THE ATTACK ON JEWISH HOLLYWOOD A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF

Harold Brackman THE ATTACK ON "JEWISH HOLLYWOOD": A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN AMERICAN ANTI-SEMITISM As the United States became a magnet for mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, the imprecation was born: "New York is not America." A continent away, with the advent of the movies a few decades later, the coda was added: "Neither is Hollywood." In tandem with the entry of emancipated Jews into the mainstream of modernity, traditional antiSemitic images of Jews as economic parasites and moral polluters were complemented by a new image of Jews as corrupters of popular culture. First, in the nineteenth century, the new popular journalism was anointed as what Sander Gilman calls the "the secret language of the Jews." Then, in the twentieth century, the cinema supplanted the newspaper in the popular imagination as the magical source of the Jews' insidious power over culture. The Nazi purge of the Weimar film industry, deemed corrupted by "Jewish-Syrian influence"; Stalin's persecution of Yiddish filmmakers, pilloried for "the bourgeois cosmopolitanism in the motion picture arts," and Jewish performers, whose "Semitic features are blatantly obvious in close-ups"; and the more recent Muslim Fundamentalist assault on "satanic" American moviemakers, who are viewed as modern-day, secular "Crusaders" out to destroy Islamic culture as well as to promote Zionism—all are variations on the same theme. So, too, is America's own attack on "Jewish Hollywood."1 A vituperative ethnocultural critique of alleged Jewish domination and degradation of the entertainment industry has been a constant on the modern American scene. As we shall see, however, this attack on Jewish Hollywood has ebbed and flowed and evolved significantly over time. It began predominantly among old-stock white Protestants as a right-wing reflex that targeted African Americans as well as Jews. But in recent decades it has mutated increasingly among white leftists and black radicals into an enthusiasm that symptomizes deepening BlackJewish estrangement. The first of three waves of anti-Semitic-tinged animus against the film industry peaked in the 1920s. Virtually all European observers have viewed the Hollywood "dream factory" as quintessentially American since its inception. But diis is not the way it looked early in this century to culModernjudaism20(2000). 1 -19 C 2000 by Oxford University Press 2 Harold Brackman turally conservative Americans. They saw instead a nightmarish undermining of Victorian religious, racial, and sexual hierarchies. In their vision of American decline, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were victims of typically Jewish popular-cultural entrepreneurs. Not least among the perceived sins of these Jewish entertainment merchants was their responsibility for unleashing libidinal impulses imagined as synonymous with African Americans. After World War 1, former Progressives fearful that the movies were corrupting American youdi shared anxieties with Ku Klux Klansmen who equated Jewish producers with big-city brothel owners. Ironically, American Catholics demonized by die Klan shared some of its concerns over moviedom's decadence. When in 1922 the New York Civic League's William Sheafe Chase asked, "What ground is there for thinking that the motion picture industry is in die despotic control of four or five Hebrews, such as Messrs. Lasky, Loew, Fox, Zukor and Laemmle?" his question answered itself in the minds of millions of anxious Americans.2 Characterizing Prohibition-era whiskey as "nigger gin" and jazz as "Yiddish moron music," Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent fused, crudely but effectively, the racism and anti-Semitism animating this antimodern critique. "As soon as die Jews gained control of the 'movies'," Ford observed, "we had a problem . . . . It is the peculiar genius of that race to create problems of a moral character in whatever business they achieve a majority." About producers "of Semitic origin," Ford's newspaper also observed that "many . . . don't know how filthy their stuff is— it is so natural to them." The movies deployed Jewish "cleverness" to "camouflage the moral filth" of "die monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps" of African American popular culture.3 During die 1920s Hollywood embraced the new liberated morality of the Jazz Age. Permissive screen images became all too real when the unconventional private lives of die movie colony spilled over into public scandals and even criminal prosecutions. The rise of Hollywood's Jewish moguls was coincidental ratJier dian causative. Cecil B. DeMille, not one of die moguls, had taken die lead by making sophisticated sex comedies starring Gloria Swanson. Only later in the decade did he turn to movie epics diat rendered sex respectable by clodiing it in die robes of biblical and historical spectacle. Neither die comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, accused in a notorious rape case, nor die principal suspects in die era's other notorious scandals—die unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor and die suspicious deadi of producer Thomas Ince— were Jews. Adolph Zukor attributed his entry into die film industry to being "struck by die moral possibilides of the screen." Trying to neutralize criticism, he wididrew from release after some hesitation films costing $1 million to produce diat starred Arbuckle, who was acquitted of any crime but had his career destroyed. Nevertheless, traditional moralists seized upon die Hollywood moguls as handy scapegoats while die less scrupu- The Attack on Jewish Hollywood C:".r:st ian Boycott t h e Movies! HOLLYWOOD is thesodom a n d G o m s r r h a wnme INTFRYATIONAL JEWRY VICE - DOPE - GAMBLING rowwoLs C O W W U N I SM .I Tlt -:ox P I r n I*>-STnY 4 Harold Brackman lous, including associates of Boston's notorious Mayor Michael Curley, targeted them for blackmail. The Jewish movie producer, identified as a moral lecher who debauched innocent Christian girls much as Leo Frank was supposed to have corrupted Mary Phagan before he killed her, became a perfect symbol of Jazz Age decadence. And nodiing was more decadent in the eyes of the moralists dian die dynamic new popular music that gave the era its name and was associated widi the threat to racial hierarchy posed by the Jazz Age's so-called "New Negroes."4 Ultimately Hollywood reassured middle-class moralists by forming the Hays Office, adopting the Production Code, and making its peace with the American Catholic Church. The price the moguls paid was surrender of significant power over film content to industry censors such as Joseph Breen