BOOK REVIEW: An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler (Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1988)

The majority of the eastern European Jews who found success in business at the turn-of-the century United States, did so in the garment industry. However, a handful of those immigrant entrepreneurs enhanced the fabric of life by weaving into the American universe a world of fantasy and illusion. They would later be known as the Hollywood Moguls.

The most notable amongst those Hollywood Jews are Carl Laemmle who founded Universal Studios, Adolph Zukor, the creator of Paramount Pictures, William Fox, the builder of the Fox Film Corporation, Harry, Sam, Albert and Jack, the Warner Brothers, Marcus Loew of the Loews Theaters, Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures and Louis B. Mayer, head of the greatest of all studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Hollywood Jews' incredible saga, their evolution and growth into money and power, and their eventual decline, are skillfully depicted in Neal Gabler's engrossing book, An Empire of Their Own.

"The Hollywood Jews, at least the first generation that built the industry, were a remarkably homogeneous group with remarkably similar childhood experiences," writes Gabler. An undeniable factor they had in common, was a "patrimony of failure." They grew up in extreme poverty and privation. Their fathers, (with the exception of Zukor, fatherless from a young age) were luftmenshen; men who could not hold on to a job, and often short of funds. The sons, who speak lovingly of their mothers, are either silent or distinctly hostile toward their fathers.

Carl Laemmle, the elder statesman of the Hollywood Jews, was born in 1867 in Laupheim, a small village in southwestern Germany. Following the death of his beloved mother, Laemmle, at the age of sixteen, immigrated to the United States to seek his fortune. After a succession of youthful meanderings as a furrier apprentice in New York, an errand boy in Chicago, a supernumerary in a production of Julius Caesar, a farm hand in the plains of Dakota, a clerk in a jewelry store, and a bookkeeper for livestock buyers, he finally attained some success in Oshkosh, Wisconsin as branch manager of the Chicago Continental Clothing store. In 1905 Laemmle was named as one of the Oshkosh's outstanding citizens. But at the time, approaching his fortieth birthday, restlessness and discontentment once again permeated his being. He traveled to Chicago where his request for a monetary recognition of his contribution to the firm ended with his resignation. It was then, distraught and once again unemployed, that Laemmle decided to open his first movie theater.

Adolph Zukor was born in Risce, Hungary. When he was a year old, his father died; Seven years later, his mother too succumbed to the angel of death. Thus, after several years under the guardianship of an unsympathetic uncle and an apprenticeship in a dry good store, sixteen-year-old Zukor petitioned for and was awarded by the Orphans' Board a ship's passage to the United States. Upon arrival, Zukor embraced his new homeland with fervor. He attended night school, took up boxing, and became a passionate baseball fan. Like Laemmle, he roved through a myriad of occupations. He tackled batting over springs in an upholstery shop, he apprenticed at a furrier's, and later he became a "contract" worker, designing, sewing and selling fur pieces himself. In 1892, Zukor moved to the Midwest, where he established the Zukor's Novelty Fur Company. In 1903 as the co-owner of Kohn & Company, Zukor was financially established, but like Laemmle, restless and unsettled. It was then that Zukor convinced his partner, Morris Kohn, to invest in an arcade on Fourteenth Street in New York. At the end of the first year, Kohn and Zukor, having expanded their Automatic Vaudeville with new arcades in Newark, Boston and Philadelphia, cashed in more than $100,000 in revenue.

Marcus Loew, a friend and a co-investor in Zukor's Automatic Vaudeville, was born on May 7 of 1870, on the Lower East Side of New York - to a poor Viennese waiter and German widow with two sons from a previous marriage. As a child, to help with the finances of his family, Loew sold lemons and newspapers. At the age of nine he quit school and began working for a printing company. Later he ran an eight-page weekly newspaper, filling multiple positions in advertising sales, journalist, and editor. Loew, like many of his Lower East-Side co-religionists, also worked as a furrier in the garment industry.

Other famous Hollywood Jews, including Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, William Fox, the Warner Brothers, Harry Cohn, Jesse Lasky, the Selznicks and the Schenks, traversed similar courses. Bored with school, too spirited and restless for a routine and prosaic life, they jumped at opportunities, took risks, and in time accumulated wealth and power.

The Motion Picture industry, not yet countenanced by the Gentile monied elite who kept Jews and other undesirables out of the "respectable" loftier commercial ventures, was custom-tailored for these men. . Moreover, in the industry's infancy, opening theaters and producing movies did not require a large capital investment, a fact that enabled these bold, adventurous men to pursue the gold. Since most of the Hollywood Jews worked in the retail fashion industry, they had an understanding of public taste. They knew their audience - for they were the audience.

