The LA Times Says Yes!
Do
the Jews Own Hollywood and the Media?
Do
Jews Run Hollywood?
How
Jews Control the American Media
How
Jewish is Hollywood?
Jews
Do Control the Media
The
Jews Who Own the Media
The
Jews Who Rule Media
Jewish
in Hollywood
Manny
Friedman: Jews “Own a Whole Freaking Country”; and Yes, That Includes the Media
Seven
Jewish Americans Control Most US Media
Six
Jewish Companies Control 96% of the World’s Media
Who Runs the Media — The Amazing – Documented
Chapter from Jewish Supremacism
Toxic media
Misleading the population by turning fiction into fact By John Kaminski Back in 1969, General De Gaulle was denouncing the excessive influence of the Zionist lobby in all media: from newspapers to television, from motion pictures to publishing. Today, this excessive influence has succeeded in achieving the total perversion of meaning, whereby the meager resistance of the weak is dubbed “terrorism”, and the infinitely more murderous violence of the strong, “the fight against terrorism”. —Roger Garaudy, The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, Institute for Historical Review, 2000, p. 141 In a world turned upside down, we now have a chance to finally learn that many of our greatest heroes were really sociopathic criminals of the first order, if only we could find someone powerful enough to imbue this truth upon the world. But today we no longer have heroes; we have only media cutout celebrities who are first extolled to the sky, rise to prominence in a media blitz, then betray their followers by maintaining the bloody status quo. Later in life some of these mysterious media darlings are excoriated to the max for some nasty habit or unaddressed scandal, behavior that has been covered up for years by compliant media which eagerly participate in the conspiracies of government against the people. What follows is the more crucial question: If our leaders are homicidal maniacs or just merely executioners for the people who put them in power, doesn’t that mean that the people who support them are the same kind of willing criminals, hypocrites preaching patriotism but really heartless accessories to mass murder all over the world? More succinctly, are we responsible for the people we put in power? America does murder well C’mon, wake up! We give cholera to children in Yemen to protect oil shipments. In Syria we murder children so they can be posed for atrocity photos to be blamed on the innocent leader we aim to destroy. This is not democracy; the American people never wanted any of this. Maybe there is no “American people” anymore. Maybe there are only ghouls in search of cash now allowed to invade the U.S. and get great benefits in the process. Who made this plan? But it’s not Americans themselves who do these things. It is the invisible foreign power that controls America which really deserves the blame. Despite the lies about history taught in U.S. schools, the real history is much more disturbing. The troubled birth of Israel looms large in the motivation for both World Wars, as the creation of Federal Reserve began a money drain from the bank accounts of every American that continues today with a deficit that can ever be repaid. Throughout the 20th century, actual history has been created by false accounts of historical events. The histories we learned in school were based on these false media reports. The so-called Greatest Generation unwittingly executed the greatest hoax of all time that led to 60 million deaths. Jews retain control of Germany to this day. After bleeding it dry with billions in so-called Holocaust reparations, the Jews rewarded Germany for its obedience to political correctness by enabling a million Africans to invade their helpless nation, and rape their women at their leisure. The Communist Merkel did this to her own country, which illustrates how leaders bought by Jews treat the country they are supposed to lead and inspire. The terrible triumvirate of Clinton-Bush-Obama did much the same to the United States. More importantly we learn how Jewish bankers set white countries against each other. Their objective — other than their usual habit of draining countries financially and then loaning them money at impossible rates, further turning the screws of people’s agony — is the extermination of the white race, humanity’s alpha race that prevents Jews from occupying (and by now solidifying) their slyly commandeered top dog position. To accomplish this, the Jews have perpetrated the two greatest scams in humanity’s history: through public relations genius, they have elevated themselves to the world’s greatest victims when in fact they have been, at least since Rothschild’s ascension, the world’s greatest criminals. FDR proved this when he rejected all of Hitler’s peace proposals, and later both Saddam and Gadhafi, both of whom volunteered to leave their countries quietly, got the same Satanic doses from the Bush-Clinton-Obama crime family. The famous Jewish claim of 6 million dead stands refuted by the 1981 International Red Cross report of fewer than 300,000, making the tens of billions awarded to Holocaust surviving relatives the greatest robbery of all time. Just imagine: the world’s foremost liars in charge of the world’s communications apparatus. And worse than that, they constantly entice us to kill our brothers and sisters, from slasher movies and pop music to nations at war. The Germans, Russians, British and Americans are racial brothers and the Jews have conspired to get us to kill each other for hundreds of years. What people will never realize is that the extermination process is most probably already complete, given the Jews’ surreptitious insertions of poisons into our food supply. Don’t expect charity or honesty When you realize now the great distance between what is actually happening in the world and the lame misrepresentations of mainstream media, you begin to get some idea of the gulf between history as you know it and history as it actually happened. Out of a stupendous act of deference to the Jews, the journalism game today seems to be describing what happened without describing what’s happening. Hell, the Las Vegas shooting was target practice by an Israeli hit team, the culmination of series of false flag attacks staged by our government to emphasize to the feckless Americans that they need a vigilant government to protect them. How many times are they going to fail this test before we notice? Take Sandy Hook as an example. Simple questions that officials refuse to answer became crimes for questioning the lies of the obvious coverup. Why no trauma helicopters? Why no response to the question of who cleaned up the blood? Why were there crowd control signs erected the night before? The main shooter, seen only in doctored, photoshopped photos, likely did not even exist, so sketchy is his profile. The story that a 125 pound weakling could have carried weapons and ammunition that weighed as much as he did, and then fired them with unerring accuracy, killing 20 cute little children in five minutes, then killed himself, is a story as shaky as a child’s lie caught in the act. Lt. Vance’s ultimatum at the outset of the “investigation” that anyone disagreeing with the official account would be subject to arrest is, like the German law that forbids disagreeing with the Jewish version of the Holocaust, ironclad evidence of a lie being defended. Why did all those houses change hands on Christmas Day, something Realtors say would never happen? How many millions of dollars fell into the hands of Sandy Hook “parents”? It doesn’t matter how many grieving witnesses you have if they’re all in on the take. The harassment of Wolfgang Halbig over time smacks of Salem Witch Trial behavior on the part of Connecticut officials who performed and have done spin control on this choreographed media presentation. People investigating a real crime would be glad to answer Halbig’s questions. When they won’t show you the photos, you know that no one was killed. So the Sandy Hook model of government forcing us to believe a staged atrocity basically applies to all of American history. The reasons for going to war are generally not what is explained to the public. There is an easy way to show the republic went south, how the democracy became a sham. Jews quibble that this was only reported and never recorded. It is David Rockefeller’s famous 1991 valedictory to an assembly of journalists he had bought. “We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years . . . . It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in past centuries.” In a speech that actually was captured on tape, Rockefeller was to add in later years: Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” Consider what these statements reveal — that we are headed toward a one-state world and the rich will be running it. They’re already running it. But the American people, caught up in their social obligations and the time it takes to make a decent living, never heard these thoughts, never understood them. They have been caught up in the rat race, deliberately set up that way so there is no time to think things through. And as for the future plans they have in store for us, not a word. Which should tell you everything. Human minds caught in a net This Jewish media empire was founded by the late Samuel Newhouse, an immigrant from Russia. The gobbling up of so many newspapers by the Newhouse family was in large degree made possible by the fact that newspapers are not supported by their subscribers, but by their advertisers. It is advertising revenue–not the small change collected from a newspaper’s readers–that largely pays the editor’s salary and yields the owner’s profit. Whenever the large advertisers in a city choose to favor one newspaper over another with their business, the favored newspaper will flourish while its competitor dies. Since the beginning of the 20th century, when Jewish mercantile power in America became a dominant economic force, there has been a steady rise in the number of American newspapers in Jewish hands, accompanied by a steady decline in the number of competing Gentile newspapers–primarily as a result of selective advertising policies by Jewish merchants. Furthermore, even those newspapers still under Gentile ownership and management are so thoroughly dependent upon Jewish advertising revenue that their editorial and news reporting policies are largely constrained by Jewish likes and dislikes. It holds true in the newspaper business as elsewhere that he who pays the piper calls the tune.
http://tapnewswire.com/2015/10/six-jewish-companies-control-96-of-the-worlds-media/ It’s like expecting lawyers to tell the truth. Never trust people who are paid to say what they say. The real truth comes from within, and determines the kind of person you are. Which makes it all the more a pity that you often believe what they say on TV, because it’s much safer to realize everything they say about the world, all this time, has been a lie. They taught us that the Germans and Japanese were barbarians and we should bomb them, they taught us evil Mooslims blew up the Twin Towers, and said there was no radioactive poison to worry about before all those cancer clusters popped up. Long ago they told us that the Federal Reserve would provide stability to the American dollar. Our national debt is now approaching $22 trillion, and most Americans are mired in poverty. After a few years of the Great Depression FDR stole everybody’s gold and then sold it back to us at almost twice the price. Roosevelt is remembered for putting everyone to work on a government program, which is the way it’s done under Communism. To those no longer under the spell of toxic media, they also know that FDR was the one person who made World War II happen. Just about everything we heard about Hitler were and still are Jewish lies. Newspapers and government, one and the same, the surest sign of a totalitarian dictatorship. We trusted them and they lied to us. Because we failed to challenge the lies we read in the newspapers or saw on TV, we lost our country to those who don’t mind killing large numbers of people to get what they want, even if their victims are their own fellow citizens. September 11th proved that. And each staged government shooting project keeps proving it over and over again.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise. Solely dependent on contributions from readers, please support his work by mail: 6871 Willow Creek Circle #103, North Port FL 34287 USA.
http://www.rudemacedon.ca/kaminski/kam-index.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070217113216/http://www.johnkaminski.com:80/ http://www.serendipity.li/jsmill/kaminski01.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20040323232319/http://johnkaminski.com/
  The Alien Grip on Our News and Entertainment
Media Must Be Broken By
the Research Staff of National Vanguard Books
P.O. Box 330 · Hillsboro · West Virginia 24946 · USA There is no greater power in the world today than that wielded by the manipulators of public opinion
in America. No king or pope of old, no conquering general or high priest ever disposed of a power even remotely approaching that of
the few dozen men who control America's mass media of news and entertainment. Their power is not distant and impersonal; it reaches into every home in America, and it works
its will during nearly every waking hour. It is the power that shapes and molds the mind of virtually every citizen, young or old, rich
or poor, simple or sophisticated. The mass media form for us our image of the world and then tell us what to think about that image.
Essentially everything we know -- or think we know -- about events outside our own neighborhood or circle of acquaintances
comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, or our television. It is not just
the heavy-handed suppression of certain news stories from our newspapers or the blatant propagandizing of history-distorting
TV "docudramas"
that characterizes the opinion-manipulating techniques of the media masters. They exercise both subtlety and thoroughness
in their management
of the news and the entertainment that they present to us. For example, the way in which the news is covered: which items are
emphasized and which are played down; the reporter's choice of words, tone of voice, and facial expressions; the wording of headlines;
the choice of illustrations -- all of these things subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear.
On top of this, of course, the columnists and editors remove any remaining doubt from our minds as to just what we
are to think about it all. Employing carefully developed psychological techniques, they guide our thought and opinion so that we can be in
tune with the "in" crowd, the "beautiful people," the "smart money." They let us know exactly what our
attitudes should be toward various types of people and behavior by placing those people or that behavior in the context of a TV drama
or situation comedy and having the other TV characters react in the Politically Correct way. Molding American Minds For example, a racially mixed couple will be respected, liked, and socially sought after by other
characters, as will a "take charge" Black scholar or businessman, or a sensitive and talented homosexual, or a poor but honest
and hardworking illegal alien from Mexico. On the other hand, a White racist -- that is, any racially conscious White person who looks
askance at miscegenation or at the rapidly darkening racial situation in America -- is portrayed, at best, as a despicable bigot who
is reviled by the other characters, or, at worst, as a dangerous psychopath who is fascinated by firearms and is a menace to all law-abiding
citizens. The White racist "gun nut," in fact, has become a familiar stereotype on TV shows. The average
American, of whose daily life TV-watching takes such an unhealthy portion, distinguishes between these fictional situations
and reality
only with difficulty, if at all. He responds to the televised actions, statements, and attitudes of TV actors much as he
does to his
own peers in real life. For all too many Americans the real world has been replaced by the false reality of the TV environment,
and it is
to this false reality that his urge to conform responds. Thus, when a TV scriptwriter expresses approval of some ideas and
actions through
the TV characters for whom he is writing, and disapproval of others, he exerts a powerful pressure on millions of viewers
toward conformity
with his own views. And as it is with TV entertainment, so it is also with the news, whether televised or printed.
The insidious thing about this form of thought control is that even when we realize that entertainment or news is biased, the media masters
still are able to manipulate most of us. This is because they not only slant what they present, but they establish tacit boundaries and ground rules
for the permissible spectrum of opinion. As an example, consider the media treatment of Middle East news. Some editors or commentators are
slavishly pro-Israel in their every utterance, while others seem nearly neutral. No one, however, dares suggest that the U.S. government is backing
the wrong side in the Arab-Jewish conflict and that it served Jewish interests rather than American interests to send U.S. forces to cripple
Iraq, Israel's principal rival in the Middle East. Thus, a spectrum of permissible opinion, from pro-Israel to nearly neutral, is established.
Another example is the media treatment of racial issues in the United States. Some commentators seem almost dispassionate
in reporting
news of racial strife, while others are emotionally partisan -- with the partisanship always on the non-White side. All
of the media spokesmen without exception, however, take the position that "multiculturalism" and racial mixing are here to stay,
and that they are good things. Because there are differences in degree, however, most Americans
fail to realize that they are being manipulated. Even the citizen who complains about "managed news" falls into the trap of thinking
that because he is presented with an apparent spectrum of opinion he can escape the thought controllers' influence by believing the editor
or commentator of his choice. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Every point on the permissible spectrum of public
opinion is acceptable to the media masters -- and no impermissible fact or viewpoint is allowed any exposure at all, if they can prevent it.
The control of the opinion-molding media is nearly monolithic. All of the controlled media -- television, radio,
newspapers, magazines, books, motion pictures -- speak with a single voice, each reinforcing the other. Despite the appearance of variety,
there is no real dissent, no alternative source of facts or ideas accessible to the great mass of people that might allow them to form opinions
at odds with those of the media masters. They are presented with a single view of the world -- a world in which every voice proclaims
the equality of the races, the inerrant nature of the Jewish "Holocaust" tale, the wickedness of attempting to halt the flood
of non-White aliens pouring across our borders, the danger of permitting citizens to keep and bear arms, the moral equivalence of all sexual orientations,
and the desirability of a "pluralistic," cosmopolitan society rather than a homogeneous one. It is a view of the world designed
by the media masters to suit their own ends -- and the pressure to conform to that view is overwhelming. People adapt their opinions to it, vote
in accord with it, and shape their lives to fit it. And who are these all-powerful masters of the media? As we shall
see, to a very large extent they are Jews. It isn't simply a matter of the media being controlled by profit-hungry capitalists, some of whom happen
to be Jews. If that were the case, the ethnicity of the media masters would reflect, at least approximately, the ratio of rich Gentiles
to rich Jews. The preponderance of Jews in the media is so overwhelming, however, that we are obliged to assume that it is due to more than
mere happenstance. Electronic News & Entertainment MediaContinuing government deregulation of the telecommunications industry has resulted, not in the
touted increased competition, but rather in an accelerating wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions that have produced a handful of
multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates. The largest of these conglomerates are rapidly growing even bigger by consuming their competition,
almost tripling in size during the 1990s. Whenever you watch television, whether from a local broadcasting station or via a cable or a satellite
dish; whenever you see a feature film in a theater or at home; whenever you listen to the radio or to recorded music; whenever you read a newspaper,
book, or magazine -- it is very likely that the information or entertainment you receive was produced and/or distributed by one of these
megamedia companies. The largest media conglomerate today is AOL-Time Warner, created when AOL bought Time Warner for
$160 billion in 2000. The merger brought together Steve Case, a Gentile, as chairman of AOL-TW, and Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, a Jew, as
the CEO. Although AOL-TW isn't (yet) run entirely by Jews, the effect of this blend of leadership between a White capitalist whose
biggest concern is money and a racially conscious Jew will be gradually to increase the Jewish influence within AOL. Steve Case won't complain
when Gerald Levin begins hiring mostly Jews to fill key positions beneath him because Case's own profits won't be affected. After
Case dies or retires, the Jews will have complete control at AOL. Before the merger,
AOL was the largest Internet service provider in America, and it will now be used as an online platform for the Jewish content from Time Warner. Time
Warner, Inc., with 1997 revenues of more than $13 billion, was the second largest of the international media leviathans when
it was bought
by AOL. Levin, chairman and CEO of Time Warner, had bought Turner Broadcasting Systems in 1996 from Ted Turner, who had
been one of
the few Gentile entrepreneurs in the media business. Ted Turner, as the company president, became the number three man at
AOL-TW, after Case
and Levin. When Ted Turner, the Gentile media maverick, made a bid to buy CBS in 1985, there was panic in
media boardrooms across the nation. Turner had made a fortune in advertising and then had built a successful cable-TV news network, CNN, with over
70 million subscribers. Although Turner employed a number of Jews in key executive positions in CNN and had never taken public positions
contrary to Jewish interests, he is a man with a large ego and a strong personality and was regarded by Chairman William Paley and
the other Jews at CBS as uncontrollable: a loose cannon who might at some time in the future turn against them. Furthermore, Jewish newsman
Daniel Schorr, who had worked for Turner, publicly charged that his former boss held a personal dislike for Jews. To
block Turner's bid, CBS executives invited billionaire Jewish theater, hotel, insurance, and cigarette magnate Laurence Tisch
to launch a "friendly"
takeover of the company, and from 1986 until 1995 Tisch was the chairman and CEO of CBS, removing any threat of non-Jewish
influence
there. Subsequent efforts by Turner to acquire a major network were obstructed by Levin's Time Warner, which owns nearly
20 percent
of CBS stock and has veto power over major deals. When his fellow Jew Sumner Redstone offered to buy CBS for $34.8 billion
in 1999, Levin
had no objection. Thus, despite being an innovator and garnering headlines, Turner never commanded the "connections"
necessary for being a true media master. He finally decided if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, and he sold out to Levin. Ted Turner is in
one respect a reflection of Steve Case. Both of these White men are capitalists with no discernible degree of racial consciousness or responsibility.
In July 2001, AOL Time Warner announced that yet another Jew, Walter Isaacson, formerly the editorial director of Time, Inc., will become the
new chairman and CEO of CNN News Group, which oversees the news empire that Ted Turner built. Time Warner's subsidiary HBO is the country's largest
pay-TV cable network. Until the purchase in May 1998 of PolyGram by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music was America's largest record company, with
50 labels, the biggest of which is Warner Brothers Records. Warner Music was an early promoter of "gangsta rap." Through its involvement
with Interscope Records (prior to Interscope's acquisition by MCA), it helped to popularize a genre whose graphic lyrics explicitly urge Blacks
to commit acts of violence against Whites. In addition to cable and music, Time Warner is heavily involved in
the production of feature films (Warner Brothers Studio, Castle Rock Entertainment, and New Line Cinema) and in publishing. Time Warner's
publishing division (editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, a Jew) is the largest magazine publisher in the country (Time, Sports Illustrated,
People, Fortune). The second-largest media conglomerate today, with 1997 revenues of $23 billion, is the Walt Disney
Company. Its chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner, is a Jew. The Disney empire, headed by a man described by one media analyst as "a control freak,"
includes several
television production companies (Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television) and cable networks
with more
than 100 million subscribers altogether. As for feature films, the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, under
Walt Disney Studios, headed by Joseph E. Roth (also a Jew), includes Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, and Caravan
Pictures. Roth founded Caravan Pictures in January 1993, and it is now headed by his fellow Jew Roger Birnbaum. Disney also owns Miramax
Films, run by the Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey, who have produced such ultra-raunchy movies as The Crying Game, Priest,
and Kids. When the Disney Company was run by the Gentile
Disney family, prior to its takeover by Eisner in 1984, it epitomized wholesome, family entertainment. While it still holds the rights
to Snow White, the company under Eisner has expanded into the production of a great deal of so-called "adult" material.
In August 1995, Eisner acquired Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., which owns the ABC Television Network, which in turn owns
ten TV stations
outright in such big markets as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston. In addition, it
has 225 affiliated stations in the United States and is part owner of several European TV companies. ABC's cable subsidiary,
ESPN, is headed by president and CEO Steven Bornstein, who is a Jew. The corporation also has a controlling share of Lifetime Television and A
& E Television Networks cable companies, with 67 million subscribers each. ABC Radio Network owns 26 AM and FM stations, again in
major cities such as New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, and has over 3,400 affiliates. Although primarily
a telecommunications company, Capital Cities/ABC earned over $1 billion in publishing in 1997. It owns seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications
(Women's Wear Daily), Chilton Publications (automotive manuals), and the Diversified Publishing Group. Number
three on the list, with 1997 revenues of just over $13 billion, is Viacom, Inc., headed by Sumner Redstone (born Murray Rothstein).
Viacom, which
produces and distributes TV programs for the three largest networks, owns 13 television stations and 12 radio stations.
It produces
feature films through Paramount Pictures, headed by Jewess Sherry Lansing. Redstone acquired CBS following the December
1999 stockholders'
votes at CBS and Viacom. Working for Redstone as CBS's chief executive is a Jew named Melvin A. Karmazin. He is the boss
and biggest individual shareholder of the company that owns the CBS Television Network, 14 major-market TV stations, 160 radio stations,
the Country Music Television and the Nashville Network cable channels, and a large number of outdoor advertising assets. Viacom's
publishing division includes Simon & Schuster, Scribner, The Free Press, and Pocket Books. It distributes videos through
over 4,000 Blockbuster
stores. It is also involved in satellite broadcasting, theme parks, and video games. Viacom's chief
claim to fame, however, is as the world's largest provider of cable programming, through its Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon,
and other
networks. Since 1989 MTV and Nickelodeon have acquired larger and larger shares of the juvenile television audience. The
first quarter
of 2001 was the 16th consecutive quarter in which MTV was rated as the #1 cable network for viewers between the ages of
12 and 24.
Redstone, who actually owns 76 per cent of the shares of Viacom, has offered Beavis and Butthead as teen role models and
currently is
the largest single purveyor of race-mixing propaganda to White teenagers and sub-teens in America and in Europe. MTV Networks
plans to acquire
The Music Factory (TMF) from the Dutch media and marketing group Wegener. TMF distributes music to almost 10 million homes in Holland and Belgium. MTV is expanding
its presence in Europe through new channels, including MTV Dance (Britain) and MTV Live (Scandinavia). MTV Italy is active through Cecchi
Gori Communications. MTV pumps its racially mixed rock and rap videos into 210 million homes in 71 countries and is the dominant cultural
influence on White teenagers around the world. Nickelodeon, with about 65 million subscribers,
has by far the largest share of the four-to-11-year-old TV audience in America and also is expanding rapidly into Europe. Most of its
shows do not yet display the blatant degeneracy that is MTV's trademark, but Redstone is gradually nudging the fare presented to his kiddie
viewers toward the same poison purveyed by MTV. As of early 2001, Nickelodeon was continuing a nine-year streak as the top cable network for children
and younger teenagers. Another Jewish media mogul is Edgar Bronfman, Jr. He headed Seagram Company, Ltd., the liquor giant,
until its recent merger with Vivendi. His father, Edgar Bronfman, Sr., is president of the World Jewish Congress. Seagram owned Universal
Studios and Interscope Records, the foremost promoter of "gangsta rap." These companies now belong to Vivendi Universal.
Bronfman became the biggest man in the record business in May 1998 when he also acquired control of PolyGram, the
European record giant,
by paying $10.6 billion to the Dutch electronics manufacturer Philips. With the revenue from PolyGram added to that from
MCA and Universal,
Bronfman became master of the fourth largest media empire, with annual revenues around $12 billion. One especially unfortunate aspect of the PolyGram
acquisition was that it gave Bronfman control of the world's largest producer of classical music CDs: PolyGram owns the Deutsche Grammophon,
Decca-London, and Philips record companies. In June 2000, the Bronfman family sold Seagram to Vivendi, a French
utilities company led by gentile Jean-Marie Messier. The combined company, Vivendi Universal, will retain Edgar Bronfman, Jr., as the vice
chairman of the new company, and he will continue to be in charge of its entertainment division. The strategy for this merger seems to
mirror that of AOL-Time Warner: infect and wait. Vivendi Universal will pay off the debts it assumed in the merger by selling Seagram's
alcohol business, retaining its media empire. With two of the top four media conglomerates in
the hands of Jews, and with Jews in executive charge of the remaining two, it is difficult to believe that such an overwhelming degree of control
came about without a deliberate, concerted effort on their part. What about the other big media companies? Rupert
Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, and Fox 2000, is the fifth largest megamedia corporation in the country,
with 1997 revenues of over $11 billion. It is the only other media company that comes even close to the top four. Murdoch is a Gentile Australian,
but Peter Chernin, who is president and CEO of Fox Group, which includes all of News Corporation's film, television, and publishing operations in
the United States, is a Jew. Under Chernin, as president of 20th Century Fox, is Laura Ziskin, a Jewess who formerly headed Fox 2000.
Jew Peter Roth works under Chernin as president of Fox Entertainment. News Corporation also owns the New York Post and TV
Guide, and they are published under Chernin's supervision. Murdoch told Newsweek magazine (July 12, 1999) that he would
probably elevate Chernin to CEO of News Corporation, rather than allow the company to fall into the hands of his own children, none of
whom are younger than their late twenties. It is hard to imagine a Jew giving a major media corporation to a Gentile underling when he
has children waiting in the wings. For his part, Chernin was quite candid: "I get to control movies seen all over
the world. . . . What could be more fun?" Most of the television and movie production companies
that are not owned by the largest corporations are also controlled by Jews. For example, New World Entertainment, proclaimed by one media analyst as
"the premier independent TV program producer in the United States," is owned by Ronald Perelman, a Jew who also owns Revlon
cosmetics and who offered a job to Monica Lewinsky when Bill Clinton was trying to keep her quiet. The best known
of the smaller media companies, DreamWorks SKG, is a strictly kosher affair. DreamWorks was formed in 1994 amid great media hype by recording industry
mogul David Geffen, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film director Steven Spielberg, all three of whom are Jews. The
company produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Considering the cash and connections that Geffen,
Katzenberg, and Spielberg have, DreamWorks may soon be in the same league as the big four. It is well known
that Jews have controlled most of the production and distribution of films since shortly after the inception of the movie industry in the early decades of
the 20th century. When Walt Disney died in 1966, the last barrier to the total Jewish domination of Hollywood was gone, and Jews were able
to grab ownership of the company that Walt built. Since then they have had everything their way in the movie industry.
Films produced by just the four largest motion
picture companies mentioned above -- Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount (Viacom), and Universal (Seagram) -- accounted for two-thirds
of the total box-office receipts for the year 1997. The big three in television network broadcasting
used to be ABC, CBS, and NBC. With the consolidation of the media empires, these three are no longer independent entities. While they
were independent, however, each was controlled by a Jew since its inception: ABC by Leonard Goldenson; NBC first by David Sarnoff and then by his
son Robert; and CBS first by William Paley and then by Laurence Tisch. Over periods of several decades these networks were staffed from
top to bottom with Jews, and the essential Jewishness of network television did not change when the networks were absorbed by other corporations.
The Jewish presence in television news remains particularly strong. NBC provides a good example of this. The executives
at NBC recently were shuffled among the key positions. Andrew Lack, who had been chief of the network's news division, ascended to become its president
and chief operations officer. Neal Shapiro, who had been producing Dateline NBC, moved into Lack's old job. Jeff Zucker, who had
been producing the Today show, was promoted to NBC entertainment president (a job that apparently was created for him), and Jonathan
Wald moved into Zucker's old spot after shoving aside Michael Bass, who had been filling in for Zucker with Today. Some time
ago, Wald became the producer of the NBC Nightly News, taking the position from Jeff Gralnick. When Wald moved to Today,
Steve Capus took over as Tom Brokaw's producer. It is not known at this time whether Capus is a Jew or not, but everyone else is. A
similar preponderance of Jews exists in the news divisions of the other networks. For example, in February 2000, Al Ortiz
moved to head
the "Special Events" coverage at CBS, making gentile Jim Murphy the executive producer of The CBS Evening
News with Dan Rather -- and the only exception that we know of to an otherwise solidly Jewish cadre of television news producers. The
new CBS Early Show, which replaced CBS This Morning, had an internal shakeup in which three producers were fired, ostensibly
for not being "aggressive" enough. One wonders whether they were also not Jewish enough. The shakeup did not, however, affect
the outgoing executive producer Al Berman, who transferred to a new job as a program developer, and Steve Friedman has become the executive producer
of the Early Show. Paul Friedman is still the executive producer of ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.
Rick Kaplan, once an executive at ABC, moved to CNN in 1997, where he became the president of CNN/USA. The Print Media After television news, daily newspapers are the most influential information medium in America.
