“I like watching old movies. I love seeing the ladies vacuuming in their high heels. They’ll have a little apron on, and they’ll pull a perfect turkey out of the oven in their spotless kitchens. The men, who have chiseled features and brooding eyes, sit at the head of the table and tell their wives what to do. You can always tell who the bad girls are, because people refer to them as “ruined.” And people have a way of getting all excited and breaking into a dance number.
When I watch these movies I see The American Dream: a big house, plenty of money, well-behaved kids and a husband who mows the lawn every Saturday. No matter how poor you start out, if you work hard, you can be the next rags-to-riches success story. And there’s always love. And you live happily ever after, as the words “The End” appear above your head, and the credits roll…
Considering what a predominantly white world these films portray, it’s surprising to learn that the movie studios that created all of these films were founded and run by Jewish immigrants. There’s a great book on the topic called An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler. (It inspired a cool documentary, “Holly-woodism: Jews, Movies, and The American Dream,” which recently aired on Arts and Entertainment). These founders include Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Carl Laemmle of Universal, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, William Fox of 20th Century Fox, Harry Cohn of Columbia and The Warner Brothers. If it wasn’t for them, there might not have been a Hollywood—there might not have been any movies.
In the early days of the movie industry, before talkies even came out, the upper class saw movies as embarrassing peep shows, the entertainment of the lowly masses, Gabler’s book suggests.
But these Jewish men, who were keen businessmen, saw the potential to make money in movies. They also hoped that by being leaders in the movie industry, they could gain the respect and recognition that the white power elite had denied them. Jews were shut out of the most powerful industries, such as banking, the law and Wall Street, which were dominated by whites. They couldn’t join the best country clubs or live in the posh neighborhoods—so they created their own, the book said.
The Jews noticed business opportunities
Adolph Zukor had already made a fortune in the fur business when around 1903, he started investing in arcades with phonographs, electric lights and peep shows with moving pictures. Zukor noticed that the peep shows were making the most money, and envisioned a movie theater where people could watch such pictures.
Zukor and his partners used a formula that would sound familiar to us today: “famous players in famous plays.” They produced “Queen Elizabeth,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” among others. Their films were distributed by a company called Paramount, which Zukor later took over.
The book goes on to profile each of these moguls, showing their business and family lives, and their little quirks (like Zukor’s constant smoking).
It’s interesting to see that Hollywood movies always had beautiful people, elegant surroundings and a strong family structure—all of the things these men didn’t have when they were growing up. They all grew up poor, had Eastern European origins and their families were unstable. All (except for Zukor who was an orphan) had fathers that shuffled from job to job, unable to adjust to the dog-eat-dog U.S. business environment, the book stated.
And all of these men seemed to have lost a connection with their Jewish heritage in an effort to be successful and fit in. For example, they didn’t observe important holidays such as Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Yet no matter what they did, Americans still saw them as Jews. They were in a Catch-22: Powerful Americans thought they were too Jewish, and their Jewish families thought they were too Americanized.
The Warner Bros. film “The Jazz Singer” (1927) shows where these guys are coming from—it’s about a Jew who breaks away from his religious father, changes his name from Jackie Rabinowitz to Jack Robin, gets a non-Jewish girlfriend and sings jazz in a nightclub. “America won’t let him be a Jew,” Gabler states, and suggests that the movie moguls felt the same pressure.
With the uprising of the Nazis in Eastern Europe, Jews in the movie industry tried to get the American government to help provide safe passage for European Jews, but found themselves talking to a brick wall, the book shows. In the beginning of the war America was trying to keep a neutral stand. So why would politicians take action to involve themselves for people that Americans treated as second class citizens themselves?
After the war, the studio founders lost status when they were accused of making Communist movies and employing Communist writers (who were blacklisted). They also lost power as new wealth came into Hollywood, and the old studio system was abandoned as the industry changed.
This book showed how our country embraced the ideas that these men produced in their movies but didn’t embrace the movie producers or Jews in general. It’s sad that these men had to give up so much of themselves in their struggle for respect. As the book states, “Out of their desperation and dreams, they gave us this America. Out of their desperation and dreams, they lost themselves.”
Fact: Yom Kippur, which happens in September, is the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is one of the “High Holidays” that mark the start of the Jewish New Year. The Jewish calendar runs on a different cycle, so the New Year doesn’t fall in January.”