of the Production Code Administration. Though not voiced in public, Breen's anti-Semitism was hardly distinguishable from Henry Ford's. Unlike Ford but like Fadier Coughlin in the 1930s, Breen was Catholic. Hollywood's golden age paid homage to his ethnic filiopiety widi its glorification of Irish American priests, typically played by Pat O'Brien, Barry Fitzgerald, or Bing Crosby.5 Despite the rise of the Hollywood moguls, Jewish characters did not fare well. In 1927—coincident with the appearance of The Jazz Singer, the first talking picture in which Al Jolson sang in blackface— DeMille released The King of Kings, which still ranks as the most blatant film rendition ever made of the Jews-killed-Christ myth. For ethnic verisimilitude, DeMille raided the New York Yiddish theater for Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut to play the chief villains, Caiaphus and Judas, and cast as extras in the mob scenes Orthodox Jews from the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. A devout Episcopalian who harbored grudges against his Jewish former partners both in the movie business and in the Julian Oil Scandal of the 1920s, DeMille was delighted rather than dismayed by the hackles his film raised in the Jewish community. On the other hand, he inoculated himself against Catholic criticism of his depiction of Jesus by having Jesuit Father Daniel Lord offer sunrise mass on the set every day.6 During the Depression and through the pre-Pearl Harbor debate over American involvement in World War II, attacks on Jewish Hollywood continued. On the political right, William Dudley Pelley, founder of the fascist Silver Shirts, claimed personal knowledge of the correspondence in the film industry between Jewish involvement and immoral practices: The fleshpots of Hollywood. Oriental custodians of adolescent entertainment. One short word for all of it—JEWS! Do you think me unduly incensed about them? I've seen too many Gentile maidens ravished and been unable to do anything about it. They have a concupiscent slogan in screendom, "Don't hire till you see the whites of their thighs!" I know all about Jews. For six years I toiled in their galleys and got nothing but money.7 The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 5 The legend of the casting couch was evoked in Ben Hecht's novel, A Jew in Love (1931), whose protagonist, a New York publisher turned Broadway producer, was a forerunner of Philip Roth's sex-obsessed Portnoy. It became part of the broader legend of screendom's Jewish moguls, which entered America's mythic pantheon in 1941 with die simultaneous publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? Fitzgerald's unfinished novel sympathetically portrayed its hero, movie producer Monroe Stahr, as a Don Quixote questing after visions of cinematic greatness. But die novel by Schulberg (son of a film producer) mercilessly exposed its protagonist, Sammy Glick, as a vile Sancho Panza pursuing the lowest common denominator in both life and art. Schulberg's debunking novel made the greater impression.8 During the prewar debate over U.S. isolation, the fledgling House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) took a political rather than a moral tack. It held hearings dramatizing the charge that the movie industry, because of Jewish influence, was subversively interventionist. Charles Lindbergh of America First fueled the fire by declaring that the Jews' "greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." These attacks were effectively marginalized when the United States entered World War II. Not even American icon Lindbergh was able to reinject them into the political mainstream.9 But then the cold war incited a new red scare and a second highprofile attack on Jewish Hollywood. Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi accused filmmakers of "insidiously trying to spread subversive propaganda, poison the minds of your children, distort the history of our country and discredit Christianity." Responsible for "one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of the government," Hollywood Jews presided over "the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States."10 Exploiting anti-Semitic prejudices as well as anticommunist fears, Rankin alleged that "Christian American actors and actresses" had been "virtually driven . . . from the film industry." Rankin buttressed this charge by exposing the Jewish "real names" behind the non-Jewish personas of film-industry leftists who had signed a petition in support of the Hollywood Ten: They sent this petition to Congress and I want to read you the names. One of the names is June Havoc. We found from the Motion Picture Almanac that her real name is June Hovick. Another name was Danny Kay, and we found out that his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. . . . Another one is Eddie Cantor, whose real name is Edward Isskowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg. There is another one who calls himself Melvyn Douglas, whose real name is Melvyn Hesselberg. There are others too numerous to mention. They are attacking the Committee for doing its duty in trying to protect this country and save the American peo- 6 Harold Brackman pie from the horrible fate the Communists have meted out to the unfortunate Christian people of Europe." Ten of the nineteen people subpoenaed by the HUAC and six of the indicted Hollywood Ten were Jews. This firestorm occurred while Hollywood attacked antiblack racism and anti-Semitism in its first "message films." These included No Way Out (1950), Sidney Poitier's first starring role. Rankin retaliated by playing the race card and accusing Jewish filmmakers of "mongrelizing America." Producer and screenwriter Adrian Scott, one of the Hollywood Ten, complained about "the 'cold war' now being waged . . . against the Jewish and Negro people." Scott, a non-Jew whose credits included Crossfire (1946), Hollywood's first high-profile exposd of anti-Semitism, soon found confirmation of his linkage of Jewish and black leftists as victims of the new McCarthyism in the American Legion-orchestrated riot against Paul Robeson in Peekskill, New York.12 Forty years after the McCarthy period, the end of the cold war ironically ushered in a third onslaught against Jewish Hollywood. Homefront America's moralizing spotlight once again focused on the depravity of moviedom. As in the past, the white right played an instigating role. Though Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were avowedly philosemitic and pro-Israel, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition nevertheless activated latent anti-Semitic biases by stridently criticizing the secularism and permissiveness of the entertainment industry. Robertson, for