Jews, Hollywood, and Gaza: Some Thoughts

A few days ago I noticed the appearance of a truly remarkable full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter. The ad, which I initially saw as a piece of poorly conceived propaganda, was concocted by the Anti-Defamation League, and called upon world leaders and ‘decent people everywhere’ to make sure that ‘Hamas terrorists’ cannot be rearmed so the ‘people of Gaza and Israel can move toward a more peaceful future.’

My immediate impression was that the ad failed on two levels. The first is the quote from the truly hideous Golda Meir: “We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Presented in bold, the quote reeks of an ADL desperate to counter the images of slaughtered children that continue to fill our television screens. A couple of important textual and contextual changes have been made to the quote — note the substitution of “the Arabs” from the original quote with the less pejorative “them.” But even more significantly, the original quote was referring to the deaths of sons and daughters on either side — soldiers rather than infants. The ADL has simply adapted the quote contextually in order to fit the current Israeli policy of mass child murder.

Even examining it in its new context, the central message being conveyed is that Israel is being forced to kill Palestinian children, and further, that Israel is distraught at being made to do this. Such a claim is ridiculous given world has seen images of Israelis making the bombing of Gaza’s schools and hospitals into a social occasion complete with snacks, drinks and selfies.

On top of this there is the sinister implication, alluded to by playwright Wallace Shawn, that “Golda Meir can be interpreted as saying here that she plans to kill the children of Arabs up until the moment when, in her sole judgment, the Arabs stop feeling ‘hate’ and become sufficiently unprovoking and pacified.” As far as warm and fuzzy ‘feel-good’ quotes go, this one left a lot to be desired.

The second ‘fail’ in the ad is the ludicrous marching out of Hollywood Jewry against ‘Hamas terrorists.’ So much for the ‘grain of truth’ lie — that there is a mere ‘grain of truth’ to the idea that Jews control Hollywood. It was quite easy for tje ADL to bring out almost every single major Hollywood executive, and every one of them a strongly identified Jew. Among those signing the letter were MGM chairman and South African Jew Gary Barber, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer, Relativity Media CEO Ryan Kavanaugh (his original family name was Konitz), Nu Image/Millennium Films co-chairman Avi Lerner, Quentin Tarantino’s personal Jewish mogul Lawrence Bender, Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chair Amy Pascal, Saban Capital Group chairman and CEO Haim Saban, and President of the CORE media group Marc Graboff.

The question begged: what do these figures know about the history of the conflict in Palestine? And so I was almost ready to dismiss it out of hand as another shoddy and pointless ADL production.

However, looked at more closely, and with some consideration for context, it quickly became apparent to me that such a question was irrelevant to the true aim of the ad: what was being presented here was not so much a claim for moral legitimacy as a Jewish ‘show of strength.’ Kevin MacDonald has pointed out that the recent slaughter in Gaza has presented “another situation where the public pronouncements of people who matter have to be squelched.” Indeed, the number of celebrities who dared to express sympathy with innocent Palestinians, even fleetingly, was remarkable. Some, such as Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, even went so far as to sign an open letter condemning “Israeli genocide” of the Gazans.

The response of organized Jewry to this mass expression of free-thinking was hurried and harsh. Nervous celebrities then clamoured to ‘clarify’ their initial statements of solidarity with the Palestinians, instead now uttering mealy-mouthed ‘hopes’ for peace and panicked refutations of anti-Semitism. Take, for example, Bardem’s effort:

This week, along with a number of artists in my home country of Spain, I spoke out about the conflict in Gaza urging all governments to intervene in this escalating crisis. My signature was solely meant as a plea for peace. Destruction and hatred only generate more hatred and destruction. While I was critical of the Israeli military response, I have great respect for the people of Israel and deep compassion for their losses. I am now being labelled by some as anti-Semitic, as is my wife — which is the antithesis of who we are as human beings. We detest anti-Semitism as much as we detest the horrible and painful consequences of war.

