A Review of Jewcentricity by Adam Garfinkle — Part 2 of 4: Hollywood
In his book Garfinkle laments the fact that “negative Jewcentricity” has often resulted from “exaggerated” claims that “Jews run Hollywood” and have subverted the traditional morality and social practices of the United States (and the broader West). He notes that:
The best way to get at the subject is perhaps to briefly review some irrefutable facts about the entertainment-business culture in the United States. The first of those facts is, as already suggested, that this culture has been and remains disproportionately, overwhelmingly, even astonishingly Jewish. This does not mean that Jews “run” Hollywood. No one runs Hollywood, and besides, “the Jews” are not a monolithic group that gathers secretly somewhere just off Santa Monica Boulevard to plot the moral downfall of America. “The Jews run Hollywood,” whether spoken by a Jew or a gentile, either in pride or anger, is a Jewcentric statement. It is a bald exaggeration.
But Jewish prominence in Hollywood is a fact that impresses even when it is not exaggerated. The heads of nearly every major Hollywood production studio from the beginning were Jewish, as were many of the directors and not a small number of the cinematographers and actors. Jews have been only slightly less prominent in the New York theater business for nearly a century, and in many aspects of popular music, as well.[1]
So, according to Garfinkle, it is wrong to say that “Jews run Hollywood” despite the fact that Hollywood is “disproportionately, overwhelmingly, even astonishingly Jewish.” This is an argument that hinges on a semantic distinction of no persuasive power whatever.
When one finds arguments that are so ridiculous that even a child could see through them and finds them in a book published by an elite academic press, it can only mean one thing: Garfinkle has plugged into a dominant religion-like mindset in which the causes of anti-Jewish attitudes are entirely beyond rational discussion.
Jews totally run Hollywood. If Jews did not control Hollywood, and, as leftists assert, it was run by corporations solely fixated on profits, we would see occasional unsympathetic portrayals of Jews and Judaism alongside the relentlessly unsympathetic portrayals of Whites (especially White men) and Christianity; we wouldn’t see blacklisting of overt Christians. The absence of such portrayals is definitive proof that Jews exercise editorial and creative control over Hollywood productions, and the consequences of this control have been incredibly damaging to the interests of the White people (and other groups).
If Hollywood was not controlled by Jews who use it to advance Jewish interests, while also generating vast revenues, then Hollywood studios would have lined up to finance and promote Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ — a film that generated over half a billion dollars in profits. Instead, Gibson was forced to finance and promote the film himself and came under fire from Hollywood’s Jewish establishment who feared the film would stoke “anti-Semitism.” Only one thing is more important than profits for a Jewish-dominated Hollywood and that is serving Jewish interests through the construction of culture. Garfinkle is well aware of this, and admits that: “Everyone, even [Mel] Gibson, knows that many, even most, of the influential directors, producers, and agents in Hollywood, and in the bicoastal world of commercial television, are Jews,” and that “It has been this way for a long time, too, although it was not so obvious several decades ago.”[2]
In the first half of the twentieth century WASPs still controlled the commanding heights of American culture and the American people were more ethnocentric and aware of (and antagonistic to) the subversive influence of Hollywood on American society. The reaction against this by conservative America did indeed have overtones of anti-Semitism (e.g., in Henry Ford’s The International Jew), but Hollywood did not voluntarily stop what it was doing. Instead, there was the establishment of The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, headed by Will H. Hays in 1922 in response to movements in over thirty state legislatures to enact strict censorship laws. Later the Production Code Administration, headed by Joseph I. Breen, was launched in response to a campaign by the Catholic National Legion of Decency.The Jewish challenge to the cultural supremacy of the WASP elite (and America’s once powerful Catholic lobby) had, therefore, to conceal itself for fear of prompting an anti-Jewish backlash. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with the rise of the new left (here, p. 76ff) that these constraints have been largely removed.
