WHY ARE LEFTIST MONOPOLIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ANTISEMITISM? The anti-Semitism row rocking Hollywood.
Fast-forward almost three years and the museum’s attempt to repair things has, if anything, made it worse. The exhibition, in a small, dimly-lit corner on the third floor, opened last month and its framing has fuelled accusations of anti-Semitism at a time of heightened sensitivity.
Jack Warner is described as “brash and irreverent” and a “womaniser” who was “frugal” when he built his studio with his brothers; Harry Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures, is labelled a “tyrant and predator” who “modelled his office after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini”; Carl Laemmle of Universal is noted for his “nepotism”.
Al Jolson, the Lithuanian-born actor, starred in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, which was notable for being the first major release to have sound synchronised with its pictures. Yet along with this brief description, the museum makes a point of the film’s use of blackface, which made it guilty of “perpetuating a century-long tradition in the United States that caricatures and dehumanises black people”.
Thus began yet another culture war in Tinseltown. Los Angeles magazine says that the exhibition “relegated Hollywood’s Jewish founders to the ghetto” and this week a group of more than 300 Hollywood luminaries – including Friends star David Schwimmer, TV writer Amy Sherman-Palladino and Lawrence Bender, Quentin Tarantino’s producer — circulated an open letter under the banner of United Jewish Writers to criticise the use of anti-Semitic tropes.
“Using the words ‘tyrant’, ‘oppressive’, ‘womaniser’, ‘predator’, ‘offensive’, ‘racial oppression’, ‘nepotism’, and ‘prejudices’, it is the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate,” the letter reads. “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, anti-Semitic.” The group also urged the museum to honour the Jewish men “with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum”.
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Neal Gabler, the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, said: “You have to understand that Hollywood in its very inception was formed out of a fear that its founders – and those who maintained the industry – would be identified as Jews.”
In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the American public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars.
Today, thanks to the hangover from the covid lockdowns, and a by-and-large unwatchable product produced by Hollywood, that number is far lower. It’s an industry that apparently despises its founding fathers — but then, the left, driven by what Roger Scruton called “the culture of repudiation,” hates the real founding fathers as well. And as we’ve seen, even before the riots of 2020, controlling how the past is viewed is a huge part of the “Woke” project on both coasts.
Or to put it another way:
