Jews dominate Hollywood and always have.
While Thomas Edison invented the motion picture camera, immigrant Jewish entrepreneurs (like Sam Goldwyn, Jack and Harry Warner, Louis B. Mayer) created Hollywood. Jews created the three major American networks, William Paley's CBS, David Sarnoff's NBC and Leonard Goldenson's ABC.
Today about two-thirds of leading tv and movie producers are Jewish. Four of the five companies that dominate American entertainment are run by Jews (Gerald Levin, who once considered a rabbinic career, runs Time Warner, Michael Eisner runs Disney, Mel Karmazin and Sumner Redstone run Viacom-CBS, and the Bronfman's run Universal).
Rupert Murdoch (News Corp) is the one non-Jew and the only political conservative.
Jewish domination of entertainment is little discussed in the mainstream media, which is also dominated by Jews.
Jews in Hollywood, like most Jews in the media, academia and pornography, tend to be radical and alienated Jews, rooted neither in Judaism nor in the majority Christian culture. They tend to be rootless and politically left of center, seeking to create a rootless cosmopolitan society to reflect their own non-Judaic traditionless values.
In his 1998 book Work in Progress, Disney CEO Michael Eisner writes about radical Jew Joe Roth (head of movie production at Disney Corp): "Joe was raised in Roslyn Heights on Long Island. His father made a modest living running a plastics manufacturing business, but his passion was social activism. In 1958, when New York State began requiring children to recite the Regent's Prayer at school each day, Joe's father viewed it as a violation of the separation of church and state and recruited an ACLU lawyer to file a lawsuit. Joe, then ten, and his thirteen-year-old brother became two of the plaintiffs in the case. In 1962, the Supreme Court finally ruled that enforced prayer in schools was unconstitutional. Joe and his brother became pariahs at aschool. The family's house was picketed by the American Nazi Party and a cross made of kerosene-soaked rags was set on fire in their driveway. By his own description, the experience fueled his self-image as an outsider." (pg. 304)
British journalist William Cash wrote about Hollywood's Jewish cabal in an October 1994 issue of the British journal Spectator. The article drew hysterical reactions. Here are excerpts from Cash's piece:
WHEN Mr Mike Ovitz, or His Most Powerfulness (as he is also known), shows up at a press conference in Los Angeles and sits in the audience, you know something big is going on: in this case the founding of a new multi-billion-dollar Hollywood studio by Steven Spielberg, record mogul billionaire David Geffen and their "best friend", the recently dumped chief of Disney Studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Although the Hollywood survival rate for studio start-up schemes has been poor - Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope Studios is the most notable recent casualty - this ambitious venture has been widely hailed as having more chance of success than any similar enterprise for 50 years. Since Katzenberg is to run the company, this may seem odd: as head of Disney he was personally responsible for a disturbing proportion of some of the dullest and crassest films (Aspen Extreme, Love Trouble) of the past five years. He once told a journalist (on the record): "Our movies are s---."
But in one respect at least this particular combination of talents, or"talent combo" in the local argot, will start out on the right foot. Like the old mogul founders of the early studios - and unlike most other failed build-your-own studio merchants - they are Jewish.
The significance of this cannot simply be met by the inevitable shrieks of"anti-Semitism". A rare glimpse of the feudal power structure of Hollywood at work was given by the Wall Street Journal's front-page report of the new studio launch. Before any contracts could be signed, a private "blessing" was required from 81-year-old Lew Wasserman - the long-time chairman of MCA (which owns Universal) and the last surviving Jewish founder-builder of a studio. To quote the Journal, he is treated in Hollywood "like a tribal chieftain".
Spielberg, Geffen, Katzenberg and Spielberg's 30-year personal mentor, the MCA president, Sidney Sheinberg, gathered at the house of the "Godfather of the Show" (as Time called Wasserman). After getting his rabbinical "blessing", they spoke in "hushed, reverential tones about the industry potentate", and how he "spun stories about the history of Hollywood and showed them artefacts". Geffen and Katzenberg, who have no formal connections with MCA or Wasserman, were reported as being "nervous" before the meeting. "The whole thing could have gone sour," said Katzenberg.
Turn now to pages 202-3 of last month's Vanity Fair and a curious "group portrait" will grin back at you. Sixteen middle-aged men are decked out in a mixture of nylon jogging anoraks, fluffy white socks, digital watches and faded jeans. You'd probably guess they were a bunch of Californian dentists.
They are, in fact, the magazine reliably informs us, the New Establishment, "the leaders of the computer, entertainment and communication industries, whose collective power has eclipsed that of Wall Street and Washington". In his "Editor's Letter", Graydon Carter confidently boasts that his 30-page"Special Report" redefines "the power centre of America ... as (it) has moved from its role as military/industrial giant to a new supremacy as the world's entertainment-information superpower".
There again, bottom left, is Hollywood super-agent Mike Ovitz, the chairman of the Creative Artists Agency (presumably he won't sign non-creative artists); in the middle is his buddy David Geffen (interests listed as "AIDS, Israel and other causes"); behind them is another close pal, Barry Diller, another AIDS activist and chairman of the home-shopping network QVC. In a"Warner Bros Fitness Centre" T-shirt is Gerald Levin, chairman of Time Warner Inc; in a denim shirt is Jeffrey Katzenberg. Banker Herbert A. Allen - their host for this "Sun Valley Conference of Corporate Leaders" - has on his running shoes. Steven Spielberg, snapped by Annie Leibovitz a few pages on, is gazing out to sea, his white sneakers and socks by his side.
Throughout the report, the magazine is repeatedly troubled by the question: "Is there anything that binds this group of men?" According to Walter Isaacson, Time Inc's media editor, the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony was linked through shared educational (that is, class) bonds and beliefs: "What binds these guys is a sense of interlocking ventures and relationships. The Old Establishment was a club. The New Establishment is a network."
Up to a point. Again, there is something very obvious (apart from white socks) that does bind together most of the leading members of the so-called"New Establishment" - or the Titans of Tripe, as Auberon Waugh recently called them - only no magazine in America (especially a Conde Nast publication owned by Si Newhouse) would point it out: they are predominantly Jewish.
While part of the blame for the fall of the eastern Establishment is placed on its exclusive "good old-boy" network and elitist WASP mentality which excluded outsiders, a delicate question remains. Has the usurping of the white-shoe Establishment by the white-sock meritocracy anything to do with a similarly invidious and protective culture? Now that Jews govern the New Establishment (their official mouthpiece is The New York Times), 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 significance in all the major studios, and he is Jewish) and others not so favoured?
IT should first be said that there is nothing remotely surprising about all this. As Neal Gabler clearly demonstrated in his acclaimed book, An Empire of Their Own, How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the early Jewish movie pioneers such as Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Fitzgerald's model for The Last Tycoon) who founded the studios of today came to Hollywood because they felt barred from power in the east. Although fiercely competitive, the Hollywood Jews worked closely together to build a close-knit empire that shamelessly imitated the social hierarchy of the very East Coast society that they felt alienated and patronised them.
"If the Jews were proscribed from entering the real corridors of gentility and status in America, the movies offered an ingenious option," wrote Gabler. "Within the studios and on the screen, the Jews could simply create a new country - one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well."
And govern they always have. That every major studio head is Jewish today is no different from 60 years ago. "Of 85 names engaged in production, 53 are Jews," a 1936 survey noted. And the Jewish advantage holds in prestige as well as numbers. In a recent Premiere magazine "Special Power Issue" -ranking the 100 most powerful people in the "Industry" - the top 12 were Jewish. There were no black or British industry executives ranked. George Steiner once famously said that to be Jewish was to be a member of a club from which you could not resign.
As small-time professional incest it is probably no worse than, say, public schoolboys in the City in London (an analogy used by one senior Jewish executive to rebut the charge of Jewish favouritism in Hollywood). The"network" manifests itself in the Jewish country clubs - such as the Hillcrest, the one Groucho Marx refused to join - or tennis clubs (application forms always say "state religion"). Hollywood Jews are not notably religious -although the town closes down on Jewish holidays, business happily continues at poolside barbecues, the deli at the Brentwood Country Mart, endless bar mitzvahs and $500-a-plate Jewish causes.
Feeling a bit left out of the loop, some non-Jews have been taking extreme measures to get on. Bill Stadiem, a former Harvardeducated Wall Street lawyer who is now a screenwriter in LA, told me that he recently came across an old WASP friend in an LA restaurant who had been president of the Porcellian at Harvard - the most exclusive undergraduate dining-club. His friend - a would-be producer - was dressed in a black nylon tracksuit and had gold chains on his wrist; dangling around his neck was a chunky Star of David. Stadiem asked: "Why the hell are you dressed like that?" The WASP replied: "I'm trying to look Jewish."
Just as in the '80s people were known to fake being homosexual or bisexual as a way of getting on in the entertainment business (it is estimated that about 35 per cent of the film community is gay), it has long been a standing joke in LA 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 short-listed last year for the Samuel Goldwyn film-writing award, always stresses his Jewish "ancestry" whenever he gets a chance in LA, something few had ever heard about before.
The extent to which this adds up to any sort of Jewish cabal behind the building of the 21st Century Entertainment Superhighway, is difficult to assess. Jews, always compulsive storytellers and talented negotiators, are extremely compatible with the executive side of the movie business. They are good at it.
THE crucial fact that Vanity Fair seems to have blindly swerved past in its"challenge of redefining the power centre of America" is that the whole point of the "Establishment", as Henry Fairlie noted when coining the phrase in The Spectator back in 1955, is that its power is exercised socially. That the socially maladroit and culturally nihilist white-sock meritocracy is now anointed the Power Elite by a "smart" glossy magazine only serves to confirm how the divide between social and professional lives has become blurred to the point of irrelevance. The important thing about New Establishment power in America is that it is exercised corporately.
Arthur J. Magida writes in the Baltimore Jewish Times 11/11/94:
Hollywood movie executives are "outraged" and "disgusted" about an article in the British magazine, The Spectator, that revives a stereotype from the early days of failmmaking that a "Jewish cabal" controls the entertainment industry.
The article by William Cash, a Hollywood correspondent for the British conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph, describes Jews as "fiercely competitive," "clannish" "and compulsive storytellers and talented negotiators." The "invidious and protective culture" they have created in Hollywood denies employment to non-Jews, according to Mr. Cash, who answered in the positive this question that he posed:
"Now that Jews govern the New Establishment does any sort of reverse form of class or racial discrimination operate against outsiders trying to get access to the entertainment high-ways -- WASPS, blacks, Brits, and others not so favored?"
Neal Sandberg, former head of the western region of the American Jewish Committee and currently head of AJC's Pacific Rim Institute, said Mr. Cash's article was "overstated, even in terms of genteel anti- Semitism. It's a classic portrayal of Jews that goes back to an embellished image of Shylock."
Jews now function in Hollywood, he said, "not as an ethnic or cultural group, but as individuals answerable to banks and foreign and corporate sponsorship. These are business people, like anywhere else, trying to make a profit. They're not defending ethnic or cultural interests."
Mr. Cash's article appeared at the same time that an anonymous Sony executive in Tokyo was quoted in the Japanese business weekly Keizaikai as saying, "... The U.S. film business is almost completely controlled by Jews. This is true of what we are doing as well and our job is to use them in an efficient manner."
The Japanese magazine then concluded, "What this person is saying is that you cannot ignore Jews if you do business in the U.S."
Jew Neal Gabler wrote hysterically in the 11/13/94 Los
Angeles Times:
The article might be dismissed as an anti-Semitic bleat from a reactionary crackpot if it didn't have a respectable platform in the Spectator and didn't play to a pre-existing prejudice-that Jews control the U.S. media. But here the canard is given new impetus in an environment of anti-political correctness, where hostility often passes for honesty.
Cash realizes his discovery will trigger the "inevitable shrieks of anti-Semitism"-and it has-though he seems willing to brave these attacks in the interest of social science. This New Establishment is a "culturally maladroit and culturally nihilist (sic)" band, Titans of Tripe, Cash calls them after Auberon Waugh, who wear, "nylon jogging anoraks, fluffy white socks, digital watches and faded jeans." You call this a power structure!
Once upon a glorious time, Cash laments, power was in the hands (or the feet) of a white-shoe aristocracy. These were well-born, well-educated, well-dressed men (at least when wearing wingtips)-culturally adroit and not at all nihilistic. They looked and acted the part of the Establishment-in fact, very much like the British Establishment. Nothing arriviste here. They ruled seigneurially and sartorially.
But now the big feet of the New Establishment wear white socks-and sneakers. These power brokers-including Rupert Murdoch of Fox Film and Television, Bill Gates of Microsoft computer-operating systems, John C. Malone of the Tele-Communications cable empire, not to mention the Jews among them-have not only nudged aside the Old Establishment. Their cabal practices, in Cash's analysis, are a "reverse form of class or racial discrimination," denying access to "Wasps, blacks and Brits." French, too?
Can it be that the godfather of the Jewish cabal that excludes Wasps, blacks and Brits pays obeisance to a higher authority? It can, because the studios and telecommunications empires that Cash identifies as predominantly Jewish are owned and controlled by non-Jews: MCA by Mashushita, Columbia and Tri-Star by Sony, Fox by Murdoch, Time-Warner by stockholders and a corporate board.