Garfinkle notes “many Jews used to change their names to fit in better with the American mainstream”[3] and that:
Show-business Jews and Judaism were discussed mostly in undertones in the years before and just after World War II, and very few were portrayed as Jews in Hollywood fare or on the radio — an informal taboo broken in 1947 by the film Gentleman’s Agreement. Well into the 1950s efforts to portray Jews in films and in the new world of television as being “not too different” from other Americans abounded, to the point where iconic Jewish TV personalities such as Gertrude Berg and Jack Benny were depicted embracing Christmas. From around the middle 1960s, Jews in the entertainment business have been openly acknowledged and freely discussed; hence Jerry Seinfeld never had to hide his Jewishness and could even flaunt its stereotypes, at least to a limited extent, on the air.[4]
By the mid-1960s the Jews of Hollywood had usurped the WASP cultural elite and could become more explicit in their Jewish identification and sympathies — together with their antipathy for the traditional people and culture of the United States. Explicitly Jewish themes began to regularly appear in films and were invariably portrayed in a positive light. This has continued through to the present day and Garfinkle is happy to admit that: “Hollywood’s infatuation with Jews makes Jews look good to non-Jews, and Jewish Americans love it.”[5] He should have added that Hollywood’s invidious portrayals of Europeans and Christians makes Whites and their traditional culture look bad to everyone and Jewish Americans love it. The recent Red Ice video “Hollywoodism: The Ideology that Devoured Western Culture” offers numerous examples of this phenomenon.
The extent to which Jewish domination of the entertainment industry has shaped the culture and thinking of many millions of people in the United States is astounding even to Garfinkle. He notes that “it is striking, one has to admit, that the cultural influence of Jews and Jewishness is what it is, considering that fewer than 5 million American Jews are influencing more than 296 million other Americans.” One reason for this vast influence, he contends, is that “Jews live within a civilization that has become entertainment — and celebrity — crazy. If Americans were less obsessed with amusing themselves, this would not be the case; but Americans are thus obsessed.”[6] He notes that “America’s celebrity culture has become so Jewish that it has managed to become Jewcentric without involving Jews or Judaism.”[7] As an example of this phenomenon Garfinkle cites Madonna’s public embrace of the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah.
Huge numbers of White people in the United States (and throughout the West) are mesmerized by the output of Hollywood and its vapid celebrity culture, and have difficulty directing their attention to issues of pressing concern to themselves, their families, and their race. According to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend about $725 billion a year on entertainment — a staggering amount of money. Garfinkle is willing to admit that
there are negative as well as positive implications of Jewish pre-eminence in American entertainment culture, and one of the former has to do with the image of frivolity and even dissipation increasingly associated with America’s closely related celebrity culture. … Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam is hard to refute when he asserts that we are increasingly “bowling alone” in this country, that the robust civic participation that has usually characterized American society and democracy is in decline — even despite the eclectic energies that went into the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. And television and the aura of celebrity culture that it and the internet deliver are certainly among the main reasons for it.[8]
Garfinkle fails to add that Putnam also concluded that increased racial and cultural diversity is directly correlated with growing distrust in American society and a decreased willingness to contribute to public goods. He should have also mentioned that organized Jewry has been the key driving force for this increased racial and religious diversity throughout the West through their decades-long promotion of mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism as an insurance policy against another “Holocaust.”
For Garfinkle, the identification of Jews with Hollywood and the entertainment industry “bears on Jewcentricity in an obvious way” in that
to the extent that left-wing and right-wing critiques of American society flow into one another in attacking what American popular culture has become — and increasingly they do — there are Jews at every turn, in marketing, in media, and, of course, in the entertainment business itself. Critiques launched from the left, including by Jews writing in that adversarial culture’s Marxist influenced tradition, often focuses on business media concentration, alleging that big business, through the enormous power of advertising dollars, has deliberately turned what used to be actual news into pasty, hollow entertainment. Most of the same people do not appreciate, either, the increasingly salacious content of mass media or the apparent elevation of anti-patriotic sentiment and homosexual lifestyles above more traditional values. Hollywood has become very much a target of such critiques, and an increasing number of Americans are ignoring Hollywood fare. Some are homeschooling their children for similar reasons.
