African Americans and Jews in Hollywood

...But the conspiratorial rhetoric about past victimization often blurs the fact that for blacks in America with talent and drive, from Colin Powell to Spike Lee, there are now some genuine options...

...The new generation of Hollywood executives is clearly more liberal and sophisticated about racial issues than either the contemporary mass audience or than Harry Cohn or Louis B. Mayer ever were...

...The Pawnbroker's central figure, Nazerman—a professor and survivor turned pawnbroker —was a complex, difficult figure who defied sentimentalization...

...Paralyzed by both the fear of calling attention to themselves as Jews and the need to preserve lucrative markets abroad, the moguls were incapable of confronting the growing specter of European anti-Semitism...

...The charge of "Jewish racism" in both executive hiring and Hollywood movie images of blacks was more recently echoed in the race-baiting, reminiscent of anti-Semitic tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of City College professor Leonard Jeffries, Jr...

...More than a year ago Legrand Clegg—president of a media watchdog organization, the Coalition Against Black Exploitation—was applauded at the NAACP convention in Los Angeles when he charged that "the century-old problem of Jewish racism in Hollywood" denies blacks access to positions of power in the industry...

...This article first appeared in a slightly different version in Cineaste, Vol...

...and favored fellow Jews when they hired studio executives...

...In addition, Home of the Brave defined racism as a psychological problem—it portrayed racists as pathological characters and black anguish as a hypersensitivity to prejudice...

...America became the home of a platoon of heterogeneous ethnic groups who harmoniously fought, joked, and worked together in films like The Purple Heart (1944) and A Walk in the Sun (1945)—citizens of a mythical melting pot...

...The film's attempt to connect Jewish and black suffering, though self-conscious, was a welcome shift from the old blackface tradition where Jewish entertainers like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor caricatured black cultural styles in order, 530 • DISSENT unconsciously or consciously, to convey their superiority to them...

...Fetchit was extremely popular and made and lost a million during his heyday—the thirties—and while playing a self-demeaning figure who had an affectionate but totally subordinate relationship with his master, gave an ironic, self-protective spin to his comic behavior...

...The first generation of Hollywood moguls, immigrants like Adoph Zukor and Carl Laemmele, were semiliterate, uncultivated descendants of poverty and of conservative and religious Jewish 528 • DISSENT upbringings...

...Obviously, there is no way that one can equate Hollywood's essentially fearful and innocuous treatment of Jewish life with its generally degrading depiction of black reality...

...Nor were there a slew of films seriously examining black reality or JewishGentile intermarriage, the growth of Jewish orthodoxy, black-Jewish relations, or the connection of American Jews to Israel...

...Hollywood bears responsibility for perpetuating these repellent images, but did not give birth to them...

...Though Warner Brothers' films often centered on workingclass, even ethnic heroes, there were almost no Jews among them...

...4. FALL • 1992 • 531...

...In Hollywood today it's not racism that shapes decision making...

...Wary of offending the Gentiles lest they lose their audiences, they avoided Jewish subjects, provided little work for Jewish character actors, and anglicized the names of Jewish stars (Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard, Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield...

...Hollywood is at once a relatively liberal and a meretricious industry, primarily committed to making a profit and producing pap...

...By the 1930s, as they became more fully assimilated, the moguls wanted the lives portrayed in front of the camera to be free of any reminder of their ethnic past...

...The forties' social-problem films provided little sense of how profound and pernicious a role racism played in the daily life of blacks and the society as a whole...

...There is no denying the fact that, since the founding of the film industry, Jews have played a dominant role, and that blacks have been, until recently, almost powerless to influence their representation in Hollywood films...

...It's an overheated film, which, though straining too hard to link the Jewish past with urban blackHispanic experience, succeeded in creating Jewish and black characters who can't be reduced to ethnic and racial types...

...The silent films emphasized the shedding of traditional and constricted religious and cultural patterns (many of them depicted in a stereotyped, comic, and patronizing manner), to be replaced by an American milieu characterized by intermarriage, economic achievement, mobility, and a general accommodation to American values (for instance, The Jazz Singer [1927...

...They were interested in power and profit...

...And in the thirties Hollywood did provide work for black entertainers and musicians like Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, who played in a number of musical shorts and features (for example, The Hit Parade of 1937), projecting talented, self-assured black images and sometimes performing with integrated groups...

...And the few Hollywood films that dealt with the ominous events in Nazi Germany almost totally skirted the issue of anti-Semitism...

...During the late sixties, Poitier's movie persona was dismissed by more militant and activist blacks as middle class and masochistic...

...Poitier's characters never bowed and scraped, but they were so reasonable and humane that the white audience knew there was nothing to fear from them...