Sixty million of them are sold (and presumably read) each day. These millions are divided among some 1483 different publications (this figure is for
February 2000). One might conclude that the sheer number of different newspapers across America would provide a safeguard against minority
control and
distortion. Alas, such is not the case. There is less independence, less competition, and much less representation of majority
interests than
a casual observer would think. In 1945, four out of five American newspapers were independently
owned and published by local people with close ties to their communities. Those days, however, are gone. Most of the independent newspapers were
bought out or driven out of business by the mid-1970s. Today most "local" newspapers are owned by a rather small number of large
companies controlled by executives who live and work hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Today less than 20 percent of the country's
1483 papers are independently owned; the rest belong to multi-newspaper chains. Only 104 of the total number have circulations of more
than 100,000. Only a handful are large enough to maintain independent reporting staffs outside their own communities; the rest must depend on these
few for all of their national and international news. The Associated Press, which sells content to newspapers, is currently
under the control of its Jewish managing editor, Michael Silverman, who directs the day-to-day news reporting and supervises the editorial
departments. Silverman had directed the AP's national news as assistant managing editor since 1992. He was promoted to his current job in
2000. Silverman reports to Jonathan Wolman, also a Jew, who is executive editor for the AP. In only 47 cities
in America are there more than one daily newspaper, and competition is frequently nominal even among them, as between morning and afternoon editions under
the same ownership. Examples of this are the Mobile, Alabama, morning Register and afternoon Press-Register; and the Syracuse,
New York, morning Post-Standard and afternoon Herald-Journal -- all owned by the Jewish Newhouse brothers through their holding company,
Advance Publications. The Newhouse media empire provides an example of more than the lack of real competition among America's
daily newspapers: it also illustrates the insatiable appetite Jews have shown for all the organs of opinion control on which they could fasten
their grip. The Newhouses own 30 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting
stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country's largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation
of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vanity
Fair, Bride's, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group. This
Jewish media empire was founded by the late Samuel Newhouse, an immigrant from Russia. When he died in 1979 at the age of
84, he bequeathed
media holdings worth an estimated $1.3 billion to his two sons, Samuel and Donald. With a number of further acquisitions, the net worth of Advance Publications
has grown to more than $8 billion today. The gobbling up of so many newspapers by the Newhouse family was
in large degree made possible by the fact that newspapers are not supported by their subscribers, but by their advertisers. It is advertising
revenue -- not the small change collected from a newspaper's readers -- that largely pays the editor's salary and yields the owner's
profit. Whenever the large advertisers in a city choose to favor one newspaper over another with their business, the favored
newspaper will flourish
while its competitor dies. Since the beginning of the last century, when Jewish mercantile power in America became a dominan t economic force, there has been a
steady rise in the number of American newspapers in Jewish hands, accompanied by a steady decline in the number of competing Gentile
newspapers -- primarily as a result of selective advertising policies by Jewish merchants. Furthermore,
even those newspapers still under Gentile ownership and management are so thoroughly dependent upon Jewish advertising revenue that their editorial and news
reporting policies are largely constrained by Jewish likes and dislikes. It holds true in the newspaper business as elsewhere that he who pays
the piper calls the tune. Three Jewish Newspapers The suppression of competition and the establishment of local monopolies on the dissemination of news and opinion
have characterized the rise of Jewish control over America's newspapers. The resulting ability of the Jews to use the press as an
unopposed instrument of Jewish policy could hardly be better illustrated than by the examples of the nation's three most prestigious and
influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. These three, dominating
America's financial and political capitals, are the newspapers that set the trends and the guidelines for nearly all the others. They are the
ones that decide what is news and what isn't, at the national and international levels. They originate the news; the others merely copy
it. And all three newspapers are in Jewish hands. The New York Times, with a September 1999
circulation of 1,086,000, is the unofficial social, fashion, entertainment, political, and cultural guide of the nation. It tells America's
"smart set" which books to buy and which films to see; which opinions are in style at the moment; which politicians, educators, spiritual
leaders, artists, and businessmen are the real comers. And for a few decades in the 19th century it was a genuinely American newspaper. The
New York Times was founded in 1851 by two Gentiles, Henry J. Raymond and George Jones. After their deaths, it was
purchased in 1896
from Jones's estate by a wealthy Jewish publisher, Adolph Ochs. His great-great-grandson, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., is the
paper's current
publisher and the chairman of the New York Times Co. The executive editor is Joseph Lelyveld, also a Jew (he is a rabbi's
son). The Sulzberger family also owns, through the New York Times Co., 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe,
purchased in June 1993 for $1.1 billion; twelve magazines, including McCall's and Family Circle with circulations
of more than 5 million each; seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New
York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies,
and magazines. Of similar national importance is the Washington Post, which, by establishing its "leaks"
throughout government agencies in Washington, has an inside track on news involving the Federal government. The Washington
Post, like the New York Times, had a non-Jewish origin. It was established in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, purchased
from him in
1905 by John R. McLean, and later inherited by Edward B. McLean. In June 1933, however, at the height of the Great Depression,
the newspaper
was forced into bankruptcy. It was purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Eugene Meyer, a Jewish financier and former partner
of the infamous
Bernard Baruch, industry czar in America during the First World War. The Washington Post
is now run by Katherine Meyer Graham, Eugene Meyer's daughter. She is the principal stockholder and the board chairman of the Washington Post Co.
In 1979 she appointed her son Donald publisher of the paper. He now also holds the posts of president and CEO of the Washington Post Co.
The newspaper has a daily circulation of 763,000, and its Sunday edition sells 1.1 million copies. The
Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers (the Gazette Newspapers, including 11 military publications);
in television
(WDIV in Detroit, KPRC in Houston, WPLG in Miami, WKMG in Orlando, KSAT in San Antonio, WJXT in Jacksonville); and in magazines, most notably the
nation's number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Washington Post Company's various television ventures reach a total of about 7
million homes, and its cable TV service, Cable One, has 635,000 subscribers. In a joint venture
with the New York Times, the Post publishes the International Herald Tribune, the most widely
distributed English-language daily in the world. The Wall Street Journal, which sells 1.8 million copies each weekday, is the nation's largest-circulation
daily newspaper. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation that also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly
financial tabloid Barron's, among other things. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter R. Kann, who is a Jew. Kann also
holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Most of New York's other major newspapers are in
no better hands than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In January 1993 the New York Daily News
was bought from the estate of the late Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell (born Ludvik Hoch) by Jewish real-estate developer Mortimer B.
Zuckerman. The Village Voice is the personal property of Leonard Stern, the billionaire Jewish owner of the Hartz Mountain pet supply
firm. And, as mentioned above, the New York Post is owned by News Corporation under the Jew Peter Chernin. News Magazines The story is pretty much the same for other media as it is for television,
radio, films, music, and newspapers. Consider, for example, newsmagazines. There are only three of any importance published in the United States:
Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Time, with a weekly circulation of 4.1 million, is published
by a subsidiary of Time Warner Communications, the new media conglomerate formed by the 1989 merger of Time, Inc., with Warner Communications.
The CEO of Time Warner Communications, as mentioned above, is Gerald Levin, a Jew.
Newsweek, as mentioned above, is published by the Washington Post Company, under the Jewess Katherine Meyer Graham. Its weekly
circulation
is 3.1 million. U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly
circulation of 2.2 million, is owned and published by the aforementioned Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who also has taken the position of
editor-in-chief of the magazine for himself. Zuckerman also owns the Atlantic Monthly and New York's tabloid newspaper, the Daily News,
which is the sixth-largest paper in the country. Our Responsibility Those are the facts of media control in America. Anyone willing to spend a few hours in a large library looking into
current editions of
yearbooks on the radio and television industries and into directories of newspapers and magazines; into registers of corporations
and their
officers, such as those published by Standard and Poors and by Dun and Bradstreet; and into standard biographical reference
works can
verify their accuracy. They are undeniable, and when confronted with them Jewish spokesmen customarily will use evasive tactics.
"Ted
Turner isn't a Jew!" they will announce triumphantly, as if that settled the issue. If pressed further they will accuse
the confronter of
"anti-Semitism" for even raising the subject. It is fear of this accusation that keeps many persons who know the
facts silent. But we must not remain silent on this most important of issues! The Jewish control of the American
mass media is the single most important fact of life, not just in America, but in the whole world today. There is nothing -- plague, famine,
economic collapse, even nuclear war -- more dangerous to the future of our people. Jewish media control determines
the foreign policy of the United States and permits Jewish interests rather than American interests to decide questions of war and peace.
Without Jewish media control, there would have been no Persian Gulf war, for example. There would have been no NATO massacre of Serb
civilians. There would be no continued beating of the drums for another war against Iraq. By permitting
the Jews to control our news and entertainment media we are doing more than merely giving them a decisive influence on our political system and virtual
control of our government; we also are giving them control of the minds and souls of our children, whose attitudes and ideas are shaped
more by Jewish television and Jewish films than by parents, schools, or any other influence. The Jew-controlled
entertainment media have taken the lead in persuading a whole generation that homosexuality is a normal and acceptable way of life; that there
is nothing at all wrong with White women dating or marrying Black men, or with White men marrying Asian women; that all races are inherently
equal in ability and character -- except that the character of the White race is suspect because of a history of oppressing other
races; and that any effort by Whites at racial self-preservation is reprehensible. We must oppose
the further spreading of this poison among our people, and we must break the power of those who are spreading it. It would be intolerable for such power
to be in the hands of any alien minority, with values and interests different from our own. But
to permit
the Jews, with their 3,000-year history of nation-wrecking, from ancient Egypt to Russia, to hold such power over us is
tantamount
to race suicide. Indeed, the fact that so many White Americans today are so filled with a sense of racial guilt and self-hatred
that they actively
seek the death of their own race is a deliberate consequence of Jewish media control. Once
we have absorbed and understood the fact of Jewish media control, it is our inescapable responsibility to do whatever
is necessary to break that control. We must shrink from nothing in combating this evil power that
has fastened its deadly grip on our people and is injecting its lethal poison into their minds and souls. If we fail to destroy it, it certainly
will destroy our race. Let us begin now to acquire knowledge and to take action toward this necessary end. Owners, managers, and corporate relationships change from time to time, of course. All of the names and other data in this report have been checked carefully and are accurate
as of July 2001. _________________________________________________ JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA "There is a new age of commercialism in American media,
with "I wonder if any of our immigrant
grandparents could have imagined that on the eve of the 21st century, Jews would comprise 11 percent of the United States Senate, dominate the entertainment industry as never before, while at the same time boasting the most popular professional wrestler as well as the most notorious spy in the country?" -- Jonathan Tobin, Jewish author, 1-4-99, p. 5 "Non-Jewish participants [in a Los Angeles-area survey sponsored by the Zionist women's organization Hadassah], most of whom did not grow up with Jews or know them personally, had vivid resentments toward Jews for their economic success, seeing them as 'insular,' superior and rich. They repeated the canards that Jews own the media, run the studios, own the Wilshire/Fairfax district. Jews were praised for their work ethic and strong family solidarity, but were regarded with suspicion, as being important behind-the-scenes players, lawyers who took advantage of their clients and media manipulators who slanted the press in the O. J. Simpson case." -- Marlene Adler Marks, New Jersey Jewish News, 4-23-98, p. 5]
"It just seems the whole world is Jewish ... The Jewish Connection
can be found in so many people, places ... and even animals." -- M. H. Goldberg, Jewish author, 1976, p. 105] "Given their skills and experiences, Jews today have excellent employment opportunities ... Jews are represented among those men most active in promoting reform in top-level positions in banking, government, and the media." -- Michael Paul Sacks, 1998, p. 265, Jewish author commenting about Jews in Russia "The main complaint heard [in Israel] is that for some reason Jews are the imaginative leaders in this field [movies] almost everywhere except Israel, and guess why. The real 'why,' the truly stinging insinuation, is that in Israel there are too many Jews who have to deal with each other." -- Jay Gonen, Israeli author, 1975, p. 274 "Only the blind
cannot see that whoever controls the cultural
apparatus ... also controls the destiny of the United States and everything in it." -- Harold Cruse, Black intellectual, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, (in Kostelanetz, p. 107) "Two-thirds of Americans,"
notes Bill McKibben, "tell researchers they get 'most of their information' about the world from television
... [Most] American homes have TVs ... on an average of seven hours a day ... As many as 12 percent of adults (that is,
one in eight) feel they are physically addicted to the set, watching an average fifty-six hours a week." [MCKIBBEN,
p. 18] "Twenty years ago," noted Neil Postman in 1985, "the question, Does television
shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question
has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture." [POWERS/ROTHMAN/ROTHMAN, p. 41]
"Most Americans are basically," noted Jewish
author Herbert Schiller in 1973, "though
unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice informational bind. Variety of opinions on foreign and
domestic
news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists
in the media. This results essentially
from the inherent identity of
interests, material and ideological, of property-holders (in this case
the private owners of the communications
media), and from the
monopolistic character of the communications industry in general."
[SCHILLER, H., p. 19]
The ABC, CBS, and
NBC television and radio networks were all controlled and developed to power by Jews: David
Sarnoff at NBC, William Paley at CBS, and Leonard Goldenson at ABC.
As late as 1985, "Leonard Goldenson, ABC's founder, was still very much in charge, and his network
... was still the Number One in America." [WILLIAMS, p 5]
Paley, the second mogul, achieved control of CBS in 1928 and headed it for nearly the next
sixty years. Early investors in the company included other Jews of Paley's original Philadelphia home, including Ike
Levy and Jerome Louchheim. One of Paley's biographers noted that he "had an insatiable appetite for power [SMITH,
S., p. 15] ... CBS shaped and reflected American society to a greater degree than its rivals ... The
flickering images on CBS represented the soul and sensibility of Bill Paley." [SMITH, S., p.
16]
"Officially, [Sarnoff, the third mogul]
did not head RCA until thirteen years after its founding," notes Carl Drehr, "actually, as
commercial manager, for all practical purposes he ran it almost from the beginning." [DREHR, C. p. 52]
By 1936 David Sarnoff was both president of RCA (later CEO) and chairman of the board of NBC
(he founded NBC in 1926 as a radio company). [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976,
p. 162] His son Robert became the CEO of NBC in 1955. In 1956, says a biographer, Sarnoff "brought
the issue of nepotism [about the appointment of his son to head NBC] in the open." "When
a man stands in the way of his son's progress," Sarnoff told an NBC staff convention, "he is
not thinking of his son, he is thinking of himself." [LYONS, p. 312-313] "David Sarnoff," notes Edwin
Emery, "retired in 1970 to the honorary chairmanship of the Radio Corporation of America,
which he had built. RCA was a two-billion dollar business and the largest communication organization
in the world. His son Robert became both President and Board Chairman of RCA and father and son
sat on the NBC board [a subsidiary of RCA]." [EMERY, p. 606]
"Both Paley and Sarnoff," notes Chaim Bermant, "have shown a consistent interest in Jewish affairs. The latter was for many years on the board of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and both he and Paley have been generous supporters of the Weizmann Institute of Science [in Israel]." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 105] (The pattern of television ownership in England has been the same. As Bermant observes: "In Britain, until 1955, radio and television were a state monopoly ... In 1955, however, commercial television was launched and in time comprised three networks and several smaller regional companies. The networks, Associated-Rediffusion, Associated Television and Granada were headed by Emil Littler, Lew Grade, and Sidney Bernstein respectively, all of whom had spent a lifetime in show-business ... and all three were Jewish.") [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 105] Despite corporate buyouts and the labyrinthian nature of
business takeovers, restructuring, et al, Jewish management and control over the decades has remained dominant; in
1993, for instance, the Chief Executive Officers for the three major American television networks and the four largest
film studios were all Jews. [MACDONALD, p. 129] (In 1998, in a survey, the Anti-Defamation League
solicited opinion about the fact that "the presidents of the three national television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC,
are Jewish." [ADL, NOV 1998] In the film world, noted J. J. Goldberg in 1996, "virtually all the senior
executives at the major studios are Jews." [GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 288]
While Jews make up merely 2.5% of the American population, in a 1990 issue of Premiere magazine, the
first thirteen individuals identified "as the most powerful people in Hollywood," were Jewish. [WHITFIELD,
p. 83] In the same year, as noted by American Film magazine, the chairmen of eight of
the top ten movie and television companies were Jewish. [STAUTH, p. 44] In an October 1994 issue of
Vanity Fair, ten of eighteen deemed important faces in the changing world of "media megacorporations"
were Jews. [HALBERSTAM, p. 12] In
1999, the Los Angeles Jewish Times ran an article entitled "Yes, Virginia, Jews Do Control the Media."
"Four of the largest five entertainment giants," it announced, "are now run or owned by Jews.
Murdoch's News Corp (at number four) is the only gentile holdout -- however Rupert
is as pro-Israel as any Jew, probably more so." [LOS ANGELES JEWISH TIMES, p. 14] (And who is the Executive
Vice President at the News Corporation? Gary Ginsberg.) [WEINTRAUB, B., 3-4-01] "Time-Warner,
Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal
rule the entertainment world in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of," noted the Jewish
Week in 1999, "And, after all the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we
started, bigger than ever." [GOLDBERG, J.J., 9-17-99, 12] Since Australian-born Rupert Murdoch is the lone non-Jew in the aforementioned pantheon of elite media moguls, it is appropriate to examine his relationship to the Jewish community. As one of his biographers, Thomas Kiernan, notes: "The most important impact of 1962 on Murdoch, though, was his trip to the United States to buy television programs ... The chief executive who impressed Murdoch more than any was New York's Leonard Goldenson, the head of the American Broadcasting Company ... At the time, Goldenson was turning the small, feisty ABC television network into a legitimate rival of the twin Goliaths, CBS and NBC. His method was to pursue 'down-market' programming, a combination of entertainment and news shows designed to appeal to the coarser tastes of the American public. ABC became known as the 'schlock network during the 1950s ... Goldenson's approach to television in America was similar to Murdoch's newspapers in Australia [p. 75-76] ... [Murdoch] and Goldenson became fast friends ... In time, Goldenson became Murdoch's newest mentor ... Goldenson's Jewishness also had a significant impact on Murdoch ... As for the stereotype of Jews being financially aggressive, brash, devious, cutthroat, pushy, and concerned only with making money -- well, he certainly possessed many of those traits too ...[p. 76-77] ... Goldenson, like many of his ambitious New York counterparts, made no effort to disguise his Jewishness. If anything, they wore it on their sleeves, mostly out of their pride in Israel. In a place like New York, it was almost fashionable to be a Jew in the 1950s, especially if one's ambitions were focused on achieving a niche in the city's establishment ... [p. 77] It was easy for him to identify with these New York Jewish counterparts. When the time came for him to make his permanent move into the United States fifteen years later, it was to them that he would turn largely for support. And they would respond eagerly, but not just because Murdoch represented a source of busness. They felt they could 'trust' him on Israel. Leonard Goldenson had not let a meeting with Murdoch go by during his trips to New York without giving him a dissertation about Israel and its imporance in the global scheme of things." [KIERNAN, T., 1986, p. 78]
"What binds [the Hollywood elite] is a sense of
interlocking ventures and relationships," said a Jewish observer, William Isaacson, Time Inc.'s media editor,
in 1994, "The old establishment was a club. The New Establishment is a network." [CASH, p. 15] In a 1980s
study, 59% of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty most economically successful movies produced between
1965 and 1982 were also found to be Jewish. [LIPSET, p. 4] (See Martin Greenberg's The Jewish
Lists for a sampling of such people). As early as 1936, one study found that "of 85
names engaged in [movie] production, 53 are Jews. And the Jewish advantage holds in prestige as well as numbers."
[GABLER, p. 2] In 1980, film scholar
Patricia Erens noted that "the list [of Jewish screenwriters in Hollywood] is long. A recent survey indicated that
seventy to eighty per cent of the Screen Writers Guild was composed of Jews, a trend dating back to the 1930s."
[ERENS, P., 1980, p. 116] (Prominent among them were Julius and Phil Epstein, Carl Foreman, William Goldman, Ben Hecht,
Garson Kanin, Howard Koch, Abraham Polansky, Herman Mankiewicz, Morris Riskin and Budd Schulberg). "Composing
[music for movies]," adds Erens, "has been another area of high concentration for Jewish artists." In
this genre, Erens notes Burt Bacharach, Irving Berlin, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrman, Marvin Hamlisch, Jerome
Kern, Alfred Newman, Andre Previn, Miklos Rozsa, and Max Steiner. [ERENS, P., 1980, p. 116]
"Hollywood," notes film critic Lester Friedman, "was a town dominated by Jews from its earliest
days down to the present time." [FRIEDMAN, L., 1982, p. vii] As early as 1925, Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel
"was the leading movie theatre impresario in America." [GABLER, N., 1988, p. PHOTO SECTION CAPTION]
He was also known for his movie theatre "palaces." Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the iconic site where
Hollywood stars dipped their hands and feet into fresh cement, was owned by Sid Grauman, also Jewish.
Early Jewish film directors are many, including
Billy Wilder, Eric Von Stroheim, Josef Von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Hal Wallis, William Wanger,
Robert Wise, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Rossen, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, and Cecil B. DeMille (who had a Jewish mother).
In later years came Peter Bogdanovich (half-Jewish), William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and many others.
More recent Jewish academy award-winning directors include Sydney Pollack, Stephen Spielberg and Barry Levinson.
Jewish influence in movie-making also has a strong international complexion: Polish-born Roman Polanski (Chinatown;
and Czech-born Milos Forman (Amadeus) are among the many prominent movie directors who are also Jewish. Jews were
also prominent, even dominant, in the pre-World War II years in the German film world (from which many Jewish filmmakers
-- the likes of Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger -- moved to America). In Russia,
"Mikhail Romm," notes Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff, "[was] considered the greatest Soviet filmmaker
since his fellow-Jew, [Sergei] Eisenstein." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 86]
As Louis Rapoport notes: "[Joseph Stalin] was
not pleased by the fact that there was a highly
disproportionate number of Jews in the Soviet film industry, as in
the other arts: for example, directors Sergei
Eisenstein, Mikhail Romm,
Mark Donsky, Leonid Lukov, and Yuli Reissman; actors and actresses
Faina Raneskaya, Mark Berness, Daniel Segal, Solomon
Mikhoels, and Benjamin
Zuskin; scriptwriters Vasily Grossman (the novelist-journalist) and Yevgency Gabrilovich; and cinematographer Boris Volchok."
[RAPOPORT, L., 1990,
p. 82]
"The motion picture industry,"
notes Charles Silberman, "was largely a Jewish invention." [SILBERMAN, p. 147] "All
the large Hollywood companies, with the exception of United Artists (a distribution company established
by Hollywood actors who feared the big producers would restrict their artistic freedom) were founded and controlled
by Jews," notes the Encyclopedia Judaica, [United Artists, however,
was controlled by Jews later] ... An even more important influence in the film industry ... were the independent producers,
among whom Jews were in the majority." [ENCY JUD, p. 445, 449]
In the earliest years of the movie and entertainment industry, Jewish filmmakers often popularized negative
images of the Jewish community. "Some of the worst offenders," says Nathan Belth, "were themselves Jews."
[BELTH, p. 46] The "so-called 'Jew movies' were produced at the rate of one every two week." [BELTH, p. 50]
These centered on highly unflattering Jewish characters -- smugglers, robbers, lustful "Yiddish sports,"
and miserly swindlers. In 1916, the Anti-Defamation League convinced Carl Laemmle (the Jewish head of Universal
film studios) to avoid making any movie that "held Jews up to ridicule or contempt ... By 1920 the policy enunciated
by Laemmle became the general practice among movie makers." [BELTH, p. 50] (Even Jewish comedian Jack Benny's
"tightwad" persona was a "Jewish character.") [FAINBOLD, N., 6-5-98] "Despite the powerful Jewish role in [early] motion pictures," says Milton Plesur, "that industry also had its anti-Semitic features. Whenever a producer wished to depict a betrayer of public trust, a hard-boiled, usurious money lender, a crooked gambler, a grafter, a depraved firebug, a white slaver, or other villains of one kind or another, the charcter was often represented as a Jew ... When one of the many theatres owned by Jews boycotted a movie with the usual stereotypes, Rebecca's Wedding Day (Chicago, 1916), Hollywood got the message and agreed to cease producing anti-Semitic films." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 34] Jews
have long been active in establishing themselves and networking throughout the American theatrical and entertainment
worlds. "The Broadway musical," says Charles Silberman, "generally considered the most
characteristically American theatrical form, has been largely an American-Jewish creation ... Composers and lyricists
who have given the Broadway musical its distinctive shape have almost all been Jews -- people such as Jerome Kern,
Oscar Hammerstein, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, Rogers and Hammerstein, and more recently Frederick
Loewe, Marvin Hamlisch, and Stephen Sondheim. [SILBERMAN, p. 147] The team of Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe produced
Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Paint Your Wagon, Gigi, and other major
musical plays. "The wellspring of the American musical," says Gene Lees, "is to be found in the opera-bouffee
of Jacques Offenbach, a German Jew by birth though he lived and worked in Paris and his shows were in French."
[LEES, G., 1990, p. 12] "With the exception of Cole Porter," notes the London Guardian, "almost
every writer of musicals in the pre-rock [music] era was Jewish, even if their names sometimes suggested otherwise."
[ARNOT, C., 10-4-2000, p. 6] "At the turn of
the century," Jewish performers Lewis Fields and Joe Weber "were the most beloved and ambitious of comedy
teams." [FIELDS/FIELDS, p. xiii] Vaudeville star Sophie Tucker "raised several million dollars for Jewish causes."
[ANTLER, J., 199,7, p. 140(d)] Unknown to most Americans, an estimated 80% of America's professional comedians in
recent history were/are Jewish, [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 170; SLAVIN, p. 18] from Milton Berle (Berlinger), Jack Benny
(Benjamin Kubelsky), Woody Allen (Alan Konigsberg), Eddie Cantor (Isidore Iskowitz), Fanny Brice (Fania Borach),
Pee Wee Herman (Paul Rubenfeld), Soupy Sales (Milton Hines), Joey Bishop (Joseph Abraham Gottleib), Buddy Hackett
(Leonard Hacker), Alan King (Irwin Kniberg), Gene Wilder (Eugene Silverstein), Gilda Radner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers
(Molinsky), Jerry Lewis (Joseph Levitch), Mel Brooks, Pinky Lee, Billy Crystal, Totie Fields, Red Buttons (Aaron
Chwatt), Allen Sherman, Henny Youngman, Shecky Green, Zero Mostel, David Steinberg, Shelly Berman, Jack Carter, Mort
Sahl, Myron Cohen, and Rodney Dangerfield (Jack Cohen) to the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges (Moe and Curly Howard/Hurwitz,
and Larry Fineman). "Nearly all the American comedians and comediennes whose names have lingered," says Chaim
Bermant, "from Fanny Brice to the Marx Brothers, and from Jack Benny to Lenny Bruce, have been Jews. If Hollywood
was a Jewish industry, no part of it was so exclusively Jewish as laughter." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 101] "When I started doing stand-up comedy in New York in 1978," says Mark Schiff, "we created our own little shtetl. All I saw every night, either walking the streets or in a comedy club, was mostly other Jewish comedians. About 80 percent of the comics I worked with were Jewish. I personally knew a therapist that was treating 10 different Jewish comics at the same time." [SCHIFF, M., 11-16-01] Lenny (Leonard Schneider) Bruce's humor, says Barry Rubin, portrays "almost everyone [as] really Jewish, meaning different, oppressed, alienated. Gentiles were hypocrites, secret anti-Semites." [RUBIN, p. 110] John Stewart (Leibowitz) "is Generation X's Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce -- a comedian who unapologetically filters his political satire through a Jewish sensibility ... he sometimes refers to Christians as 'you people' ..." [FORWARD, 1-5-01] Comedian Jackie Mason is even an ordained rabbi. He was an early supporter of political racist Meir Kahane. "Democratic principles shouldn't apply to Israel like they do to America," he told a Jewish journalist. [FRIEDMAN, R., 1990, p. 222] Early in her media career, talk-show host Sally Jessy Raphael interviewed Mason on a live radio broadcast:
"I was just beginning to feel that the interview was going pretty well
when all of a sudden he reached under my
sweater, unhooked my
bra, and cupped my breasts in his hands. I was repelled. I was shocked.
I was scared. I was dumbfounded. But there
was absolutely nothing I
could do about it but try to get the interview over as fast as I could. I
was on live radio, after all." [RAPHAEL,
S., 1990, p. 21] George Burns recalls
the political activism of fellow Jewish comedians Georgie Jessel, Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny: "George had just come back after raising something
like $25,000,000 in
bonds for the new nation of Israel. 'That's a lot of money, Georgie,' I said, 'How'd you raise so much?
'It wasn't that difficult,
Natty," he explained, "I just left no Cohen
unturned ... [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 178] One night, I remember, [Jack
Benny] had dinner at Cantor's house and Eddie
started telling him about
Israeli Bonds. Jack made out a check right there for $25,000." [BURNS,
G., 1989, p. 203]
During the 1950s and 1960s, notes Irv Saposnik,
"Sid Caesar, Alan King, Morey Amsterdam, Jack Carter, Buddy Hackett, Sam Levenson, Jackie Mason, Jan Murray,
and Joey Bishop
(among others) became household fixtures. Suddenly, Jewish comedians were everywhere: Milton Berle on
the Texaco Star
Theatre, Eddie Cantor on the Colgate Comedy Hour, Sid Caesar
and company on Your Show of Shows,
and a whole comic avalanche
on the Ed Sullivan Show ... Psychoanalysis and stand-up comedy
offer a distinct way of looking at
the world. Both present the abnormal
as normal, the neurotic as necessary, the outsider as the true insider.
No wonder Jews invented both."
[SAPOSNIK, 1998] Joan Rivers explains the psychology
of what she believes to be the successful comic who "makes it to the top":
"The conventional diagnosis of comics holds that they are hypersensitive, angry, paranoid people who feel somehow
cheated of life's
goodies and are laughing to keep from crying. I agree, but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for
revenge. We can
deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection
which hurt us. Comedy is power. We can be in control... People want to be around somebody who entertains them -- but
simultaneously they
fear us. The only weapon more formidable
than humor is a gun ... [RIVERS, p. 24] ... If you have reached the top in comedy, you are, in your own way, a killer --
but every killer
is bandaged. And the anger is never out of you." [RIVERS, p. 150] Mel Brooks is more explicit about this. As one news report noted: "There's a very serious reason Mel Brooks makes so many jokes about being Jewish. The writer-director of such classic films as 'Blazing Saddles' and 'History of the World: Part I' says his humor stems from a deep-seated anger about anti-Semitism. 'Yes, I am a Jew. I AM a Jew,' he says on '60 Minutes,' which airs at 7 p.m. EDT Sunday on CBS. 'What about it? What's so wrong? What's the matter with being a Jew? I think there's a lot of that way deep down beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.'" [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 4-12-01; updated 4-16-01] Jewish comic Bobby Slayton,
self-described as the "Pit bull of Comedy," noted a Phoenix newspaper in 1998, "despises conservative
white Christians, and doesn't fear their warnings of hell 'because the Jews'll cater, the blacks'll entertain, the
homos'll decorate, and it'll be one big fuckin' party." [MOORHEAD, M.V., 3-19-98] Another Jewish comedian, Robert
Schimmel, was noted in 2000 as "America's newest comedy star, fresh off his first HBO special and his third
major-label release." [SELVIN, J., 3-10-2000] "Schimmel," declared one reviewer, "is one of those
men who leaves audiences breathless with his potty-mouth talk about fucking his daughter's boyfriend and jacking off
to porn." Schimmel once talked about the death of his 11-year old son to cancer on the Howard Stern radio show,
joking that "well, the Make-a-Wish Foundation came to us. Derek was really sick, and they wanted to make his
wish come true. So I told them his wish was to watch Dolly Parton blow me." [SCHOENKOPF, R., 2-19-99, p. 29]
Jerry Sadowitz, a Jewish comedian from Great Britain,
was "beaten up by members of his audience on stage in Canada for being so rude about the Francophone population."