As detailed in Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, Freud and his followers (such as Wilhelm Reich) regarded anti-Semitism as a universal pathology which had its roots in sexual repression. The social cure for this affliction lay in overthrowing traditional Christian attitudes on sex in favor of “sexual liberation.” Individuals preoccupied with sex and self-pleasuring were considered unlikely to concern themselves with the activities of Jews, much less to organize politically against them. People who spend most of their time in search of sexual stimulation are unlikely to organize pogroms or threaten the rich and powerful Jewish establishment. The hyper-sexualization of Western culture (the most conspicuous result of the Jewish takeover of the Western media and entertainment industries) is, therefore, a self-conscious Jewish ethno-political response to a traditional Western culture regarded as inherently authoritarian, fascistic and anti-Semitic due to its “repressive” sexual morality.
The promotion of homosexuality (and the increasingly full gamut of sexual perversions and gender-identity dysfunctions) by Hollywood and the Jewish controlled media is an important part of this Jewish attempt to render White populations politically docile through hyper-sexualizing their culture. There is also the added and rather obvious fact that, as Charles Silberman pointed out, “American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief—one firmly rooted in history—that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse ‘gay rights’ and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called ‘social’ issues.”
The consequences of the erosion of traditional Western shaming code which enforced constraints on sexuality (the result of the triumph of the psychoanalytic and radical critiques of Western culture since the 1960s) have been far more deleterious to those lower IQ groups that are genetically predisposed to precocious sexuality than to diaspora Jews (higher intelligence being correlated with later age of marriage, lower levels of illegitimacy, and lower levels of divorce). The net result of the sexual revolution has, as Kevin MacDonald has noted, been the establishment of a society controlled by a Jewish “cognitive elite” who politically, economically and socially dominate “a growing mass of individuals who are intellectually incompetent, irresponsible as parents, prone to requiring public assistance, and prone to criminal behavior, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse.”[9] Meanwhile, at the other end of the social spectrum, Jewish activists have been able to recruit the most intellectually capable elements from within White populations and use them (through a Jewish-sanctioned public school curriculum and a perverted system of financial incentives) as agents willing to harm communities of their own biological origin.
Garfinkle notes that many commentators have “singled out Jews as the source of Hollywood’s supposed undermining of American morals.” He is particularly annoyed that people “have made a big deal about Hollywood Jews hollowing out the moral fiber of America” and then spread this “all over the internet.”[10] He does admit this is not surprising given that it “does not take a rocket scientist to connect the dots: liberals are responsible for the dangerous debauching of our society, not least through vapid entertainment-culture garbage, and a disproportionate number of liberals who are doing precisely that are Jews.” Garfinkle is, however, reassured that there is little evidence that “this marginal thinking and material” has “made its way into the mainstream.”[11] Of course, that is not an accident. Any mainstream voice calling attention to Jewish power or committing other sins against the racial zeitgeist enforced in the elite media will immediately find himself out of a job.
There have been several prominent Jews who have offered honest critiques of the Jewish role in using Hollywood to subvert the traditional morality and culture of the West. One of these is the director David Mamet whom Garfinkle calls a “splenetic critic.” Mamet contends that “Hollywood movies are profoundly, genetically Judaic; the product, via the minds of their creators, of certain distinctive racial traits that arose in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and transported themselves to Beverly Hills.” Mamet believes two of these traits, indifference to wider social norms and high intelligence, combined with a form of autism known as Asperger’s Syndrome, which “has its highest prevalence among Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants … sounds to me like a job description for a movie director.”[12]
Garfinkle does agree that Ashkenazi Jews and northern Europeans have very dissimilar psychological makeups and that the Jewish temperament (shaped over millennia by their social marginality in the Diaspora) rendered them particularly well equipped to take on the WASP establishment and to eventually dominate the American entertainment industry.
The overriding point here is that social marginality often enough generates energy, encourages unconventional perspectives, and focuses ambition. It also produces anxiety and angst, widely and probably correctly said to produce art, which is a Jewish speciality. Pierre Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843–1916), the French Catholic economist and philosopher, put it best over a century ago: “The Jew is the most nervous and, in so far, the most modern of men.”