example, warned that "the part that Jewish intellectuals and media activists have played in the assault on Christianity may very possibly prove to be a grave mistake. . . . For centuries, Christians have supported Jews in their dream of a national homeland. But American Jews invested great energy in attacking these very allies. The investment may pay a terrible dividend."13 Henry Ford's equation of the immorality of the movies with the Jewish backgrounds of film producers was revived in the 1980s by Reverend R. L. Hymers of the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle in Los Angeles and Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. Hymers warned that the alleged blasphemy of The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese's film based on Nikos Kazantzakis's novel, would "bring hatred on Jewish people" because Lew Wasserman was chairman and Sidney Sheinberg president of the releasing company, MCA.14 Wildmon threatened a boycott of television networks, whose sins he put at the doorstep of the "59 percent of the people . . . responsible for network programs [who] were raised in Jewish homes."15 Even further to the right than Hymers and Wildmon, William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, accused "Jews, with their 3,000-year history of nation-wrecking" of using "Jewish television and Jewish films" to take "control of the minds and souls of our children."16 And Richard The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 7 G. Butler of the Aryan Nations accused "hooked-nosed anti-Christs in the line of Cain" of dominating the "Jewsmedia."17 Compared to the past, however, the white political right during the 1990s was not at the forefront in giving anti-Hollywood discourse an anti-Jewish inflection. Conservatives like Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich, and William Bennett, who have politically mainstreamed the new recoil against movie-industry sex and violence, have assiduously avoided any hint of anti-Semitism. They also repudiated Pat Buchanan's overt appeal to anti-Jewish sentiment. Though sometimes accused of using the term "Hollywood elite" as an ethnic euphemism or code phrase, they have immunized themselves against charges of anti-Semitism sufficiendy to win the support of religious Jews such as conservative movie critic Michael Medved, audior of Hollywood vs. America, and centrist senator Joseph Lieberman. Even in the late-1990s climate of near hysteria over school shootings, conservative Republicans not beholden to Hollywood contributions and more critical of toxic media than lethal weapons show no inclination to play the anti-Jewish card the way it was played in the 1920s and the 1940s.18 Instead the renewed attack on Jewish Hollywood in the 1990s has been energized by white leftists and radical Black Nationalists. There is nothing new about black and white progressives uniting to protest racism in the entertainment industry. What's unprecedented is the growing popularity of an ostensibly antiracist gospel singling out Jews, past and present, as responsible for entertainment-industry racism. Jewish Hollywood, once viewed by the white right as complicit with African Americans in subverting racial hierarchy, now faces an antithetical indictment from the other end of the spectrum for reinforcing cultural repression and conspiring against black liberation. Golden-Age Hollywood, the presumed promised land of the Jewish moguls, has been recast as a prison house of racism. And Aljolson, the Jew in blackface, is no longer viewed as a pied piper ofJazz Age permissive freedom but is pilloried as a cultural parasite and racist villain. Not Jolson in blackface but Steven Spielberg, the adoptive father of two black children, has become a lightning rod for today's Black Nationalist attacks on Jewish Hollywood. This started in the 1980s when Spielberg began the transition from blockbuster adventure and fantasy films to socially portentous pictures focusing on the experience of African Americans and Jews. A protest against Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, was the impetus for the organization of the Coalition Against Black Exploitation (CABE). CABE is the West Coast counterpart of New York's Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP). Picketing the Hollywood premier o£The Color Purple, CABE launched scattergun attacks on Jews who "with rare exceptions . . . have depicted black men 8 Harold Brackman as criminals, pimps, drug addicts, clowns and fools" and "black women . . . as fat, loud, bossy mammies who dominate their husbands and families . . . [or] as whores."19 CABE's power base in metropolitan Los Angeles was the city of Compton, the black community where rap music was invented. Compton's mayor, Omar Bradley, blamed rap's unpalatable aspects not on black performing artists but on "lox and bagel eaters" in the music industry, whom he alleged were "having a bar mitzvah at the same time" they were destroying the black community. C. Delores Tucker of the Washington-based National Political Congress of Black Women also blamed rap excesses on "Jews in the suites" who produced the music rather than "blacks in the streets" who performed it.20 Attributing the most mercenary and malevolent motives to Spielberg, African American talk-show host and columnist Tony Brown in 1986 asked: "Did a Jew have to go into a gas chamber to understand Hitler's motives? I know what the 100 million dollars that 'Purple' has made at the box office means."21 Essentially, Spielberg was caught in the crossfire between black feminists like Alice Walker and Oprah Winfrey and Black Nationalists like Tony Brown and sociologist Nathan Hare. Hare's 1984 book The Endangered Black Family argues that feminism is a genocidal Jewish conspiracy against African Americans that seeks to brainwash black women into emasculating their men and aborting their babies.22 These attacks on Spielberg's movie version of The Color Purple set the stage for later Black Nationalist assaults on Schindler's List, which Louis Farrakhan's Final Call newspaper referred to as a "Swindler's List" designed to cause historical amnesia among African Americans about their own "slave trade Shoah." Nor were such critics appeased by Spielberg's recent movie Amistad, despite its glorified romantic portrayal of slave rebel Cinque teaching political philosophy to former president John Quincy Adams. They attacked Amistad as a conspiracy to cover up the Jewish role in slave dealing.23 In 1991 Professor Leonard Jeffries of the African American Studies Department of the City University of New York unveiled for a national audience this new Black Nationalist melodrama vilifying Jewish Hollywood. Though the headlines about Jeffries's speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany played up his charge that "rich Jews helped finance the slave trade," he actually devoted more time to attacking "a conspiracy planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, with people named Greenberg and Weisberg and whatnot . . . for the destruction of black people."24 Farrakhan compressed this libel into the compelling image of Hollywood Jews as "bloodsuckers of black people" and wielders of parasitic "control over black professionals, black intellectuals, black entertainers, [and] black sports figures." "What I represent is black suffering," Farrakhan intoned The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 9 in 1994. "I don't own Hollywood. Who depicted black people?" he went on. "Who writes the books? Who writes the plays, the songs that make us look less than human? Do you mean to tell me that Jews have never done any evil to black people?"25 In an interview with journalist Arthur Magida of the Baltimore Jewish Times, Farrakhan also promised or threatened that the Nation of Islam's book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which alleged "Jewish domination" of the slave trade, would be followed by a second volume that would "address such topics as Jewish control of Hollywood."26 In 1996, on the Larry King Live television program, Marlon Brando joined the new assault on Jewish Hollywood by accusing Jewish studio heads of defaming nonwhites while "drawing the wagons around" to protect their own kind from "kike" imagery. Brando's words echoed his comments in a 1979 Playboy magazine interview. However, they were given much more publicity the second time around, partly because of their synergy with similar attacks emanating from Black Nationalist circles. Of course, it is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between Farrakhan's puritanical, sexist, black separatist crusade and Brando's picaresque, hedonistic, Tahitian lifestyle. This was not the first time, however, that anti-Semitism made for strange bedfellows.27 Also in 1996 the scurrilous and crackpot accusations of Farrakhan and Brando were given the patina of academic respectability by the appearance of Berkeley political scientist Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Heavily indebted for background to Neal Gabler's popular 1989 book An Empire of Their Own, on how "the Jews invented Hollywood," Rogin's study explores blackface minstrelsy and racial imagery in American films from the 1920s through the 1940s.28 In 1976 Irving Howe had sympathetically analyzed how, for performers such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Sophie Tucker, and for composers such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, "black became a mask for Jewish expressiveness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another."29 Rogin's book is a pejorative repackaging of Howe's thesis. "It was not just that antiblack racism was the badge of belonging in the United States," he asserts, "but that the badge was worn as blackface, and often by Jews," who in Rogin's eyes also wore a "stain of shame." Rogin is undeterred by the knowledge that his view of Jews as expropriators of "symbolic surplus value" from African American culture is uncomfortably close to Farrakhan's image of Jews as "bloodsuckers of black people."50 There is no room in either Farrakhan's or Rogin's vision for the complex reality of two-way interaction and mutuality that historian Ann Douglas shows existed between Jews and African Americans at the center of American popular culture during the Jazz Age.Sl Jewish performers were inspired by black music, but the 10 Harold Brackman affinity was rooted partly in earlier borrowings from the Hebrew scriptures by African American slaves and freedmen. The most virulent era of movie stereotyping of minorities—during which nickelodeon screens flickered with images of drunken Indians, violent Italians, and usurious Jews, as well as savage Africans—culminated in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The apotheosis of high cinematic art and low racial prejudice, Griffith's film, which President Wilson called "history written widi lightning," glorified the postCivil War Ku Klux Klan as saviors of the white South from newly freed African Americans.32 It came at the end of the formative period in film history that predated the rise to dominance of Hollywood's legendary Jewish moguls, few of whom made the transition from East Coast movie distributors to West Coast moviemakers until after the outbreak of World War I. For example, when Birth of a Nation was made, Louis B. Mayer was still a Boston movie-house owner and former scrap metal dealer. Mayer did, however, make a tidy profit by buying the New England distribution rights to Griffith's film.33 The men who became the Hollywood moguls sometimes trafficked in cinematic bigotry demeaning not only other minorities but their fellow Jews. Zukor, for example, bought a European film version of the Oberammergau Passion Play for exhibition in the United States in 1910. But what distinguished them was an underlying uneasiness about the hard-core racism and anti-Semitism of the early silent-film era. This began to manifest itself as early as 1913, when the newly organized AntiDefamation League started lobbying against a cycle of films that depicted Jews as sadistic misers exploiting Christian widows and as crafty arsonists burning down a clothing store for the insurance proceeds. Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Pictures, responded with a lowkey but persistent campaign to purge movie screens of the worst specimens of prejudice. In this spirit, the independent production Birth of a Race (1918), partly financed by Julius Rosenwald, sought to be an antidote to Griffith's cinematic racism.34 In 1915—the year that juxtaposed the release of Birth of a Nation, the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the lynching of Leo Frank—Joel Spingarn, Lillian Wald, Jacob Schiff, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise joined W.E.B. DuBois in picketing Griffith'sfilm,which Rabbi Wise called an "incredibly foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings."35 These protests had limited immediate impact, but they set a precedent for more effective lobbying a generation later when Jewish rabbis and radicals joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in persuading David O. Selznick to omit from the screenplay of Gone With the Wind (1939) the most objectionable aspects of the novel. "I feel so strongly about what is happening to the Jews of the world," Selznick averred, "that I cannot help but sympathize with the Negroes and their The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 11 fears." Omitting the novel's