Interestingly, the quest for financial success was not the sole motivator for the Hollywood Jews, claims Gabler. In their effort to distance themselves from their fathers' failures, these men waged war on their heritage. "To escape their fathers' fate meant escaping the past." To escape their past, they rejected old-home customs, language, accent and tradition. To escape their tradition, they espoused a new style -- an America style. Louis B. Mayer went so far as to claim America's independence day, the forth of July, as his birth date. It is evident that the underlying force propelling these Jews into the motion-picture industry was the need for acceptance. Above all, the Hollywood Jews desired to be regarded as Americans. Not Jews.

"Within the studios and on the screen," writes Gabler, "the Jews could simply create a new country--an empire of their own, so to speak--one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well. They would fabricate their empire in the image of America as they would fabricate themselves in the image of prosperous Americans. They would create its values and myths its traditions and archetypes. It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent. This was their America, and its invention may be their most enduring legacy."

Indeed, these men created "America" and American values. America the strong, the wholesome, the honorable, the upright, the incorruptible and the upstanding -- but definitely not Jewish. The studios were managed by Jews, but the films were mostly devoid of anything Jewish. The occasional Jewish characters in their films were often portrayed by gentile actors. Jewish actors, on the other hand, changed their names to obscure ethnic affiliation. So Jacob Krantz became Ricardo Cortez. Stella Adler became Stella Ardler. Sophia Kosow became Sylvia Sidney. Emmanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson. Julius Garfinkle became James Garfield and Muni Weisenfreund became Paul Muni.

Some Hollywood Jews admitted to shunning Jewish subjects to avoid "ruffling the goyim." Louis B. Mayer argued that priests are dramatic, where rabbis are not. Gabler asserts there was a deeper truth camouflaged behind these excuses. "Hollywood was itself a means of avoiding Judaism, not celebrating it." Yet, Gabler's book should be celebrated. The author captures the era, the industry and its players with an unerring pen. The sound of reels turning, of money changing hands, of ushers, and of movie-goers jump off the pages. The bullying and contemptuousness of Harry Cohn, the mild mannerisms and affectations of Carl Laemmle, and the intensity of Louis B. Mayer are palpable. The tension created by the Hollywood Jews' constant attempt at assimilation, and the unwillingness of the Gentile world to accommodate this desire, is compelling. It is also paradoxical.

The Hollywood Jews succeeded in promulgating the fiction of America by idealizing and glorifying its every cliche, truism, banality and platitude. They created a lordly image and impressed it upon the nation's and the world's imagination. "American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made . . . by creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction." Says Gabler. The movies are quintessentially American, yet those who created them were not. Indeed while Americans embraced their work, Hollywood Jews remained outsiders. Hence the

This is a very good review of Neil Gabler's 1988 book in which he chronicles how Jews and Jewish sensibilities created and controlled the Hollywood film industry.

The Gabler book comes to mind as the world waits in expectation for the Mel Gibson film production, "The Passion of the Christ."

Some 140 million American Christians are expected to see the Gibson film. One 20-screen cineplex owner, and perhaps others, plans to show the Gibson film simultaneously on every screen 24/7. Global Christianity numbering in the billions are also expected to see the film about Jesus Christ's last 12 hours of life.

Gibson's film has also garnered negative comments.

Many Christians complain about Hollywood's double standard. They say Hollywood continually denigrates Christian beliefs but when Christians complain, the Hollywood coterie shrugs off Christian concerns by saying, "it's just a movie," and "if you don't like the subject matter, don't go see it."

Christians are aware that most of the naysayers against Gibson's film are Jewish, and, while trying to be sensitive to Jewish concerns, Christians wonder why individuals deploring aspects of The Passion of Christ subject matter, remain silent while Hollywood continually degrades and marginalizes Christian beliefs.

Here's another review of Gabler's book.
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An Empire Of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1988. Hardcover, 502 pp., illustrated, $24.95, ISBN 0-51746808 X.

Much of An Empire of Their Own reads like a press agent release for the stereotypical Hollywood movie producer. Having originally subtitled his book How Zukor, Laemmle, Fox, Cohn and the Warner Brothers Invented Hollywood, author Neal Gabler provides valuable information about those Jews who came to dominate the film industry during the nineteen-twenties, thirties and forties. Undoubtedly the subtitle was changed to How the Jews Invented Hollywood to promote more effectively the myth that Jews singlehandedly created the film industry.

Reading An Empire of Their Own may cause one to be ultra-conscious of whether a film producer, director, actor or technician is Jewish or not. One reviewer has written that "if misread, the book could provide fuel for anti-Semitism." This may or may not be true. What is certain is that the history of cinema is now old enough for us to see the extraordinary power this medium has had upon the political and moral values of the masses. Many Jews
have persistently sought, and gained, this power throughout the twentieth century.