Sadowitz is also a British TV star. As the Times [of London] reported:
"'It's very childish and very offensive,' explained Sadowitz, when
asked to describe his new X-rated late-night sketch
show, Bib and and
Bob." [EDWARDS-JONES, I., 4-25-98] Another
Jewish British comedian, Ian Stone, has a stand-up routine guaranteed to offend fellow Jews, entitled "A Little
Piece of Kike." "I knew that using the word [kike] would get peoples' noses up," he says, "because
they're Jewish noses, what noses!" [GIBB, E., 8-9-2000, p. 3]
As Rabbi Daniel Lapin complains, "Some of the most notoriously foul-mouthed and obscene-minded entertainers
are Jewish and earn no reproof for their public aggrandizement of filth." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 293] "From the
first," adds Jewish author Ellen Schiff, "Jewish comedians and comediennes have provoked laughter by breaking
the rules. They are loud and vulgar; they shamelessly call attention to their physicality ... [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 95]
... The caricatured comic Jew who pokes fun at himself (and everything else) as one ethnic among others is essentially
an American Jewish creation. Responding both to opportunity (theatres by the turn of the present century were largely
controlled by Jews) and to cultural conditioning ... Jewish performers scored conspicuous success in vaudeville and burlesque
as well as in drama." [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 84] As the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California noted
about Jewish author Arthur Asa Berger (author of "The Genius of the Jewish Joke") and the Jewish impact on
American humor: "While assimilation is a big concern in the Jewish community, Berger contends that conversely, Jewish culture has 'Yiddishized American humor.' 'When Jews disappear,' he joked, 'the Jewish humor will be written by non-Jews because they've been Yiddishized and they'll be able to carry it on." [FAINGOLD, N., 6-5-98] Long
time Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, noted biographer Laurence Leamer, "had something else going for
him. He was a WASP in a profession full of Jewish comedians. The television executives knew that much of their audience
was in Topeka and Peoria and other stations in the heartland, where the borscht belt was considered an item of apparel."
[LEAMER, L., 1989, p. 135] Even the people writing the jokes for comedians have usually been Jewish. "A lot of
great comedy writers started in radio," noted comedian George Burns. "For some reason, a lot of them were
Jewish." [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 138] (Among Burns' own "top writers" was fellow Jew Sid Dorfman). [RANDALL,
T., 1989, p. 123] "The storefront
theatres of the late teens were transformed into the movie palaces of the twenties by Jewish exhibitors," says
Neal Gabler about the early twentieth century, "And when the sound movies commandeered the industry, Hollywood was
invaded by a battalion of Jewish writers, mostly from the East. The most powerful talent agencies were run by Jews."
"Jews," notes Joel Kotkin, "also accounted for a large portion of the agents and, often working under
Anglicized names, many of the actors as well." [KOTKIN, p. 60] The most pre-eminent "talent agency,"
the William Morris Agency was founded by Zelman Moses -- who renamed himself William Morris.
Its major modern day rival, Creative Artists Agency, was founded in 1975 by another Jewish
entrepreneur, Michael Ovitz, and other defectors from the parent firm. Yet another who got his start at
William Morris was David Geffen, who has risen to become one of the biggest record company, and mass media,
executives in Hollywood. At powerful William Morris, "it was no accident," says Frank Rose,
"that a mostly Jewish agency handling mostly Jewish performers in a business that smacked of the underworld
should employ an Episcopalian ... to sell its acts to Madison Avenue." [ROSE, p. 70] (This strategy closely
parallels that of Sigmund Freud's early psychoanalytic movement when it was almost all Jewish. Freud appealed to his
Jewish followers, explaining the reason he selected non-Jew Karl Jung to head the International Psychoanalytic Association:
"Most of you are Jews, and therefore you are incompetent to win friends for the new teaching ... It is absolutely
essential that I should form ties in the world of general science." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 101] This strategy
of hiding the Jewish hand has also been true in the Jewish-dominated world of socialism and communism. As Jewish scholars
Stanley Rothman and S. Robet Lichter note: "The same pattern characterized the Socialist Party of America.
Until 1918 SPA drew its greatest relative strength from non-Jewish areas of the country. Nonetheless, Jews already
dominated the party's organization, aside from the very top leadership (i.e., Eugene Debs and his immediate followers).
By 1920 Jews constituted the main prop of both the party leadershp and cadres, a position they maintained through
the 1960s. They tended to avoid the very top leadership positions, however, lest attempts to develop a broader base be
weakened ... The American Communist party would soon follow the same pattern ... Indeed, when instructed to change
their names for party purposes, most American Jewish communists chose non-Jewish pseudonyms." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 99, 100] ) Indeed, a Jewish criminal
underworld, as well as (to a lesser degree) the Italian mafia, has long held influence in Hollywood [see, for example,
Dan Moldea's Dark Victory, focusing on MCA, about the subject] and its Nevada playground,
Las Vegas. In a battle for Columbia Pictures between brothers Harry and Jack Cohn in the late 1930s,
for instance, Harry received economic help from Jewish "crime boss" Abner Zwillman. [MOLDEA, p. 88]
Mobster Joseph Stacher was also a "silent partner" in the firm. [MCDOUGAL, p. 420] Joseph
Schenck, also Jewish, the head of 20th Century Fox, was "convicted of perjury during government
investigations into bribes he and other studio bosses had paid to ... union racketeers connected with the mafia."
[WOLFE, D., p. 197] "Behind the case was union business," says Mary Ellin Barrett (Schenck's
"god daughter"), " the paying off of racketeers to grease the wheels of Hollywood productions, something
all the big studios, including 20th-Century Fox, were suspected of doing. 'Joe took the rap for a lot
of guys,' my father [Irving Berlin] would say later, and try to explain how it was that Uncle Joe, though engaged
in quesitonable dealings, had been a form of Hollywood hero; that the other studio chiefs, also dealing in illegal
payoffs, had families; Joe, the only one without children, had volunteered to stand for the rest." [BARRETT, M.
1994, p. 196] William Fox, of 20th Century Fox, spent five months in prison for tax evasion in 1943. [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 419] And when Jewish "labor lawyer Sidney Korshak ... arrived in Hollywood [in the 1940s]," says Dan Moldea, "a new, more ambitious and sophisticated era of the Mafia's penetration of the film industry had begun." [MOLDEA, p. 86] Korshak had connections and friends throughout the Hollywood world. "To scores of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials," wrote Seymour Hersh, "Korshak is the most important link between organized crime and legitimate business." [MOLDEA, p. 278] In 1978 a California Attorney General report listed Korshak as one of the "Mob figures" in the state. [MCDOUGAL, p. 420] Among those many in
Hollywood who worked with Korshak was Charles Bluhdorn, who had gained control of Gulf +Western (of
which Paramount studios became a subsidiary) in 1966. "Bluhdorn seemed to have few qualms
about turning to gray money," says Peter Biskind, "He was under investigated by the SEC through the '70s, and
he was close to Korshak, the real Godfather of Hollywood ... [BISKIND, p. 144] ... Everyone who worked for him was
certain [Bluhdorn] was Jewish, but he took great pains to conceal it. Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak told [producer Robert]
Evans that his sister went to synagogue with Bluhdorn in Chicago, but the Gulf + Western chief
always professed ignorance of Jewish holidays." [BISKIND, p. 143] Film director Don Simpson called Bluhdorn a "mean,
despicable, unethical, evil man ... He had no problem breaking the law. He was a criminal." [BISKIND, p. 144]
(Bluhdorn's Gulf + Western corporation
was a many-tentacled monster. "There is hardly a major issue in the news that does not affect Gulf +
Western," noted investigative journalist Ben Bagdikian in 1983, "Almost every American buys the
company's goods." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 31] The company controlled over 100 other firms, including TV production center
Desilu Productions, clothing lines Kayser-Roth, Catalina, Cole
of California, Jonathan Logan, Oscar de la Renta; nuclear power and mining
interests; racetracks, professional sports teams, insurance companies, farm supplies, and missile parts. "It
once owned 50 percent of UPITN, which provided television news for networks in eighty countries
... and it owns 8 percent of the arable land of the Dominican Republic." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 30-31])
Eventually Paramount's (Jewish)
head of production, Robert Evans, decided to do a film version of the popular book about the Italian mafia, The Godfather.
But when he and the number two man at Paramount, Peter Bart (also Jewish), "screened [old]
mob movies, [they] realized they had all been written and directed by Jews. Evans concluded he needed an Italian if he
was going to 'smell the spaghetti.'" [BISKIND, p. 142] Enter Francis Ford Coppola.
Noting the importance of being Jewish in Hollywood,
in 1994 William Cash noted (in a British journal, The Spectator) that:
"In Hollywood, the most obvious Jewish Club are in the sideshows,
the lawyers, talent agencies,
and management and production offices.
Birgit Cunningham ... told me that when she worked as a personal
assistant to Vic Sutton,
the Jewish head of the fast track LA
commercial talent agency, Sutten, Barth and Vennari, her boss would often -- if signing a deal
-- bluntly ask if they were Jewish.
'I was surprised,' she said, 'I mean, in England, you'd never hear
someone ask, 'Are you
Anglican?'" [CASH, p. 15] Throughout the history
of Hollywood, note David Desser and Lester Friedman, "the Jewish film producers, known not entirely affectionately
as movie moguls, employed a veritable army of talent both in front of and behind the camera, many of whom were Jewish.
The number of Jewish writers and actors, in particular, is amazing, as are the number of [Jewish]
émigré directors who started in the 1920s." [DESSER, p. 27]
Among Hollywood's many public promotions is Sigmund Freud's
theories of psychoanalysis. [See earlier chapter on its use in Jewish theories of anti-Semitism] The New York
Times notes that "since the 1920s Hollywood has been fascinated -- off and on screen -- by psychiatry ... Despite
the erratic matter in which it was practiced, psychoanalysis struck a chord with the Hollywood elite. Writers were
particularly enthralled by the new science." [FARBER, p. 22] "As they evangelized psychoanalysis,"
note Stephen Farber and Marc Green, "the Hollywood elite led the way in making the Freudian science -- with
all its contemporary offshoots -- an integral part of American life." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 7] "Suddenly,"
says Dr. Louis Jolyon West, "psychoanalysis was no longer seen as a quaint and slightly perverted Jewish conspiracy
to subvert the world's morals. After World War II, psychiatry became respectable." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 70]
How entwined this secular Jewish world view of guilt, sexuality,
and neurosis has been in the heart of Hollywood may be measured in the flurry of 1990s books about the subject,
including titles like Farber and Green's Hollywood on the Couch; Lebeau's Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis
and Cinema; Bergstrom’s Endless Nights: Cinema and Psychoanalysis; and Kaplan's Psychoanalysis
and Cinema. Among the most obvious of the self-conscious psychoanalysis promoters is director/actor Woody Allen,
whose stereotypical on-screen neurotic Jewish persona centers on psychotherapists to explain the world to him. In
real life, notes Allen's former lover, Mia Farrow, "that Woody had been in psychoanalysis two or three times a week
for about thirty years was astonishing to me." [FARROW, p. 223-224]
Among the prominent Jewish psychoanalysts who have set up shop in Tinseltown over the years included Otto
Fenichel and Ernst Simmel (see earlier chapter about their thoughts on anti-Semitism), Karl Menninger, Margaret Hohnehberg,
Lawrence Kubie, Philip Solomon, Joshua Hoffs, Leo Rangell, Rudolph Loewenstein, Mildred Newman, Bernard Berkowitz,
and David Rubenfine. May Rom (originally: Minyetta Belyoshi Ichi Minya M'Aike) set up her practice in Hollywood in
1946. Jewish therapist Frederick
Hacker set up a clinic in Beverly Hills and was "the first analyst to become a millionaire" in Hollywood. [FARBER/GREEN,
p. 118] Analyst Milton Wexler was struggling for years to hustle one of his own screenplays; he finally found a
taker in one of his own patients, director Blake Edwards. [FARBER/GREEN, p. 215] Another Jewish
therapist, Gregory Zilboorg, exploited one vulnerable patient so much that he "was making himself the manager
of his patient's business." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 63] When O.J. Simpson was jailed after accusations
that he murdered his wife, therapist Saul Faerstein outraged Simpson's lawyers with a bill for $25,000 for his first
month of part-time work with the notorious patient. [SCHILLER/WILLWERTH, p. 165] Jewish director/screenwriter Norah Ephron
even married her psychiatrist. [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 63] (She was also once the wife of famous Washington investigative
journalist Carl Bernstein). [GROSSVOGEL, D., 2000, p. 184] Actress Esther Williams (and Cary Grant)
first took LSD in 1959 as experiments at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, headed by Mortimer Hartman and Arthur
Chandler. [WILLIAMS, E., 1999, p. 12] Another
therapist, Eugene Landy, raised eyebrows by claiming 25 percent of royalties on some of his patient's songs: Brian
Wilson of the Beach Boys. [FARBER/GREEN, p. 216] Landy's therapy fee was $5 a minute ($300 an hour). [WILSON, p. 276]
Between 1983 and 1986 he was paid $35,000 a month ($420,000 a year). Landy also became a half partner with Wilson
in a "creative partnership" to share profits in "recordings, films, soundtracks, or books." In addition,
he was also paid $150,000 a year from 1987-1991 from a special Beach Boys fund. In sum, he made nearly $3 million
as Wilson's psychoanalyst. [HILBURN, p. 63] Wilson,
burned out on drugs in the 1980s, had ceded complete control of his life to his therapist. Landy's accountant's
son, Scott Steinberg, even moved in with Wilson to oversee his personal world. Therapist Landy became Wilson's "executive
producer, co-producer, business manager, co-songwriter, and business adviser." [WILSON, p. 351] Pushed by fellow
Beach Boys and Wilson's wife, the Board of Medical Quality Assurance, a California medical ethics organization,
eventually charged Landy with unethical conduct. Landy surrendered his license to practice therapy for two years. [WILSON,
p. 352] Other Jewish therapists, at various times, for the famous Beach Boy included Harold Bloomfield, Solon Samuels,
and Lee Baumel. (The economic exploitation
of vulnerable patients by their psychoanalysts is apparently an ethical norm of the psychoanalytic community. At a meeting
of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Jewish psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaoeff Masson notes his initial
introduction to the "political realities of psychoanalysis. I ought not to have been shocked, but I was. As I've
indicated earlier, I knew of the practice of soliciting money from patients, but this was the first time I was directly
involved. About twenty analysts, most of them holding some official position or other, had gathered together to
discuss the funding of the new chair of psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A million-dollar endowment
was needed. How to get it? The solution, said one prominent analyst from Chicago, was easy, and had been used several
times. 'I would ask each of you to compose a list of your wealthiest patients, with their names, addresses and phone
numbers. We will then circulate this list within this group. The next stage is for some of us to contact these people,
without, of course, telling them how we have their names, and asking them if they wish to donate money for the chair.'
This was, by any standard I knew, unethical behavior, but nobody in the room voiced any objection." [MASSON,
J. M., 1990, p. 187-188]) Such a profiteer of
the therapist-patient bond was George Pollock (president of both the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the American
Psychiatric Association), who was eventually sued by the son of one of his deceased patients (Anne Lederer) who
claimed that the "doctor" brainwashed his mother into leaving him her fortune. Jewish therapists Martin Wasserman
and Melvin Heller also entered lucrative careers as "media consultants." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 242]
Another, analyst Carol Liebeman, started out as a cabaret singer. She remained a member of the Writers' Guild
of America and ran ads in its house organ, noting her psychological services to improve screenplays. Therapist Evelyn
Silvers even started out as a fashion model, and was a pretty backdrop for TV's "The $64,000 Question." [FARBER/GREEN,
p. 290] New York therapist Louise Kaplan's book, entitled Female Perversions, was translated
into a movie in 1997. Directed and co-screen written by Susan Streitfeld, the film features "a sexy, high-powered
attorney who sleeps with both men and women." [SKALR, R., 1997, p. 9]
Dr. Martin Grotjahn counted Warren Beatty, Vivian Leigh, Danny Kaye, David Geffen, and many others as patients.
Phil Cohen had Sterling Hayden, Lloyd Bridges, John Garfield, among others. Judy Garland's Jewish psychoanalysts included
Ernst Simmel ("five days a week on her way to work") and Herbert Kupper. She first went to one at the
encouragement of her lover, Joseph Mankiewicz, also Jewish. [SHIPMAN, 1993, p. 142] Another therapist,
Frederick Hacker, used "to accompany Garland to [her movie] rushes, where she judged her work." [SHIPMAN,
1993, p. 201] Marilyn Monroe is another who
fell under the dominance of a string of Jewish analysts, and a Jewish world, including, most famously, Ralph Greenson
(born: Romeo Greenschpoon) who was her therapist when she (allegedly) committed suicide. "Like many of his
colleagues at the time," notes a Good Housekeeping review of a book by Donald Spoto about Marilyn,
"Greenson relied heavily on drug therapy
for his patients, routinely
prescribing barbiturates and tranquilizers or having patients' other
doctors do so. He referred Marilyn to internist
Hyman Engelberg [also
Jewish], who prescribed many of the medications Greenson ordered for her. Greenson would also regularly meet with Marilyn
at his home and
even asked his daughter to befriend her, disastrously unprofessional tactics that increased Marilyn's dependency on him ...
Her friends noticed
that the more Marilyn saw Greenson, the more
miserable she became ... Greenson encouraged Marilyn's deep dependency on him (he was seeing her twice daily)."
[GOOD HOUSEKEEPING,
1993, p. 212, 214] The incestuous nature
of Hollywood life may be noted in Greenson's case: his sister Elizabeth "was married to Milton 'Mickey' Rudin,
an entertainment attorney who was one of the town's major power brokers." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 93]
Rudin was Jewish and also Monroe's lawyer. He was also an attorney and publicist for Frank Sinatra, who, early in
his career, was also a patient of Ralph Greenson. [KELLEY, K., p. 208, 305]
Marilyn Monroe's publicist, Arthur Jacobs, was also Jewish. So were her agents at MCA, Jay
Kanter and Mort Viner. Many of the directors of her films were also Jews (for example, Billy Wilder of Some Like It
Hot and George Cukor of Let's Make Love). Natasha Lytess, her personal manager, and a woman she lived
with at one time in Hollywood, was the subject of talk about Monroe's rumored lesbianism. Lytess was also Jewish, from
Austria. [LEAMING, p. 31] In the quest for Monroe's career, says Barbara Leaming, "Marilyn's relationship with
Nathasa was ... mutually exploitive." [LEAMING, p. 31] Milton Greene, also Jewish, a fashion photographer
"with whom she'd reportedly had a fling during the late forties," was another early personal manager.
[MCDOUGAL, p. 216] Charles Feldman was also once her agent. Monroe,
early in life, had resolved to sleep with anyone who could help her attain fame and fortune in Hollywood. Close
friend Ted Jordan notes that she had "sex with anybody she thought might be able to advance her career." [JORDAN,
p. 121] "It is clear," notes Anthony Summers in his biography of her,
"that Marilyn made judicious use of her favors. A key beneficiary,
reportedly, was the man who got Marilyn that vital
first contract at Fox
-- Ben Lyon. According to writer Sheila Graham, Lyon had been sleeping with Marilyn and promising to further her career...
Lyon called the casting director
for Sol Wurtzel, a B-movie producer
of the time [and Monroe was awarded a small part in the 1947 film Dangerous Years]." [SUMMERS, A., 1985, p. 35]
Garment millionaire Henry Rosenfeld was another Jewish
sex partner on the road to fame. "She would join Rosenfeld at his home in Atlantic City for trips in his speedboat
and for quiet evenings of talk and laughter." [SUMMERS, A., p. 45] Jewish mobster, and Hollywood powerbroker,
Bugsy Siegel also had sex with Marilyn. [JORDAN, p. 84, 87] Ted Jordan (born Edward Friedman) even wrote a book
about his early sexual experiences with Monroe -- they began on his fourth date with her when she was 17. Then known
by her real name, Norma Jean, Monroe was soon sleeping with Friedman's uncle, Ted Lewis (original name also Friedman),
who, "with his clarinet and distinctive style of old favorites, was among the hottest acts in show business."
[JORDAN, p. 73] "I learned," says
Jordan,
"that at one point in their little backstage
meeting, Ted had slipped
Norma Jean a piece of paper with his telephone number on it. Soon they were meeting in hotel rooms whenever Ted was in town
... Soon he
was pulling strings for Norma Jean, trying to hook her up with an agent who would do her the most good ... As Norma Jean had vowed
to me, whoever she had
to fuck, she was prepared to do it. And, for
good measure, she did the same with [prominent, and Jewish, gossip
columnist] Walter Winchell." [JORDAN, p.
75]
Lewis, notes Jordan, "began an affair
with the then-unknown model and introduced her to narcotics." [JORDAN, photo section] A key agent in accelerating
Monroe's early career was Johnny Hyde (like many Hollywood Jews, born in Russia, and a veteran of vaudeville.) She
was also his mistress -- he soon fell in love with her, and wanted to leave his wife for the actress. (He was 53,
she was 23). Hyde, notes Ted Jordan, "not so coincidentally ... was Ted Lewis' personal manager." [JORDAN,
p. 85] "In making Marilyn known," says Fred Guiles, "[Hyde] flexed a lot of muscle. The simple fact is
that Johnny Hyde was the chief architect of her fame and her eventual legend." [GUILES, p. 147]
"By 1953," says Jordan,
"... [Monroe] could be virulently anti-Semitic
(a prejudice that grew
as she got older). To my discomfort she would sometimes refer to
Joe Schenck, the mogul [and another sexual
stepping stone], as 'that Jew
shit' and to other Hollywood personalities as 'Jew' this or that. Occasionally I would have to remind her that I was
half Jewish."
[JORDAN, p. 188] The Hollywood world
and its pressures of being a sex goddess of course destroyed her. Monroe's physician Hyman Engelberg and her therapist
Romeo Greenson were the first to her death scene, reported to be a drug overdose, but they didn't call police for
four hours. One investigative author, Donald Spoto, in a 1993 work, even burdens Greenson with the responsibility for
killing her, directing that a female employee "administer [to Monroe] ... a fatal barbiturate-laced enema."
(In this scenario, Greenson's motivation was that Monroe was trying to free herself from Greenson's influence and control,
and had fired him.) [WOLFE, D., p. 99] In this scenario too, Monroe did not realize that this enema was abnormal.
[SPOTO, D., 1993, p. 218] A friend of Monroe's recalls that she was beginning to feel that Greenson was "trying
to substitute himself for everything she'd built up those past years. She decided he was anti-everything she wanted.
She was radically turning on Greenson and Mrs. Murray, the woman he'd put with her, she felt, to spy on her." [STRASBERG,
p. 250-251]) The famous movie
star's alleged suicide has always been controversial, and there are various conspiracy notions about who would want
her dead. Greenson's secret life is much clouded. As well as being a therapist, he was, like a number of Hollywood
people, an activist Communist Party member; he was also part of its international Comintern. Whatever Greenson's role
as a listener of movie star's confessionals, his communist ties have profound implications because Monroe had romantic
affairs with President John F. Kennedy and knew a great deal about behind-the-scenes politicking, perhaps including plans
against communist Cuba and Fidel Castro. Everything Monroe knew, per "opening up" in therapy, she undoubtedly
told her psychotherapist. As Donald Wolfe notes:
"Once Marilyn Monroe became Greenson's patient, he became one of
the most important Comintern operatives
in America; he had access
to the mind of a woman who often shared the bed with the president
of the United States and was an intimate
of the attorney general
[Kennedy's brother, Robert] ... As Greenson has correctly stated,
Marilyn Monroe had a tendency to 'get involved
with very destructive
people, who will engage in some sort of sado-masochistic relationship
with her.' Ironically, among these people
was her psychiatrist
[Greenson], her physician [Engelberg], and her housekeeper, Eunice Murray [who was appointed by Greenson to live with
Ms. Monroe and
report back to him], who joined in a conspiracy to survey Marilyn Monroe within a sphere of influence designed to gather
intelligence from
her relationship with the president of the United States and the attorney general." [WOLFE, D., p. 386]
Greenson, once noted his sister, Elizabeth, also had "strong
ties to Israel." [KELLEY, K., p. 305] Marilyn Monroe's
road to psychoanalysis was directed upon her by the influential Jewish acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, who is usually
credited with spawning the "method acting" genre, made famous by the likes of Marlon Brando and James
Dean. Brando's first Jewish analyst, says the famous actor, early in his career, was Bela Mittelman, "the coldest
man I've ever known ... [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 124] ... Acting afforded me the luxury of being
able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoanalysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and
Beverly Hills psychoanalysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from
their money while making their emotional problems worse." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 243] Brando was not much endeared
to Lee Strasberg either, calling him "an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors
Studio, and he tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him, but I never knew why.")
[BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 85] Strasberg's daughter,
Susan, notes that her father "sent numerous actors to psychiatrists, and many doctors sent their patients to class
because they felt his work helped theirs in analysis." [STRASBERG, S., 31] Susan Strasberg herself used to
argue with Marilyn Monroe about whether she or the famous sex goddess "needed therapy more." [STRASBERG, p.
138] As Barbara Leaming observes: "It
was said that the master teacher Lee Strasberg could open inner doors that one scarcely knew existed. Some admirers called
him the Rabbi. Some compared
him to a psychiatrist or a highly
judgmental Jewish father ... Strasberg focused on psychology. He ran his workshop as though they were group therapy sessions...
Strasberg often advised actors
to enter psychoanalysis in order
to put them in touch with emotionally-charged material they could use in their work." [LEAMING, p. 156-157]
"Under [Lee] Strasberg's influence," note Stephen
Farber and Marc Green, "Marilyn became an earnest devotee not just of method acting, but of Freudian analysis as
well." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 83] Monroe's one-time husband, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller,
also had his own Jewish psychoanalyst: Rudolph Loewenstein. [WOLFE, D., p. 307] Monroe even had sessions with Sigmund's
Freud daughter, Anna, also a therapist, in London. [WOLFE, D., p. 300] "The significance of [Monroe's
reliance on psychoanalysts] for psychoanalysis," notes Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, "was that Monroe left
a substantial part of her estate to further the work of Anna Freud, whom she had seen briefly for analytic help in 1956
(Anna Freud wrote about her that she was paranoid with schizophrenic traits), and this bequest was undoubtedly achieved
through her analysts, who were intimately connected to Anna Freud." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 129]
As Masson, a former offical at the Sigmund Freud Archives,
further notes about the ethical undercurrent of such funding:
"It is not, in fact, uncommon for analysts to solicit, usually through
roundabout methods, former patients for money
to support analytic
projects. Chairs of psychoanalysis in medical schools at various universities have been partially endowed through former
patients. There
was also the case of the Centenary Fund, named for the centenary, in 1956, of Freud's birth. [Marilyn Monroe's therapist]
Romi Greenson had
organized this fund for psychoanalytic research in Los Angeles ... I felt then, and still do now, that it is an exploitation
of the emotional relationship
with a patient to solicit money, in whatever
form, directly or indirectly. It seems to me that the patient, or ex-patient,
is in no position, emotionally speaking, to refuse
... I find it wrong and
morally distasteful." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 130]
Another Jewish Hollywood therapist, Judd Marmor (born Judah Marmorstein), candidly wrote an article in 1953
about the trap vulnerable patients would inevitably find themselves in under the control of a psychoanalyst. Its theme
we have run across before, as being quintessentially "Jewish." Marmor's piece was entitled "The Feeling
of Superiority: An Occupational Hazard in the Practice of Psychotherapy." "Marmor,"
note Stephen Farber and Marc Green, "pointed out the neurotic needs that may drive a person to become a psychiatrist
-- a hunger for prestige as well as a desire to solve one's own internal conflicts." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 135]
"[The] ego-seductive aspects [of the field of psychoanalysis]," noted Marmor, "tend to foster
such defensive arrogance to a greater extent, perhaps, than do many other professions." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 135] A
Monroe friend once stated that "I felt [Ralph Greenson] had a big ego, like a lot of doctors he wanted to be
God, and of all the analysts in L.A. she found him. Inger Stevens was his patient too. She killed herself later."
[STRASBERG, p. 250] As Greenson, Monroe's analyst, once claimed, "I can count Marilyn to
do anything I want her to do." [WOLFE, D., p. 422]
"I was a patient of five different psychiatrists," says Marlon Brando,
"Based on my experience, most psychiatrists are people who feel
comfortable trying to control other people
because they can't handle
themselves. Their experiences have overwhelmed them and they believe
they will be able to cope only if they
are in a controlling position over
others. I've known a lot of them, and some of them have been among the nuttiest people I've ever met ... [One of them]
spent a lot of our
sessions asking for money." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 366]
Yet another tragic Hollywood movie star "goddess" driven to a psychological abyss was Frances Farmer,
one of the most famous film faces of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Farmer's demise is particularly disturbing. Ardent
rebel and idealist, she was attracted to the largely Jewish New York communist world before she became a movie celebrity,
even visiting Moscow in 1935. Attracted to serious theatre, in New York she was "escorted around the city by a delegation
of local communist leaders and -- through an introduction written by [Jewish friend] Sophie Rosenstein -- [Farmer]
got herself invited to a party given by members of her cherished left-wing Group Theatre" where she first met
famous Jewish playwright Clifford Odets. [ARNOLD, W., p. 50] (Supposedly anti-capitalist and anti-materialist, the
Group Theatre grew out of meetings at Harold Clurman's home. Eventually he, fellow Jew Lee Strasberg and "WASP
shiksa" Cheryl Crawford were the Group's early directors. [SMITH, W., p. 213, photo] Clurman
was also the aforementioned Stella Adler's husband.) William Arnold notes the illusory idealism of the famous (largely
Jewish) Group Theatre: "The Group actors, far from being the artistic purists [Farmer] had always believed them
to be, all seemed to want to go to Hollywood and make piles of money (which, eventually, most of them did)."