portrayal of a black rapist, Selznick insisted that African American characters would be shown solely as "loveable, faithful, high-minded people." The film fell considerably short, however, of Selznick's stated intention "that the Negroes come out on the right side of the ledger" and that the film not serve as "an advertisement for intolerant societies in diese fascist-ridden times."56 Arguably the most important film-industry development affecting African Americans occurred between the world wars, when the Jewish moguls consolidated their position behind the camera and a community of black actors and musicians appeared on screen for the first time.37 This context helps explain why African American audiences joined Jewish audiences in applauding the story told by the film The Jazz Singer, in which an immigrant Jewish boy achieves American success by embracing black music. According to a Yiddish reviewer, Jolson in blackface proved that: "The son of a line of rabbis well knows how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world's history."38 The equally positive African American reaction was summed up by a black newspaper that reported of Jolson that "every colored performer is proud of him." Looking for progress amidst frustrating paradox, African Americans saw in die white actor wearing burnt cork and singing black music a transitional step toward the day when African American performers, unencumbered by masks, would come into their own.39 Of course, for a generation after they began to appear on screen black actors played mainly butlers, maids, and plantation hands. During this same period, most Jewish characters were also relegated to comic relief. When Samuel Goldwyn put Montague Glass, creator of the hapless haberdashers Potash and Perlmutter, to work injecting coarse comedy into a screenplay adaptation of immigrant novelist Anzia Yezierska's/1 Salome of the Tenements, she broke down and cried.40 But African American performers like Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind, conveyed an innate dignity that often triumphed over servile conventions.41 During World War II a major fault line in Hollywood was between black actors like Lincoln Perry, stage name Stepin Fetchit, who played a comic buffoon and wanted to continue doing so, and civil rights organizations strongly supported by Jews, which wanted Hollywood to stop casting African Americans in such roles. By 1946 Walter White of the NAACP had suggested creation of a special organization —"something like the [Jewish] Anti-Defamation League"—to monitor minority portrayals in movies.42 White skin certainly gave Jews greater opportunities in front of the camera during Hollywood's golden age, but their advantage should not be exaggerated. The mythology that has grown up about Jews chang- 12 Harold Brachman ing their names (and sometimes their noses) on the way to stardom is based on a handful of instances including those of John Garfield, Edgar G. Robinson, Paul Muni, Melvyn Douglas, and Paulette Goddard. Yet a study of the period 1932-1951 shows that less than five percent of the top box-office stars were Jews. The mythology is correct, however, in that the most successful Jewish actors specialized in empathetically playing every white ethnic group except their own.43 The campaign against anti-Jewish film prejudice bore fruit slowly, and then it took the perverse form of purging the screen not so much of anti-Semitism as of identifiable Jews. After The Jazz Singer, Jewish characters and riiemes—favorable and unfavorable—gradually disappeared, at the same time that Hollywood gradually destroyed the Yiddish film industry by stealing away its greatest talents.44 By the Depression era, with The Life ofEmile Zola (1937), about die Dreyfus case, the word Jew was left unsaid. Also in 1937, They Won't Forget, ostensibly based on Leo Frank's lynching, asked the audience to forget that Frank was a Jew. Charlie Chaplin's comic but candid deflation of Nazi anti-Semitism in The Great Dictator (1940) raised the ire of isolationist senator Gerald Nye, who accused the film industry of having "its own foreign policy" and even of being "the most potent and dangerous fifth column in our country" and "the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse the war fever in America and plunge this Nation to her destruction." Nye's Hollywood hall of shame, not surprisingly, was populated almost entirely by Jewish studio executives. Hollywood subsequently decided it was the better part of valor to fight World War II as if there were no Holocaust. That theme was not really engaged direcdy until The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959, but the Jewish content of the diary was so diluted by the film as well as by the play on which it was based that Meyer Levin sued.45 Though MGM actually commissioned Leon Uris to write the novel that was the basis of the pro-Israel blockbuster Exodus, the 1960 film was delayed for years, partly by fears of an "Arab box office" backlash.46 Three decades later, despite the recent spate of Holocaust films, a 1996 study showed the virtual disappearance from the wide screen of identifiable American Jewish characters and the proliferation on the narrow screen of culturally denuded Jews in the Seinfeld mold.47 In terms of preservation of group identity at least, Hollywood arguably has done better by African Americans than by Jews, whose ascriptive "whiteness," as Sander Gilman points out, poses the risk of making them, if not exactly invisible, culturally transparent. At or near parity as a percentage of Hollywood screen actors, blacks on the other hand are achieving gains as screenwriters and directors. Today the seriously underrepresented minority on screen is not African American but Hispanic.48 The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 13 A new Hollywood is in the making that builds on the slow but real progress that has been made since the rise of the Jewish moguls. The future was portended almost sixty years ago in a scene in Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon, in which producer Monroe Stahr, while walking on the beach at Malibu, encounters a black man who had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. The man tells Stahr that he never goes to the movies or lets his children go because movies aren't true to life. Stahr tells himself that the man "was prejudiced and wrong" and that "many pictures, a decade of pictures, must be made to show him that he was wrong." More than a half century later, Hollywood Jews are still trying to prove that African American wrong.49 In the new Hollywood some past paradoxes and moral contradictions are recapitulated in ironic guises at the same time that others are transcended. Hence, filmmaker