Indeed, Jews in the Diaspora have become connoisseurs of angst. Religious Jews tend to pour their nervous energy into prayer, study, and career; nonreligious Jews pour it into their intellectual and artistic passions. In America, historically a prosperous, secure, and self-confidant nation, the Anglo-Saxon and northern European peoples of the land have been, again by historical standards, stolid and calm. The contrast between them and the Jews could hardly be more vivid. As wealth and technology have created the potential for a mass-based and varied entertainment culture, Jewish creative energies have helped turn that potential into reality.[13]
So how does Garfinkle, having acknowledged that Hollywood “has been and remains disproportionately, overwhelmingly, even astonishingly Jewish,” defend his tribe from the accusations of those who see this as a profound problem for White people and the future viability of Western civilization? He feebly claims that the Jews who run the entertainment industry are not real Jews because Judaism is a religion and not a blood phenomenon.
Hollywood’s Jewish movers and shakers are with few exceptions not religious people, either in practice or in education. They certainly do not invoke religious rationalizations to justify what they do — rather the contrary. Still, many practicing Jews would be more comfortable if Howard Stern, Andrew Dice Clay, Sarah Silverman, Steven Hirsch, Al Goldstein of Screw magazine “fame,” or Sasha “Borat” Baron Cohen had been born, say, Presbyterians.[14]
This is despite that fact that all these individuals are fully entitled to Israeli citizenship and regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as Jews. This is despite that fact that the vast majority have strongly identified as Jews. As Andrew Joyce noted,
although not religious, moguls like Carl Laemmle, Louis Mayer, Harry Cohn, Irving Thalberg, and the Warner brothers moved in an almost exclusively Jewish social milieu. On a larger scale, ethnic “connections and sympathies opened the flourishing Hollywood commerce to thousands of transplanted New Yorkers, in turn offering possible escape routes to Jewish filmmakers in Europe.” There were so many Jews working for Mayer’s MGM that the company was known in Jewish circles as “Mayer’s Ganze Mishpokhe” (“Mayer’s entire family). RCA founder David Sarnoff struggled “to maintain Jewish cultural identity.” Almost all of the moguls maintained links with Jewish organized crime, particularly with Chicago’s Jewish mobster and former pimp, Willie Bioff. Although outwardly, and perhaps even inwardly, maintaining the pretence of an assimilated citizen of the world, Mayer himself was notorious for interfering on the set of the Andy Hardy series by issuing pronouncements on “how the Gentiles behave.” Despite these realities, there appears to have been a great deal of self-deception and hypocrisy at work in the group. Buhle notes that, despite the fact that these moguls operated in an almost exclusively Jewish world, they were at pains to present the image of “the benevolent melting pot, usually exaggerating its virtues on the screen.”
Little has changed. …
According to Garfinkle, the net result of the Jewish stranglehold over the American media and entertainment industries is that
there is virtually no anti-Semitism in mainstream American culture. The freedom of Jews to work and prosper, as Jews and as members of wider society, has often led to envy, resentment, and anti-Semitism. In America, so far at least, this unnerving pattern has almost been nonexistent, a conclusion that seems to be borne out by the fact that not even a systemic economic crisis with Bernie Madoff as its poster child, combined with the most broadly unpopular military action the Israel Defense Force has ever undertaken (in Gaza in January 2009), managed to evoke much evidence of mass-appeal anti-Semitism in the United States.[15]
Garfinkle notes there was a slight upsurge in “negative Jewcentricity” in the aftermath of the global financial crisis as increasing numbers of people came to the conclusion that “contemporary global capitalism resembles old-fashioned carpetbagging on a global scale.” He also notes that: “If global capitalism is essentially ‘fixed’ or crooked, manipulated so that a relative few gain huge wealth at the expense of the majority — and if Jews become prominent successes in it, as they were, for example, in the free-for-all grabfest that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union — then global “virtual” anti-Semitism looks to be a growth industry.”[16]
The origins of the global financial crisis lay in the actions of a Jewish dominated financial elite whose speculative activities were allowed to expand for two decades at the expense of the productive sectors of the economy. They behaved more like an organized criminal gang than citizens with a sense of civic responsibility and commitment to the welfare of the societies in which they lived. This is not surprising given that Diaspora Jews have traditionally thought of themselves as outsiders, alienated from the societies around them; a hostile elite with a potent sense of historical grievance. For American Jewry, forever fixated on the aggressive pursuit of their individual and group interests, the viability of their host society has always been a lesser concern.