[ARNOLD, W., p. 90] Both Farmer's mother
and sister Edith believed that such "communists" destroyed her. [ARNOLD, W., p. 94] (For her part, Frances
despised her mother and placed enormous blame for her troubles upon her. In the third page of her biography she even
quotes a "Jewish saying" about mothers, and bemoans her lack of a good one). [FARMER, p. 12] William Arnold,
who interviewed sister Edith, notes that she believed "the Communists drove Frances crazy. [Edith] seemed particularly
bitter towards the Group Theatre and its left-wing members who, she said, took criminal advantage of France's kind
nature and then harassed her into insanity." [ARNOLD, W., p. 94] During the McCarthy-era communist probes,
eight Group Theatre members were identified as members of a communist cell -- Joe Bromberg and Lewis
Leverett were its "co-leaders." [SMITH, W., p. 157] (Generally speaking, Jewish left-wing radical Saul Alinsky
once noted that "few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s.") [ALINSKY, S., 1971,
p. xiii]
Farmer's rise to acting stardom was meteoric.
Within two weeks of moving to New York City to live, and within weeks of returning from Moscow, she was signed by agent
Shepard Traube who managed to get her hired by Paramount Pictures top talent scout in New York,
Oscar Serlin. Although Farmer reached Hollywood stardom by age 21 (with the film "Come and Get It" in 1936),
she returned to New York -- because of personal conviction to the legitimate theatre, and for little pay -- to star
in Odet's play entitled Golden Boy. The largely Jewish cast, some with changed names, included Luther Adler,
Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Lee J. Cobb (born Lee Jacob), John Garfield (Garfinkel), Martin Ritt, Howard Da Silva,
Robert Lewis, Michael Gordon, and Roman Bohmen. By now too, Farmer had begun a troubling affair with Odets, a married
man -- a relationship that was to hasten her road to psychological destruction and a mental institution. In her autobiography,
Farmer wrote that: "Odets was
a strange, almost ugly man, but he was everything I could ever imagine, at the time, admirable in a man. He was a fiery,
fascinating intellect with
strange sexual drives, and I reacted like a
smitten schoolgirl. I believed in him passionately ... I drowned myself
in his doctrines and political theories, and had he
not severed the affair,
I probably would have followed him to his far-left politics... Odets maneuvered me as he would a character in one of his
plays. He toyed with
my attitudes and reactions. He was a psychological button-pusher ... One moment he would marvel at my brilliance and
minutes later he would curse
me for my stupidity. Sometimes, locked
with me in his apartment, he would plead like a schoolboy for love and favors, and then, suddenly and with insulting accusations,
he would assault me as if
I was a streetwalker ... He would insult
me in front of everyone, belittling my performance [in Golden Boy],
and he was satisfied only when he had reduced me to
tears and set me
sobbing to my dressing room.
There were times after such incidents when he would not speak to me for two or three days. At other times, he would force his
way into my dressing
room and make a great point of not only locking the door behind him, but further securing the room by propping a chair under
the doorknob, and then he
would tear off his clothes and scream his
love and need for me with all the fire and passion of a Rococo Thespian.
He would threaten to take his life and mine, unless
I loved him... His
sexual appetite was a complicated maze of weird manipulations. He would deftly maneuver me to a point of fulfillment, then
withdraw and mock what he termed
my base and disgusting desires.
After searing my feminine spirit in this bed of humiliation and
degrading me in every possible manner, he would begin again
with the shyness of
an innocent lad and explore me with tender
fascination.
This was no ordinary man. He was a creature who pried open the psyche with the intention of sticking it with pins. I cannot
say that I loved
him; a more apt description would be a passionate hatred coupled with a physical fascination. Whatever it was, it did much to
destroy me. Whereas I had
once lived secure within myself, after
Odets I became a bundle of raw hesitant nerves, confused and almost without purpose." [FARMER, p. 193-194]
"Looking back," notes Margaret Brenman-Gibson,
"Group members, all of whom had watched the [Farmer-Odets] affair with unusual concern, agreed that this seemed
to be the trigger for her life's descent, during which she became addicted to alcohol and to drugs, was jailed,
reviled, beaten, and for seven years, institutionalized by her mother as a lunatic." [BRENMAN-GIBSON, p. 579]
As one Group member recalled, Odets was "so kind and tender a man who obviously revered his dead mother
and whose empathy with women could be so delicate, could nevertheless be so exploitively cruel with some women."
[BRENMAN-GIBSON, p. 579] A Farmer wrote herself, "My artistic id was clobbered to shreds
and the emotional trauma with Odets finished the job." [FARMER, p. 578] Institutionalized against her will, Farmer
endured electroshock therapy, various drugs, and possibly a lobotomy.
She died in 1970. A decade later, Farmer's horrifying story was afforded renewed interest in Hollywood. Jewish
producer/comedian Mel Brooks embarked on a movie project (Frances, starring Jessica Lange). Brooks' film featured
a character named Harry York who "appears repeatedly to bed and befriend the doomed actress Frances Farmer
in her downroad spiral through alcohol, despair and a Dickensian insane asylum." [HAMMER/PILCHER, p. 38] William
Arnold, author of a biography of Farmer (Shadowlands) eventually sued Brooks and his partners (Jonathan Sanger
and Marie Yates), charging that the York character was an invention in order to avoid linking the film's screenplay to
Arnold's book. "The lawsuit," said People Weekly, "raises doubts about the business practices
of Mel Brooks, whose company produced Frances -- and about the veracity of the film itself." [HAMMER/PILCHER, p.
38] The Harry York character was eventually declared by the Brooks team to be a real-life character, Stewart Jacobson,
an ex-convict and convicted pimp who claimed to know Farmer as far back as high school. The outlandish assertions made
by Jacobson (highlighted in his claim to have set up a Farmer affair with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas),
charged Arnold, was merely a contrivance for "stealing my book." "Mel Brooks is a crook and an incredible
cheat," agreed producer Noel Marshall, who was scheduled to originally produce the film. *******************************************
The Jewish business network that built Hollywood,
observes Claire Pajaczkowska, "provided an opportunity for a relatively small managerial elite to formulate American
culture as it should or could be. It has been said that 'Hollywood' -- the American Dream -- is a Jewish idea in
a sense; it's a Jewish revenge on America. The genius of future moguls was a complex one, partly sheer business
ingenuity, partly ruthless risk taking, and a kind of competitive solidarity.... They were also closely associated with
the meretricious, ostentation of the industry, with poor morals, bad taste, and the industrialization of art."
[PAJACZKOWSKA, p. 238] As Marlon Brando once noted, "I've never had any respect for Hollywood. It stands for avarice,
phoniness, greed, crassness and bad taste." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 153-154] Or as film critic Kenneth Turan
noted in an introduction to David Freeman's book A Hollywood Education: "Freeman knows that the movie
business is more than any old conniver's paradise, it is one where the grail is a whole new persona. Because stakes
are so high, because 'in Hollywood, what you succeed with and what you fail with are virtually the same,' everything,
even your most personal life, is a viable tool to get ahead. Mind games, hidden agendas, backstabbings, and all around
venality, they all pass without so much as a second glance. Everything is excused in pursuit of the dream."
[FREEMAN, D., 1992, p. 7] "[A]s I heard about Hollywood," wrote prominent science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in a reflecion on his career, "I liked it even less. Walter Bradbury of Doubleday would travel to Hollywood once a year on business. When I had lunch with him after such a visit, he would be drawn and strained. He hated the people he had to deal with there, phonies, one and all, he said, and not to be trusted an inch." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 365]
The literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote
"Perelman; Hollywood. Jewish girl, very nice and intelligent. Not fancy,
who had lost her husband out there
after three years -- her theory [is]
that Jewish men thought themselves ugly, so they had to keep proving to
themselves what they could do in
the way of getting Gentile girls."
[GOULD, p. 305] "In olden times,"
said the great journalist and muckraker, Upton Sinclair, "Jewish traders sold Christian girls into concubinage
and into prostitution, and even today they display the same activity in the same field in southern California where
I live." [GOULD, p. 305] The Hollywood rulers, noted Hollywood rabbi Edgar Magnin, "were
men who made all that money and realized they were still a bunch of Goddamned Jews. Sleeping with a pretty gentile
girl made them feel, if only for a few minutes, 'I'm half gentile.' No wonder they made idols out of shiksa goddesses."
[RUBIN, p. 78] This kind of sexual predation, if we are to believe what some Jewish scholars have to say about it,
has root in the psychological insecurities of Jewish identity. The (Jewish) Forward, reviewing a biography of
(Jewish) writer Arthur Koestler by (Jewish) scholar David Cesarani, notes that
"Koestler's life was marked throughout by 'non-stop womanizing,'
Mr. Cesarani writes. As a journalist
in the 1930s, for instance, he
'was sleeping his way through Berlin at the rate of one girlfriend
every four to six weeks.' The
chronic philandering was in part a
function of Koestler's Jewishness, Mr. Cesarani explained in a telephone interview, because, for Koestler,
to be seen with tall,
blond shiksas was a sign of the fullness of his assimilation and
acceptance around gentiles."
[BRAHMS, p. 11] (This kind of predator is apparently evidenced in the case of Evan (Meshulam) Frankel, a real estate mogul in East Hampton, New York, "An otherwise suave and gallant companion, Frankel might easily reach out in conversation and caress the breast of a woman he hardly knew or run his fingers over her buttocks ... In one famous incident, he gave a large party at which three generations of women he had bedded from the same family were his guests, unaware that each one of them had been a Frankel conquest.") [GAINES, F., 1998, p. 176] Jewish
men rushing in veritable herds to bed non-Jewish women is much remarked upon in the Jewish world. As an old Yiddish
folk saying notes: "Why does a Jew need
legs? To school he must be forced, to
marriage he must be led, to burial he is brought, to synagogue he won't go, and after Gentile girls he crawls. So why does
he need legs?"
[KUMOVE, S., 1985, p. 142] This long tradition
of Jewish male interest in the non-Jewish female has created profound resentment by Jewish women in modern Hollywood.
In 1998, "a group of 30 high-level Hollywood women in television, film, art and academia" (called
the Morning Star Commission) released a study, headed by Jewish "superagent" Joan Hyler, and sponsored by the
Zionist women's group Hadassah, about the portrayal of Jewish women onscreen in Hollywood. As the New Jersey News
noted about the Jewish psychological undercurrent in the survey findings:
"Among the most devastating findings of the Morning Star Commission
is the way that Jews, both men and women, still
regard non-Jews as
competitors and even adversaries ... Jewish women, though proud of their professional achievements ... project a surprising degree of
ambivalence toward themselves
within American society and a shocking
degree of rivalry and hostility toward non-Jewish women ... Jewish
women, in their envy of non-Jews, often project
hostility onto non-Jews,
often project hostility onto non-Jewish women, calling them 'air heads'
and perceiving them as 'irresponsible' and 'unambitious.'"
[MARKS, M. A.,
4-23-98, p. 5] "I have not fingers
and toes enough," notes Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe, "to count the [Jewish] men I know who can only love
the shiksa." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 199] "Jewish men's attraction to non-Jewish women," philosophizes
Joel Streiker, "[is] an important theme of Jewish American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the attraction
that has to do with Jewish men's desire to be accepted by the larger society. Bedding or wedding a beautiful non-Jewish
woman was a symbol of a Jewish man's having made it in America." [STREIKER, J., JULY-AUG, 1999, p. 36]
A Jewish Ms. editor, Susan Braudy, noted a
story she published in a 1975 "Special Issue on Men" issue:
"The story was about a Jewish scholarship student at Harvard who
thought he was very ugly, and his obsession
with this gorgeous, upper-
class, Radcliffe gentile person, and with bringing her to her first orgasm
orally. I think it was about him
and his first wife, actually." [THOM, p. Conversely, non-Jewish womanizer
Marlon Brando credits Jewish women early in his acting career in New York with opening him to the sexual world:
"It was common in those days for girls
from wealthy New York Jewish
families to rent an apartment in the city and have a little fling before
striking out on a career or marriage after
they had graduated from
college ... They were fascinated by me and I by them. Many were
more experienced sexually than I was, and I
was a willing and
happy pupil. I especially remember Carole Burke." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 74]
Jews dominated the vaudeville world, precursor to radio, television and the other mass media worlds. George
Burns remembers the first time he met fellow Jewish comedian Georgie Jessel:
"I remember the first time I met Jessel. Actually, it was the first time
I met him alone. He was starring on Broadway
in the dramatic version
of The Jazz Singer. It was a big hit, and Georgie was brilliant. The
Jazz Singer is the story of a cantor who wants his son to become a
cantor, while the son wants to go into show business.
At the end the father
dies and the son quits show business and becomes a cantor. The show ended with Jessel singing 'Kol Nidre,' a sacred, very
emotional song....
[After the show] I was stopped outside the door
[to his dressing room] by his cousin, Bob Milford. 'You can't go in right now,' Bob told me, 'he's got his clothes off.'
The tears were still dripping from my eyes, that's how wonderful Jessel had been. 'That won't bother me,' I said. 'I've
seen a naked Jew
before. I just want to tell him how much I enjoyed his performance.' 'I'm sorry,' Bob said, shaking his head,
'you really can't go in.' He
dropped his voice to a whisper. 'He's got a girl in there.' I was shocked. Until that moment I'd believed that
there was nothing that
could follow 'Kol Nidre.'" [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 77-78]
The Hollywood "casting couch" is an infamous icon. Actress/writer Joan Collins (half-Jewish) notes
an early introduction to the world of Hollywood as a young aspiring actress:
"[When] Buddy Adler, who was head of 20th Century-Fox, to whom
I was under contract, asked me in his own home
if I would like to be the
biggest star on the lot, I said, 'Yes, of course.' 'All you have to do' --
and he smiled suavely as he maneuvered me across
the lacquered dance
floor of his Beverly Hills mansion -- 'is to be nice to me, and the best
parts at the studio are yours.' 'What do you
mean exactly by 'be nice,'
Mr. Adler?' a worldly and sophisticated twenty-two-year-old Joan asked
warily. 'Listen, honey' -- he held me closer in the
dance and whispered
in my ear -- 'you're a beautiful girl and I'm not exactly an ugly old man...
We'll see each other a couple of times a week,
you can still have your
own life, and I'll have mine, of course." [COLLINS, J., p. 25]
Marilyn Monroe, as noted earlier, was a willing mistress to many to help her career. Aside from those mentioned
earlier, she was also regularly invited to the home of Joseph Schenck (early head of 20th Century-Fox)
where, she once said, "I liked sitting by the fireplace with Mr. Schenck and hearing him talk about love and
sex. He was full of wisdom on the subjects." [WOLFE, D., p. 198] Schenck was once married to early film star Norma
Talmadge. [WHITFIELD, E., 1997, p. 239] Monroe, says Ted Jordan, "bitterly complained about Schenck, who made
it clear what her primary function was: sex." [JORDAN, p. 100] Schenck, says film historian Neal Gabler, "embodied
just about every cliché of Hollywood decadence and debauchery." [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 259] "Uncle
Joe [Schenck] continued to have 'fiancees,' notes Mary Ellin Barrett (the "god daughter" of Schenck, and Irving
Berlin's actual daughter), "and when I was old enough to catch on, I wondered how a pretty girl could fancy
such a homely, potbellied old man 'that way.' 'Power,' someone said, 'is attractive,' an odd concept to a young person."
[BARRETT, M., 1994, p. 140]
Early in Monroe's career as a struggling
actress, the head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, also once invited her, "and no one else," to an
overnight cruise on his yacht. According to close friend Ted Jordan, Monroe was required to strip naked for Cohn
in his office. As she bent over, at his direction, he approached her, penis in hand. When she declined his advances,
said Monroe, "I had never seen a man so angry." [JORDAN, p. 91; WOLFE, D., p. 211-212] Cohn
then "banned her from the [Columbia] lot after she refused to accompany him on a yacht to Catalina
Island." [LEAMING, p. 8] "You know," Monroe once said, "that when a producer calls an actress into
his office to discuss a script that isn't all he has in mind ... I've slept with producers. I'd be a liar if I said
I didn't." [SUMMERS, p. 34-35] In 1955, 20th Century Fox awarded Monroe the richest
per-film contract of any actress. "It means," remarked Monroe, "I'll never have to suck another cock
again!" [MCDOUGAL, p. 217] Cohn also, notes Barbara
Leaming, "developed an obsession
with getting [his contracted actress] Rita
[Hayworth] into bed that was more than just sexually motivated... As time went by he would become preoccupied with keeping
other men out
of her life, including her own husband and any other man who might come between Rita and the studio ... [Cohn] went so far
as to sport hidden microphones
in her dressing room to listen in on
her private conversations." [LEAMING, B., 1989, p. 60]
Louis B. Mayer (head of MGM) had "a private life [that] was not always so praiseworthy,"
notes Norman Zierold, "... Although married, he had a keen eye for feminine beauty and courted women at a clip in
keeping with his extravagant nature." [ZIEROLD, p. 319] "In his more delicate personal
relations with established and aspiring actresses," adds Bosley Crowther,
"[Mayer] was naturally careful and decorous, but none the less
vigorous in pursuit of those he lusted
after, frequently in vain ...
He once said to Luise Rainer, 'Why don't you sit on my lap when
we're discussing your contract the way the
other girls do?' A little
adroit lap-sitting would go a long way, they found. He was hardy and persistent, however. Tirelessly he laid siege
to some of the
more formidable actresses, rewarding them with richer roles or disciplining them with poor assignments, in maneuvering
to accomplish
his private aims." [CROWTHER, 1960, p. 263] Mayer
was alleged to have "once insisted that 'the Talmud says a man is not responsible for a sin committed by any
part of the body below the waist.'" [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 389] Legendary
actress Lana Turner remembers what it was like for her as a teenager at MGM:
"Often in those early years at MGM I'd see a young actress
with more experience than I had, and I'd think,
'Oh boy, there's
competition for me.' Six months later she would have fallen by the wayside. When I asked, people would say, 'You're
so dumb!' It had to
be spelled out for me that those six-month
option girls would never go on to a movie career -- they were there for the benefit of management. That was what Zeppo
Marx [Turner's first
agent and one of the famous Marx Brothers]
had meant when he told me to say I was eighteen [she was fifteen when signed]. If I got one of those six-month-option deals,
I'd better lie
about my age -- for their protection." [TURNER, L., 1988, p. 34-35] Shirley Temple (Black) recalled her experience as an 11-year old movie star the FIRST time she went to the MGM offices with her mother: "Eight months had elapsed since leaving Fox in May 1940, and on this first executive visit under my new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract, Mother and I were split up, she ushered away by general manager Louis B. Mayer and I left alone with producer Arthur Freed. Best known as producer of the blockbusting The Wizard of Oz, Freed was rumored in some adult circles to have an adventuresome casting couch. At the time I knew none of this, nor would I have recognized such furniture even when sitting on one. To visit an executive of such stature was enough to send my spirits soaring. 'I have somthing made just for you,' he continued, fumbling in his lap. 'You'll be my new star!' That phrase had last been used when I was three years old in Kid in Hollywood. Obviously, Freed did not believe in preliminaries. With his face gaped in a smile, he stood up and abruptly and executed a bizarre flourish of clothing. Having thought of him as a producer rather than exhibitor, I sat bolt upright. Guarded personal exposure by both brothers and Father had maintained me in relatively pristine innocense. Not twelve years old, I still had little appreciation for masculine versatility and so dramatic was the leap between schoolgirl speculation and Freed's dazzling exposure that I reacted with nervous laughter. Disdain or terror he might have expected, but not the insult of humor. 'Get out!' he shouted, unmindful of his disarray, imperiously pointing to the closed door. 'Go on, get out!' [BLACK, S., 1988, p. 319-320] Telling her mother about the incident as she drove home, her mother told her that she too had similar troubles, fending off a sexual advance from Louis Mayer in HIS office at the SAME time. [BLACK, S., 1988, p. 320] "Usually solemn,' writes Temple, "[Mayer's] eyes glinted. Surely [Temple's mother] could recognize real sincerity when she saw it. Never forget, he continued, at MGM we are a family. We take care of our own. Slipping down off his chair, he approached the sofa and sank down beside her, uttering a contented sigh. Surely she was the most unique mother in the world, he said. Someone who should be a star in her own right. He grasped her hand, pulling her toward him. Mayer's opinion of his personal prowess was rumored to be overblown, but not the power of his office. Reluctant to test either, Mother picked up her purse and retreated out the door, walking backwards. Unlike my reaction of hilarity to Freed, hers was to be grieviously affronted. Not for nothing was the MGM lot known as the 'factory,' a studio perfumed with sultry, busty creatures with long legs and tight haunches, and more than its quota of lecherous older men." [BLACK, S., 1988, p. 320] And what
of movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, also married, partner in Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
and United Artists? As his biographer notes,
"[An assistant director] stumbled into Goldwyn's office during the
making of Whoopee! and discovered the
producer in a compromising
position with a girl who did not even get into
the picture. Most of the girls on the lot had heard about Sam Goldwyn's 'casting couch.'" [BERG, A., 1987, p. 205]
Actress Joan Crawford, early in her career, allegedly starred
in a porno movie. "When she was trying to break into the studios," says Ted Jordan "she got nowhere until several studio executives were given a private
screening of her stag
film ... In short order Miss Crawford won a studio
contract." [JORDAN, p. 122; also CONSIDINE, S., 1989, p. 12-13] Crawford was brought to Holywood in 1924 by Jewish MGM mogul Harry Rapf. Agent in the early MGM years? Michael E. Levee. [CONSIDINE, S., 1989, p. 16, 61] "Over a sixteen month period," says Shaun Considine, "Joan Crawford appeared in thirteen pictures at M-G-M. She also acquired the reputation of being a quid-pro-quo girl. Years later, when asked if she ever had to sacrifice her virtue for roles via the proverbial casting couch, Crawford replied, 'Well, it sure as hell beat the hard cold floor.'" [CONSIDINE, S., 1989, p. 17]
"While their wives were meant to be decorous and refined and sexless," notes Neal Gabler,
"many of the Hollywood Jews found sexual release elsewhere
-- sometimes
flagrantly ... Sex, like family, power, wealth, and culture, was meant to be conspicuous in Hollywood. It was a symbol of power, which
may be why so many of
the Hollywood Jews behaved with such little
discretion. Jack Warner [one of the heads of Warner Brothers] bragged
about his conquests as if they were trophies.
Bess Lasky knew that when
her husband [the head of Universal] sneaked away to make a quick
business call he was not talking to Adolph Zucker
... David Selznick
[was] a bearish hedonist with the appetites and discipline of a child."
[GABLER, N., 1988, p. 246, 258]
Charles Feldman, founder of the important Famous
Artists film artist agency, represented the likes of Greta Garbo, Marlena Dietrich, and John Wayne. "Feldman,"
also, notes Peter Biskind, "was known for casting his girlfriends in his movies." [BISKIND, p. 25]
He was once banned from MGM for his love interest in actress Jean Howard, a woman MGM
head Louis B. Meyer had his eye on too. [CROWTHER, p. 193] Feldman was once romantically involved with sex queen
actress Jean Harlow. [RUBIN, p. xii] So were others. Columbia Pictures' head Harry Cohn introduced
Harlow to Jewish mobster Abner Zillman (an investor in Columbia). "For years after Harlow's death,
[Zwillman] was boasting nostalgically about the various ways he'd banged the actress." [MCDOUGAL, p. 146] Zwillman
also "reportedly gave some gangster friends gold lockets, each containing a strand of Jean's blonde pubic hair."
[MARX, S., 1990, p. 121] Blonde bombshell movie star Carroll Baker's Jewish husband was theatre and film director
Jack Garfein: their son is named Herschel David Garfein. Mae West made a career centered upon flaunting sexuality --
in a long list of intimates, her "first steady beau, Joe Schenck," a pianist and singer, [LEIDER, E.M.,
p. 51] was also Jewish. Blonde sexpot Jayne Mansfield's boyfriend at the time of her death in a 1967
car accident was also Jewish: Hollywood lawyer Sam Brody. The crash killed both of them. Among Marilyn Monroe's
long list of Jewish (and other) partners, one of her husbands was playwright Arthur Miller. She even formally converted
to Judaism for him. [WOLFE, D., p. 285]
Clara Bow, renowned for her promiscuity, was the sex goddess (the "It girl") of the late silent screen era. Like many who have the burden of being "sex" stars, she repeatedly collapsed with nervous breakdowns. She was built to fame by Benjamin Schulberg, head of a film company called Preferred Pictures. "To launch her," note Joe Morella and Edward Epstein: "Schulberg instructed his photographer [in 1923] to take a series of provocative pictures of Clara. In the photographs she was gracefully posed and draped only in a sheet, Greek goddess-style. Her breasts and ample derriere were outlined, and it was obvious that she wore nothing under the sheet ... Clara was in effect a pin-up girl, though the term had not yet been coined. This manner of selling her would set the tone for her entire career ... One of the unpublicized advantages of being under contract to a studio, even a small one like Ben Schulberg's, was the ready availability of reliable medical attention for 'unspeakable' problems certain to arise among Hollywood's high-living set. Abortions were easily arranged. Venereal diseases could be treated without undue embarrassment. To put it bluntly, and in the words of an actor of the era, 'Anyone as promiscuous as Clara was sure to catch the clap." [MORELLA/EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 58] Eventually, in 1925, Schulberg and his company moved under the wing of larger Jewish film moguls Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky at Paramount Pictures, at the time the largest movie studio in Hollywood. [MORELLA/EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 69-70] Bow's paramours were numerous, but perhaps the most publicized was her affair with "showman Harry Richman," "Mr. Broadway," "a Cincinnati-born Jewish boy ... By his own admission he often wined, dined, and bedded down as many as four showgirls in one night. And Harry was generous. He shared his conquests with his pals ... For a time one of Harry's closest buddies was fellow womanizer and enormously wealthy film mogul Joseph Schenck ... head of United Artists ... At the time of his friendship with Harry Richman, Schenck was married to top star Norma Talmadge [who later married Jewish comedian George Jessel]." [MORELLA/EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 69, 70, 169, 170] Schenck arranged the initial sexual tryst with Bow for Richman. [p. 172-175] (Richman also owned Club Richman, "a speakeasy which became a big success." [MORELLA /EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 70]) "Richman's name was romantically linked with the most glamorous women of his day, including the tragic, gorgeous silent-screen star Barbara La Marr. There was mystery and scandal too. Ziegfield girl Helen Walsh burned to death in a fire on one of Richman's yachts." [MORELLA/EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 70] Per Clara Bow, "Harry Richman had finally found his match for sexual adventure. In his own words: 'One of the greatest things about Clara was that she had an appetite for lovemaking that was at least the equal of mine. Every time I was ready, she was, and believe me, there was hardly an hour when I was not ready." [MORELLA/EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 179] "Not all Bow suitors retained fond memories of her," write Morella and Epstein, "Abel Baer, a sexy young songwriter from New York, was in Hollywood writing the score for an upcoming Clara Bow picture. Baer had attracted the attention of Mae West back in New York, and in Hollywood he caught Clara's eye. 'I went to bed with her,' Baer says, 'but I'll tell you this -- there were no repeat performances. Once was enough for me.'" [MORELLA/EPSTEIN, 1976, p. 209-210] Jewish comedian and early television star Milton Berle
hosted "the most successful show in television history." [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 269] His "reputation with
the girls was pretty big," notes George Burns,
"He went out with everybody from silent movie star Pola Negri to
evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson to Marilyn Monroe.
You'll notice I
use the phrase 'went out,' but that's not exactly what I mean. I can't
tell you exactly what I mean, because I do a clean
act. I don't even
drop cigar ashes on the page. But if you want to know what Milton
did with these women, think of a train going into
a tunnel. And based
on Milton's reputation, this train was so popular with the passengers
that he couldn't keep it in the station."
[BURNS, G., 1989, p. 253] "Why do Italian women wear panties?" joked Berle, "To keep their ankles warm." [BERLE, M., 1996, p. 306] "What's a blonde standing on her head?" "A brunette with bad breath." [BERLE, M., 1996, p. 92]
Jewish singer Eddie Fisher, ("I prefer seduction to singing") for years a cocaine addict, divorced
Debbie Reynolds, "America's sweetheart," to marry Elizabeth Taylor in 1958. To the mores of the 50s it was
a scandal of monumental attention. "Even a partial list of his claimed [sexual] conquests," adds London's
Daily Telegraph, "include
Mia Farrow, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Kim Novak, Stefanie Powers, Angie Dickinson, Dinah Shore and Judith Exner,
the mistress also shared
by President Kennedy and Sam Giancano,
the boss the Chicago mafia.... Fisher is of the generation that
still uses a good sprinkling of Yiddish words, and
prominent among them
is shiksa." "I think I slept with
only one Jewish girl in my whole life," Fisher told the London paper, "Peggy Lipton, and then I didn't know
she was Jewish ... Boy, did I have a libido." [LAURENCE, C., 10-14-99, p. 23] (Film director Oliver Stone's father
was Jewish -- originally Lou Silverstein. He was a wealthy stock broker. [RIORDAN, 1995, p. 4] "Like many men
his age," writes James Riordan about Oliver's father and mother, "[Lou] began to seek solace through an
increasing number of affairs. There were several models, but often he preferred high-class call girls." [RIORDAN,
J., 1995, p. 16] Doris Day was
stunned when her agent, Al Levy, "followed me into my room, closed the door, turned off the lights, and pulled me
onto the bed. He desperately thrust himself on top of me as if he was some unknown rapist and I were an anonymous
victim." [HOTCHNER, 1976, p. 102] Jewish bandleader Artie Shaw's romantic flings included those with Judy Garland,
Betty Grable, and Lana Turner. [SHIPMAN, D. 1993, p. 104-107] Hollywood lawyer Gregory Bautzer "had a reputation
not unlike Artie Shaw of having 'squired' many of Hollywood's most famous stars; he had preceded Shaw in Turner's life,
and he was publicly associated with Joan Crawford for several years." [SHIPMAN, p. 464] Among [MGM
screenwriter-producer] Joe "Mankiewicz's former lovers were Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney, and Linda Darnell.
