There Are Lots of Jews in Hollywood. Let a Rabbi Explain Why

Here’s something we’re not allowed to say about Ye/Kanye West’s recent series of antisemitic tirades: there’s a small grain of truth in them.

No, obviously not the conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, or downright fascistic claims that people who don’t believe in Christ shouldn’t hold public office. Ye has clearly crossed over into either profound mental illness, or hatred, or both.

But it is true that Hollywood has a lot of Jewish people in it, right?

It should not be controversial to admit this. After all, Adam Sandler sang in 1994 that “so many Jews are in showbiz.” And, speaking here as someone who’s worked as a rabbi, queer activist, and journalist for the last twenty years, I don’t think it’s helpful for us to deny this reality, or refuse to discuss it. Doing so just shoves people’s questions underground, where they often ferment into doubts or misgivings, aided by the shit-filled fertilizer of online conspiracy mongers.

So I’m going to talk about it.

Not to defend Kanye, because that’s impossible. But because, again speaking as a rabbi here, I understand that reasonable, non-bigoted people might wonder about why there are so many Jews in the entertainment industry, and I want to answer that question. Especially because, as it turns out, the real story of why there are so many Jews in Hollywood is, itself, largely about America’s long history of racism and antisemitism.

For centuries in Europe and America, Jews were shut out of most avenues to wealth. Until the 1800s, we were forbidden from owning land in most of Europe and barred from most guilds, industries, and professions. As a result, European Jews seeking upward mobility turned to urban, cosmopolitan occupations like trade, the lending of money (which was often forbidden to Christians), and, when they could, to emerging professions like law. Many also turned to theatrical entertainment, which was often regarded as too indecent (and, for men, “effeminate”) for respectable Christians.

Editor’s picks Shoppers congregate as vendors sell their wares on the sidewalk outside of haberdasheries at 57 Hester Street and 55 Hester Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, New York, circa 1900. The area is home to a mostly Jewish immigrant population. Hulton Archive/Getty

This continued in the United States, but with more opportunity for entrepreneurship. The elite “white-shoe” law firms all banned Jews, so Jews started their own (often with a non-Jewish partner as the first name on the door). The elite hospitals refused to hire Jewish doctors, so Jews started their own (often with Jewishly resonant names like Mount Sinai). The elite theaters refused to employ Jews, so Jews came to dominate vaudeville — and, eventually, the nascent film industry, which, like vaudeville, was seen as too vulgar, too working-class, too low-brow for good Christians to be involved with.

So, in the California of the 1920s and 1930s, these first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe built their own power structures, their own studios, even their own country clubs, when they were shut out of existing ones. While there were many non-Jewish studios as well (Disney, for example, not to mention D.W. Griffith’s and Harry Aitken’s Epoch, which gave us the overtly racist, KKK-glorifying epic Birth of a Nation), Jewish immigrants founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Loew’s, and Universal.

Jews became disproportionately present not just among studio bosses but throughout the whole Hollywood enchilada (or bagel, I guess): agents, music moguls, lawyers, everybody. In Sandler’s words, “Tom Cruise isn’t [Jewish], but I heard his agent is.” Shunned by antisemitism, these formerly immigrant Jews created their own empire.

Not only that, but as Neal Gabler discusses in his book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (which also became the movie Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own) these Jewish producers, directors, and screenwriters — mostly first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe — created a whole new American mythos, about a land where you could come from nothing and still make something of yourself. While overtly Christian themes were still common, Hollywood’s golden age also presented a kind of secular, melting-pot American: decent and hard-working, who stands up to bullies and works his way up. This was no utopia — that American was white, straight, and Protestant-acting — but Louis Mayer, the Warners, Adolph Zukor, and their generation of immigrant moguls promoted, and created, a new version of the American dream.

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They also faced continued antisemitism.

Circa 1930: Dancers in cowboys and girls costume rehearse before shooting in an unknown Hollywood film.  Getty

While Jewish studio moguls were one thing, Jewish actors were something else — and most changed their names to gain mainstream acceptance. Emanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson. Betty Perske became Lauren Bacall. Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk Douglas. Even my cousin (twice removed) Nathan Birnbaum became George Burns.

And the association of Jews with Hollywood was well-known long before Kanye hatefully pointed it out. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy — and his Jewish/Jew-baiting, gay/queer-baiting henchman, Roy Cohn, who incidentally became a mentor to the young Donald Trump — singled out Jewish Hollywood as being a hotbed of communism.

So, yes, even now, a century later, there are still a disproportionate number of American Jews in the entertainment industry. It’s culturally prevalent in American Jewish culture; it’s a thing a lot of Jews do, whether in front of the camera, behind it, or in the studio offices. And the networks that first generation of moguls built are now firmly entrenched, and the “alternative” country clubs they founded are now where deals are closed and fortunes are made.

This is problematic: to the extent Jewishness overlaps with whiteness (which is a whole other complicated story), these entrenched networks and structures have caused other groups, including people of color, to be excluded. But that doesn’t mean there’s some nefarious conspiracy. Dave Chappelle put it well in his controversial-and-maybe-not-entirely-okay SNL monologue: “There are two words in the English language that you should never say together in sequence, and those words are ‘The’ and ‘Jews.’ I’ve never heard anyone do good after they said that.”

That’s exactly right. Because there’s no such thing as “The Jews,” some organized, coordinated entity. Ask anyone who’s ever gone to a synagogue — there’s no way we could ever get as organized as we are depicted in the wildly fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Ye’s fevered imagination. There are just… Jews. No plan, no central coordinating agency, no conspiracy, no adrenochrome-harvesting committee, nothing.

Chapelle was also right when he said, “I’ve been to Hollywood, and… it’s a lot of Jews. Like a lot.” That is true, and it’s true for specific, historical reasons. But it is, as he continued, a “delusion that the Jews run show business.”

That delusion of control — whether of finance, politics, or media — is a classic antisemitic move. When did you last think about who “controls” farming or automobiles or rail companies? No one talks about white, Christian men controlling certain industries. It’s only when there are Jews around — again, due to specific historical causes — that this delusion becomes a conspiracy theory. 

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And, of course, it’s a dangerous delusion. Because if there is really a shadowy, elite conspiracy that’s doing harm to society, well, doesn’t it make sense to strike back against it?  There’s a straight line from antisemitic conspiracy theories — whether of Kanye’s variety or any other one — to my daughter’s preschool getting a credible threat of violence (according to the FBI) a few weeks ago. Just as there’s a line from QAnon to January 6, from the stochastic terrorism of transphobic politicians to attacks on queer gathering spaces, and from the racist “Great Replacement” rhetoric of reactionary politicians to violence perpetrated on Black bodies.

Well, that’s interesting: Queers, Black folks, and Jewish people…. I wonder, who could possibly gain from dividing and oppressing these marginalized populations? In a way, that’s the real conspiracy.