Spike Lee personifies the film industry's heightened openness to African American talent. Yet, criticized for the crude stereotyping of Jewish nightclub owners in his film Mo' Better Blues (1990), he justified the portrayals as payback for "one hundred years of Hollywood cinema" racism. Lee's Malcolm X (1992), a ISOmillion project, was based on a screenplay by blacklisted writer Arnold Perl that had languished for twenty-five years. The resulting film can be viewed either as a triumphant collaboration by a young Black Nationalist filmmaker with the ghost of a Jewish radical or as a cynical ripoff of Perl by Lee, who took top billing for a script most of which Perl had written.50 In the new Hollywood white actor Ted Danson was harshly criticized for complying with the request of his then-girlfriend, Whoopi Goldberg, that he don blackface at a Friar's Club Roast in her honor. Yet African American star Eddie Murphy received no criticism for donning whiteface in one scene in the film Coming to America (1986) in order to play a comical elderly Jewish man. Nor did Murphy or his production company receive much blame in the media when writer Art Buchwald sued and won for their failure to give him appropriate credit and compensation for the idea upon which Coming lo America was based. In contrast, Spielberg was pilloried as "Stealberg" when his production company was the target of an unmerited plagiarism suit in connection with thefilmAmistad.51 At a time when Hollywood and Hollywood's Jewish community are caught up in an ethnic succession process through which African Americans and other minorities have made strides but are impatient for more, the newest attack on Jewish Hollywood is bad history and no road map to a more inclusive future. SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER 14 NOTES Harold Brackman 1. Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 145-46 and 229-34; John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago, 1996), p. 246; Gennadi Kostyrencho, Out of the Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin's Russia (Am- herst [NY], 1995), p. 173; Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews (New York, 1994), p. 138; Daniel Pipes, The Long Sliadow: Culture and Politics in the Middle East (New Brunswick, 1989), p. 13. See also David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema (New York, 1987), pp. 285-90. 2. Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York, 1985), pp. 329-30; Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago, 1983), pp. 36-41 and 43-59; Hiram Wesley Evans, "The Klan's Fight for Americanism," North American Review (March 1926), p. 33; William Sheafe Chase, Catechism on Motion Pictures in Inter-State Commerce, 3d ed. (Albany, 1922), pp. 5-57. 3. "Baring The Heart of Hollywood: The Truth About the Motion Pictures," Dearborn Independent, 29 October-10 December 1921; The International Jew (Dearborn, 1920-22), Vol. 2, pp. 117-26; Vol. 3, pp. 64-87; and Vol. 4, pp. 7-41. 4. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York, 1975), pp. 78-83 and 91-92; Cecil B. DeMille, Autobiography, ed. Donald Hayne (Englewood Cliffs, 1959), pp. 219-20; Thomas Doherty, PreCode Hollywood: Sex, Morality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (New York, 1999), p. 26; Stuart Oderman, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle: A Biography of tlie Silent Film Comedian, 1887-1933 (Jefferson [NC], 1994), pp. 138 and 196; Neal Gabler, An Empire ofJiieir Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988), pp. 277-78; Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874-1958 (Reading [MA], 1992), pp. 195-96; Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro m American Film, 1900-1941 (New York, 1993), pp. 117 and 134; Nancy MacLean, "Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Lynching: The Leo Frank Case Revisited," in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, 1997), pp. 168-169. Jazz Age scandals engulf the moguls in Andy Edmunds's anti-Semitic-tinged Frame-Up!: The Untold Story of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (New York, 1991), which portrays Adolph Zukor as a sexual hypocrite who engineered Arbuckle's undoing as a way of punishing the comedian for high salary demands, and in William Manus's recent play, Last Laugh, which instead places the blame on bigots in the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office. 5. Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from tlie 1920s to the 1960s (New York, 1990), pp. 1 - 5 4 ; Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality, Catholics, and the Movies (New York, 1994), pp. 70-71 and 149-83; Doherty, p. 98. 6. Starr, pp. 331-33; Charles Higham, Cecil B. DeMille (New York, 1973), pp. 179-80; Black, p. 65; Les Keyser and Barbara Keyser, Hollywood and the Catholic Church: The Image of Roman Catholicism in American Movies (Chicago, 1984), p. 22. The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 15 7. Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Right from, the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1982). Pp. 43-47 and 61-63; Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York, 1999), pp.41-43; Quoted in Adam Parfrey, Cult Rapture (Pordand, 1995), p. 366. Bill Kaufman, America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics (Amherst [NY], 1995), echoes the charges of the unAmericanism of Jewish Hollywood: "Beginning in 1939, the spectacle of our stateside Eisensteins, many of them foreignbred, urging American natives to sacrifice their sons for Winston Churchill, provoked a brief, sad, and futile protest by the pugnacious guardians of the Old Republic" (pp. 85-86). 8. Gabler, pp. 335-38; Ben Hecht, A Jew in Love (New York, 1931), pp. 4 5 46 and 214-17; William MacAdams, Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend (New York, 1990), pp. 137-40; John F. Callahan, "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Evolving American Dream: The 'Pursuit of Happiness' in Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon" Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42 (September 1996), pp. 372-96; Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? (New York, 1941). 9. Birdwell, pp. 154-171; Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemttism in America (New York, 1994), pp. 129-30; Edward S. Shapiro, "The Approach to War: Congressional Isolationism and Anti-Semitism," American Jewish History, Vol. 74, No. 1 (March, 1984), pp. 47-49; Richard Maltby, "Made for Each Other: The Melodrama of Hollywood and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1947," in Cinema, Politics and Society m America, ed. Philip Davies and Brian Neve (Manchester [England], 1981), p. 82. Hollywood and the legendary aviator have come full circle, with Steven Spielberg reportedly planning a new film biography based on A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh (New York, 1998) downplaying its protagonist's anti-Semitism. 10. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews m America (New York, 1992), p. 624; Edward S. Shapiro, "Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style," in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana, 1986), pp. 144-45; Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un- American Activities (New York, 1968), pp. 167-89. 11. Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York, 1980), pp. 113 and 369; Larry Ceplair and Steve Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Garden City, 1980), p. 289; Clancy Segal, "Hollywood During the Great Fear," Present Tense, Vol. 9 (Spring 1982), pp. 45-48. 12. Navasky, p. 113; Shapiro, pp. 138-39; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, Tlu Hollywood Writers' Wars (New York, 1982), p. 273; Gordon Kahn, Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the 10 Who Were Indicted (New York, 1948), pp. 106-8; Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York, 1989), pp. 364-74. 13. Michael Lind, "Pat Robertson's Grand International Conspiracy Theory," New York Review of Books, Vol. 42 (2 February 1995), p. 23; Anti-Defamation League, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism (New York, 1994). 14. Leo Noonan, "The Temptation of R. L. Hymers," Jewish Journal (Los Angeles), 29 July-4 August 1988, p. 6; John Dart, "2 Step Back From Film Protest Over Anti-Jewish Tone," Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1988, p. Bl. 15. Steve Weinstein, "Religious Right May Be in for a Fight," Los Angeles 16 Harold Brackman Times, 20 May 1991, Calendar section, p. 1; Glenn R. Simpson, "Four Years Later, Buchanan's Advisers, Not His Words, Draw Criticism," Wall Street Journal, 22 February 1996, p. A20. 16. Leonard Ziskind, The "Christian Identity" Movement: A Theological Justification for Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence (Division of Church and Society of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.; Atlanta, 1986), pp. 5-40; National Vanguard Book Service Catalog, No. 16 (William L. Pierce's National Alliance; November 1995). 17. Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, 1994), pp. 162-64; David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History, rev. ed. (New York, 1995), p. 349. 18. William Bennett, The De-Valumg of America: The Figlitfor Our Culture and Our Children (New York, 1992); Dan Quayle and Diane Medved, Tlie American Family: Discovering the Values that Make Us Strong (New York, 1996); M. J. Rosenberg, "Dan Quayle, Hollywood, and Anti-Semitism,"y«yis/i/ournai (Los Angeles), 25 September-1 October 1992, p. 28; Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America (New York, 1993), pp. 313-19; Steven Levy, "Loitering on the Dark Side," Newsweek, 3 May 1999, p. 39. 19. Bruce Newman, "On Location: Spielberg's Children Inspired Him to Recount the Amistad Mutiny of 1839," Los Angeles Times, 9 November 1997, Calendar section, p. 8; Earl Walter and Legrand H. Clegg II, " 'The Color Purple': Another Bad Image," Los Angeles Sentinel, 5 December 1985, p. A12; Coalition Against Black Exploitation (CABE), "Why Do Jewish Producers Degrade Blacks in Hollywood?" (1989 mimeographed broadside); J. J. GoXdbtrg, Jewish Power: Inside the Jewish Establishment (Reading [MA], 1996), pp. 288-89. 20. James Bolden, "Compton Mayor Omar Bradley s Comments Spark Anger Amongjews," Los Angeles Sentinel, 27 October 1993,p. 1; "The Rap on'Gangsta Rap,' " Final Call, 2 August 1995, p. 8. 21. Tony Brown, "The Color Purple is White," Los Angeles Herald-Dispatch, 9 January 1986, p. A4. 22. Andrea M. Wren, "Rerunning The Color Purple' Controversy Over 1985 Movie Now Seems Unfathomable," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10 March 1996, p. C5; Nathan Hare and Julia Hare, Tlie Endangered Black Family: Coping with the Unisexualization and Coming Extinction of the Black Race (San Francisco, 1984), pp. 33-37, 59, and 133; Abdul Allah Muhammad, "I Have A Scheme," Final Call, 2 March 1994, p. 10. 23. J. F. Moses, "Spielberg's Movie Answer to Jewish Slave Dealing?" Blacks&Jews News (available online at hup: //www.blacksandjews.com/Amistad.html [cited May, 1999]). 24. The full text of Jeffries' speech is in New York Newsday, 18 August 1991, p. 1; and New York Amsterdam News, 31 August 1991, p. 1. See also Jim Sleeper, "The Battle for Enlightenment at City College," in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, ed. Paul Berman (New York, 1994), pp. 239-53. 25. Louis Farrakhan, "Let My People Go!" Final Call, 23 September 1993, p. 16; Sylvester Monroe, "They Suck the Life From You," interview with Farrakhan, Time, 28 February 1994, p. 22; Meet the Press, interview with Farrakhan, 18 October 1998. The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 17 26. Arthur J. Magida, Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation (New York, 1996), pp. 139-72. 27. Abiola Sinclair, "Marlon Brando Blasts Hollywood Jews More Pointedly than Dr. Jeffries," JWW York Amsterdam News, 13 April 1996, p. 10; Rosalind Muhammad, "Brando Ignites Debate About Jewish Filmmakers," Final Call, 28 April 1996, p. 3. 28. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melttng Pot (Berkeley, 1996). For critical reviews of Rogin's book, see Gabler, Forward, 24 May 1996; Lary May, American Jewish History, Vol. 85 (March 1997), pp. 115-19; Hasia Diner, Commonquest (Summer 1997), pp. 40-43; Cripps, Journal of American History, Vol. 83 (March 1997), pp. 1462-63; Harold Brackman, "Through the Prism of Race and Slavery," AJS Review, (in press). 29. Irving Howe with the assistance of Kenneth Libo, World of Our Fatliers (New York, 1976), p. 561. 30. Rogin, pp. 11, 16-17, 64, and 68. 31. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), p. 359. 32. Lester D. Friedman, ed., Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Urbana, 1991); Daniel J. Leab, From SambotoSuperspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (Boston, 1976), pp. 23-40. 33. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York, 1990), p. 12; Diana Altman, Hollywood East: Louis B. Mayer and tlie Origins of the Studio System (New York, 1992), pp. 1-23 and 48-53. 34. Will Irwin, The House Tliat Shadows Built (Garden City, 1928), pp. 14547; Nathan C. Belth, A Promise to Keep: A Narrative of the American Encounter with Anti-Semitism (New York, 1979), p. 50; Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Film (Bloomington, 1984), pp. 31-37; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, pp. 71-73 and 157; Cripps, "The Making of Birth of a Race: The Emerging Politics of Identity in Silent Movies," in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, 1996), pp. 38-55. 