He had a habit,' said his son Chris Mankiewicz, 'of bedding down with leading ladies.'" [HEYMANN, C.D., 1995,
p. 203] Screenwriter/playwright George S. Kaufman (best known for the Marx Brothers movies), who was
married, "had a cleanliness compulsion, abhorred outward displays of affection, and hated physical contact
except, presumably, with his many sexual conquests (the Broadway producer Max Gordon called him a 'male nymphomaniac')."
[WINOKUR, 1987, p. 109] Even Jewish Hollywood hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff "had a long affair with [Greta]
Garbo and then moved on to Ava Gardner." [MCDOWELL, p. 15]
When swimmer Esther Williams first got started in show business, "famous New York showman" Mike
Rose lured her into "a seduction scene -- pure and simple. I saw that look in his eyes ... Couldn't he look in
the mirror? He was already in his fifties, married, and five feet two inches. I was seventeen, not even the legal
age for such antics." [WILLIAMS, E., 1999, p. 45] Williams' first marriage, that same year, was to a Jewish pre-med
student, Leonard Kovner, whom she soon divorced. Her lawyer in her golden years was also Jewish, Lew Goldman. [WILLIAMS,
E., 1999, p. 302] As a budding actress, a particularly pesky Hollywood sexual predator was Sam Katz, head of MGM's
musical productions. Williams recounts an early encounter with him: "Sam,
aren't you married?
'Yes, I am. I have two beautiful daughters.' 'And so am I,' I said. 'Don't you think it would be embarrassing
if you
and I were seen in public having dinner together?' 'Well ... I have little places.'
'I bet you do.'" [WILLIAMS,
E., 1999, p. 92] "Katz's philandering was
common knowledge," writes Williams, "so
I decided to deal with this head-on.
'You've done this before, Sam. Did the other girls become big stars?'
Astonishingly enough, he tried to answer
the question. He began ticking
off his other conquests.
'Well, let's see. Kate Groom? No. Ilona Massey? Not really...’
I stopped him before he got too deep. I didn't
want to be another 8 X 10
glossy on his wall of conquests, and I didn't want to know the names of
the rest of them." [WILLIAMS, E.,
1999, p. 92] Williams' most bizarre love
affair was with Jeff Chandler (also Jewish, born Ira Grossel, his most famous role was that of Cochise in Broken
Arrow). Williams fell in love and had an affair with him until she discovered his fetish for wearing women's
clothing. "Jeff," notes Williams, who quickly abandoned him,
"was dead serious about this dress-up game and obviously had been
at it for a long time ... [He] had a compulsion
to don Aunt Sophie's
underpants, which gave him his first orgasm, growing up and feeling
happy and secure only in women's clothing."
[WILLIAMS, E., 1999,
p. 309] As Rachel Abramowitz notes the oppressive
undercurrent for women trying to make it in Hollywood: "Go
to CAA [a rival talent agency]," [top Jewish agent Sue Mengers at the William Morris agency] derisively told the starlet Valeria Golino,
who
was vacillating about William Morris, "Ronnie Meyers [a Jewish executive at CAA] just wants to fuck you." [ABRAMOWITZ,
R., 2000,
p. 331] Jewish novelist Judith Krantz notes the stir actress Loretta Young created at the funeral of Jewish film director Mervyn Le Roy: "At the funeral of Mervyn Le Roy ... I heard Loretta Young give a eulogy that won the bad-taste prize of all time. She slithered exquisitely down the aisle of the Forest Lawn chapel, clad in a startingly sexy, body-hugging black dress and the largest black garden-party hat I'd ever seen. 'Mervyn Le Roy discovered me,' she announced slowly. Pause. 'No, we didn't have an affair.' Long pause. 'I was only thirteen,' she added thoughtfully, as if in explanation for the omission." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 209] In 1977
director Roman Polanski, also Jewish, fled America rather than face sentencing for raping a 13-year old model. He
had drugged her (with Quaaludes and alcohol) as he photographed the child at an actor's home. Arrested, he was allowed
to work on his current film. As Barbara Leaming notes:
"Since the probation report would affect his fate, Polanski worked on his [Jewish] probation officer, Irwin Gold,
for whom he painted
a picture of a tragic past [Polanski was a Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland] a compliant girl, and remorse for
anything he had done
wrong ... He managed to win Gold's
sympathy ... This was a victimizer as victim -- a role Polanski had played to the hilt." [LEAMING, 1981, p.
181, 184] Also, "at age fifteen,
Natassia [Kinski, star of Polanski's film Tess] became Polanski's lover. Polanski gave her books to read and suggested
ways for developing her acting abilities." [LEAMING, 1981, p. 192] Polanski once married
actress Sharon Tate, star of his film Fearless Vampire Killers. "During the shooting, Polanski had become
Sharon's lover." [LEAMING, 1981, p. 79] She had been introduced to him by Jewish producer Martin Ransohoff
of Filmways, who had her under contract. After Tate and others were sensationally murdered by the Charles
Manson "family," one week later Polanski charged Life magazine $5,000 to pose at the door of the
house she was slain. [KIERNAN, T., 1980, photo section]
Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider were Jewish partners who produced a number of influential 1970s "counterculture"
movies (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, et al). "Bert was so relentless," noted one acquaintance,
"that he came on to almost every pretty woman who came his way ... Sex was a publicly traded commodity among
the Raybert guys, sexual exploits, a variety of who could piss farther." Actor Jack Nicholson (no innocent himself)
reportedly admonished a friend, "Never bring a woman that you're serious about around Bert or Bob." [BISKIND,
p. 58-59] Among Schneider's love affairs was one with actress Candice Bergen. [MCGILLIGAN, 1994, p.
181] At BBS (the Rafelson/Schneider company), notes Patrick McGilligan,
"All of the important players were men; the atmosphere was familial;
but really it was a fraternity of insiders, a
boy's club. Bert was capable
of unzipping his pants during an argument and flourishing his cock; his
brother, Harold, was also known to bring his
penis out and lay it on the
table. The BBS men circulated throughout the building, calling each
other "babe," and "doll,"
and hitting on the women. 'The important
players took a macho pride in fucking the same women at different times,' said one former BBS staff member,
'from the starlets right
down to the typists.'" [MCGILLIGAN, p. 201]
"This [Hollywood]," complained novelist Theodore Dreiser in its big studio glory days, "is a
selfish, self-concentrated, mean, loafing town. The business and political world is hard-boiled and cruel. The movies
are solidly Jewish. They're dug in, employ only Jews with American names and buy only what they cannot abstract
and disguise. And the dollar sign is the guide -- mentally and physically. That America should be led -- the mass --
by their direction is beyond all believing. In addition, they are arrogant, insolent, and contemptuous." [GOULD,
p. 298] "There's enough sincerity in Hollywood," wrote H. L. Mencken, "to fill a peanut
shell and still leave room for an agent's heart." [GITLIN, p. 145] The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald summed
up the Hollywood scene as "a Jewish holiday, a gentile tragedy." [GABLER, p. 2]
"The entire [movie] industry," notes Chaim Bermant, "was dominated by the big five: MGM,
Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO, and Twentieth Century
Fox, all of which were owned and controlled by Jews. And of the not-so-little three -- Universal,
Columbia, and United Artists -- two were in Jewish hands." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 91-92]
The major motion picture studios of the Hollywood golden age of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and their Jewish founders
and most important chiefs over the years include: Universal
-- Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky
Paramount - Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, Barney Balaban; much later,
in the 1970s,
Robert Evans. Bought by Charles Bluhdorn in 1960s
Twentieth Century Fox - William Fox (originally Fuchs), Sol Brill,
Joseph Schenck,
(and non-Jew Daryl F. Zanuck). Bought by
Marvin Davis in 1970s
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM, part of Loew's Inc.) Louis B.
Mayer,
Samuel Goldwyn (originally: Shmuel Goldfisz), Nicholas Schenck, Irving Thalberg
(the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon), Dore Schary; earlier, Marcus Loew; 1970s: Frank Rosenfelt Warner Brothers - Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack; Norman Katz
Columbia - Harry
and Jack Cohn (At Harry's death, Columbia merged
with Screen Gems, headed by Leo Jaffe, Abe and Stanley
Schneider,
and Mike Francovich); Daniel Melnick
RKO - in early years, financially controlled by the Lehman Brothers,
Jewish bankers. Later headed by Arnold Grant (Goldstein), one time
head of Board of Directors. (Also chairman of the Anti- Defamation League
and the Joint Defense Appeal of the American
Jewish Committee). Later controlled by non-Jew Howard Hughes United Artists - [None of the original founders -- the biggest attractions
in
the early film industry who sought freedom from the exploitive hegemony
of other film companies -- were Jewish: director D. W. Griffith, actress
Mary Pickford, and actors Charlie Chaplin,
Douglas Fairbanks, and William S. Hart. But it was arranged that Jewish
businessmen Hiram Abrams and B. P. Schulberg "would run the company,
receiving 20 percent of the profits."
[WHITFIELD, 1997, p. 191] Facing economic difficulties, in 1924
D.
W. Griffith pulled out of leadership of United Artists. The new (Jewish) Chairman
of the Board became Joseph Schenck. Samuel Goldwyn joined U.A. as a distributor, "but here too his personality proved too dominant, and he bought his partners [the above-mentioned actors] out." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 93] In later years, Jewish U.A.
heads included Al Lichtman, Samuel Goldwyn,
and Alexander Korda. Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin later took
over
power; still later Krim, Benjamin, William Bernstein, Mike Medavoy, and
Eric Pleskar branched out to form Orion Pictures. As an example of almost complete
Jewish domination of the studios' executive hierarchy, one recent author listed the members of Columbia's
1957 Board of Directors, as part of a section entitled "the Columbia Empire on the eve of Harry
Cohn's death." (Is there more than one non-Jewish name here?) :
President: Harry Cohn
First Vice President and Treasurer: Abe Schneider Vice President for Production: B. B. Kahane
Vice President for Domestic Sales: Abraham Montague
Vice President for Foreign
Distribution: J. A. McConville
Vice President for Advertising and Publishing: P. N. Lazarus, Jr. Vice President for Public Relations: N. B. Spingold
Vice President for Finance:
L. J. Barbano Vice
President and Assistant Treasurer: Leo Jaffe
Secretary: Charles Schwartz
Assistant Secretary (Legal): D. G. Cassell
Assistant Secretary: Bernard Birnbaum
Assistant Treasurer: Mortimer Wormser
Controller: Arthur Levy
Director (Hemphill Noyes): L. M. Blanke
Director (City National Bank): Alfred Hart
Director (Sonnebend): A. M. Sonnebend
Director: (Hallgarten): D. S. Stralem
Director: Ralph M. Cohn
A listing of Columbia's "Corporate Management, Divisions and Subsidiaries" executives contains
almost all the same names, and the "Hollywood Studios" hierarchy is the same pattern. [DICK, B., 1993, p. 196-198]
And as Chaim Bermant observes, to understand the nature of this firm: "Harry Cohn, or King Kohn, as he was
sometimes called, head of Columbia, directed his company with the arbitrariness of a Caliph. So many legends have accumulated
round his barbarity that one almost suspects that he consciously set out to play a part." [BERMANT, C., 1977,
p. 94] (More generally, note here one investigator's overview research into the gender and ethnicity of many past
studio executives at MGM, Columbia, Warner Brothers, 20th
Century Fox, Paramount, Disney, and MCA/Universal).
Famous swimmer/actress Esther Williams notes
what it was like when she first strode down the long and intimidating executive office carpet as a teenager to meet
her new (Jewish) MGM employers (who were considering her for a contract):
"As I walked the sixty-foot-long walk on this white carpet, [MGM head Louis] Mayer scrutinized me
through his thick glasses as if I were a piece
of merchandise. Sitting in back of [Mayer] was a phalanx of executives
-- L. K. Sidney, Sam Katz, Eddie Mannix, and Benny
Thau -- all the
top management ... Although I didn't know it then, they were the men
who ran MGM. Like Mayer, they
were all short ... I felt like Snow White
with the dwarfs. When I reached the desk, I put out my hand and said,
'Hello Mr. Mayer." No one stood up."
[WILLIAMS, E., 1999, p. 62-63] Mayer's assistant, Ida Koverman,
adds Williams, was "a power behind the throne." [WILLIAMS, E., 1999, p. 79]
At Warner Brothers, brother Harry was an "ardent Zionist." Brother Jack even forced
his Jewish employees to donate part of their salary to the United Jewish Welfare Fund. [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 289-290]
"If a thing worked," Jack Warner, Jr. once remarked about his father, "it was moral. That's a terribly
cynical thing to say, but I think that's how he felt." [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 293]
Other prominent Jewish executives at various smaller studios over the years have included Victor
Carter (chairman of Republic Pictures), William Chaikin (president of Avco Embassy Pictures),
Bernard Donnenfeld (president of the Filmmakers Group), and Paul Heller and Fred Weintraub (heads
of Sequoia Pictures), among others.
Dan Moldea notes that: "As
early as 1938, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division had filed suit against the eight big motion picture companies
--
Paramount, Loews, RKO, Warner Brothers,
Twentieth Century
Fox, Columbia, Universal and United Artists
for 'combining and
conspiring to restrain trade in the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures,' in violation
of the Sherman Antitrust
Act ... Thurman Arnold, the head of the Antitrust Division charged that the motion picture business had
become 'an industrial dictatorship
and strictly unAmerican ... The danger in this country is the private
seizure of power ... it is
subject to no criticism and no attack because
no one even knows about it.'" [MOLDEA, p. 46]
A settlement was reached in 1940. A second trial commenced in 1944 with some changes being forced upon the
studios. In 1941, there was even a public investigation in the U.S. Congress about Jewish domination of Hollywood and its alleged activist postion in support of American involvement in the looming world war: "In August 1941 [Senators Gerald P. Nye and Bennett Champ Clark] called for a congressional investigation into warmongering and propaanda in the film industry .. [Because it did not receive enough votes in support] ... the Interstate Commerce Committee ... established a subcommittee to investigate Nye's and Clarks' allegations ... The subcommittee hearings raised exactly the charges which Jewish organizations and industry leaders had long feared anti-Nazi films would bring about: that Jews in Hollywood were warmongers and propagandists and that Jewish organizations abetted their coreligionists in Hollywood. The hearings added new and powerful rhetoric to the long-time charge that Jews controlled Hollywood and were using it for nefarous purposes, and they gave these ideas an airing on the very public floor of the U.S. Congress ... Yet ... despite Jewish fears, the American press treated the subcommittee hearings with criticism and even derision." [HERMAN, F., MARCH 2001, p. 86-88] "All the great moguls," notes Frank Rose,
"belonged to the Hillcrest [Country Club] -- Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers and Harry
Cohn of Columbia and Adolph Zukor of Paramount. Most of the top comics belonged
-- George Burns, Danny Thomas, Georgie Jessel, Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers ... Benny Siegel, the mobster who invented
Las Vegas, was admitted, but Joseph P. Kennedy was turned down: Jews only. (Danny Thomas was an exception)."
[ROSE, p. 1] "Within the studios and
on the screen," says Neal Gabler, "the Jews could
create a new country -- an empire of their own so
to speak ... They would create its values and myths, its traditions
and archetypes ... This was their
America and its creation may be their
enduring legacy.... They lived in large, palatial homes that imitated (some
would say "vulgarized")
the estates of Eastern establishment. They
became members of a lavish new country club called Hillcrest that
mimicked the Gentile clubs and barred them
... For their social life,
they organized a system of estates, a rigid hierarchy, that could easily
have been modeled after the court of Louis
XIV ... The Hollywood
Jews would cope through 'a sustained attempt to live a fiction, and to
cast its spell on the minds of others.'
... The Hollywood Jews created
a powerful cluster of images and ideas -- so powerful that, in a sense,
they colonized the American imagination
... Ultimately, American values
came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made." [GABLER, p. 6-7]
************************************ In
1979, a Jewish screenwriter, Ben Stein, wrote a book about Hollywood, based upon his own experience in the city
and interviews with nearly forty TV producers and writers. Such people, he concluded,
"with a small number of exceptions ... are all white males. They are
almost never younger than 35. They are
almost never second-generation
Californians. A distinct majority, especially the writing of situation
comedies, is Jewish ... [STEIN, p. 10]
... The super-medium of
television is spewing out messages of a few writers and producers (literally in the low hundreds) ... Television is
not necessarily a mirror
of anything but what those few people think. The whole entertainment
component of television is dominated by
men and women who have a
unified, idiosyncratic view of life." [STEIN, p. xiii]
"Hollywood is largely liberal and Jewish,' Jewish agent Barry Mendel (of the United Talent Agency
in Beverly Hills) told Jewish journalist Steve Berg in 1995, "We live in an insular world. We don't understand
fully people's common concerns." [BERG, S., p 1A] "The Hollywood elite," note
one Jewish research team, "shares a set of political and cultural assumptions that it views as natural (as all of
us view our own assumptions) and that it seeks, as do others, to put into action. These Hollywood leaders do not
do this in a concerted or conspiratorial way; yet because there is a general agreement on core issues ... the totality
of their world suggests a more or less coherent ideology. That ideology is generally left-leaning and highly critical
of traditional features of American society." [POWERS/ROTHMAN/ROTHMAN, p. 5]
"I've always believed that film," observed Jewish film critic Lester Friedman, "like all art
forms, is inherently propagandistic. Even seemingly innocuous pictures carry messages that either support or attack
the prevailing status quo." [FRIEDMAN, L., p. vii] In this vein, psychology professor Kevin
MacDonald suggests sometimes deeper dimensions and themes to Jewish-dominated Hollywood movies. He cites the example
of the film Addam's Family Values (1993), produced by Scott Rudin, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and written
by Paul Rudnick -- all Jewish. "The bad guys in the movie are virtually anyone with blond hair," says MacDonald,
"... and the good guys include two Jewish children wearing yarmulkes." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 18]
As Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce once noted in his stand-up
routine:
"Now the Jew gets into show business. And
he writes motion pictures,
he's making the images -- he has the film industry knocked up -- he
controls it! And the Jew naturally writes what
he thinks is pretty, what
he thinks is ugly -- and it's amazing, but you never see one Jewish
bad guy in the movies. Not ever a Jewish villain,
man. Gregory Peck,
Paul Muni -- haha! It's wonderful! Who's the bad guy? The goyim!
The Irish!" [COHEN, J., p. 37-38] [Apparently
even Bruce, like
virtually all movie-goers, didn't realize that Muni was Jewish.]
In 1983, a book, Inside Prime Time, by Jewish sociologist Todd Gitlin, was published about the entertainment
divisions of American television. (Among the pioneers in the field was Ira Phillips, who was Jewish. "In 1941",
notes Anthony Heilbut, "the most popular [radio] soap operas were the creations of Ira Phillips ... By 1949
[he] had become the doyenne of television serials." [Heilbut, p. 125]) Noting that his field
work evidenced "the large number of Jews who hold top positions in the networks and production companies,"
[GITLIN, p. 184] Gitlin interviewed a range of people in the TV business. Among them was Ethel Winant, vice-president
in charge of mini-series at NBC, who told him "There's
a kind of joke that you hear often in this business. The same people move in kind of a circle. It's a family. If I were fired tomorrow,
I
would get a job the day after ... I'm part of that group. Which has very
little to do with whether I'm good or bad."
[GITLIN, p. 116] "A few score producer's
names come up over and over again," noted Gitlin, "a few major production companies dominate the airwaves ...
[GITLIN, p. 118] ... The old-boy networks binding executives, agents, and top producers amount
to a curious kind of solidarity. Outsiders charge corruption ... [GITLIN, p. 155] ...
Cronyism, mutual back scratching, behind-the-scenes favors, revolving doors, musical chairs, careers made by failing
upward, the 'amazing largesse' given to favored members of the 'creative community' ... The same names may stay
in circulation for years, or decades ... Old-boy networks bind this savage business together." [GITLIN, p. 156]
"Nepotism," says Jewish critic Michael Medved,
"... plays a limited role in preserving Jewish prominence in the entertainment industry. Power often seems to pass
from generation to generation. Just look at famous acting [Jewish] families like the Douglases (Kirk and Michael).
Among producers and top executives, this pattern is even clearer. One of the major independent studios,
Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, is run by the son of founding father Samuel Goldwyn ... A third-generation Goldwyn
(Tony) is a successful and talented young actor ... It's possible that industry leaders feel more comfortable working
with people who share their own outlook, values, and background." [MEDVED, p. 39] In the heyday
of MGM, studio chief "Louis B. Mayer placed so many of his relatives on the payroll that the
initials M-G-M were said to stand for 'Mayer's ganze mishpoche [Mayer's whole family].'" [WHITFIELD, p.
156] "Back in the heyday of the self-made Jewish movie moguls," notes the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, "the studios were, to a certain degree, family businesses. For Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner [at Warner Brothers], and others, nepotism was standard operating procedure ... Nepotism reached unprecedented heights at Universal Pictures, which was founded in 1915 by Carl Laemmle, an affable and unpretentious German-Jewish immigrant." [ZAGA, D., 5-23-97] Universal, notes Chaim Bermant, "during [Laemmle's] heyday, was full of relatives, a fact which gave rise to Ogden Nash's famous couplet: 'Uncle Carl Laemmle has a large famlee.'" [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 93-94] "Perhaps the most unique aspect of Jewish participation [in Hollywood],"
says Jewish scholar Patricia Erens, "that
which sets them apart from any other ethnic group -- has been the virtual monopoly on film producing ... As Jews gained a foothold in
the industry, they hired
friends and relatives, and so their numbers,
and influence, grew." [ERENS, P., 1980, p. 115]
"In certain ways," says Tom Tugend, "the Hollywood moguls revealed their Jewish roots implicitly,
by the patriarchal style in which they ran their fiefdoms and by their close family loyalties." [ERENS, P., 1980,
p. 115] "Relationships play a big part in Hollywood filmmaking ... There is a very familial relationship between
the four of us [Jews] who head Orion -- Eric Pleskow, Bill Bernstein, Arthur Krim, and myself," noted a Jewish co-founder,
Mike Medavoy, of Orion Pictures in 1990. [BROUWER/WRIGHT, 1990, p. 8] Richard Shepherd, for example, whohad "a brilliant producing career,"
became a partner at talent agency Creative Management Associates, and eventually production chief
at (post-Mayer) MGM. A key factor in getting the ball rolling was that his wife "was
a granddaughter of the fabled Louis B. Mayer. Judy's father, William Goetz, had married Mayer's daughter, Edith,
and had gone on to become a powerful producer in his own right during Hollywood's golden era." [BART, p. 127] Goetz
was once a producer at 20th Century Fox. Another Mayer daughter, Irene, married David Selznick,
member of another prominent Jewish Hollywood clan. Mogul Samuel Goldwyn married the sister of mogul
Jesse Lasky. [ERENS, P., 1980, p. 133] One
time head of the Paramount film studio? Stanley Jaffe. One time chief at Columbia?
Jaffe's father, Leo, whose brother-in-law, Abe Schneider, was Chairman of the Board. One time chairman of MGM?
Nick Schenck. At the same time his brother, Joseph, headed United Artists. And as Peter Hay notes about Warner Brothers studio:
"In 1950 stockholders brought suit against Warner
Brothers and
United States Pictures, which was run by Milton Sperling, the son-in-
law of Harry Warner. Warner Brothers
financed and distributed the
films made by United States Pictures. This was not the first nepotism suit, which prompted producer
Jerry Wald to remark: 'If this sort of thing
keeps up, the son-in-law business in Hollywood will be set back at least ten years.'" [HAY, P., 1990, p. 262-263]
Note the case of Joan Micklin Silver, a "housewife
turned director." Silver's husband Raphael, says Rachel Abramowitz, "had grown so distressed by watching his
wife's frustrated ambition that he personally raised the money to finance her 1975 directorial debut, Hester
Street, about a neglected Jewish housewife at the turn of the century." [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 139] "At
a party," notes the Jewish Press, "Silver
met Joan Ganz Cooney, a founder of the Children's Television
network, who put her in touch with Linda Gotlieb,
then an executive
with an educational film company. Gotlieb fed her freelance script
writing work and when Micklin Silver told the
company head she
wanted to direct as well, she got her wish." [BIGA, L., 4-14-2000, p. 34]
David Begelman "was in the insurance business when he met and married Esther Feldman, sister of the
agent Charles Feldman." Feldman was one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood. Begelman soon worked at the MCA
agency till he formed his own company with Freddie Fields, Creative Management Associates (CMA).
[SHIPMAN, D., 1993, p. 447] By the 1970s, Begelman was head of Columbia studios. MCA
executive Jay Kanter was Paramount president Barney Balaban's son-in-law. [MCDOUGAL, p. 231] Famed
Universal director William Wyler's cousin, Carl Laemmle, was the head of that movie company. [BERG,
A., 1989, p. 263] Paul Weinstein, vice president of production at Warner Brothers has a sister,
Lisa, who is a "D-girl for the powerful production team of Leonard Goldberg and Jerry Weintraub at
Universal." [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 170] Famous agent Mort Janklow's wife Linda is the daughter of prominent Jewish film director Mervyn Le Roy and granddaughter of Harry Warner, of Warner Brothers. Jeremy Zimmer, who rose to head the motion picture packaging department at talent agency giant ICM, (and later became a partner in the "prestigious Baver/Benedek Agency" is the grandson of former MGM president Dore Schary. [BROUWER/WRIGHT, 1990, p. 45] Howard Kaminsky, president of Warner Books, is Jewish director/comedian Mel Brook's first cousin. [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 209, 288] Ray Stark was the "producer of such films as Funny Girl, the Oscar-winning movie based on the life of [Jewish comedian] Fanny Brice, Stark's mother-in-law." [KING, T., 2000, p. 270] George Shapiro was Jewish comedian Andy Kaufman's personal manager. "[Kaufman]," notes Shapiro, "came to my attention through my darling uncle and client Carl Reiner, who saw Andy in a nightclub in New York City." [ZEHME, B., 1999, p. 3] And on and on. Sidney Ganis was named president of the motion picture group for Paramount Pictures in 1988. Here's how he got his start in Hollywood: "As a teenager, he responded to a New York Times want ad for an office boy needed in a show business publicity office. When the rejection note came, he left it on the kitchen table, where his uncle Phil, a restaurateur with acquaintances in the entertainment industry, happened to read it. One call from Uncle Phil, and Sid had the job. Within three years he was introduced to the publicity chief at Twentieth-Century-Fox who brought him on board." [BROUWER/WRIGT, 1990, p. 515-516]
"Hollywood is a make-work town where nepotism is a way of life," observed (Jewish) comedian Roseanne
Barr's sister (and longtime manager), Geraldine, in 1994. [BARR, G., 1994] "In Hollywood," once joked British
character actor Arthur Treacher, "success is relative. The closer the relative, the greater the success."
[HAY, P., 1990, p. 262] "I became a director," says Jay Sandrich (director of TV's The Cosby Show,
among others), "by being in the right place at the right time, plus the wonderful thing that helps so many people
in this business, nepotism.... My father was a feature film director ... I really had no interest in the business.
I've always felt that if my father had worked in the automobile business, I'd be in the automobile business."
[LEVINSON, p. 118-119] (Cosby's Jewish agent, Jerry Katzman, originally arranged the deal for his show with NBC's
Jewish head, Brandon Tartikoff. One of the two co-writers for the program was also Jewish, Ed Weinberger.
[TARTIKOFF, p. 10, 13] Thomas Werner, the head of Carsey-Werner, produced "The
Cosby Show" and "Roseanne" for television. In earlier years, as Bill Cosby made
the transition from stand-up comic to television with the I Spy series, his managers were Fred Weintraub and Roy
Silver. The producer of another popular Black-oriented program, Sanford and Son? Bernard Orenstein).
"Now that Jews govern the New [mass media]
Establishment, (their official mouthpiece is the New York Times)," complained William Cash, a reporter for
Britain's Daily Telegraph, "does any sort of reverse form of class or racial discrimination operate
against outsiders trying to get access to the entertainment highway -- wasps, blacks, Brits (there is only one Brit of
any level of executive significance in all the major studios, and he is Jewish) and others not so favoured?"
[CASH, p. 15] "Recently I had
a meeting with a young executive," wrote Jewish screenwriter Adam Kulakow in a Jewish journal, "to discuss
a possible script assignment. Our conversation began with a discussion of the Eastern European origins of my surname
and segued from their to talk of my grandparent's arrival in America ... It wasn't long before we were playing 'Jewish
geography.' By the time we got around to the business of the meeting, we had achieved a comfort level based on our
common ground." [KULAKOW, A., p. 43] Kulakow ends his story that dismisses Jewish nepotism by
declaring that Jewish solidarity meant nothing because he didn't get the job. What he neglects to mention, of course,
is how many other candidates were interviewed for the job, and whether or not the person who did get the position had
the same "comfort level." After all, even the most ethnocentric Jewish executive can't hire all
fellow Jews for one open position. "Relationships at studios," says television comedy
writer Stuart Gibbs, "often begin with whether they are comfortable with you. If you share a bond you might
have a slight edge [in getting a job.]" [KULAKOW, p. 43]
Meanwhile, Kulakow quotes a non-Jewish television writer who dutifully says that being a non-Jew hasn't hurt
his career. However, the Gentile notes to Kulakow that "in a nice way every now and then I feel like a shabbes
goy." Short of those married to Jews, how many non-Jews know what a shabbes goy is, except those
who have the term directed to them, jokingly or otherwise? A shabbes goy is (whatever its formal dissimulative
explanations) essentially a non-Jewish servant who traditionally does all the work for Jews on Saturdays while they sit
home lounging around, religiously forbidden to even light candles. One dictionary of Yiddish slang
defines shabbes goy as "Someone who does the dirty work for others (Lit., gentile doing work for a
Jew on Sabbath)." [KOGOS, p. 69] In what context would such a Yiddish term come up between Jew
and non-Jew, unless there was, however veiled in humor, a latent undercurrent of reality? In Black parlance, shabbes
goy is the rough equivalent to "house nigger."
