Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/textfile/antisem.zip/FILMS.JEW

Text File | 1993-08-02 | 10KB | 145 lines

Dear Fellow Religion Forum Members,
     The following is a considerably longer version of a piece that ran in
the Fall issue of Reform Judaism on the relationship between Jews and the
film industry as explored in several recent books.  Due to last-minute
space limitations, my editor chopped the thing in half, but I though some
of you might be interested in it in its original form and I'm grateful for
the opportunity for someone to read what I actually wrote.  I welcom your
comments.
                                                 George Robinson
                                                 User ID 72440,1172

                  Who Dominates Whom:  Jews and Hollywood
                             By George Robinson
     It was an old hornets' nest that CCNY Professor Leonard Jeffries
stirred up last July when he denounced Jewish movie studio heads for their
depiction of African-Americans.  Jewish domination of the movie business
has been under attack by American demagogues since the 1920s.  All
Jeffries added to the mix was the accusation that the moguls had been
working in concert with their Mafia funding sources to help destroy
Americans of color.
     It's a swell story and, if this was 1938, Jack Warner would have
probably bought it as a vehicle for Cagney; he would have been the
crusading producer who busted up the mob.
     It's a swell story alright, only it never happened.
     Books published in the past decade on Jews and American cinema fill a
small but steadily growing shelf, and the picture that emerges is vastly
more complex and nuanced than the one Professor Jeffries imagined.  The
picture is not, incidentally, one that does much credit to the Jews who
ran most of the Hollywood studios from the '20s through the '50s.  But it
is a picture from which the Mafia is noticeably absent.
     One can go through Neal Gabler's fascinating "An Empire of Their
Own:  How the Jews Invented Hollywood" (Crown, 1988; Anchor, 1989) with a
fine-toothed comb and run across only a passing reference to the
underworld, an off-hand remark by Sam Warner made in a 1937 article in
Fortune, that he and his brothers had recourse to loan sharks in their
early, struggling days.  (An expert on organized crime of my acquaintance,
a former chief investigator for a Senate panel on the subject, observes
that there is a good chance the loan sharks were Jews themselves.)
     One of the book's great strengths is the detail with which Gabler
depicts the rise of "the Hollwyood Jews," as he calls them, a rise
predicated on a combination of astute business sense, acquired in the
rough-and-tumble of the fur and garment industries, capital raised in
those businesses and loans and investments by Eastern banks.
     For example, Paramount's theater chain, a keystone to the studio's
overall success, was built with help from Otto Kahn and the firm of Kuhn,
Loeb.  When Universal was foundering in 1935, Carl Laemmle was able to
save the studio with a loan from a Wall Street group headed by Charles
Rogers and British financier J. Cheever Cowdin.  The most consistent
source of bank funding for the studios was A.P. Giannini's Bank of Italy
(later the Bank of America); while any good socialist would argue that the
Bank of America was not without its evil side, I know of no one who can
link the Gianninis to the Mafia, except by the most scurrilous of ethnic
slurs.
     The men who ran the studios, as Gabler depicts them, were a more
variegated lot than legend admits.  Adolph Zukor, who founded Paramount,
was no light-fingered vulgarian looking for a quick buck; he was a
successful furrier when he entered the movie business, loaning a cousin
money to start a nickelodeon.  Jesse Lasky, who would later be his partner
at the studio, was a quiet and gentle man.  Carl Laemmle, head of
Universal, was an avuncular old gent who delighted in hiring his
relatives.  Only Louis Mayer, Harry Cohn and the Warners really live up to
the stereotype of the crass, crude, fire-breathing dragon studio boss
(although Zukor was a consummate Machiavellian and a mean man in a knife
fight, as the saying goes).
     At the heart of Gabler's book and of any discussion of Jews and
American cinema (or Jews and America, for that matter) is the issue of
assimilation.  The sons of luftmenschen, the studio heads yearned more for
worldly success than Torah study.  Frankly, it's debatable just how Jewish
the Hollywood Jews really were.  Few were synagogue-goers, their studios
were open and running on shabbat and the High Holy Days, and many of them
contemplated conversion to Catholicism or Christian Science.
     Moreover, Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the chief representative of the