...Despite the film's providing a more complex account of anti-Semitism than the Hollywood norm, the use of a Gentile journalist as its protagonist blurred the whole issue, creating the illusion that Jews had no distinctive social and cultural history or ethnic character—that Jews were indistinguishable from Gentiles...

...They supported the war effort by making patriotic films that touched on Nazi atrocities, finally free from being viewed as parochially acting out of Jewish self-interest or indulging in special pleading for the Jews...

...But films such as Home of the Brave (1949) and Lost Boundaries (1949) tended to evasion, affirming tolerance and integration, providing it was for blacks who behaved like WASPs...

...It was the classic Hollywood way of treating social problems —personalizing them rather than dealing with their social or historical context and texture...

...Even in the forties the moguls were afraid to evoke the nature of Jewish reality on the screen...

...Scriptwriter Ben Hecht acerbically summed up the moguls' response to the rise of Nazism: "[A]lI of Hollywood's top Jews went around with their grief hidden like a Jewish fox under their Gentile vests...

...From directors like Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Paul Mazursky, a variety of openly Jewish characters have appeared on film, though Jewish milieus have for the most part been portrayed warily or left unexplored...

...The industry's growing ease with Jewishness comes at a point when intermarriage is a commonplace, and assimilation for Jews is a relatively natural process...

...As screenwriter Michael Blankfort said about the moguls: "They were accidental Jews, terribly frightened Jews, who rejected their background to become super-Americans...

...It was that dignity that made Poitier the one black star who was consistently successful with white audiences...

...It's interesting to note that Barry Levinson's evocation of his familial past, Avalon (1990), uses non-Jewish stars like Joan Plowright to play one of his immigrant Jewish grandparents, and centers the extended family's holiday dinners around Thanksgiving, not Passover...

...Given the moguls' fear of anti-Semitic attacks, and their desire for assimilation into the mainstream culture, their relationship to Jewishness was profoundly ambivalent...

...Still, when social attitudes towards blacks began to shift, they permitted a more liberal handling of racial themes...

...The moguls still conspicuously gave money to Jewish charities and organizations...

...They allowed and even promoted racial stereotypes when it meant being in accord with dominant white attitudes and minimizing the economic and social risks faced by their films...

...XVIII, No...

...For the moment, they believe that these films can tap that one-quarter of the film audience that is black, and begin to cross over to the white audience as well...

...The sixties also saw Sidney Lumet's ambitious film The Pawnbroker (1965), which paralleled the emotional deadness and isolation of a concentration camp survivor, imprisoned by his past, with images of squalid Harlem streets and its own social victims...

...And though the films he appeared in were neither politically incisive nor artistically imaginative, the emergence of even a token black star could be seen as a minor triumph...

...Still, the industry's past unwillingness to deal with Jewish characters and themes illuminates how apprehensive, hungry for social acceptance, and concerned about the bottom line the moguls were, and provides a historical context for those years of films that reinforced the most denigrating stereotypes of blacks...

...Nevertheless, he was one black actor who didn't have to sing, dance, or roll his eyes to appear on the screen...

...Even in postwar social-problem films like Elia Kazan's Oscar-winning Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which explores facets of anti-Semitism that had rarely been depicted by Hollywood in previous decades, the narrative centers on a WASP magazine writer, Phil Green (Gregory Peck), who pretends to be a Jew for two months so he can write an exposé FALL • 1992 • 529 of anti-Semitism...

...These bare facts, however, account only for a piece of a complex story...

...Two years after the viciously racist 1935 Nuremberg Laws were passed, Warner Brothers could make a film about the Dreyfus case, The Life of Emile Zola, without ever using the word "Jew...

...The attacks were not only racist in nature but distorted the role played by Jews in Hollywood...

...What black talent confronts in Hollywood today is not racism, though it must unconsciously motivate some of the decisions that are made, but the incestuousness of an industry that hires from a narrow pool of applicants (for example, how many top women executives work in Hollywood...

...The moguls' depiction of Jews was clearly not only motivated by their own unease with their Jewishness but by their unwillingness to take political, aesthetic, and intellectual risks that might alienate the mass Gentile audience...

...If black-directed films make a profit, there will be many more of them, and ultimately even black executives on the production level...

...But their success did not mean a seamless entry into the American mainstream...

...It took the Second World War to grant the moguls an escape from their dilemma...

...In 1920s Los Angeles they faced discrimination from WASP social clubs and private schools, and, periodically, the industry came under attack from groups like the fundamentalists, who saw the Jews as a moneyhungry, subversive force promoting sexual immorality...

...The Jewish moguls were conformists who most likely shared the racist feelings of their Gentile peers and the society at large...

...All these stereotypes, of course, could be found in the pre– and post–Civil War era in greeting cards, children's book illustrations, knickknacks, Currier and Ives prints, and minstrel shows...

