Will Jews ever be welcome in Hollywood?

One of the major civil rights issues of our time remains very much under the radar:

Some top stars in Hollywood are among those calling for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the body behind the Academy Awards – to immediately add Jews to the organization’s inclusion and diversity standards and are criticizing the group for the oversight.

Actors including Tiffany Haddish, Josh Gad, David Schwimmer, Debra Messing, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Ginnifer Goodwin, Iliza Shlesinger, Julianna Margulies and Mayim Bialik are among the nearly 300 Hollywood figures who signed an open letter to the Academy this week, demanding that Jews be recognized as an underrepresented group.

“While we applaud the Academy’s efforts to increase diverse and authentic storytelling, an inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands antisemitism,” reads the letter obtained by CNN. “The absence of Jews from ‘under-represented’ groupings implies that Jews are over-represented in films, which is simply untrue.”

In 2020, as part of its new diversity initiatives, the Academy unveiled new standards that requires films to submit confidential inclusion data to be considered for best picture. The upcoming 2024 Oscars are the first year that a film submitting for best picture will need to meet those inclusion standards.

At the time, the Academy said it identified “underrepresented groups” as including women, LGBTQ+, people with cognitive or physical disabilities or who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as racial or ethnic groups. The “underrepresented racial or ethnic groups” outlined in the Academy’s standards are Asian, Hispanic/Latinx, Black/African American, Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native, Middle Eastern/North African and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

The omission of Jews in the list of protected groups “erases Jewish peoplehood and perpetuates myths of Jewish whiteness, power, and that racism against Jews is not a major issue or that it’s a thing of the past,” the letter asserts.

Someday I would like to see some Black players in the NBA, but let’s not ask for two miracles in the same week.

Thanks everybody, Be sure to tip your waitress

OK, I’m going to try to be serious here for just a bit.

First, it’s quite true that “the Jews control Hollywood” has been deployed as a classic anti-Semitic trope but, um, Jewish men did in fact own and run most of the major studios in Hollywood in the years of the studio system, and they did so in no small part precisely as a. consequence of anti-Semitism in American life. Film was a new industry, open to outsiders, such as the Eastern European and Russian Jews who were locked out of the traditional power elite: Nobody was going to admit Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn to Princeton, or let them into the Los Angeles Country Club.

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose.

Opening paragraph of The Sun Also Rises (1926).

When 20th Century Fox executive Darryl Zanuck was refused membership at a Los Angeles country club because he was (wrongly) assumed to be Jewish, he pushed Hollywood to produce the Academy Award-winning “Gentleman’s Agreement” (directed by Elia Kazan and starring Gregory Peck). As a conscientious study of anti-Semitism, the film was discouraged by Jewish studio heads who feared it would “stir up trouble.”

Second, it’s also true that, as the production history of Gentleman’s Agreement indicates, the Jewish men running the studio system were extremely hesitant to openly represent Jewish life or themes on America’s movie screens, because of their well-warranted fear of anti-Semitism. (The 1937 films “The Life of Emile Zola” and “They Won’t Forget,” which is about the lynching of Leo Frank, do not include the word “Jew.”).

This really didn’t begin to change until the 1970s. Side issue: Consider how the Jewishness of the Jewish gangsters in the two great Godfather films (1972 and 1974) is represented to the audience. In the first film, Moe Greene — loosely modeled on Bugsy Siegel — is never overtly identified as Jewish, other than by his characteristically Jewish name. The treatment of the Meyer Lanksyesque figure Hyman Roth in the second film is even more interesting in this regard. Via various indirect cultural clues, the audience knows that Roth is Jewish, although this isn’t acknowledged overtly until the very end of the film, when Al Neri tells Michael that the Israeli high court has turned down Roth’s request to use the law of return to escape prosecution in the US.

So anti-Semitism has in fact had a significant effect on Hollywood.

But still. What’s really going on here, beyond what looks like a particularly surreal Curb Your Enthusiasm plot, is, I think, a consequence of how the backlash to the invasion of Gaza is creating an acute sense of non-whiteness in the American Jewish community. (Another side issue: It still feels awkward for a non-Jew, specifically me, to even use the word “Jew,” as opposed to “Jewish.” There’s still a residual sense in which only Jews can use the word “Jew” without it having some faint echo of prejudice).

Jews in America are among the groups that I’ve described as “off white” — that is, “white” in some sort of liminal or provisional way, with that ambiguous status prone to being yanked away whenever their whiteness becomes contested or contestable. (As a Mexican American I’m in a vaguely similar position in this regard. Discussion here.)

So it’s actually a pretty complicated situation, despite the evident surface absurdity of the complaint.

In his opening monologue for the 2010 Academy Awards, co-host Steve Martin turned to Christoph Waltz and joked, “‘And in Inglorious Basterds, Christoph Waltz played a Nazi obsessed with finding Jews. Well, Christoph…’ Martin paused, then slowly spread out his arms to embrace the audience—which exploded with laughter, followed by a second explosion when Martin added, with arms still spread wide, ‘…the Mother Lode!'”

And such small portions!