Honesty about the flaws of Hollywood’s Jewish founders isn’t the same as antisemitism
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Emily Tamkin June 13, 2024
American Jews are increasingly scared of antisemitism; an overwhelming 87% of respondents to a recent American Jewish Committee survey think that antisemitism has risen since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7.
But I worry about one response to that fear that I’m seeing more and more: My fellow Jews trying to make sure that people don’t say anything “bad” not only about Jews, but about things that Jews have done.
This kind of whitewashing of Jewish history is ahistorical and anti-intellectual. More than that, though, it confuses who is responsible for antisemitism.
To take one recent example: After originally coming under criticism for initially leaving Jews out of its depiction of the history of Hollywood, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures received pushback again — this time in the form of an open letter criticizing the museum for including too much of Jewish history.
A new, permanent exhibition on the Jewish history of Hollywood, informed by the research of Neal Gabler, the (Jewish) author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, drew outrage for how it portrayed certain actions by Hollywood’s early Jews. “Some critics took issue with what they saw as the exhibition’s implication that Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers had discriminated against other marginalized groups as a way to assimilate, noting its discussion of blackface in The Jazz Singer,” The New York Times noted.
But The Jazz Singer, a story of a struggle between a cantor father and an aspiring jazz singer son, does famously feature blackface. And racism was rampant in early Hollywood, including among its Jewish founders: Harry Cohn, co-founder of Columbia Pictures, ordered a Mob hit on Sammy Davis Jr., who was Black, unless he left star Kim Novak, who was white, and married a Black woman instead.
(The letter writers also objected to wall text in the exhibit that describes Harry M. Warner and his brother Jack as “frugal,” and calls Jack a “womanizer,” saying such descriptors are vilifying.)
The letter said, “We call on the Academy Museum to thoroughly redo this exhibit so that it celebrates the Jewish founders of Hollywood with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum.” And the Academy Museum has said it would revise the exhibit. That’s a shame, because pretending the bad parts of Hollywood’s Jewish past didn’t happen doesn’t change the past, or educate the visitor.
It also doesn’t help Jews.
To say that a visitor would be encouraged to be antisemitic by learning the bad as well of the good of Jewish history is to say that antisemites are responding to what Jews say and do. But antisemitism is based on conspiracy and hate, not reality. As Lila Corwin Berman, a scholar at Temple University, put it to me when I interviewed her in 2021, “Those tropes and fantasies reflect much, much more about the people who are spinning them… than they do about Jews themselves.”
Given what we know about how hatred of Jews works, it’s highly unlikely that nascent antisemites will decide to lean in to their bigotry because they learn from the exhibit that Cohn had a reputation as a “tyrant and a predator,” words to which the signatories of the open letter objected. (The museum is hardly the first to note that Cohn used the “casting couch,” in which sex was exchanged for stardom, to exploit would-be actresses).
People who are in thrall to bigotry will be in thrall regardless of whether the subjects of their hatred act poorly or well — or, like most humans, some mix of the two. The rest of us should be able to learn about and discuss Jewish history in all its fullness.
This kind of conflation between “fighting antisemitism” and “fighting descriptions of reality” is not limited to museums. After The Washington Post last month reported that “a group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University,” the Anti-Defamation League accused the paper of playing into “antisemitic tropes.”
This, despite the clear fact that the report was deeply and thoroughly sourced, with its writers pouring over WhatsApp messages describing a call with New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and even speaking to a member of the group about a donation he had made to the mayor that month.
Discussions of Jews and money can, of course, easily tip into antisemitic tropes, and the subject should be approached with sensitivity, precision and care. That’s exactly what The Washington Post did: They reported on specific communications they had obtained, quoting a staffer for billionaire Barry Sternlicht who said the point of the group was to help Israel “win the war” of U.S. public opinion. To not report on it because the story involved both Jews and money would have been to warp reality.
It also, again, would have confused who is responsible for antisemitism, which exists not because of Jews, but because of antisemites. It’s true that stereotypes and tropes can spring up in reaction to perceived behaviors by a group of people. But that makes it even more important to have honest discussions about specifics and disentangle criticism from conspiracy, not to pretend that Jews are uninvolved in discussions around things relating to money, politics, and power.
Academia, too, has faced this conundrum: Earlier this year, when Harvard announced that Derek Penslar, professor of Jewish studies, would be on its antisemitism taskforce, some objected because his writing included mentions of hatred and fantasies of revenge in Jewish history.
But the truth is that Jewish history has included plenty of moments of hate and revenge in Jewish history, some of which are celebrated in our major holidays, like Passover and Purim. As Penslar put it in an interview with the Forward in February, “Fundamental to my approach to Jewish history is that Jews are human beings like anyone else. When Jews act as collectives, their behavior is not totally different from that of other human beings. Human beings are capable of hatred.”
I worry that those who would only present the “good” parts of Jewish history are inadvertently holding Jews to a double, and dehumanizing, standard. It seems to me that critics of the museum, and of The Washington Post’s reporting, and of Derek Penslar’s work are saying that if we admit that there has been bad as well as good in Jewish history — as in all social groups’ histories — then we encourage antisemitism.
But to say that “presenting what happened” is “encouraging antisemitism” is, to my mind, dangerously close to saying that antisemites have a point. And they do not have a point.
If we say that admitting or presenting the lows as well as the highs of Jewish history is encouraging antisemitism, we are, in effect, saying that we need to whitewash our history to be safe from hatred and harm. But one of the ways we will keep learning and growing — core Jewish values — is by debating and discussing our history in full, even in sensitive moments.
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