(While we're on Yiddish terms, the double moral/linguistic standard in today's Jewish-dominated mass media
can be staggering to behold. The free use of the word shiksa (the defamatory slur against non-Jewish women)
can still be found today, common in major publications. The New York Post calls Hilary Clinton's grandmother
a shiksa [PEYSER, 8-6-99], the Los Angeles Times notes a film with an "unattainable shiksa
princess," [HORNDADY, p. 90], and Richard Siegel, the executive director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture
has a letter printed in the New York Times quoting another commentator about a "shiksa-chasing
Jewish prince." [SIEGEL, R. 11-30-96] Can we imagine this day and age the same Jewish (or any other) organization
discussing "nigger-chasers," "Pollock-chasers," or any other comparable defamation
in a reputable national newspaper? One writer, Ellen Jaffe-Gill, (who is Jewish; how many non-Jews have even heard
the shiksa term, let alone know the way that the Jewish community still widely uses the word?) had the integrity
to complain to the Times about the paper's use of the term. Shiksa, she noted, "is about as
affectionate as the N-word, and if the Times' style sheet lists racial pejoratives ... as no-nos,
shiksa ... should go on the list." [JAFFE-GILL, p. 95] Elsewhere, in a Jewish journal, Gabrielle Glaser
notes that when she reviewed Jewish literature for information about intermarriage with non-Jews, "a lot of
it was judgmental and didactic. The attitude was, 'Well, if she's not Jewish, she's a stupid shiksa.'"
[COLEMAN, S., p. 41]) (A review of expressly Jewish periodicals in the Ethnic Newswatch
computer databank, from 1994 through 1999, notes the use of the word shiksa in over 70 different articles).
Being Jewish means nothing in Hollywood? In 1992, struggling
Jewish actress Fran Drescher ended up sitting on a plane next to a Jewish broadcasting mogul, Jeff Sagansky, then
president of CBS Entertainment. "To her captive audience she pitched an idea: a sitcom about a
Jewish babe who become a nanny for the children of a dashing British millionaire. By the time Drescher deplaned,
she'd convinced the network honcho to give her a weekly show [The Nanny] -- which is now in its fourth season."
[HANSON, p. 160] In another such case, Jewish
journalist Philip Weiss "conspired to get himself seated next to [book publisher] Farrar, Strauss' formidable
[Jewish] boss, Roger Straus, at a dinner party. After three drinks, an emboldened Weiss asked Straus if he would
take a look at his novel. Straus agreed to look, and later agreed to publish [Weiss' novel entitled Cock-a-doodle-do]."
[CRYER, p. 34] "The social and professional scope I have as an American Jew is largely unlimited,"
says Weiss, "... I have been included just about everywhere I have wanted to be. My (largely Jewish) professional
network is well connected and powerful." [original author's parenthesis: WEISS, p. 26] Jewish NBC head Brandon Tartikoff notes that at his grandmother's
death bed she was still asking him to do a TV mini-series based on the book Evergreen, by Belva Plain. "Grandma,"
Tartikoff explained to her, "It's a Jewish story. There are only six million Jews. We're into large audiences ...
After she died, I felt badly that I'd never done it and -- largely for sentimental reasons, I admit -- I commissioned
a script of the book." [TARTIKOFF, p. 29] Evergreen eventually became a regular television program. In 2001, the New York Times started an article about Jewish/Israeli Hollywood mogul Haim Saban like this: "Haim Saban picked up the phone in his office. Leslie Moonves [also Jewish], president of CBS Television, was returning his call. 'Bobbie,' said Mr. Saban, the childrens' television mogul and top Democratic fund-raiser, 'Don't worry, don't worry, I'm not asking for money.' Instead Mr. Saban asked Mr. Moonves to help a singer, who was a family friend, in finding a TV gig." [WEINRAUB, B., 3-4-01, p. 2] In this vein, Jewish Hollywood mogul David Geffen "helped [Jewish fashion mogul] Calvin Klein's daughter, Marci, land a job at Saturday Night Live." [KING, T., 2000, p. 480] (Geffen had helped the head of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, get a job earlier in his career as a writer at a Phyllis Diller TV show). [KING, T., 2000, p. 61] "Soon after the success of Daisy," says Jewish novelist Judith Krantz, about one of her early novels, "Nat Wartels sold Crown to Random House, which was owned by Si Newhouse, one of the richest men in America. On my next trip to New York, this unknown billionaire gave a dinner party to welcome me, inviting only executives from Crown and Random House. He and Bob Bernstein, who was his second-in-command at the time, quizzed me, a total stranger, trying to get a grip exactly who this strange Californian was besides being a successful novelist. 'So where did you go to high school?' Bob began. 'Birch Warthen.' 'My God, did you know my cousin, Alice Bernstein?' 'Well, of course I did, we graduated in the same class,' I answered 'What did you do after college?' Si wanted to know. 'I worked for Herb Mayes at Good House [Keeping]." 'Herb? I've known him all my life. A great man' was Si's response. 'My father was one of his best friends,' I said modestly, 'and Alex is one of my oldest and dearest friends,' I added, knowing full well that Si had dated their daughter, Alex, at one point her life, and that Mitzi Newhouse, his mother, and Grace Mayes were friends. Both men's faces beamed with relief. An absolutely perfect game of Jewish Geography had just been beautifully played and I had been squarely identified as a highly credentialed, super-nice New York Jewish girl, no potentially oddball California exotic." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 303] In 2000, Tom King's The Operator. David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood outlined Hollywood mogul David Geffens' rise to fabulous power via his largely Judeo-centric networking: First Geffen got a job in the mailroom at the William Morris (Jewish-founder) agency. He told the Jewish man who hired him, Howard Portnoy, that he was (Jewish music producer) Phil Spectre's cousin. He also lied and said he had graduated from UCLA. [p. 46-47] Expecting a letter from UCLA to the company to evidence that Geffen was not a graduate, Geffen came in early to the mail room to intercept it. He had his brother, a lawyer, write a bogus UCLA confirmation from his law office instead. [p. 47] Geffen was much like the Hollywood hustler in [Jewish author] Budd Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy Run, "a backstabbing [Jewish] huckster who employed appalling tricks to run to the top in Hollywood." [p. 48] In the mail room, Geffen met "Barry Diller, a Jewish kid from Beverly Hills who years later became one of Geffen's best friends, when the two were among the most powerful moguls in all of Hollywood." [p. 50] At a night club, he "struck up a conversation with Herb Gart, a manager who had recently come to New York with comedian Bill Cosby." [p. 50] "He next set his sights on romancing Nat Letkowitz, the celebrated head of Morris's New York office." [p. 51] "Enlisting Letkowitz's support was a brilliant move. Geffen had realized the value of having a 'rabbi' in life, someone powerful to help him get what he wanted." [p. 52] [Journalist -- and later Hollywood everything -- David Freeman likewise notes this "rabbi" relationship with Marv Seligman, his boss at the New York Post: "Marv was my rabbi at the paper. He had hired and trained me."] [FREEMAN, D., 1992, p. 10] "Geffen worked in the mailroom for six months until "he was stopped by Scott Shukat [also Jewish], who offered him a job as secretary to Ben Griefer [also Jewish], one of the office's most respected television agents ... Brooklyn born and raised in Queens, Shukat ... too, had lied on his employment application at the Morris office, listing his stage name, Scott Logan, Jr. But when he arrived at the office on the first day and saw the executives' names on the company directory in the lobby -- Letkowitz, Kalcheim, Griefer, Weiss, and so on -- he hustled back to the personnel office and told them his given Jewish name." [p. 52-53] [KING, T., 2000] "To cover some of the long-distance calls, Geffen called the local switchboard at CBS and claimed to be Jerry Rubin, a CBS executive he had met." [p. 53] "Geffen began to mentor other secretaries and trainees. Jeff Wald [also Jewish], who supported his petty salary by peddling marijuana in the mailroom, immediately latched onto Geffen." [p. 54] "But by far the most important alliance Geffen made was with Elliot Roberts [also Jewish], a dope smoking clown who had grown up across the street from Wald. In the years to come, Roberts hitched his star to Geffen's and played a critically important role in David's life ... Born Elliot Rabinowitz ... he was not as swift as Geffen, [but] he was nevertheless a hustler." [p. 54] "Nat Lefkowitz placated Ben Griefer [also Jewish] by giving him a new secretary and then promoting Geffen to assistant to a crusty agent named Harry Kalcheim [also Jewish]." [p. 59] "With Marty Litke [also Jewish], also now a pal, Geffen signed Carmen Matthews ... Nat Lefkowitz soon promoted [Geffen] to agent." [p. 60] "At the meetings, Geffen often prattled on about a fellow he had met at the University of Texas named Ronny Pearlman [also Jewish], who he claimed would be the hottest writer the TV business had ever seen. He also talked up a hippie named Lorne Michaels [also Jewish, and later head of Saturday Night Live] and soon got him a gig writing for a situation comedy." [p. 61] "Geffen first turned to Herb Gart [also Jewish] .. who was now handling a group called the Youngbloods." [p. 66] Geffen got a hot stock tip "at a lawyer's office" about "Allen Klein [also Jewish], the manager of the Rolling Stones who was going to take over Cameo-Parkway Records." [p. 67] "Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Barry Diller [also Jewish] had quit the Morris office to become assistant to Leonard Goldberg, the head of West Coast programming at ABC ... Before long, Diller was running the department by himself." [p. 68] "Laura Nigro [Nyro] was born in the Bronx in 1947, the daughter of a Jewish mother and an Italian-Catholic father ... [She was managed by] Artie Mogul [also Jewish]l, a hustler who had once signed Bob Dylan [of course also Jewish] to an early publishing deal . [p. 73] "He did not interfere with her songs, but he did insist that she change her name, fearing people might pronounce it 'Negro.'" [p. 73] "Geffen next plotted to make a new label deal for his client. He went to see Jerry Schoenbaum [also Jewish], the head of Verve-Folkways." [p. 80] "CBS Records head Clive Davis [also Jewish] was one of the slickest and most intimidating figures in the business ... Geffen, meanwhile, had gotten all the use he could squeeze out of Nat Lefkowitz and was searching for a more powerful rabbi." [p. 81] "Clive Davis, meanwhile, had developed an extraordinary affection for David Geffen." [p. 86] In 1968, the "rivals of William Morris began to court [Geffen]. The Ashley Famous Agency [also Jewish-founded] ... now badly wanted him." [p. 87] "[Nat] Lefkowitz also may not have wanted to get in a bidding war with Ashley Famous in part because Ted Ashley was his nephew." [p. 88] "In late 1967, Ashley sold his agency for thirteen million dollars to Kinney Service ... Kinney was run by the owner's son-in-law" Steve Ross [also Jewish], "later ... chairman of Warner Communications. Ross was the man directly responsible for the transactions that were to make Geffen a billionaire." [p. 88] "Once again displaying indomitable guts, Geffen set his sights on Albert Grossman [also Jewish], the biggest gun in the management business." [p. 89] Geffen "got on the phone, found [Todd] Schiffman [also Jewish] at home in Los Angeles, and began selling him on the notion that he ought to quit APA and join Ashley Famous." [p. 90] "But the real clincher for Schiffman was that he, like Geffen, had a shady artist-management operation on the side." [p. 91] "Geffen met the man with home he would develop a decades-long friendship, bonded in a love that many would term brotherly" -- Sandy Gallin [also Jewish]. [p. 92] Gallin shot to stardom after booking the Beatles for their legendary 1964 debut on The Ed Sullivan Show." [p. 93] "The only person Geffen knew at Atlantic Records was Jerry Wexler [also Jewish], Atlantic's president." [p. 106] "The next day, Geffen visited his friend Lous Adler [also Jewish]." [p. 120] Freddie Fields [also Jewish] "was the most powerful motion-picture agent in the business. Geffen thought that he might be able to use a connection to fields as a springboard to establishing himself as a power in movies as well as music." [p. 127] "At CMA, Geffen was in Field's office every day, ushered in by Field's assistant, a young man named Jeff Berg [also Jewish], who years later became the chairman of the agency (known then as ICM)." [p. 129] When Geffen first met David Begelman [also Jewish], who a few years later became known as one of Hollywood's most notorious felons, he looked him in the eye and said, 'You know, what I admire most about you is your ability to lie with such grace.'" [p. 129] Geffen "finangled relationships with Robert Evans [also Jewish], the president of production at Paramount Pictures, and David Picker [also Jewish] the head of United Artists." [p. 129]
"It has long been a standing joke in LA,"
says English journalist William Cash, "that the way to get on is to convert to Judaism. Simon Kelton, an Eton-and
Oxford-educated screenwriter friend with whom I used to share a house, and who was shortlisted for the Samuel Goldwyn
film-writing award, always stressed his Jewish 'ancestry' whenever he gets a chance in LA; something few had heard
about before." [CASH, p. 29] Non-Jew Jon Peters, a
seventh grade dropout, [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 95] eventually rose from co-ownership of a hairdresser shop to become
co-head of a Columbia division. It didn't hurt his possibilities that when he started out, he shared
the hair business with a Jewish friend, Paul Cantor. Nor did it hurt his Hollywood career that he eventually was doing
Barbara Streisand's hair, and that he later became her live-in lover. [GRIFFIN/MASTERS, p. 23, 102, et al]
Jewish film producer Julia Phillips, early in her Hollywood career, notes the first time she met Streisand at
her home: "She stares at me a lot. I make sure to let her know I'm Jewish like the time I met [my husband]
Michael's grandmother, and that pleases her." [PHILLIPS, J., p. 90]
Russian-born French film director Roger Vadim (Jewish?) -- famed for romances with Brigette Bardot, Catherine
Deneuve, and Jane Fonda -- notes the beginning of his movie career: "All I needed was opportunity
and luck. Opportunity came in the form of Raoul Levy.... a Belgian of Russian origin." [VADIM, p. 78] Levy,
notes actor Tony Randall, "made many of Brigette Bardot's films, starting with her first, And God Created Woman."
[RANDALL, T., 1989, p. 89] Famed French film director
Francois Truffaut? "His father had disappeared in 1931 after impregnating his mother." A hired detective discovered
that Truffaut's father was "the Bayonne-born Jew, Roland Levy." And as the Jewish Bulletin of Northern
California notes: "According to the
authors of a new biography on the filmmaker, Truffaut was relieved [that his father was Jewish] 'because it confirmed he
was not like everyone
else. He was different. He was not a child like
anyone else and perhaps that was because he was Jewish child... [Truffaut] kept his Jewish origins a secret from all but
his ex-wife Madeleine
Morgenstern; Helen Scott, the head of the public relations for the French Film Office in New York; and film producers Pierre
Braumberger and Ilya
Lopert -- just a few of the Jews he surrounded
himself with.'" Truffaut's "long time
Jewish assistant" was Suzanne Schiffman. He was also a member of Fonds de Solidarite avec Israel (the
Israel Solidarity Fund). [GELENTER, T., 4-23-99, p. 35A]
How prominent are Jews in Hollywood? Superstar Judy Garland's road to Hollywood stardom was like many others.
Although not Jewish, her big break in Hollywood was provided by a Jewish friend of her parents, Marc Rabwin. He contacted
a Jewish acquaintance, Joseph Mankiewicz, a prominent screenwriter, who personally asked an audition for her from
Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Garland's agent at the time, Al Rosen,
also Jewish, "claimed credit" for setting up a second audition for his client at the powerful studio where
the man she "decided to see was Sam Katz, a new arrival to the studio." [SHIPMAN, D., 1993, p. 42-44, 51] Like
many Hollywood stars, Garland's eventual agent was the prominent Charles Feldman, also Jewish. So was her doctor,
Lee Siegel. Garland's first husband was also Jewish -- bandleader Artie Shaw. Her second husband was a Jewish musician,
David Rose. (Garland's sister, Suzi, also married a Jewish musician, Lee Cahn. [SHIPMAN, D., 1993, p. 104, 108]) Judy
Garland's fourth husband was her business manager, Sid Luft, also Jewish. A man he hired, Harry Rubin, "a former
hoodlum from Brooklyn," [SHIPMAN, p. 304, 352] also had a series of affairs with the famous actress/singer. One
of Garland's many Jewish psychotherapists, Leonard Krauss, called Rubin "her one island of [emotional] safety."
[SHIPMAN, D., p. 353] When Garland divorced Luft, her divorce lawyer, Jerry Geisler, was also Jewish. Garland also had
a variety of other marriages and other affairs. Included among them was romantic engagements with her lawyer Gregory
Bautzer. (Another of her lawyers was Irving Erdheim). Bautzer was "the unofficial California law partner"
of mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, also Jewish. [MCDOUGAL, p. 327] The man Garland declared in later life to have been "the
only one she ever loved," was also the aforementioned Joe Mankiewicz. [SHIPMAN, D., 1993, p. ix]
Late in her career, Garland also believed that
she had been swindled by as much as $300,000 by a Jewish agent, David Begelman. Both Begelman's wife and Garland's husband
believed he too had a secret affair with the famous actress. [SHIPMAN, D. p. 448] Aside from numerous Jewish producers
and directors in her life, others in Garland's business world included Arthur Freed, MGM lyricist,
described by one chronicler as "a vulgar, ambitious, sentimental, reactionary, ruthless, insensitive, and ill-educated
man." [SHIPMAN, D., 1993, p. 53] Garland's daughter Liza (Minelli) was even named after
a song by Jewish songwriters Ira Gershwin and Gus Kahn. [SHIPMAN, D. p. 190] Daughter Lorna Moon was named after a character
created by Jewish playwright Clifford Odets, [SHIPMAN, D., p. 299] the character played by Odet's real-life tragic
paramour, Frances Farmer, in Golden Boy. Lana
Turner? The legend that she was "discovered" by Hollywood at Schwab's pharmacy was created by a Jewish
columnist, Sidney Skolsky. [TURNER, L., 1982, p. 23] Her first agent, when she was 15, was Zeppo Marx, who had dropped
out of the Marx Brothers comedy group to concentrate on business ends of Hollywood. In later years her agent was
Stan Kamen. [TURNER, L., 1982, p. 28-29, 283] As a teenage actress, the first man Turner ever had sex with was Jewish
Hollywood lawyer Greg Bautzer. "I wasn't surprised at all," she wrote in 1982, "when I recently read
that he is now the power behind the throne at MGM." [TURNER, L., 1982, p. 43] Turner's next lover
was Jewish bandleader Artie Shaw (Arshawasky), who she married in Las Vegas at age 19. [TURNER, L., 1982, p. 50]
(This was the first of seven marriages). After having sex with Shaw after the marriage, Turner writes that "I experienced
nothing but a question -- what am I doing underneath this man? I don't even know him." Others actresses at
the same time with emotional investments in Shaw included Judy Garland and Betty Grable. [TURNER, L., 1982, p. 53] "By
the third day of our marriage," notes Turner, "I knew I was in trouble, but how could I get out of it?"
[TURNER, L., 1982, p. 55] Within the year she had divorced him and had an abortion of his child. Turner's last husband
(for six months) was scam artist and nightclub hypnotist Ronald Dante (Peller). Dante skipped out of the marriage
after six months, trying to swindle Turner out of $35,000. [TURNER, L., 1982, p. 291] (Dante surfaced publicly again
in 2000, heading a fraudulent business system called the Permanetics Institute, and became a fugitive when sentenced
to 67 months in prison). Non-Jewish actress Betty Davis? "Her role in [Jewish film director William] Wyler's movie," notes Reuters, "was one of Davis' many trademark performances. She always maintained that 'Jezebel' made her a box-office star. She also had an affair with Wyler. Though Davis would have many Hollywood affairs, some with her other directors, Davis later maintained that Wyler was the love of her life." [REUTERS, 4-6-01]
TV star Mary Tyler Moore became famous on the Dick Van Dyke Show (produced by Carl Reiner and Sheldon
Leonard). The heads of her production company, MTM Enterprises, were Arthur Price and Mel Blumenthal. In recent years
she moved in with Robert Levine, also Jewish, a cardiologist she met in a Los Angeles hospital. Soon thereafter
they took a vacation to Israel, where he had nearly 100 relatives. [MOORE, M., p. 258] Touring the Jewish state, she
says,
"Nothing compared to the effect I felt at
visiting The [Jewish Wailing]
Wall, with its millions of prayers and wishes written on small pieces of
paper that were tucked into crevices and
cracks by all who had come
there throughout the ages. It was an Orthodox tradition that men and
women visit separately, so I was alone and
without a prayer, but I did
put my forehead against the Wall and embraced with outstretched arms
all the pleas hidden there. When Robert and
I were reunited some
distance from it, we both had tears in our eyes." [MOORE, M., p. 258-
260]
This emotional scene, she states, soon led to a Jewish marriage. "My [Christian] family," she writes,
"was more accepting of the impending marriage
than Robert's was
at first. Marion [Robert's mother], who was about to become my mother-in-law, was only five years older than I. She confided
to Robert
that as the director of a family mental-health agency, it might appear that she had failed personally as a parental counselor. Irving
[the groom's father,
who was Director of the Institute on American
Pluralism of the American Jewish Committee] was obliged to be a little more receptive because of his long involvement with
and knowledge
of cultural pluralism." [MOORE, M., p. 261] Moore
first heard the Yiddish word shiksa with her new husband at a party. It "is taken," she says,
"almost always, as an affectionate term for a non-Jewish woman." [MOORE, M., p. 255] "Suicide blonde" starlet Gloria Grahame attained fame in
the early 1950s. Her initial screen test as MGM was conducted by Harry Rapf and J. Robert Rubin.
She was romantically involved with film producer Stanley Rubin, later marrying Cy Howard (originally Seymour Horowitz).
"Cy's Jewishness," notes Vincent Curcio, "was a very important issue to him, and as time went on it
was to weigh very heavily on Gloria." [CURCIO, 1989, p. 186]
"Platinum Blonde" superstar Jean Harlow was, early in her acting career, involved with Jewish mobster
Abner "Longie" Zwillman. Harlow's mother, notes David Stenn, "knew [Zwillman] could help her daughter's
career, which he proved by securing a two-picture deal for Harlow with Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures."
[STENN, D., 1993, p. 61] Harlow eventually married MGM executive Paul Bern (born Paul Levy), a
close friend of top Jewish MGM executive Irving Thalberg. "Paul Bern fell in love with Jean Harlow,"
says Samuel Marx, "and got her the part that made her a star [a film called Red-Headed Woman]."
[MARX, S., 1990, caption; photo section] Bern, while marrying America's silver screen sex symbol, was alleged
to have been impotent. He was also, says Harlow biographer David Stenn, "interested in abnormalities and complexes,
inhibitions, perversions, suicide and death." [STENN, D., 1993, p. 92] Bern was found dead at home, naked,
with a gun at hand. His death, ruled a suicide, has always been controversial. Harlow later married Hal Rosson. Another
Jewish beau late in Harlow's short life was Donald Friede, one of the owners of the Boni & Liveright
publishing firm. [STENN, D., 1993, p. 105-134, 160, 216]
Jewish bandleader Barney Rapp (Rappaport) "gave Doris [Day] her start as a singer." [HOTCHNER,
1976, p. photo] Al Levy was Day's agent. She married her Jewish manager, Marty Melcher. When
Melcher died in 1968, "he left his widow nearly half a million dollars in debt. His business partner, lawyer
Jerry Rosenthal, mismanaged Day's assets -- estimated at $20 million -- down to nothing." [MCDOUGAL, p 251] (Among
others Rosenthal hastened towards financial ruin was actor Van Johnson, "especially [via] a shelter that was
supposed to decrease his tax bill. It was completely bogus.") [WYNN, N., 1990, p. 187] Sam Weiss, the head of Warners
music, noted that "the fact was that the only thing Marty loved was money. He loved Patty's money
[Melcher was first married to Patty Andrews of the popular singing trio, the Andrews Sisters] until Doris's money came
along and then, because there was more of it, he loved Doris's money more." [HOTCHNER, 1976, p. 126] Day successfully
sued Rosenthal; the presiding judge noted Rosenthal's "pattern of kickbacks and rebates disguised as attorney fees,
and the implication of his clients thereby in tax fraud." [HOTCHNER, 1976, p. 281]
Actress Debbie Reynolds married Harry Karl -- they were introduced by omnipresent Jewish mob lawyer Sidney
Korshak. [MCDOUGAL, p. 326] Reynolds once was also married to Jewish singer Eddie Fisher. Fisher left Reynolds to court
superstar actress Elizabeth Taylor -- eventually Fisher became Taylor's fourth husband. Taylor converted to Judaism
during this marriage, in 1959. (Her Hebrew name was Elisheba Rachel). Although she was never known by her husband
to have attended a Jewish religious service, she promised to invest $100,000 in Israel Bonds. [HEYMANN, C.D., 1995, p.
195] Taylor's prior husband, Mike Todd, was a Hollywood film producer and was also Jewish. He, in turn, was formerly
married to actress Joan Blondell. Todd's other "conquests," says C. David Heymann, "included Marlene Dietrich,
Gypsy Rose Lee, and Marilyn Monroe ... Lawsuits, civil litigations, and bankruptcy court peppered Todd's career.
The consummate con man, he survived (even thrived) by skirting the edge ... [HEYMANN, C.D., p. 151] ...
Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, Todd made an entire set of tape recordings of their lovemaking sessions and frequently presented
the tapes as mementos to friends and business associates ... [HEYMANN, C.D., p. 153]
Taylor's uncle Howard, says C. David Heymann, "couldn't understand why Elizabeth would become involved
with so many Jewish men." [HEYMANN, C.D. p. 195] These also included, during her marriage with Eddie Fisher, and
"on-again off-again romance with another man" -- Max Lerner, a professor at Brandeis University who was
decades older than her. Patricia Seaton, the widow of Peter Lawford, recalls that "I knew Max when he would hang
out at the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles. He had his own room there and would lure the young Playboy bunnies into
his web by promising to read poetry to them. He pulled the same routine on me, and to my amazement it worked." [HEYMANN,
C.D., p. 228] The Jewish presence in Elizabeth
Taylor's life, like so many in the Hollywood world in the rise to stardom, was important. "Taylor's emergence as
a child star ... was largely the result of one man's intention." [HEYMANN, 1995, p. 36-37]
This man was Samuel Marx, a producer at MGM, also Jewish. The director of the film that catapulted her
to fame, National Velvet, was also Jewish: Fred Zinnemann. Taylor's agent in her glory years was Jules
Goldstone. Her partner in the Elizabeth Taylor Theatre Company was also Jewish, Zev Bufman.
Marlon Brando? Agent: Jay Kantor. When the future movie star moved to New York to begin an acting career,
he began taking courses at the Jewish-dominated New York School for Social Research and was subsumed by a Jewish environment.
"I was largely raised by these Jews," he says, "I lived in a world of Jews. They were my teachers;
they were my employers. They were my friends ... As well as [Jewish] academics and scholars from Eastern Europe, Jewish
girls, most of whom were more educated, sophisticated and experienced in the ways of the world than I was, were
my teachers in those early days in New York." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 72, 74] Brando's profoundly influential
"method acting" acting teacher was Jewish, Stella Adler, who he credits with having enormous influence
in his personal life; he even had a "relationship ... off an on, for many years" with Adler's daughter Ellen.
[BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 98-99] Adler also secured Brando his first important part in a play. [BRANDO/LINDSEY,
1994, p. 101] Early in his career, Brando
also took an important role in a play called A Flag Is Born, written by avid Zionist Ben Hecht and directed
by Stella Adler's brother, Luther: both Jewish. As Brando notes, "it was essentially a piece of political propaganda
advocating the creation of the state of Israel ... Everyone in A Flag Is Born was Jewish except me ... I did
not know then that Jewish terrorists were indiscriminately killing Arabs and making refugees out of them in order
to take their land ... The play, as well as my friendship with the Adlers, helped make me a zealous advocate for
Israel and later a kind of traveling salesman for it." Brando was then further exploited by his Jewish cohorts;
he began giving propaganda speeches for a Zionist organization, The American League for a Free Palestine.
Influenced by Hitler's mass murder of Jews and the world view of the many Jews around him, Brando even contributed money
himself to the Zionist Irgun organization, a terrorist group. Noting his avidly pro-Israel political
activities, the movie star wrote to his parents, saying, "I'm really stimulated more than I've ever been."
[BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 107-111] Eventually
Brando learned more about Zionism and his politics changed. "Now," he said in 1994, "I understand
much more about the complexity of the situation than I did then ... [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 111]
... I sided with Jewish terrorists without acknowledging that they were killing innocent Palestinians in their effort
to create the state of Israel ... [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 231] ... One of the strangest government policies is that
largely because of the political influence of Jewish interests, our country has invested billions of dollars and
many American lives to help Israel reclaim land that they say their ancestors occupied three thousand years ago."
[BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 388] This kind of devotion
by non-Jews in the entertainment world to Jewish causes was echoed by silent screen star Mary Pickford, who was catapulted
to fame by Jewish mogul Adolph Zukor. Originally, Pickford held contempt for a number of the Jews she knew and was
highly critical of them. "Behind his back," says Eileen Whitfield,
"Pickford called Goldwyn 'Shylock.' And to [her husband Douglas]
Fairbanks, whose grandfather had been Jewish,
Mary sometimes said,
'That's the Jew in you.' But she topped these comments in the presence
of actress Carol Myers, to whom she explained
that the Jews had invited
Hitler's persecution. Forgetting that Myers was a rabbi's daughter...,
Pickford chirped that avaricious Jews had
snapped up German property at
bargain prices after World War I. She added that a syndicate of Jews would repeat the conspiracy after World War II."