35. Altman, p. 51; Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York, 1968), pp. 71-72 and 156-57; Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York, 1986), p. 244; Diner, In llie Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (Baltimore, 1977), p. 134. 36. David O. Selznick to Sidney Howard, 6 January 1937, in Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (New York, 1972), p. 151; Carlton Jackson, Hatlie: The Life of HaUie McDaniel (New York, 1980), pp. 41-43; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, pp. 361-64 and 430-31; Cripps, "Africans Americans and Jews in Hollywood," in Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (New York, 1997), p. 265. Joseph Coebbels admired Gone With the Wind as a triumph of epic film technique but kept his opinion private because of Hitler's preference for the hard-core racism of Griffith's Birth of a Nation. See David Stuart Hull, Film in tlie Third Reich: Art and Propaganda in Nazi Germany (Berkeley, 1969), pp. 179-82 and 212. 37. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive 18 Harold Brackman History of Blacks in American Films, 3d ed. (New York, 1994), pp. 35-100; Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, pp. 94-114. 38. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land, p. 69. The Jazz Singer was one of many generational conflict dramas about the contradictory demands of tradition and ambition including the play and film, Der miner balebesl, also about a cantor's son who has to choose between filial obedience and artistic success, not on Broadway in blackface, but at the Warsaw Opera House. 39. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, p. 222; and "African Americans and Jews in Hollywood," in Struggles in the Promised Land, p. 263. 40. Montague Glass, T Understand (New York, 1925); Anna Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a While Horse (New York, 1950), p. 81; Mary V. Dearborn, "Anzia Yezierska and the Making of an Ethnic American Self," in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York, 1989), pp. 113-14. 41. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, pp. 361-62 and 366; Duberman, Paul Robeson, pp. 113-15, 203-4 and 604-5. Robeson eventually left Hollywood, frustrated by limited opportunities; but contrary to legend, he was eager to sing in the 1936 Hollywood film version of Showboat (though he preferred the word darkey to nigger in singing "Old Man River"). 42. Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War IIto the Cruil Rights Era (New York, 1993), pp. 11, 32, 44-56, 81, and 180; Cripps, "Stepin Fetchit and the Politics of Performance," in Beyond the Stars: Stock Characters in American Popular Film, ed. Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller (Bowling Green, 1990), pp. 45-46. 43. Ian C. Jarvie, "Stars and Ethnicity: Hollywood and the United States," in Unspeakable Images, pp. 103-8; Gilman, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in tlie Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (Durham, 1998), pp. 72-80. 44. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, pp. 300-2; Friedman, Hollywood's Image of Hie Jew (New York, 1982), p. 130; David S. Lifson, The Yiddish Theater m America (New York, 1965), pp. 178-79; J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 113-22. Edgar Ulmer, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, bridged the gap between the Yiddish film industry and independent black film production before it, too, was absorbed by Hollywood. See George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1990), pp. 194-200. 45. Friedman, Tlie Jewish Image in American Film (Secaucus, 1987), p. 120; Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis, 1962), pp. 186-88; Lawrence L. Langer, "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen," in From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish American Stage and Screen, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Bloomington, 1983), pp. 21230; Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 42-46 and 60-70; K. R. M. Short, "Hollywood Fights Anti-Semitism," in Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II, ed. K. R. M. Short (London, 1983), p. 159; Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, pp. 345-60. 46. Otto Preminger, Otto Premmger: An Autobiography (Garden City, 1977), pp. 165-66; Deborah Dash Moore, Tb the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York, 1994), pp. 243-53. 47. Alan Spiegel, "Vanishing Act: A Typology of the Jew in Contemporary American Film," in From Hester Street to Hollywood, p. 275; David Porush, "Jews The Attack on Jewish Hollywood 19 Don't Hitch: The American Religion in Northern Exposure" in Representations of Jews Through the Ages, ed. Leonard Jay Greenspoon and Bryan F. LeBau (Omaha, 1996), pp. 115-30; Frank Rich, "The 'Too Jewish' Question," New York Times, 3 March 1996, p. 15; Susan Kaplan, "From 'Seinfeld' to 'Chicago Hope': Jewish Men Are Everywhere; But . . . ," Forward, 29 November 1996, p. 1. 48. Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York, 1991), pp. 236-38; Claudia Puig and Greg Braxton, "Minorities Open Doors for Each Other in Hollywood," Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1995, p. Dl; Cripps, "Film Industry," in Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media, ed. Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp. 171-80; S. Robert Lichter and Daniel R. Amundson, Distorted Reality: Hispanic Characters in TV Entertainment (Washington, D.C., 1 September 1994), pp. 14-16. The most recent studies show representation of African American characters on television achieving parity in 1994 but dipping by 1998. See Paul Fahi, "It's a White, White World on Network TV," Washington Post, 13 July 1999, p. Al. 49. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York, 1941), pp. 92 and 95. 50. Ed Guerrero, framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 197-204; Murray Friedman, What Went Wrong?: The Creation and Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance (New York, 1995), p. 109; Paul Buhle, "The Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics," New Left Review, No. 212 (July/August 1995), p. 119. 51. Patricia J. Williams, "On Imagining Foes, Imagining Friendship," in Struggles m the Promised Land, p. 379; Nelson George, Blackface: Reflections on Afncan-Amencans and the Movies (New York, 1994), p. 96; Pierce O'Donnell and Dennis McDougal, Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount (New York, 1992); Bruce Handy, "Steven Stealberg?" Time, 24 November 1997, p. 99.