...Among the huge number of films made between 1900 to 1929 there were, according to Lester Friedman in his Hollywood's Image of the Jew, only "approximately 230 films featuring clearly discernible Jewish characters...

...Still, all these films—both black-directed genre entertainments and auteurist, personal works—are clearly an unprecedented step for Hollywood...

...It's what sells...

...A number of them discarded their Jewish wives for second marriages to Gentiles, sought friendship with Catholic prelates, and avidly sought to live in a manner—palatial homes, luxurious country clubs, expensive restaurants—that mimicked what they conceived of as the genteel style of an Eastern aristocracy...

...The moguls never could obliterate their Jewishness, but they could sanitize and Americanize themselves, and their films provided a perfect canvas on which to construct their vision of America...

...From the time of Birth of a Nation (1915) on, blacks were often stereotyped as brutal, savage bucks (who lusted after white women), insidious mulattoes, good toms and mammies, or coons like Stepan Fetchit's indolent, dim, shuffling, grinning character...

...In fact, such facilely optimistic works were sufficiently liberal to move a few steps ahead of their forties white audience on racial issues...

...It's not that Hollywood in the sixties suddenly became an industry where aesthetically adventurous, intellectually serious, or politically challenging works became the norm...

...Consequently, in the forties, when Jewish characters began to reappear in films, the emphasis was on the unity of all ethnic groups, never their differences...

...For Louis B. Mayer at MGM, America was never represented by Jewish life in New York or Los Angeles, but by Mickey Rooney's Andy Hardy—an all-American boy in a mythical small town...

...Though these socialproblem films about race were deeply flawed and politically pallid—severely compromised by having white performers like Jeanne Crain and Mel Ferrer playing blacks—and turned most of their black characters into social symbols, devoid of individuality, they still demonstrated that political liberalism had begun to take root in historically conservative Hollywood...

...They were men who brought great entrepreneurial energy and a genius for intuiting and helping to shape the dreams and desires of American audiences, and by the 1920s successfully moved from owning neighborhood nickelodeons to becoming the heads of major studios...

...1967) playing in each a black hero who was charismatic, seductive, and superior to the whites who surrounded him...

...So it is no surprise, given the pervasiveness of racism, that black characters in Hollywood's first thirty or so years (in their generally fleeting screen appearances) were usually depicted in contemptuous terms...

...In a speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany he stated that "Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies," and with "their financial partners—the Mafia—put together a financial system for the destruction of black people...

...That isn't to say that Hollywood's perpetuation of racial stereotypes does not merit anger...

...In the fifties and sixties Sidney Poitier appeared in The Defiant Ones (1958), Lilies of the Field (1963), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...

...The more serious films like Boyz N the Hood (1991), Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), and Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) run the danger of suggesting to white audiences that black reality can be reduced to underclass life, the ethos of which seems more sensational than the life of the black middle class...

...At this moment, then, engaging in shrill, rhetorical attacks on "Jewish racism in Hollywood" is morally abhorrent, politically counterproductive, and simplistic...

...By the 1940s, Hollywood began to produce social-problem films that explored racism as an issue...

...But what motivates their support of the new Hollywood flowering of black directors is not altruism or a desire to be "politically correct," but marketing surveys that tell them that there is an audience for the films of young black directors like John Singleton and Spike Lee...

...The two most valuable works involved in researching this piece were Neal Gabler's Empire of Their Own and Lester Friedman's Hollywood's Image of the Jew...

...Many of the black-directed films merely exploit inner-city despair and violence, as New Jack City (1991) does, or have no other aim than escapist entertainment like Juice (1992), A Rage in Harlem (1991), House Party (1991), and Strictly Business (1991...

...and a commitment to a hard-edged capitalist ethos...

...supported, though rarely attended, the local Beverly Hills temple...

...They would hardly ever touch a story with a Jewish character, and if they did, they usually cast a Gentile for the part...

...Nevertheless, as art or dross, the last few decades saw Hollywood's predominantly, but far from exclusively, Jewish production people become more at ease in portraying Jewishness (ownership is now largely in the hands of other people—Sony owns Columbia and Rupert Murdoch owns Fox...

...In films like Annie Hall Woody Allen's character speaks and jokes about his Jewish identity and past and is obsessed with anti-Semitism, but neither lives in a Jewish world nor defines his personal problems in ethnic terms...

...However, most of the moguls passionately wanted to assimilate, to become full-fledged, respectable Americans...

...For the Hollywood Jews acceptance in America has moved them to project an ethnic consciousness in many of their films, so they can marginally differentiate themselves from the American mainstream without asserting a separate religious or cultural identity...

...Racism was conceived as a problem that existed between individuals, simply resolved by a dose of sympathy and understanding...