[WHITFIELD, E.,
1997, p. 333] Later, however, leaning
on her universalistic Christian religious values, and troubled by increased reports of Nazi attacks
against Jews, Pickford repented. Henceforth, "for years she tried to compensate [for her earlier feelings]
by giving till it hurt to Jewish causes. Her greatest triumph was the Mary Pickford Building at L.A.'s Jewish Home for
the Aged, to which she became a devoted patron." [WHITFIELD, E., 1997, p. 333] (Another example of such well-meaning
non-Jewish Hollywood support for Jewish causes is the case of Jon Voigt and his activism for the Orthodox Chabad Lubavitch
movement. As Howard Jacobson notes about the actor: "Jon Voigt would seem to have a special relationship with
Chabad Lubavitch. He speaks of 'whirlwinds of knowledge' ... 'I'm a firm believer,' Jon Voigt goes on, 'in this source
of energy that keeps the just justly.'" [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 100] One presumes that, like so many, the well-meaning
non-Jewish Voigt has not done his homework about the racist teachings of this Orthodox organization. Click these
three links for earlier discussions about Chabad: First, Second, Third. (Meanwhile, people like former NBC producer Molly Resnick, raised in Israel, has returned to her Jewish roots
via alleigiance to Chabad. She eventually beame a "proud Jew, instead of the kind of Jew who wanted to be a WASP,"
and founded Mothers Against Teaching Children to Kill and Hate, an organization against the content of
Palestinian school textbooks). [ESKENAZI, J., 5-11-01]
Comedian John Belushi's Hollywood world included the usual swirl of Jewish lawyers, agents, and film and
TV people: Lorne Michaels, head of Saturday Night Live; Belushi's personal manager Bernie Brillstein, his assistant
Joel Briskin; movie producer Robert Weiss; "physician and psychiatrist" Bennett Braun, musician and cocaine
supplier Richard Gerstein, [WOODWARD, p. 344] filmmaker and drug addict Gary Weis, among others. The public relations
firm of Solters, Roskin and Friedman was hired, "as with many of their clients, ... to keep
[Belushi's] name out of the news, not in it." [WOODWARD, 1984, p. 377] Belushi degenerated into
a hopeless drug addict and developed a reputation for unreliability, eventually dying of a heroin overdose.
TV talk show host Jay Leno? His manager is Helen Kushnik,
later the Executive Producer of Leno's TV show. She and her husband Jerrold Kushnik (a Hollywood lawyer) have been
members of Temple Emmanuel in Beverly Hills. Leno's lawyer? Ron Berg. [CARTER, B., 1994, p. 79, 104-106, 62]
Tough-guy John Wayne started out in Hollywood at Harry
Cohn's Columbia Studios, moved to Nat Levine's Mascot Pictures, and then was under
contract to Sidney Rogell and Leon Schlesinger. [ROBERTS/OLSON, 1995, p. 99, 102, 112] Likewise, Gene Autry got
his start at Levine's film company. [TUSKA, J., 1982, p. 156] Director Orson Welles? "A curious member of Welles'
entourage," says Barbara Leaming, "[was] his mentor and surrogate father, Dr. Maurice 'Dadda' Bernstein."
[LEAMING, B., 1989, p. 92] "Bernstein, "notes Charles Higham, Welles' biographer, "was greedy and unscrupulous;
he used, married, and discarded Mina Elman, sister of the violin virtuoso Mischa Elman, and later equally misused
the Chicago opera star Edith Mason, drawing her into a menage a trois with her former husband. Later Dr. Bernstein
tried to milk Welles of every possible cent when Welles achieved fame." The index in Higham's volume lists ten pages
under the heading: "Bernstein-- money grubbing antics of." Bernstein also had an affair with Welles' mother. [HIGHAM,
C., 1985, p. 6, 350, 38-39] Welle's first acting role was as a "brutally anti-Semitic, bullying nobleman" in
the Irish play Jew Suss. [HIGHAM, C., 1985, p. 57] Jackie Gleason's Jewish circle? His agents were "superagent" Sam Cohn [HENRY, W., 1992, p. 10, 66] and Herb Siegel [p. 225] Meeting CBS chief Joseph Cates in 1952, his "agents and managers" included "Herb Rosenthal and Herb's assistant Jerry Katz." The writers for his smash 1950s TV series The Honeymooners were Marvin Marx ("Gleason's leading writer for a couple of decades"),Walter Stone, Leonard Stern, and Sid Zelinka. [p. 169] Coleman Jacoby was the "creator of most of the characters Gleason played for two decades of network television." [p. 10] Of particular note too was a "tall, fat, big-nosed, craggy-faced, homely Jewish man called Toots Shor ... [p. 67] For at least a decade and a half, from the early forties through the late fifties, [Gleason] was to center his life on a ceaseless effort to tease, amuse, trick, top and otherwise entertain Toots Shor. He spent more cumulative time with Toots than any of his wives or mistresses." [p. 68] As Gleason's biographer William Henry III notes about Shor: "No social history of Manhattan would be complete without mention of Shor, the barkeep-turned-celebrity who was described by The New Yorker in a November 1950 profile (adulatory at such lenght that it ran in three installments) as 'the burly, impudent, hard-working, high-spirited, sentimental proprieter of the restaurant at 51 West 51st Street that bears his name' ... Shor's was not for the literati, the left-leaning or, naturally, the ill-to-do. It was not for the cafe of society of tuxedoed gentlemen and gilded debutantes. Rather, Shor's was for saloon society, the self-confident men of attainment in sports and journalism and entertainment, plus their hangers-on, admirers, and gawkers ... Toot's was a world of celebrities, commingling with all sorts of people whose common bond was being famous ... Just as being 'mentioned in [Jewish columnist Walter] Winchell' was a vital hallmark of this status, so was being moved to the front of the inevitable waiting line at Shor's ... Just as important to Shor's reputation were the newspaper columnists, most of them locally based but many of them nationally syndicated ... These journalistic power brokers worked the tables at Shor's to get glittering celebrity items for their columns, often accumulating a whole day's worth of material in the course of lunch. The celebrities, in turn, worked the tables at Shor's to promote their careers ... Toots was regarded as a crude but accurate barometer of how one's career ws going ... The warmer his greeting, the faster one was rising; the more perfunctory the handshake, the quicker one's impending fall." [HENRY, W., 1992, p. 68] Danny Thomas, the Arab/Lebanese-born comedian famous for the long-running TV series Make Room for Daddy, was -- like most -- inundated by Jewish Hollywood. He started his career at Harry Eagle's nightclub in Chicago. His first agent was Leo Salkin, who passed him up to super-agent Abe Lastfogel (Thomas called him "Uncle Abe" all his life), [THOMAS, D., 1991, p. 111] the head of the William Morris Agency. Thomas describes his first performance for Lastfogel: "When I finished, I joined the William Morris group at their table. Mr. Lastfogel was deep in thought. Everybody was waiting for him to speak. Finally, his wife, Frances, broke the ice. She said, 'You've sure got a lot of talent for a Lebanese from Toledo. Are you sure you're not a Jew from New York?" Everyone laughed." [THOMAS, D., 1991, p. 110] Thomas (who was often mistaken for being Jewish) notes his first stand-up comedy gig in Chicago: "Sensing the makeup of the audience, I told a lot of my Yiddish stories, starting with my classics about Mrs. Feldman. I didn't know it at the time, but in the audience there was a wealthy diamond appraiser, Max Finkelman, who was staying at the nearby Edgewater Beach Hotel and had stopped by with his wife for a cold beer on that warm night. This man became my biggest booster. There were two big Jewish private clubs in Chicago, the Covenant and the Standard. The diamond appraiser spread the word around these two clubs, and people soon came flocking to see 'this great neew Yiddish comic.'" I never said I was or wasn't Jewish." [THOMAS, D., 1991, p. 86-87] Jewish comedian Fanny Brice gave him his first radio break. Three prominent Jewish movie moguls (Louis Mayer, Harry Cohn, and Jack Warner) offered him a future in the movies if he had his large nose changed with plastic surgery. [p. 153-157] He declined each time, but MGM's first film offer cast him as a Jewish cantor. [p. 155] At Warner Brothers, his first movie role was to star in a screen biography of Jewish songwriter Gus Kahn (producer: Lou Edelman). [p. 158] He next starred in a remake of the classic Jewish-themed movie The Jazz Singer. [p. 159] Thomas is known for building the St. Jude Catholic hospital. The only people Thomas mentions in his biography on the St. Jude Foundation of California were Lastfogel as president, fellow-Jew Morris Stoller (another executive at William Morris) as treasurer, and Democratic Party activist Paul Ziffen (also Jewish) "the attorney who got us our tax exemption." [p. 171] The script writer who wrote the pilot for Make Room for Daddy was Mel Shavelson. [p. 186] Other writers for the series included Danny Simon, Bob Schiller, Bob Weiskopf, Frank Tarloff, and Mac Benoff. [p. 210-211] The director was first Bill Asher, and later Sheldon Leonard, who became Thomas's co-partner on many future projects. These projects included successful TV series like the Dick Van Dyke Show, The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, and others. "The man who deserves most of the credit," writes Thomas, "for running the Empire (we frequently had three shows in the Top Ten) was the indefatigable Sheldon Leonard." [THOMAS, D., p. 218] Moving along in the show busines world, there is Joseph E. Levine. "I built a helluva lot of people -- made them stars," he declared, "Sophia Loren -- I won her the Academy Award for Two Women, promoted the shit out of her within the industry, and she didn't even mention me in her book. And don't forget [Jewish actor] Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. I made a helluva lot of directors too. I hired [Jewish director] Mike Nichols the first one -- won him an Oscar for best director, The Graduate. I hired [Jewish director] Mel Brooks the first one -- on The Producers. Yeah, it was his first picture." ARONSON, S., 1983, p. 194] Among actress Gloria Swanson's marriages was one to Herbert Somborn, a Jewish film executive. [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 279] After Dezi Arnaz, Lucille Ball married Gary Morton (born Morton Goldaper) in 1961, a comic and film producer. Husband of the famous redhead for the rest of her life, Morton became head of Lucille Ball Productions. [AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 4-1-99, p. B3] Late in her life, actress Rita Hayworth developed Alzheimer's disease. Yet "even at this point there was a man in Rita's life, Kim Novak's former beau, Mac Krim, who regularly squired her about town and to certain of her public appearances." [LEAMING, B., 1989, p. 356] In once-prominent Hollywood actress June Allyson's autobiography, she dedicates the book to her husband, two children, and her manager Jerry Cohn. [ALYSON, J., 1982, DEDICATION PAGE] (Allyson, who was once thinking about giving up her Hollywood ambitions, credits MGM producer Joe Pasternak with launching/saving her movie career, interceding with MGM head Louis B. Mayer on her behalf). [ALLYSON, J., 1982, p. 36]. Even "top supermodel" Cindy Crawford has a Jewish husband. When she was honored with an award by a women's division of Yehisva University, a number of rabbis began complaining that, "as a gentile married to a Jew, Ms. Crawford sends an inappropriate message to a Jewish community that is beleaguered by intermarriage." [FORWARD, 5-5-2000, p. 1] The incestuous Jewish world
of power in Hollywood may also be noted in the Jewish team of Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, who have been influential
in a variety of Hollywood projects since the late 1960s. Schneider got his start in his father's Screen
Gems company, the television wing of Columbia pictures, rising to become treasurer
of the company. The two men later formed a firm called BBS which was influential in the creation
a number of hit "counterculture" films like the aforementioned Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces,
among others. Independent filmmaker Jim McBride noted that at BBS, "the truth is, they were
very schizophrenic. We used to call them 'the Hollywood Sperm,' because they were all children of successful Hollywood
people. They had beards, but in other ways, they didn't seem at all that different." [BISKIND, p. 77]
Another who knew them, Harry Gittes (also Jewish), noted that the BBS "people were the meanest
people I ever met in my life, brutal, inhumane inflicted. Respect and loyalty, that was the way BBS operated.
They had a gangster mentality. This was the Jewish, Bugsy Siegel-type of hipness ... These were the coldest, toughest
Jews I'd ever met in my life to another Jew!" [BISKIND, p. 117]
Famed television talk show host Larry (Zeiger) King's first "benefactor" was Lou Wolfson, "a great
philanthropist in the Jewish community" who once "controlled a $400 million industrial empire and was
known as 'the great raider' because of his penchant for taking over corporations." [KING, p. 11] "Now, one
may wonder," wrote King, "as I did not, why this virtual stranger suddenly wanted to become my benefactor
and career advisor. To this day I don't know." [KING, p. 13] (Wolfson eventually went to prison for stock crimes.
Jewish Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas was also hit by Wolfson's wake, resigning "from the Court in disgrace"
when it was learned he was a $20,000 a year advisor for the "Wolfson Foundation." [KING, p. 197] King himself
was sued by Wolfson in 1972, accused of stealing $5,000; the charge against him was eventually dismissed because
"the statute of limitations had run out." [KING, p. 29] A later wealthy benefactor for King's career was Ed
Gordon.
Being Jewish means nothing in the behind-the-scenes
world of Hollywood? The chummy network is so strong that lead defense lawyer, Robert Shapiro, in O.J. Simpson's trial
for murder, seriously entertained the idea that he could influence potential jurors by requesting a favor from some
Hollywood friends. The idea was to warm the local public up to the idea that O.J. Simpson had been set up by racist
policemen. "I know people in the TV industry," he remarked to his staff, "I'll talk to them about playing
movies that show people being framed by the police. Perhaps Twelve Angry Men." [SCHILLER/WILLWERTH,
p. 161]
The eventual president of production at Columbia
Studios, Dawn Steel (she replaced another Jewish executive, David Puttnam, and her boss was Jewish mogul
Victor Kaufman, the CEO of Columbia Pictures Entertainment), wrote about her path towards becoming the
second woman to head a major Hollywood studio. ([Paula Weinstein had a similar post at about the same time at United
Artists. Sherry Lansing, another Jew, was the first woman to get such a high position. Lansing started out as
a math teacher in Watts while she looked for acting jobs. Within ten years of getting a $5 an hour script reviewing
job, in 1980 she was named -- at the age of 35 -- to be the head of Twentieth Century Fox. "Quite
honestly," she says, "I think I've been accused of sleeping with every man I've ever worked for. Every
single man: married, unmarried, gay, whatever." One verifiable such connection, early in her career, was Jewish
executive Dan Melnick. [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 90-91] Lansing eventually married Jewish movie director William
Friedkin, of "The Exorcist" fame. [Earlier husband: Michael Brownstein]. After her first big hit, Fatal
Attraction, she turned to do The Accused, a film about a woman who gets gang raped in a bar. Members
of the Portuguese-American community protested that the story defamed their community).
Dawn Steel's own road to power is illustrative. "Steel's defining characteristic was unapologetic and
ambitious," says Rachel Abramowitz, "a consuming desire to make it." Steel "drank with the best of
them [male Hollywood executives]. She fucked with the best of them. She told the same bawdy stories," says her "close
friend" Howard Rosenman. [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 187, 195] In Steel's autobiography, she
notes that she got her start in the media as the head of merchandizing at Penthouse. Her
first personal entrepreneurial venture was a mail order business selling amaryllis plants as "penis plants."
She ran a simple ad in men's magazines across the country, announcing "Grow Your Own Penis. All It Takes Is $6.98
and a Lot of Love." Costing her thirty cents apiece, Steel sold 100,000 of them. [STEEL, p. 68] Her next money-making
venture was to mass produce and sell toilet paper with the Gucci imprint. Eventually she was dating actor Richard
Gere, highlighted by a visit with him to Plato's Retreat, a nude swinger club in Manhattan where her brother worked as
a lifeguard. Steel's move up the movie
world was expedited by a self-described "connection" to Jewish media mogul Jeffrey Katzenburg. "He was
one of the best friends of Sid Davidoff," she notes, "my lawyer in the Gucci [toilet paper] affair." [STEEL,
p. 106] Jewish mogul Michael Eisner [later head of Disney, where Steel landed later producing work] hired her virtually
off the street to be a major movie executive: "You're
vice president of production in Features. Congratulations." [Eisner said]
"I don't know anything about movies,"
I told him. "Neither
does anybody else. Goodbye, good luck, and break a leg." [STEEL, p. 110]
As Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Matthews later wrote: "Marketing designer toilet paper seems
as good a background for success in Hollywood as anything else." [SLOMAN, p. 14] Steel quickly
built a reputation as "Hell on Hells" and the "Queen of Mean"; California magazine put her
on one of its covers in 1984 as one of the state's worst bosses to work under.
When Steel [whose father was a professional bodybuilder who changed his last name from Spielberg] married
a fellow movie industry Jew, Chuck Roven, "the main obstacle was Chuck's mother, Blanca ... Somehow she got it into
her head that, of all things, I was not Jewish. She was convinced I was pretending, to catch her son. I was enraged
... Blanca tracked down my family." [STEEL, p. 191] (An earlier Steel husband was Ronald Rothstein). [ABRAMOWITZ,
R., 2000, p. 190] Opportunities have been
obviously improving for Jewish women in Hollywood in more recent times. Paula Hyman and Deborah Moore noted that:
"Since the 1990s there seems to be a deluge of Jewish
women behind the
[Hollywood] scenes. The following list, which is by no means complete,
attests to the immense energy and talent
of Jewish women who are now
working in [film] production: Susan Arnold, Bonnie Bruckheimer, Laurie
Schuler Donner, Connie Field, Wendy Fineman,
Ellen Geiger, Litz
Glotzer, Lynn Harris, Susan Hoffman, Gale Ann Hurt, Donna Isaacson,
Gail Katz, Nana Levin, Rachel Lyon, Nancy Myer,
Linda Obst, Polly
Platt, Mimi Polk, Jane Rosenthal, Midge Sanford, Deborah Schindler,
Sandra Schulberg, Arlene Sellers, Shelby Sherr,
Sandy Stern, Shelby
Stone, Roselle Swid, Anthea Sylbert, Paula Wagner, Paula Weinstein,
and Laura Ziskin ... The real change in the
past few decades has been in
the number of Jewish women in positions of power and influence. Jewish
women have always worked behind the scenes,
most often as writers.
More recently, and especially in the exponential leap of the early 1990s,
they have moved into directing and producing,
both independently, and
as studio executives. For many, there is no question that Jewish women
have gained higher access because of their
connection to Jewish men in
the industry." [HYMAN, p. 447-448] "There
was hellish competition among the women," says executive Paula Weinstein about those around her in corporate
Hollywood, "Roz Heller [at Columbia] and Marcia Nasatir and Nessa Hyams [at Warner Brothers] always argued about
who was the first woman vice president [at a Hollywood studio], but one of the three of them was. We all tended
to compete with each other." [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 131] All these women are Jewish. In the talent agency world,"
notes Rachel Abramowitz, "by the late eighties, a number of young women had begun to make their mark -- Elaine
Goldsmith and Risa Shapiro ... and the lanky JJ Harris." Others included Joan Hyler and Toni Howard. [ABRAMOWITZ,
R., 2000, p. 329-331] (See Abramowitz's volume -- Is That a Gun In Your Pocket? about women, almost all Jewish,
in the business side of recent Hollywood). Want to
take your production crew to film in Philadelphia? You'll be talking to the Commissioner of Greater Philadelphia
Film Office, Sheila Pinkenson, who is also Jewish. [SALISBURY, G., 3-30-99]
"Even those who might not like Jews," says Barry Rubin, "[have] to accept their power and
win their favor. In June 1991, the Simon Wiesenthal Center held a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-table dinner to honor movie
star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reportedly contributed five million dollars to build its Museum of Tolerance. Present
were Jewish executives heading virtually every movie studio including Disney, whose late founder refused even to hire
Jews. The Austrian-born actor's father may have been a Nazi Party member and the actor himself was a friend of Kurt
Waldheim, Austria's ex-Nazi President, but Schwarzenegger also needed the favor of these powerful men." [RUBIN,
p. 88]
Among those who sociologist Todd Gitlin sampled
in the early 1980s by interview or research in his television entertainment project included Sy Amlen, vice-president
of ABC Entertainment in New York; Paul Klein, program chief at NBC;
Gerald Jaffe, NBC vice president for research development Stu Sheslow, vice president for dramatic development
at NBC; Jonathan Axelrod, vice president at ABC "before he moved through the
industry revolving door to Columbia Picture's television division;" [GITLIN, p. 24] Arnold Becker,
CBS vice president for television research; Fred Silverman, the research head at NBC;
Peter Roth, an ABC development executive; Lee Rich, Lorimar president; Ann Daniel,
an ABC executive in drama development; Richard Reisberg, former president of United Artists;
Esther Shapiro, an ABC executive (she and her husband wrote the founding script
for the Dynasty TV series); Lew Wasserman, head of MCA; Herman Keld, vice president of CBS;
Jane Rosenthal, at CBS and "probably the youngest high-ranking woman in network entertainment";
Brandon Tartikoff, for ten years the president of NBC Entertainment and later
head of Paramount Pictures and New World Entertainment; Alfred Schneider, head of ABC's
Standards and Practices department; Stu Samuels, vice president for TV movies at ABC, writer-producer
Richard Levinson, producers Norman Lear, Aaron Spelling, Barney Rosenzweig (whose father-in-law -- Arnold Rosenberg
-- was a producer at Twentieth Century Fox), Mace Neufeld, David Wolper (the most prominent producer
of documentary films in recent decades), Herb Brodkin (whose projects include the TV program "The Holocaust"),
Leonard Goldberg, David Gerber, Michael Zinburg, Tony Ganz, Marvin Kupfer; former president of the Writers' Guild of
'America, David Rintels; William Morris agent Jerry Katzmann, and writers Garry Goldberg and Michael
Elias.
Among the many prominent Jewish television directors
over the years was Alan Rafkin. Rafkin directed over 80 TV shows from the 1960s into the 1980s, including Danny
Thomas in Make Room for Daddy, Love, American Style, Mash, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Rafkin's autobiography is subtitled "Tales from TV's Most Prolific Sit-Com Director." [KROTKI, A., 2-2699,
p. 49]
Another Jewish director, Jess Oppenheimer, subtitled
his own autobiography "How I Came to Create the Most Popular Sitcom of All Time." This was the I Love
Lucy show, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Oppenheimer founded the show, produced it, directed it, and
was one of its three screenwriters. The show's film editor, Dann Cahn, and cinematographer, Karl Freund, were also
Jewish. The key man who actually sold the I Love Lucy show to Philip Morris cigarette company sponsorship
was also Jewish, Milton Biow, "head of the ad agency that bore his name." An early influence upon, and
connection for, Oppenheimer was Ralph Freud, director of a theatre group at San Francisco's Jewish Community Center.
(Freud later founded UCLA's theatre arts department). A former Oppenheimer roommate, Bob Weiskopf, joined the I
Love Lucy staff as a screenwriter in the show's fifth year. And Oppenheimer's high school friend, Mort Weiner, "would
later become programming chief at NBC-TV." [OPPENHEIMER, J., 1996, p. 18, 56-58, 141, 145, 158, 185] Ralph Levy directed the original pilot program for I Love Lucy. He also directed The George Burns and Gracy Allen Show, The Jack Benny Show, and, in later years, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Hawaii Five-0. [OLIVER, M., 10-20-01, p. B15
Jews have long shaped the essence of American popular culture through the medium of television: David Dotort,
for instance, created and produced Bonanza (actors Michael Landon and Lorne Greene were also Jewish), Aaron
Ruben produced The Andy Griffith Show, Chuck Barris created The Dating Game, The Gong Show,
and The Newlywed Game. [JEWHOO, 2000] Rod Serling, host of The Twilight Zone, was Jewish. David
Levy created The Addams Family. Gil Fates was the Executive Producer of pioneer TV game shows To Tell the
Truth and What's my Line? [KIRSCHNER, S., 9-14-00, p. 11] Lou Cowan produced the infamous $64,000
Question, and other early TV quiz shows like The Quiz Kids. He was also once the president of CBS-TV. [COWAN,
P., 1982, p. 4] (Cowan "met with Israeli officials to suggest ways of explaining their policies to the American
public. Sometimes he would be among the most hard-line, uncompromising American Jews in the room, insisting that Israel
emphasize its own self-interest, its own point of view, instead of concocting the bland, half-true justifications
for controversial policies that Americans might not want to hear ... [COWAN, P. 1982, p. 91] [Cowan's wife Polly's]
feelings about Israel as a vital, precarious symbol of Jewish survival were deeper than I imagined [wrote her son
Paul], even when I thought about her lifelong obsession with the Holocaust." [COWAN, P. 1982, p. 93] Ms. Cowan
was also a television producer.) "In a study completed in the 1960s, Muriel Cantor found that almost half of the Hollywood producers of prime time television shows were of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 97] And as Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note elsewhere: "The role of Americans of Jewish background in television dramas was equally pronounced. Michael Robinson and Ben Stein have pointed to the negative portrayals of businessmen, the military, and other 'establishment' groups that characterized dramatic series and soap operas during the 1960s, as well as the counter-cultural themes that were openly introduced in such dramas. Although Stein does not make the point directly, his interviews with television writers and producers suggest the importance of Jews in formulating the social imagery of television entertainment." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 107]
In the 1950s, Jules Stein's and Lew Wasserman's MCA subsidiary, Revue Productions,
was the world's largest producer and distributor of television series. Popular Revue shows included
most of the major TV shows of the era, including Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, The Ed
Sullivan Show, Wagon Train, The Jackie Gleason Show, General Electric Theatre, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, et al. Dennis McDougal lists in his volume about MCA over 60 such programs).
[MCDOUGAL, p. 230] (Danny Thomas' popular show, Make Room for Daddy, was run by independent
Jewish producer Lou Edelman). MCA's influence at NBC was great -- it is credited with
getting Robert Kintner his job as NBC president, as well as that of NBC vice president
Mannie Sacks. [MCDOUGAL, p. 239] In
later years, Norman Lear was the producer of TV programs like All in the Family (lead character Archie Bunker,
the "loveable bigot," was based upon Lear's father, Herman), [COWAN, G., p. 24] Maude, Mary Hartman,
Mary Hartman, Soap, and the Jeffersons. Lear is also the "king of a multimillion dollar
media empire that ultimately embraced publishing, broadcasting stations, theatres, and TV and film production."
The man who founded the righteous-minded "liberal" political action group People for the American Way
has a brand of "American Way," however, which is remote from most Americans. As the San Francisco Chronicle
notes: "The Lears' new 12,300-square home is off Mandeville Canyon on a nearly 10-acre site, which Lear
says is costing $15 million to buy and remodel. The property will have a facility for 30 cars built cantilevered under
a tennis court that is being built on a hilltop ... In 1986, Lear was listed by Forbes magazine as one of
the 400 richest Americans in the United States, with an estimated worth of $225 million -- only to be deleted in
1987 after his $112 divorce settlement from his second wife, Frances, with whom he had a 29-year marriage and two daughters.
She has since become founder and editor-in-chief of the women's magazine Lear's. [MICHAELSON, p. 43] Frances
Lear's monthly, with a circulation of 350,000, claims a readership whose "average yearly household income
[is] a startling $95,000." [SMILGIS, p. 70]
(A similar kind of magazine, Lifestyles, founded by Gabriel Erem, is expressly geared to rich Jews
-- or, as Mediaweek calls it, "a super-glossy lifestyle magazine for upscale Jewish people." [LIEBMAN,
H., p. 16] Its circulation by 1993 was 118,336, of which 81,659 was paid subscriptions.
"Readers," notes Mediaweek, "have high incomes and education levels, as well as a propensity
for purchasing art objects and collectibles. They also give a lot to charities -- the main [Lifestyles subscription]
list is culled from donations of more than $10,000 to major Jewish groups." [LIEBMAN, H., p. 16])
Aaron Spelling, described by some as the "Cotton Candy
King" of TV, or the "King of Schlock," "boasts of being the most successful TV producer in the world."
[CRITTENDON, p. C12] Starting out in the business with partner Leonard Goldberg, Spelling's string
of eventual TV hits included Dynasty, Melrose Place, Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat,
Beverly Hills 90210, and The Mod Squad, among others. He has "often been criticized," notes
the (London) Guardian, "for perpetuating inane shows," [JOHNSON, p. 14] of which his own daughter was
installed as an actress in one of them. Locally, in Los Angeles, Spelling is also known for his spectacularly ostentatious
home, called by some "the tackiest in Hollywood," a 123-room mansion costing $60 million dollars.
In 1990, Peter Bart noted another Jewish agent/producer/executive
of this genre, Jerry Weintraub: "His mannerisms and
life-style seemed to spill from the pages of The Great Gatsby. The vast parties at his Malibu estate, called Blue Heaven
(San Simeon South, others
dubbed it) were Gatsby-like in their opulence.
Clad proudly in his two-thousand-dollar custom-made Brioni suits, a valet always at his elbow, poised to light his Havana,
Weintraub presided
over the swarms of strangers -- some of them important strangers -- who always seemed to overflow the grounds. And while
not everyone would necessarily
get to shake hands with the host,
all would, at the very least, confront the life-sized portrait of Weintraub
and his wife in stained glass that adorned the
house. (In Weintraub's
portrait, he is talking on the phone)." [BART, p. 240] (At a ceremony in Los Angeles in 2002, Weintraub was awarded the "Golan Fund's Humanitarian Award" by former right-wing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanjahu. The Golan Fund is a Zionist organization, described at one Internet web site as "a non-profit organization in the U.S. Its objective is to support developing Jewish life in the Golan [Heights -- part of the Occupied Territories of Israel] by strengthening the 32 [Jewish] communities and the city of Qatzrin.")
Dennis McDougal notes the self-conscious image of MCA mogul Jules Stein in his early years
in Chicago: "[Stein] took great
glee in dressing like a million bucks, crashing
the highest society that money would permit, and tossing a leopard-
skin blanket across the back seat of his Rolls Royce
and tooling down
Michigan Avenue like a peacock." [MCDOUGAL, D., p. 2]
Then there is Joel Silver, producer of Lethal
Weapon, Die Hard, 48 Hours, and other "action" movies. He is "known for his flamboyant
personal style, which includes shouting matches and public feuds. Silver is said to be the model for the ruthless
Steve Martin character in the film Grand Canyon." [A DAY IN THE LIFE, 1992, p. 124] In 1984, one author noted that "the three largest
producers of documentary films for television are NBC, CBS, and [Jewish independent
producer] David Wolper." [WALDEN, p. 473] Alexander Salkind (who died in 1997) was the "producer of the Superman
films and one of the first movie moguls to put together large, internationally financed films." [DALLAS, M,
p. 33A] Samuel Arkoff headed for years the "exploitation film" production center American International
Pictures ("How to Stuff a Wild Bikini," et al).