The problem of the Jewish domination of financial markets is not simply that Jews often exploit non-Jews and generate wealth at their expense, but also what Jews do with the wealth they generate. Jewish economic domination of Western societies has gone hand in hand with the Jewish capture of the commanding heights of Western political and cultural life, with profoundly negative consequences for White people. There is a fundamental nexus between disproportionate wealth and disproportionate political, legislative, and media influence, and Jewish elites have wielded this influence to reengineer Western societies in their own interests.
Given the Jewish domination of the important sectors of American society it is only logical that, as Garfinkle puts it, “The global image of the Jews is bound up with the image of America as well as that of Israel.”[17] This is because
America is also the world’s foremost secular evangelist, urging other societies to embrace freedom, experimentation and change. And America happens to be, not coincidentally as many see it, host to the wealthiest and most influential Jewish community in the world. There are almost as many Jews in the United States (about 5.4 million) as in Israel, more in New York City than in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined. The prominence of American Jews, particularly over the past half century or so, is manifest as well, whether in politics, science, business, or entertainment and the arts.[18]
Garfinkle points out that most Jews regard the Jewish domination of America’s financial, entertainment, media and educational sectors (and many other fields) as the thoroughly merited product of their exceptional qualities as a people. He fails to mention the role of Jewish ethnic networking and nepotism in allowing Jews to gain a hold over these industries. He notes that many American Jews “believe that Jews possess superior intelligence, and that because of their superior intelligence they have proved to be superior achievers in so many fields.” As a result of this belief, it is very easy for many of them “to conclude that Jews are superior by blood.” He notes that:
Psychometric data suggest that, yes, Jews are of high general intelligence, and data of other sorts show disproportionately large Jewish professional and intellectual achievement, not just in the United States, but wherever Jews have been allowed to compete on a reasonably level playing field. … There isn’t much doubt that Jews, and among Jews particularly Ashkenazi Jews are significantly more intelligent by conventional measures compared to almost all other groups. Longitudinal studies of intelligence testing show consistently that two groups end up in the highest percentiles: Jews and Japanese, with other Asian groups close behind. The tests consistently show certain other groups near the bottom. The mean IQ for Ashkenazi Jews is somewhere between 110 and 115, depending on which test one cites.
As noted, overall scores are highest for Ashkenazi Jews and Japanese, but not in the same way. Japanese do better on spatial intelligence, Jews in language ability. Those experts in psychometrics are sure that group differences are real, and that finer differences among groups are real too. There is nothing fatally wrong or culturally skewed about the tests, at least not any more. No one who understands the science doubts that these differences — and not just in intelligence but in, for example, natural aptitude for some kinds of sports … are rooted ultimately in differential genetic endowments. Obviously, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable to credit a definite link between genetic endowments and both intelligence and achievement. But it should make these same people more uncomfortable to deny plain scientific facts.[19]
The author fails to offer any further discussion of the “other groups near the bottom” of the racial IQ distribution and the social problems these people inevitably create when imported en masse into Western nations. Nor does he comment on recent findings that Jews are overrepresented at elite universities far beyond what would be predicted by IQ, whereas Whites of European descent are correspondingly underrepresented. For any given level of high IQ, non-Jews far outnumber Jews in America. For example, there are around 7 times as many non-Jews as Jews with IQ > 130 (an IQ typical of successful professionals), and 4.5 times as many with IQ > 145. Are there 7 times as many non-Jews as Jews among elites in Hollywood or other elite sectors of the U.S.? Obviously not.
