I grew up in Boston, a city with the highest percentage of Irish ancestry in the United States. Because I was new to the biz and assumed that is what one needed to do in order to work as a screenwriter. Before sending it out, however, my then-agent advised me to make the storyline “less Jewish.” Could we change the Jewish characters to Irish-Catholic ones? she asked. In 1997, after graduating from USC with an MFA in screenwriting, I spent that summer penning a semi-autobiographical script that would ultimately land me a deal at a major motion picture studio.

Growing up Jewish in post-Holocaust America, I’ve experienced antisemitism in all its various nefarious forms, from violent physical assaults to passive microaggressions shrouded in the guise of woke intellectualism.īut, for whatever reason - aside from the well-documented epigenetic trauma, antisemitism can breed introspection in its objects of hatred - said producer’s assertion that Jews dominate decision-making in Hollywood prompted me to examine the years working in the film industry in which I, a Jew, had zero decision-making power. of Labor, supports some 2.6 million jobs. This was not, of course, the first time I’d heard uttered the weary and delusional trope that Jews, who comprise roughly 0.2 % of the world’s total population, are somehow at the totalitarian helm of an industry that, per the U.S.

In short, there is a core etymological difference between invent and control. Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, John Ford, Howard Hawkes - these were the artists largely shaping early 20th century cinema in the U.S. But if these pioneering studio heads were Jewish, the majority of directors, writers and actors were not.

Mayer - they created Hollywood out of collective necessity, a decidedly human desire to realize the American Dream. But it was clear that said producer had either never read Gabler’s book, or missed one of its key points entirely: the founding producers of the film biz were Jewish, most of them Eastern European immigrants, excluded and ostracized from virtually every other industry in America. He assured me this was a compliment, as many antisemites are wont, trotting out Neal Gabler’s seminal text on the subject, “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” as evidence. Several years ago, a non- Jewish film producer turned to me and announced, casually and with an air of arrogance and ignorance reserved particularly for bigots, “Jews control Hollywood.”

Malina saval