A small sampling of other recent faces
for the 1990s include Jeffrey Sagansky, the president of CBS Entertainment; Mel Harris, president of
Sony Pictures; Jon Feltheimer of Sony TV Entertainment; MCA president and CEO
Ron Meyer; Fred Bernstein, president of Columbia Tri-Star; Warner president Terry Semel; David Goodman,
president of WarnerVision TV, John Goldwyn, the production head at Paramount;
Barry Diller, formerly of 20th Century Fox and now head of USA Network, Inc. which controls
the USA Network (America's "most watched" cable channel), Studios USA, the
QVC Home Shopping Network (host: Kathy Levine), and other firms. In 1999 he joined
with computer Internet giant Lycos to create a new entity called USA-Lycos Interactive Network that
expected $1.5 billion in annual sales. [SUROWIECKI, p. 54]
In 1995, the London Sunday Times called Barry Isaacson, the vice president of production at Universal
Pictures, "probably the single most powerful Englishman in the film business." [YOUNG, ONLINE]
In 1996 the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, Arthur Hiller, was
also a member of the Anti-Defamation League. [ROSENFELD, p. G1] Hiller, who headed famous TV series like Gunsmoke,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, and many others, was awarded the first annual Jewish Image
Awards in 2001 "which recognizes outstanding work reflecting the Jewish heritage through film and television."
[NATIONAL FOUNDATION FOR JEWISH CULTURE, 10-31-01] Gilbert Gates, also Jewish, was the "former president of
the Screen Actors Guild, long time producer of the Academy Awards telecast, producing director of the Geffen playhouse
and former dean of UCLA's School of Theatre, Film and Television." [WELKOS, R., 7-22-2000, p. F1] Andy Vajna,
a Jewish immigrant to America and head of the independent Cinergi company, "is considered one of the most respected
and richest filmmakers in Hollywood." [TUGEND, Arts, p. 2] His $60 million Rambo III
was the largest film ever produced in Israel.
In 1992, Arnon Milchan, an Israeli, was described by the Jerusalem Post as being "among the handful
of Hollywood moguls with the muscle and money to single-handedly give the go-ahead for a new movie project. [Among his
big movie hits was his movie about a prostitute, Pretty Woman.]" [TUGEND, MOGUL, p, ARTS]
Milchan "has admitted laundering some of the more than $100 million spent by the South Africans during the
1970s in an attempt to improve the white government's image abroad." [MARSHALL/SCOTT/HUNTER, 1987, p. 123]
A citizen of both Israel and Monaco, he controls 30 companies in 17 countries, profiting in everything from film
production to the weapons trade. Milchon has been investigated for "possible links to a pro-apartheid propaganda
campaign [in South Africa] and ... a shipment of nuclear triggering devices to Israel." [TUGEND, MOGUL, p. ARTS]
"I've heard the rumors [about Milchon]," said controversial film director Oliver Stone who signed a long-term
deal with the Israeli producer, "but, then, I've always had a penchant for larger-than-life figures. If Arnon
comes from an arms background, well, so did Rhett Butler [in Gone With the Wind]. If those stories are true, I'm sure
Arnon sees himself as a [n Israeli] patriot." [TUGEND, MOGUL, p. ARTS] Curiously, Stone
-- defender of Israeli patriotism -- is the well-known director of a number of anti-military (American) establishment
films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, and Platoon. (Oliver Stone
is "half-Jewish." This kind of referral is often used by Jewish observers who seek to claim the famous and
accomplished -- whatever the subjects' own opinion about themselves -- to the tribal fold. Other famous "half-Jews"
include actors Paul Newman, and Harrison Ford. Whatever the subjects' own sense of identity, being at least "half-Jewish"
is a definite plus in Hollywood. And with popular American celebration of Jewish identity as being a lineage of
noble hero/victims, many are pulled into the fold. Take, for example, the children of Jewish actor Kirk Douglas, twice
married to non-Jews. Although the famous actor didn't assert a Jewish identity until recent years, his "half-Jewish"
sons Peter, Joel, Eric, and Michael Douglas all made connections to a Jewish identity on their own). [DOUGLAS, K.,
1997, p. 147-151] Oliver Stone is especially
famed for his film "Natural Born Killers," a movie (in which two teenagers murder dozens of people) that has
spawned a number of real life "copycat" killers who cited the movie as an influence in their crimes. "Already
the target of outrage and a pending lawsuit over viewers who took 'Natural Born Killers' as a how-to-manual," noted
the San Francisco Chronicle, "... two [more] serial-murder movies will be released under Oliver Stone's
imprint." [WHITING, S., 8-18-96, p. 32] Even in the wake of controversy, Stone released an "unedited"
"director's cut" version of "Natural Born Killers" to the video market, including even more carnage,
including a chainsaw attack upon twin bodybuilders. Stone
was also the producer, and Milos Forman (also of Jewish heritage) the director, of The People Versus Larry Flynt,
a film that heroizes the non-Jewish pornographer (of Hustler magazine fame) under the auspices of a noble
struggle for free speech. (The film was released under the auspices of Phoenix Pictures, headed by Gerald
Schwartz, also Jewish). Flynt, who once wrote of his copulation with a chicken, has even been accused of child molestation
by his own daughter. And as so very often (even in the movie itself), a "baby-faced Jewish lawyer," notes reviewer
Adina Hoffman, "... takes up Flynt's cause because he believes the publisher's constitutional
rights have been violated." [HOFFMAN, A., 3-28-97, p. 5; STEYN, M., 3-2-97, p. 29]]
Another Israeli media mogul now based in Hollywood, Haim Saban, created and produced the "Mighty Morphin
Power Rangers" film and fad. His Saban Entertainment company (president: Stan
Golden), and offshoot Libra Pictures, produces about twenty-five feature length films a year, mostly
for television. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV show was banned in some countries for excessive violence,
including Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. In 1996, he merged Saban Entertainment with Rupert
Murdoch's Fox Children's Network and he remained head of this company. The Children's Network
in turn owns the Christian-founded International Family Channel. Bought from Pat Robertson,
this channel reaches 69 million American households. [TUGEND, T., 3-28-99] Jerry Bruckheimer is "probably the most financially successful film producer in movie history with film, video and soundtrack revenues topping $11 billion." Among his many credits are Pearl Harbor, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Con Air, Armageddon, and Flashdance. "He is returning to his roots," noted a Jewish ethnic newspaper in 2001, "by developing his first Jewish-themed film, 'Operation Moses,' based on the mass airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1985." "Even if [the critics] don't like my movies," he says, "the public does. That's why I make my pictures. I've gota take the bright side."[PFEFFERMAN, N., 5-25-01]
In 1997, Michael Nathanson, the head of Milchon's New Regency Productions, became the CEO
of MGM Pictures, replacing yet another Jewish mogul, Mike Marcus. In 1999, Hollywood director Mike Nichols
(original name: Michael Igor Peschkowsky) was awarded the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Lifetime Achievement
Award. The New York Times noted that in 1980s he had "a prolonged reaction to the drug Halcion, prescribed
for sleep after minor heart surgery, left him delusional, convinced that he had lost all his money and was being
subjected to some form of retribution for having escaped the Holocaust." [APPLEBORNE, p. 24] Sociologist Gitlin noted (in 1983) that few on-screen personalities
actually on network television call attention to the fact that they are Jewish, in part because the Jewish TV executives
have a "self-protectiveness against any real or conceivable anti-Semitic charge that Jews are too powerful in the
media." [GITLIN, p. 184] "In the 1930s," adds Edward Shapiro, "the operative
principle in Jewish life was shah (low profile). Jews were advised to be as inconspicuous as possible for fear
of provoking anti-Semitism." [SHAPIRO, Jewish-Americans, p. 166] Or, as James Jaffe noted in 1968: "'Don't
make yourself conspicuous'-- this is one of the earliest pieces of advice that the Jewish mother gives to her child."
[JAFFE, J., 1968, p. 61] "To 'make rishis,'" says Paul Jacobs, in describing traditional Jewish
thinking, "was to stir up a fuss of some kind, and it was a cardinal sin, for it supposedly made Jews vulnerable
to the potential wrath of the Christian world. This world was conceived of as something like a potential sleeping
giant who, if awakened by a loud noise, might, and probably would, turn on the disturber of his peace and do him
harm." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 40-41]
For decades, throughout the entertainment world most Jews assumed WASP-sounding names to disguise their identities (a process that was eventually dictated by Hollywood moguls upon virtually all actors). Jewish actress Lauren Bacall was really Betty Joan Perske (she's a cousin of current Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres), Jewish dancer Arthur Murray was Arthur Teichman, actor Danny Kaye was Daniel Kaminisky, and Tony Martin was Alvin Morris. Among many, many other Jewish name-changers were Fanny Brice (Fanny Borach, whose husband Nick Arnstein spent two years in prison for heading a $5 million Wall Street bond theft), [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 248] Mel Brooks (Melvin Kaminsky), George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum), Dyan Cannon (Samile Draen Friesen), Kitty Carlisle (Catherine Holzman), Jack Gilford (Jack Gellman), Lee Grant (Lyova Rosenthal), magician Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss), Peter Lorre (Lazlo Loewenstein), Paul Muni (Muni Weisenfreund), conductor Billy Rose (William Rosenberg), Jill St. John (Jill Oppenheim), Dinah Shore (Francis Rose Shore), opera singer Beverly Sills (Belle Silverman), Walter Matthau (Walter Matuschanskavasky), Ethel Merman (Ethel Zimmerman), Shelley Winters (Shirley Schrift), Bert Lahr (Irving Lahrheim), Ed Wynn (Isaiah Edwin Leopold), and on and on. [SIEGEL/RHEINS, p. 13-16] "The first western star who played a lead in the first motion picture that had a story line ("The Great Train Robbery," 1903) was Max Aronson, better known as 'Bronco Billy' Anderson." [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 72-73] This on-screen dimension, of course, is drastically
changing. "Any Martian monitoring America's television," said Jewish media writer Michael Medved in 1996, "...
would view Seinfeld, Friends, the Nanny, Northern Exposure, Mad About You,
and other shows [Rhoda, Welcome Back Cotter, Barney Miller, et al] and be surprised
to learn that fewer than one in forty Americans are Jewish." [MEDVED, p. 39] The same year, the Jewish Bulletin
of Northern California noted that
"On a recent episode of the TV sitcom 'Third Rock from the
Sun,' a young man who
happens to hail from an alien planet
bemoans the fact that while all his schoolmates can claim an ethnicity, he cannot. His
landlady solved the dilemma
explaining that the youth must be Jewish because his surname is Solomon. Later, when his sister returns
from a date, the alien
father immediately demands: 'Is he Jewish?' Watching this show with
his young daughter, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's executive director Richard Siegel
was thrilled to see yet
another example of Jewish identity popping up in mainstream culture ... Pointing out that filmmaker Mel
Brooks recently joked
on CNN's 'Larry King Live' that his next movie will straighten out all the kinks in the Talmud,
Siegel said Jewish culture is becoming
more and more part of mainstream media. 'It's everywhere,' he said."
[WEINSTEIN, N,
p. 28]
Michael Elkin notes that:
"Alex Rieger, Judd Hirsh's character on
TV's 'Taxi,' was Jewish
'because I made him Jewish,' says the actor. 'Barney Miller' was
never defined as a Jewish cop. But,
according to Hal Linden, the
actor who played him, there was a Talmudic wisdom about his decisions 'that reflected my own Jewish upbringing.'"
[ELKIN, God,
p. 1x] By the mid 1990s, Jewish Internet
web sites were appearing which traced the rising numbers of Jewish actors and actresses in films and television and their
Jewish pedigrees ("half-Jewish," full-Jewish, practicing Jew, non-practicing Jew). Here we learn that
the TV series Love Boat has a regular Jewish actor (Bernie Kopell), as does Friends (David Schwimmer),
Knotts Landing (Michele Lee), Cheers (Rhea Pearlman), Starsky and Hutch (Paul Michael
Glaser), Hill Street Blues (Bruce Weitz), Anything But Love (Richard Lewis), and on and on. Alicia
Silverstone was chosen by (also Jewish) film producer Joel Schulmacher to be "Batgirl"; Steven Bochoco created
NYPD Blues, Hill Street Blues, and Brooklyn South. Douglas Schwartz was the Executive
Producer of Baywatch. Janis Hirsch was the writer/producer of Frasier. Marshall Herkovitz and
Edward Zwick created thirtysomething. Michael Gelman is the Executive Producer of Live with Regis (Philbin).
Jeff Melvoir is Executive Producer of Northern Exposure. Al Franken, actor/writer/producer for Saturday
Night Live moved on to be the Executive Producer of the satiric Lateline. Actress Ellen Barkin is Jewish,
as is Barbara Hershey (Herzstein), Robert Downey Jr., Richard Dreyfuss, Kevin Costner, Winona Ryder and so on. Paula
Abdul's mother was Jewish; her father an Arab. In
1996 a reporter for the (Jewish) Forward, Susan Kaplan, wrote an article about the lack of Jewish women in
positive role models onscreen. But this is how she framed it:
"Although it's not a theme of the show 'Friends,' it's clear that both
... Ross Geller ... as well as his father
... are Jewish ... After 'Friends'
comes 'The Single Guy' with Jonathan Silverman as novelist Jonathan
Elliot ... Then there's 'Seinfeld' ... Next
on Thursday night comes 'ER.'
Oops, no readily identifiable Jewish characters here although on CBS's
'Chicago Hope,' Adam Arkin and Ron Stone
... are oozing Jewishness
from every pore ... On other days of the week, 'Mad About You' gives
us non-Jewish Jamie and her hyper-Jewish husband
Paul ... 'Relativity,'
a new show this season ... focused on -- surprise! -- a Jewish guy...
Many television writers are Jewish men."
[KAPLAN, S., 11-29-96, p. 16] As Jewish author Alina Sivorinovsky noted in 1995: "In the 1990s, it seems that the mother of every fictional female on television is advising her daughter to find a nice Jewish boy. And the daughters are listening. From hour-long dramas, 'Sisters,' 'Chicago Hope,' and 'Murder One,' to 30-minute comedies, 'Mad About You,' 'Cybill,' 'Partners,' 'Bless This House,' 'The Single Guy,' 'The Larry Sanders Show,' 'Friends,' 'Love and War,' 'Seinfeld,' and 'Murphy Brown,' Jewish men are dating and marrying Gentile women in numbers far exceeding any other interethnic relationship currently on television ... All [of these Jewish men] are either resident New Yorkers, as in 'Seinfeld,' 'Mad About You,' 'Love and War,' 'The Critic,' 'The Single Guy,' 'Friends,' and 'Dream On,' or transplanted New Yorkers, as in 'Northern Exposure,' 'Murphy Brown,' 'Anything But Love,' 'Homefront,' and 'LA Law' ... The question is, why should an ethnic group that makes up only two percent of the US population be so disproportionately, albeit stereotypically, represented on television? And why is that representation nearly exclusively male?" [quoted by O'BRIEN, P., 12-23-97] Scholar Patrick Gerald O'Brien noted in 1997 what he found on television during the Christmas season: "Let's return to TV. At 7:25 I surfed to Channel 11, the Christian channel, and Pat Robertson was talking about a court ruling ... he specifically mentioned efforts of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] to enforce this ... Then I turned to NBC and caught the end of 'Suddenly Susan' (or something like that). The set was a living room or small cafe all done up in Christmas decor, but huge Stars of David were prominently posted pasted all over ... Now that I was on a roll, I watched the next NBC show, 'Jenny,' ...[where George] Hamilton now sits in front of his mantelpiece, on which is strung a large 'Happy Hanukkah' decoration, and in a thick accent, he belts out a Yiddish greeting ... At 8:00 came 'Caroline in the City' (I think it's called) in which another Christmas scene took place [in which O'Brien senses a Jewish undercurrent] ... At 8:30 came 'Georgie and Leo,' with Bob Newhart attempting a comeback, and Judd Hirsch playing a Jewish guy (which he mentioned during the show). So, given that about 2% of Americans are Jewish, I'd say that Jewish identities and concerns crop up fairly often. Autobiographical of the producers, writers, and actors? It would seem so. Though the 9:00 show was not about Christmas, it did deal with a Jewish topic for an hour ... tensions between Hasidic Jews and African Americans in parts of Brooklyn. The following night, Tuesday, I only once scanned the network sitcoms, but on the first show I turned to, 'Hiller and Diller,' they were singing We wish you a Merry Christmas We wish you a Merry Christmas We wish you a Merry Christmas And a Happy Hanukkah." [O'BRIEN, P., 12-23-97] Jews are so omnipresent in entertainment television that in 1999, when
the Anti-Defamation League took offense at some jokes at the expense of Jews on Saturday Night Live,
ADL's director, Abraham Foxman, found himself protesting to NBC's head of programming, Rosalyn
Weinman, and Saturday Night Live's executive producer, Lorne Michaels. [TUGEND, 12-19-99]
Both of them, too, are Jewish. Saturday Night Live was also criticized for anti-Semitism years earlier
for a satire sketch: a "Jew-Not a Jew" game show. The head of NBC at the time, Brandon Tartikoff,
fielded a flood of negative phone calls, noting that:
"Tom Hanks played the host. A slide of a famous personality would
appear on the screen, and the panelists had to
decide whether the
person was Jewish ... It was funny, I thought -- but was it anti-Semitic?
All week long, I agonized over that question,
not just with Broadcast
Standards but with myself. Since I'm Jewish, I wondered if I was being too sensitive or maybe too blasé." [TARTIKOFF,
p. 192] (In 1998 the Anti-Defamation League even attacked a series of Superman comic books in which Superman flies back in time to fight the Nazis. The complaint, wrote ADL director Abraham Foxman, was that Superman "never names the victims. The intent was to send a universal message. The result provided offensive to Holocaust victims." Although the word "Jew" was never used in the comics, "the victims were shown wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls, had Jewish names like Mordechai and Baruch, and referred to each other using Yiddish terms such as 'bubeh' and 'zayde.'" The CEO of DC Comics, Jenette Kahn, which produced the Superman series, was even Jewish. She responded with a formal apology for not using the word "Jew" in the comic series). [GOLDBERG, D., TIKKUN]
Some in the Jewish community even suggested anti-Semitic undertones in a new Jewish-like Star Wars movie
character, Ferengi, despite the fact that the film's executive producer, Rick Berman, was also Jewish. [WALZ, 6-8-1999]
Original Star Trek stars William Shatner (Captain Kirk) and Leonard Nimoy (Dr. Spock) were also, in real
life, Jewish, as was William Koenig (Chekov). (Nimoy's Jewish activism includes an integral role in getting Mel
Mermelstein's story made as a film. Nimoy also starred in the film as the main character. Meremelstein is a man who figured
out a way to sue a "Holocaust denial" organization that offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that
the Holocaust really happened). [NIMOY, p. 307-308]) Jews
in the mass media apparently even have subtextual dialogues with themselves about Jewish identity in film reviews.
References (anti-Semitic?) to Jews in an Entertainment Weekly review of director Barry Levinson's science fiction
movie, Sphere, drove him to anger, culminating in a furiously written script (in three weeks) for his next
film (Liberty Heights). This new movie expressly embraced his Jewish heritage. The offending review, entitled
"Abysmal," trashed, like most reviews, his earlier science fiction effort. But Levinson zeroed in on these
words by the EW reviewer: "... Norman the
emphatic Jewish psychologist [played by Jewish actor
Dustin Hoffman]. Okay, so he's not officially Jewish [in the film];
he's only Hoffman, who arrives at the floating
habitat and immediately
announces, noodgey and menschlike, 'I'd like to call my family' ... This
Sphere isn't science fiction, or even
psychological fiction ... It's a matzo
ball. Norman's mother knows what I mean." [Even Jewish actor Liev Schrieber, notes the reviewer,
plays "the neurotically competitive
astrophysicist."] [SCHWARTZBAUM] Levinson
was "enraged" and "furious" by such commentary. "The movie has nothing to do with religion!"
he exclaimed to the Los Angeles Times, "... I mean, you wouldn't say that Mel Gibson [in the film "Ransom"]
is a Catholic businessman whose son is kidnapped." [HORNADY, p. 90] This fixation on the
subliminal Jewish nature of Levinson's film as preface to his overtly Jewish one, the one that
champions "being Jewish," the one where he goes back to his roots in Baltimore, is certainly curious.
But more strange is the Los Angeles Times report on Levinson's motivation to make Liberty Heights -- it never
notes the fact that the Entertainment Weekly culprit/author of the slights to Jewry is not a malevolent Gentile.
On the contrary, the critical reviewer, Lisa Schwartzbaum, who cannot see Levinson's science fiction from his Jewish
"religion," is also Jewish. To carry on such a "film review" (and thrust to Levinson's heart)
in actual Yiddish jargon, she has to be.
One negative review of Liberty Heights, by Jewish author Jeff Salamon, notes the usual Jewish stereotypes
about the non-Jewish Other (repeatedly evidenced throughout Jewish history):
"The WASP elite [that a Jewish protagonist] is trying to infiltrate turns
out to be full of drunks with sexual hangups."
[SALAMON, J., 12- 23-99]
Reflecting the trend of more and more overtly
Jewish themes in Hollywood, "many more films," notes Barry Rubin, "dealt openly with Jews in the 1980s
and 1990s than ever before, and Jews not only remained numerous on stage, screen, and television, but also became
far more visible." [RUBIN, p. 99] David Desser and Lester Friedman suggest that "ethnic consciousness in American
cinema is a fairly recent trend. ... The notion of a 'great melting pot' ... held little interest to people ...
Directors turned to Jewish themes and characters..." [DESSER, p. 2-3] By the 1990s, even
Gentile actor Robin Williams was playing the role of a Jew in Holocaust-era Poland ("Jacob the Liar"); non-Jew
Demi Moore converted to Orthodox Judaism in a Woody Allen film. Even a TV game-show called "Win Ben Stein's money"
has recently made the airwaves, sounding like a stereotypical joke by an anti-Semite. (Stein, among other things,
is a former speech writer for Richard Nixon). As Larry Mark noted in an ethnic Jewish newspaper in 2001: "Over the past five years, as Holocaust survivors pass away and filmmakers struggle with the lessons of World War II, it has become even-money that a film touching upon the Nazi atrocities will be an Oscar nomination. Since 1995, these nominees and winners have included One Survivor Remembers, Ann Frank Remembers, Shine, Life is Beautiful, The Long Way Home, The Last Days, and even One Day in September. ... Three very strong and poignant nominees drank out of the well of the Holocaust for this year's stories: Divided We Fall, One Day Crossing, and Into the Arms of Strangers ... Three other actors portraying Jewish characters received Oscar nominations [in the films Requiem for a Dream, Pollock, and Almost Famous]." [MARK, L., 3-1-01] Jewish actor Jerry Seinfeld
(of the popular Seinfeld TV series) was named to have the highest yearly income ($225 million) in a 1998 "Top
Entertainer" list by Forbes magazine. A Jewish co-creator of the Seinfeld show, Larry David,
was ranked number two, at $200 million.” To some degree," suggests Adam Levitin, "the reason for Seinfeld's
success is that America has absorbed so much Jewish culture that 'being Jewish' has become mainstream America ...
What Jews have long considered 'Jewish' has evidently become so incorporated into America at-large that non-Jews assume
them to be American ... A significant manifestation of this New-York Jewish milieu is the ineffable neurosis that
pervades the outlandish, manic drama of each episode [of Seinfeld]." [LEVITIN, p. 52-54]
Among the many Jewish power mongers in
Hollywood is film producer/director Stephen Spielberg, "perceived by many to be the formative representative of
American popular culture." [LOSHITZSKY, p. 12] Like many supposed "non-Jewish Jews"
of Tinseltown, Spielberg had followed the pattern of being a non-committed, non-didactic Jewish public figure throughout
his early years, but inevitably experienced a "rebirth" as a Jew.
This return to Jewish particularism has many adherents, dramatically exemplified in Jewish actor Kirk Douglas'
renewed interest in Jewish Orthodoxy. (Douglas' original name was Issur Danilovich Demsky). In 1997 he was even honored
at a dinner held by a "controversial Orthodox outreach organization," Aish Ha Torah. [TROUNSON,
p. B1] "I'd have to say [Aish Ha Tora] techniques bother me," a Conservative rabbi
told the Los Angeles Times, "It's the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christian groups." [TROUNSON,
p. B1] "As part of its executive learning program," noted the Times in an earlier
article, "Aish, which is based in Jerusalem and has offices around the U. S., sends rabbis to the
homes and offices of executives, free of charge." [HEIMAN, p. B4] Co-chairs of the Ha Torah
occasion -- held at the home of Merv Adelson, the founder of Lorimar Pictures -- included
other Jewish media moguls Jeffrey Katzenburg, Michael Ovitz, Lew Wasserman, and talk show host Larry King. Right-wing
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu even managed to attend the dinner for the famous actor. "I see that
no matter how far I run away from my Jewishness," Douglas has written, "it was always there. Like my shadow,
I could not lose it." [TROUNSON, p. B1] Echoing similar communal loyalties, in 1996 the
Israel Film Festival in New York City featured not only a former Israeli prime minister as guest of honor, but also mostly
Jewish Hollywood powerbrokers as co-chairs for the event: Michael Ovitz, Sherry Lansing, and David Geffen.
Even when not so overtly visible, the Jewish producer/writers'
dominance in the media world is still felt. In 1968, NBC featured a weekly sit-com
starring an African-American (Diahann Carroll), the first since the 1950s (Amos and Andy). The new show was created
by Jewish writer/producer Hal Kanter. The program, "Julia," is still examined by scholars today, particularly
in the way it featured Carroll as a "white Negro" living an upper-class lifestyle familiar to very few
African-Americans. "While large numbers of blacks lived in exploding ghettos," notes Aniko Bodroghkozy, "Julia
and Corey Baker [the main character and her son] lived a luxury lifestyle impossible on a nurse's salary [her occupation]."
[BODROGHKOZY, p. 143] (This depiction of African-American life is similar to that of the aforementioned Bill Cosby
show, where the Cosby resides in a "lavish townhouse decorated with African-American art works." [BODROGHKOZY,
p. 150])
In 1993, USA Today noted that Black actor
Paul Winfield was "not happy with the state of Black sitcoms these days." "They are mostly Jewish jokes,"
he complained, "being mouthed by Black actors." [KING, L, p. 2D] Jewish dominance caused troubles in the
Black community in 1999 with a remake of the classic Black-oriented movie, "Shaft." Director John Singleton
locked horns with Jewish producer Scott Rudin over the fact of 125 positions filled to make the movie, only six
were Black employees. [FINK, M. 8-23-99] A front
page New York Times article in June 2000 highlighted the same theme, although the Jewish dimensions of the
problem were muted. In the piece entitled "Who Gets to Tell a Black Story?," the usual tensions between "white
journalist" (and eventual writer-film producer for HBO) David Simon and African-American director Charles Dutton
(during the shooting of "The Corner") were rendered purely as a Black-White problem. Not surprisingly, Simon
is Jewish; his father was even a public relations director and speech writer for B'nai B'rith. When Dutton found
so few African-Americans on staff to film a story about drug addicts in a Black ghetto, he was outraged. The Times,
(owned and mostly edited by Jews, as we shall soon see) evaded the theme of Jewish dominance and nepotism in Hollywood,
but did criticize other ethnic ethnocentrism (however minor in Hollywood) instead, saying:
"It was always the same, Mr. Dutton said later. The business was 'full
of nepotism and cliquism.' Italians hired Italians,
Asians hired Asians.
'So why is it a problem when it's a black project? Every black project
that I've worked on, with the exception of the
Spike Lee movies, you've
got to go through this every time. You've got to say, Why can't we have
some more black folks on the crew?" [SCOTT,
J., 6-11, 2000, p. 22] [Note that the Italians
and Asians reference is an insert by the paper between quotes by Dutton. Did the reporter write this? Did the editor?
What, one wonders, was Dutton's direct quote on the subject of nepotism, when his foremost nemesis on the
film he was directing, and all of Hollywood, was/is Jewish?]
In 1990 the Los Angeles Times reported that
"In comments sure to trigger controversy in the entertainment industry,
members of a panel at the NAACP convention in
Los Angeles complained
today that the influence of Jewish executives over films and music distribution has held back black entertainers and producers."
[FOX, D., 6-11-90, p.
B1] In 2000, the African-American newspaper The Los Angeles Sentinel noted the following story: "Jerome Metcalf, a black writer and entrepreneur has filed [a lawsuit] recently against [Jewish] CBS television producer Steven Bochco for allegedly stealing the story idea that led to the creation of 'City of Angels' ... The material was submitted to Bochco and CBS and according to Metcalf, both passed on the project. However, after viewing the pilot episode of the 'City of Angels' Metcalf said he and his wife were 'shocked and devastated to see their works, dramatic expressions, literary expressions, ideas, treatment, scripts and property had been stolen' ... The most interesting if not revealing truth surrounding the lawsuit is the fact that Bochco's attorney, Edward A. Rottenberg, contacted [Metcalf's attorney Michael] Lotta recently with a settlement offer. Lotta deemed the settlement inadequate and turned it down ... A hypocritical truth, would the court find Metcalf's allegations valid, is that Bochco and the president of CBS Entertainment Leslie Moonves [also Jewish] hosted a screening of the 'City of Angels' at the Magic Johnson Theater Complex in South Los Angeles prior to the series debut. Metcalf said he was particularly insulted that Moonves, in front of invited guests, many of them black community leaders, praised Bochco as the creator of the first black medical drama for prime television." [WILLIAMS, S., 12-27-00, p. A3]
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