Garfinkle’s statement is basically an admission that the vast post-World War II literature spawned by the Boasians denying the reality of racial differences — which has profoundly influenced Western societies, and is now the default assumption across almost all academic disciplines — is intellectually bankrupt. The Boasian ideology of racial egalitarianism (discussed in Chapter 2 of The Culture of Critique as a Jewish intellectual movement) was a critical weapon in opening up the West to non-White immigration with all its associated dysfunctions and drawbacks for Whites. For instance, Jon Stratton notes that the dismantling of the White Australia policy and the ultimate adoption of multiculturalism was a direct result of “internal and external pressures related to a general turning away from biological racialism.”[20] The Australian Jewish academic Andrew Markus articulates the standard critique of “white racism” that became prominent in the 1960s when he asserts that it was based on the notion that:
(i) as a result of some (undefined) “natural” process, national groups (or ‘races’ or ‘cultures’) have inborn (‘essential’) qualities which will never alter; and (ii) there are inherent characteristics in such groups which interpose barriers against harmonious co-existence, not least against interbreeding of populations. Such ideas give rise to closed forms of nationalism which restrict membership to those qualified by birth or descent, in contrast to open forms which grant citizenship to individuals on the basis of residence and adherence to the governing principles of the nation. They justified European colonial rule; the denial of basic human rights and citizenship; segregation in the workplace, housing and education; and policies of genocide culminating in the “factories of death” established in the period of Nazi domination of continental Europe. Rarely challenged in western societies prior to 1940, the idea of biological racial difference lost much of its legitimacy in the aftermath of the Holocaust.[21]
It is obvious from this statement just how closely acceptance of the myth of racial equality from the 1960s onwards was bound up with Jewish post-Holocaust ethno-political activism. Note also the outright lies and hypocrisy in the above paragraph. The “(undefined) ‘natural’ process” that Markus claims is the wholly irrational basis for “racism” is the very well-defined process of human evolution itself. The differential evolution of human groups in response to selection pressures imposed by diverse environments, resulted, after thousands of years, in differences in external morphology and psychological traits — including intelligence as measured by IQ tests. The average intelligence of a group will profoundly influence the society that will be created by that group. There is nothing undefined, irrational, or pseudo-scientific about this whatsoever.
Garfinkle notes that Jews are eager to claim significant figures from history as having had Jewish ancestry, including important figures from American history like Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. These claims are generally nonsense; however Garfinkle sees a danger in this tendency of Jews to claim important historical figures as fellow tribesmen. He argues that “this is not a harmless error, because it is a form of Jewcentric philo-Semitism that feeds its opposite, Jewcentric anti-Semitism.”[22] This is clearly a form of Jewish intellectual activity that is directed at influencing social categorization processes in a manner that benefits Jews through enhancing Jewish pride and group cohesion. Garfinkle believes this hubristic tendency among Jews, as well as antagonizing non-Jews, provides them with dangerous confirmation that Judaism is indeed a bloodline phenomenon — that is, a group evolutionary strategy. As stated in Part 1 of this review, this is something he claims to reject.
[1] Adam Garfinkle, Jewcentricity: why the Jews are praised, blamed, and used to explain just about everything (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley, 2009), 130.
[2] Ibid. 128.
[3] Ibid. 131.
[4] Ibid. 128-29.
[5] Ibid. 130.
[6] Ibid. 134.
[7] Ibid. 140.
[8] Ibid. 135-36.
[9] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 151.
[10] Garfinkle, Jewcentricity, 137.
[11] Ibid. 137.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid. 133.
[14] Ibid. 140.
[15] Ibid. 114.
[16] Ibid. 88.
[17] Ibid. 73.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid. 158-59.
[20] Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish — Constructing Ambivalent Identities (London: Routledge, 2000) 223.
[21] Andrew Markus, Race: John Howard and the remaking of Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 5-6.
[22] Garfinkle, Jewcentricity, 152.
End of Part 2.
Go to Part 3.
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