Ignoring the facts to suit his myth of Jewish control, Cash is in a long tradition of anti-Semites who began smiting Jewish movie executives almost from the moment the Jews entered the film industry in the 1910s.
One reform group demanded that movies be liberated "from the hands of the devil and 500 un-Christian Jews." Another religious zealot blasted Hollywood Jews for the "seduction of hundreds of thoughtless girls every day," which he ascribed, euphemistically, to a general "Europeanization" of the country. Henry Ford, in his Dearborn Independent, cited Jewish control of the film industry and said, "It is the genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority."
The idea was that Jews were somehow different from the majority of Gentile Americans. Jews didn't subscribe to the same values. They had taken control of this powerful instrument of social control, but they couldn't use it responsibly.
Whether by design or sheer ignorance, they were said to be using the movies to subvert so-called traditional values, though anyone who studies film history knows, no group was more conscious of traditional values or more eagerly sought to purvey them than the Jewish movie pioneers-who regarded themselves as American first, Jewish second.
He obviously believes Hollywood and the world would be better places if the New Establishment and its nine Jews would hand culture back to the people who deserve it-people presumably like Cash. At the very least, they should share their power. He closes by citing the "white-sock mediocracy" as "another example of how driven Jews have always dealt with exclusion. Barred from one form of Establishment, they have ended up helping to create their own."
Similarly, an article like Cash's is another example of how powerless elitists have always dealt with exclusion. Barred from one form of Establishment, they end up spewing anti-Semitic bile.
From the 11/11/94 St. Louis Dispath:
Anti-Semitism is as old as the hills. Even in today's enlightened age, it endures. The latest addition comes from William Cash, Hollywood correspondent for Britain's The Daily Telegraph. He has written an article for another British publication, The Spectator, titled "Kings of the Deal," asserting that Jews control Hollywood.
He is entitled to his opinion, of course, though it is flat wrong. Most Hollywood studios are owned either by foreign interests or New York banks. What Mr. Cash is not entitled to, if he is to retain any respect from civilized people, is his opinion that Jews are the authors of "an invidious and protective culture" that bars work to non-Jews. It is neither true nor fair.
Worse, Mr. Cash goes on to picture Jews as "clannish" and "vulgar." That's way beyond serious analysis. It is nothing but unadulterated anti-Semitism. Mr. Cash convicts himself with his own words. He says his motive for writing the piece was a Vanity Fair article about the new video establishment and its executives that didn't reveal how many of them were Jewish. He insists that keeping silent on this point is "so politically correct." That shows how little Mr. Cash understands either America or Jews. Failure to mention the religion of U.S. executives isn't political correctness, but moral and cultural virtue.
From the 12/05/94 New Republic:
The Spectator of London has always mistaken the expression of prejudice for an intellectual activity, and found it invigorating; but this time the journal has surpassed itself. In its issue of October 29, there appears a piece called "Kings of the Deal," which reveals that "Jews govern the New Establishment," that is to say, Hollywood and the new communication technologies. The piece might have been translated from, well, the English of the 1920s and 1930s. It is the kind of rank social anti-Semitism that has always characterized a type of British snob on his or her way down. "The idea of `New Establishment' players like David Geffen (who refuses to wear a suit), Mike Ovitz or Steven Spielberg dressing up in a tail-coat to go fox-hunting is ludicrous," writes William Cash. The Hollywood hebes, he notes, prefer to wear white socks. It's an observation from which they are unlikely to recover. According to Cash, who covers l.a. for The Daily Telegraph, the Jews in Hollywood created an "invidious and protective culture" in which they generally hire each other. Cash even has people in Hollywood trying to pass for Jews. We have been unable to verify this; but we have been able to verify that there are people in Hollywood trying to pass for journalists.
Phil Reeves writes from Los Angeles for the British newspaper Independent 11/06/94:
London-Los Angeles fax lines have been humming with copies of an article by William Cash which has been variously described by Hollywood players as ``odious, despicable and fascist garbage''. As a shaken Mr Cash admits: ``All hell has broken loose.''
Mr Cash, son of the right-wing Tory MP Bill Cash, claims that Hollywood is controlled by a ``Jewish cabal'' and suggests that it may operate reverse discrimination against outsiders, including blacks, Wasps and Britons. He characterises Hollywood's Jewish leaders as vulgar (a ``white-sock mediocracy''), ``compulsive story-tellers and talented negotiators''.
Few have disputed that the industry has been dominated by Jews since the days of Adolph Zukor, Louis B Mayer and Harry Cohn - although it includes many others. But these days its moguls and powerbrokers are answerable to banks, stockbrokers andinternational coporations based in Japan and Australia.