In concentrating upon the lives and personalities of these Jewish producers, mostly of Eastern European birth, the author glosses over or completely ignores the achievements of gentile, Christian pioneers of the film industry. It can safely be said that the earliest cameras, projectors, sound and lighting equipment, and raw film stock were developed primarily by gentile inventors. The same can be said of those artists who were the first to create artistic movies with true narrative content, creative lighting and special effects, panoramic scenic settings and fast-paced editing. Certainly Jews made many valuable contributions to early film, but Gabler vastly exaggerates their innovation.

Creative individuals such as W.K.L. Dickson, William Friese-Greene, Thomas Armat, Georges Melies, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, and Charles Pathe are not even mentioned. Edwin S. Porter, the director of the early narrative film and first western, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was also an engineer who developed cameras, projectors and special
effects devices.

In An Empire of Their Own, Porter is dismissed as a Projectionist-turned-director." Thomas Edison is portrayed as a villain for his great power in the early industry. Edison and his partners created the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908, which until 1918 held an almost complete monopoly in camera and projection equipment licensing. What these Jewish producers did achieve was to move very quickly from owning a few nickelodeons to controlling complete monopolies consisting of production, distribution and exhibition facilities.

These men acquired this control because of an excellent sense of what the public would buy, intense personal drive, group solidarity as Jews, a willingness for hard work-and --a lot of shady dealing. Gabler describes how Adolf Zukor and Carl Laemmle illegally used Edison cameras without paying the royalities and how Louis B.Mayer cheated the producers of Birth of a Nation by falsifying his bookkeeping, thereby making as much as $500,000 on the exhibition of that one film in 1915.

These Jewish producers moved to Hollywood from the East Coast in the teens and twenties because of the abundant sunlight, cheap non-union labor and distance from the enforcers of the Edison Patents Company. Zukor and his associates arrived relatively late in Hollywood. A woman from Illinois had given Hollywood its name in remembrance of
her native state's holly bushes; several Englishmen, the Horsley brothers and Charles Rosher, created the first film factory in Hollywood, the Nestor Studio, in 1910.

The Jews did not invent Hollywood, but they certainly did come to dominate it. Throughout An Empire of Their Own Neal Gabler contends that Hollywood "was founded and for more than thirty years operated by Eastern European Jews who themselves seemed to be anything but the quintessence of America" and that "above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men."

Although the Jewish movie moguls rarely kept kosher and seldom went to synagogue, it does not mean that they ever really stopped being Jews. Assimilation often simply meant acquiring ostentatious symbols of wealth and success such as country club membership, the breeding of thoroughbred racehorses, compulsive gambling and sexual highjinks in Las Vegas and Havana, season tickets at the opera and palatial mansions on both coasts.

Many of these "role models" dumped their old Jewish wives and married younger gentile women. In retrospect these Jewish men never truly wanted to join the culture of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. What they sought was entree into those domains of power and influence which had once been exclusively gentile. The most important question in historical and political terms is to what extent the Jewishness of these movie executives affected the content of motion pictures. An Empire of Their Own provides a number of valuable answers to this question. Gabler also reveals inside information on the East Coast boards of directors and stockholders who were the true powers behind the movie producers.

A number of passages cite the various Jewish lobbying groups which also influenced film content. Several chapters are devoted to the Hollywood executives' response to the investigations of congressional committees into Jewish and Communist influence in motion pictures in the 1940's and 1950's.

In spite of Neal Gabler's ethnocentric prejudices (and partly because of them!) An Empire of Their Own will be a valuable addition to any collection of books about the political and cultural history of the twentieth century.

I have a question to ask since I hear the word Anti-Semite thrown around especially since The Passion has been in the making..
So what is an Anti-Semite? You don't like the Jewish people because they deny Jesus Christ? (But them some Jews do so then what?)

You don't like Jews because you think there religion is wrong? (Well then you cannot be a Christian because your faith derived from Judiasm)

You don't like the Jews because you beleived they killed the Messiah? (Well even though they did not, if they did not want his death and Jesus lived, Christianity would of never evolved?)

So then who gets branded with this term: Anti-Semite in year 2004?

Are you hating a people because of there faith? because of there success? because of there what?????

Or in today's world does every ethnicity have a brand?
I hear people say The Irish are Drunks, The Italians are Organized criminals, The Blacks well we all know what everyone has said about them from day one, The Indians are dumb the list goes on and on....

It seems to convienent now a days to play this race card that has seemed to snowball since the OJ Trial...

People in general are good but all races and all faiths have there share of bonified jerks...

One day we will all live in a world where there will be no race, no religion, a world where we are all as one, some people proably hate that thought because then they would have nothing to gripe and complain about...

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