Hollywood, Jews, and America

Abstract

Americans believe in democracy and religious tolerance-up to a point. When Jewish movie stars called on Congress in December 1938 to boycott German products until Hitler stopped persecuting Jews and other minorities, they were barraged with scores of anti-Semitic letters. Pray tell me, I. E. Schoening, a self-proclaimed Bible Christian wrote to Edward G. Robinson, is the greater sinner, Hitler in his treatment of the Jews and Christians or the movie industry producers whose rotten movie-plays are corrupting the minds of American boys and girls and turning them into criminals and sex perverts.' J. P. Thompson of St. Louis denounced Warner Brothers' Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) as 'gross Jewish propaganda'' and told the brothers their film 'will more people hating the Jew because a Jew produced it to show his hatred' (p. 197). A decade later, Hollywood moguls were subject to anti-Semitic diatribes by FBI informants who insisted that the junk dealers, fur traders, push cart operators and their like who run the studios have never learned that there is a moral code in America against which you cannot buck. They still feel that the man with the dollar can do anything he likes.2 In Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II, Steven Alan Carr argues that such attacks were not peculiar to the 1930s and 1940s, but were part of a long tradition of anti-Semitism and fear of Jewish control over a wide array of American institutions: banks, newspapers, theaters, and especially movies. Much broader than the title suggests, Carr's book surveys the history of anti-Semitism from 1880 until the emergence of the Cold War in the 1940s. In the wake of recent outbreaks of anti-Semitic