``Few in Hollywood (can) recall such an anti-Semitic article in a mainstream publication,'' wrote Bernard Weinraub, the New York Times' Hollywood correspondent. Others appear to agree. The writer-director Lionel Chetwynd described the piece as the work of a ``certain upper-class Brit . . . what they are really saying is: `We may not be as important and powerful as you, but we're more civilised'.''
Mr Cash, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, is unrepentant. He denies anti-Semitism, insists he was only seeking to raise questions, and points out that Dominic Lawson is Jewish, and that the Spectator' s proprietor, Conrad Black, owns the Jerusalem Post. And he has found an unexpected ally. This week's Spectator includes a letter from Claus von Bulow, whose acquittal on charges of attempting to murder his wife was made into the Hollywood film Reversal of Fortune.
``The same industry which produces the elegant `High Society' comedies featuring a Cary Grant or a David Niven will now systematically portray well-to-do Gentiles as caricatures, and their homes as hotel lobbies, '' he wrote.
Miles Kington makes this sensible response in the 12/06/94 Independent: But then my wife reminded me that it is still possible to touch a nerve by pointing to the recent furore over William Cash's Spectator piece on the supposed Jewish domination of Hollywood.
If you missed this, you didn't miss much, but if you did followit, you would have been amazed to see how one muddle-headed piece could bring the hornets out. Now, if you or I read an article about the Jewish domination of Hollywood, I think we would react sensibly by saying: ''Well, if the Jews are so clever and are so much in charge, how come Hollywood isn't making any good films these days? Maybe the wrongJews are in charge!''
But that wasn't the reaction in the Spectator. The letter columns were filled with horrified reactions, including a letter from Hollywood whose list of well-known signatories (Kevin Costner, Sidney Poitier, Tom Cruise, etc) was actually longer than theletter itself. The letter warned against racist cant and raised the spectre of the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition. Another letter voiced the same thought, though negatively: ''No doubt there has been an over- reaction to Cash's article; it is a long way from gas ovens . . .' '
Indeed, you might think, so why mention it? Because, I suppose, the awful trump card of the Holocaust is such a powerful card to play, and the Jewish community finds it tempting to play it, or even just to get it out and wave it around without actually playing it.
Mark Lawson wrote in the 12/06/94 Independent:
"Writing about television, I have regularly received letters asking me to point out the number of Jews in positions of influence in British broadcasting. Generally underground, this allegation occasionally goes public: some of the Catholic agitators protesting against the recent Christopher Hitchens polemic against Mother Theresa of Calcutta on Channel 4 saw fit to mention the Jewish background of the station's chief executive, Michael Grade. This implication was at least as slanderous as anything Hitchens said about the nun. (I write this as a Catholic, a fact which had perhaps better be declared as there is enough anti-Semitism in Britain for it to be assumed that any defence of Judaism comes from within.)"
Lawson admits that Jews do dominate the entertainment industry but this does not lead to our movie and TV screens filling with Jewish culture.
"Jewish movies - Crossing Delancey, Yentl, Brighton Beach Memoirs - have been relatively few. Zionist conspiracy theorists are limited to such exhibits as the two films about the Entebbe rescueproduced in 1976 and the obscure 1971 US/Israeli co-production, The Jerusalem File, a thriller about the Six-Day War.
"In general, Hollywood movies reflect Middle American Christian values. For example, Forest Gump, this year's smash hit and likely 1995 Oscar winner, is a fairly standard weepie but, like most American films of this genre, a Jesus-weepie... The two big family releases in 1994 - The Lion King and The Nightmare Before Christmas - were also submerged sermons: in the latter, various forces of negativity are trying to destroy the spirit of Christmas, until taught a lesson by military force.
"Baddies in action films do often have an Arab aspect, but this panders less to Zionism than a general American prejudice, as demonstrated in the Gulf War.
"The gags in Nora Ephron's When Harry Met Sally are Jewish; the ending is Middle American. Jewish humour has saved Hollywood from a complete surrender to the mawkish sentimentality of American Christian culture: its tendency towards - to use, appropriately, a Yiddish word - schmaltz.
"...In mainstream cinema and television, content is dictated by consumers not producers, and there are onlylimited ticket sales in Judaism. The second is that Jews in Hollywood have been keen to assimilate and avoid self declaration, a parallel to the paradox that although the movie business contained numerous homosexuals, there was scarcely a gay film before the 1980s."