rabbinate in Hollywood (and central figure in the book's most interesting
chapter, a portrait of L.A.'s Jewish community), wasn't exactly an
aggressive pursuer of the straying flock.  Gabler writes, "If any of the
Hollywood Jews came to Magnin with a personal problem, he claimed he told
them, 'I'm your rabbi, not Dear Abby.  Don't bother me.'"
     The movie studios were hardly a base for Jewish propaganda, anti-
Semites like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh to the contrary.  In fact,
as Gabler says, "Hollywood was itself a means of avoiding Judaism, not
celebrating it.  Most of the moguls had no stake in and no attachment to
so-called Jewish projects."
     For proof of this claim, one need look no further than Patricia
Erens' "The Jew in American Cinema" (Indiana University Press, 1984; out
of print), and Lester Friedman's "The Jewish Image in American Film"
(Citadel Press, 1987), an expansion of his pioneering 1982 study
"Hollywood's Image of the Jew."  Friedman's book takes place of honor
ahead of the Erens volume on the strength of his superior wit and her
dogged comprehensiveness, which will exhaust all but the most patient
reader.
     Professor Jeffries is absolutely right when he argues that American
films primarily negative images of black Americans durig the height of the
studio period.  But Erens and Friedman would undoubtedly add that the
depiction of Jews is only marginally more positive for much of the same
period.  The seduction of America, both film historians argue, is that one
can be dissolved in the "melting pot" ane reborn without a hyphen.  The
world created by Gabler's Hollywood Jews is, as he strenuously insists, a
dream world of midwestern WASPs in nuclear families; anyone else is
reduced to a stereotype.
     Erens catalogues a series of archetypes to which the Jewish
experience is reduced by filmmakers and observes that the problem with
such archetypes isn't that they don't exist "but rather that within
society there exist other realities, other types, which never find their
way to film."  What American film refuses to acknowledge until the 1970s
is that pluralism doesn't mean smoothing out the difference between
ethnicities--it means accepting those differences.
     Writing about films of the '30s, Erens makes an astute observation
which would apply to most films about Jews made in Hollywood.  She writes,
"What was lacking was the portrayal of the acculturated Jew who was an
American citizen, who spoke standard English and who still observed the
religion of his forefathers. . . . It is these people who are missing from
the screen.
     An assimilated American Jew's cinema that offers a homogenized
America in which Jews are just Christians who celebrate Chanukah and
Passover instead of Christmas and Easter--that is what mainstream American
film has offered us all too often, even today.  What would films made by
Jews for Jews look like?
     For one answer to that question, turn to J. Hoberman's new book
"Bridge of Light:  Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds" (Museum of Modern
Art/Schocken, 1991).  Hoberman, the film critic of the Village Voice, has
toned down his flash-and-filigree Voice style to author a sound popular
history of Yiddish cinema.  Yiddish film, he argues at the outset, is "not
just a national cinema without a nation-state, but a national cinema that,
with every presentation, created its own ephemeral nation-state," a state
of mind that he calls "Yiddishland."
     This was a perpetually embattled cinema, beset by the rising tide of
Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the twin pressures of domestic anti-
Semitism and foreign enemies in Poland, and the perils of assimilation and
economic competition in America.  The last is the most poignant.  As
Hoberman notes ironically, the coming of sound--that triumph of Hollywood
Jews Jack, Harry and Sam Warner--actually closes off the future of Yiddish
film, exoticizing it by foreclosing the possibility of a larger audience.
     And yet it is Yiddish film, along with other low-budget ethnic
cinemas (Ukrainian and "race" films), that is the true forerunner of
today's independent feature film movement, standing resolutely and
consciously outside the Hollywood production and distribution apparatus.
That movement has spawned such talented black filmmakers as Charles
Burnett, Julie Dash and, most conspicuously, Spike Lee, an historical
irony that Professor Jeffries might not appreciate.

     George Robinson was formerly a film critic for the Shalom America
cable network, and writes regularly for Newspaper Enterprise Association,
Newsday and the Washington Post.  He is also president of Beth Am, the
People's Temple, a Reform congregation in upper Manhattan.