Time will tell whether Bardem’s grovelling will be sufficient to stop his career going down the toilet — a consequence that Jackie Mason would like to see for any uppity goy actor who doesn’t know his place. MacDonald also noted that Mason has been quite clear that these people should suffer professional consequences—that the Jews who run Hollywood should punish celebrities who offend the pro-Israel crowd.

They come from these kinds of anti-Semitic, low-class backgrounds where a Jew is the most disgusting thing in the world to them,” Mason answers, according to audio obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. “The ironic thing is that it’s Jewish people who own these Hollywood studios … And they all hire these people and they depend on them for a living. Every penny they made is made from Jews and they hate every Jew just by nature.

These celebrities are justifiably afraid that Hollywood Jews will act as Jews in exerting pressure on them to conform, because the idea that Hollywood executives are ‘just’ Americans who ‘happen’ to be Jewish ‘by faith’ is nonsense. In my analysis of Jewish self-deception regarding participation in the media, I pointed out that

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. In fact, Jews might have more of a monopoly on the entertainment industry now than at any time in their history. However, self-deception regarding Jewish participation in the media today can only be said to be very weak at best. For a start, I think today’s moguls are more openly and unapologetically Jewish than before. Take Ryan Kavanaugh. Before signing his name to the ADL ad, Kavanaugh, described by The Hollywood Reporter as “an outspoken supporter of Israel” and a past recipient of the ADL’s Entertainment Industry Award, claimed in an open letter to renegade celebrities that “Israel is perhaps the closest free-thinking place to Hollywood.” After a rambling, and very clumsy defense of Israeli actions, Kavanaugh then brings out a classic Jewish argument-ender:

My grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, used to say, “Remember Ryan … remember this happened. Remember that the U.S. stood by and allowed Hitler to take over Poland and so many other countries, and slaughter 6 million Jews.” It took five years before the U.S. did anything, and one-third of the Jewish population was captured and killed. Remember the very streets in London with rallies chanting “Free Palestine” are the same streets where some British citizens rallied and chanted in favor of the Nazis. And remember our government did nothing.

Yes, that’s right, Kavanaugh is actually drawing a parallel between people protesting against the killing of Palestinian children and support for Nazi Germany. As an exercise in logic, it’s little more than an ADL special served up with a side of irony. It means nothing beyond the emotive response the trigger words ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Nazis’ might elicit from the indoctrinated, the uninformed, and the unsuspecting. But it says a lot about the mentality of your typical Jewish media mogul. Note the resented and ‘not forgotten’ failure of the United States to intervene in World War II at a speed sufficiently pleasing to the Jews. This is the classic, and often stereotyped, Jewish sense of entitlement together with that notorious sense of historical grievance.

Kavanaugh was also among the first to bring Bardem and Cruz under fire, at one point stating that he didn’t want to work with them again. Kavanaugh told the Holywood Reporter that their expression of sympathy with Gaza “makes my blood boil… As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, anyone calling it Israeli ‘genocide’ vs. protecting themselves are either the most ignorant people about the situation and shouldn’t be commenting, or are truly anti-Semitic.”

Never a guy to miss an opportunity to dwell on the past, Kavanaugh went on to say that the lack of support for Israel “is akin to the silence when concentration camps started during World War II.” Kavanaugh, who has produced such cultural treasures as Fast & Furious 6, 21 Jump Street and The Social Network, has spent a great deal of time in Israel, and works to strengthen American Jewish identity by arranging trips for business leaders, politicians and fellow industryites to tour the region. His statement: “As a Jew, I’m shocked that other Jews in America and our industry aren’t being more proactive,” stands in marked contrast to the denials of moguls in my essay on self-deception, particularly that of producer David Selznick who was always eager to superficially maintain “I am an American, not a Jew.”

The ‘media Jew’ has evolved, and he is certainly now more assertive and aggressive in protecting Jewish interests. Gary Barber, (Chairman and CEO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures), Jon Feltheimer (CEO, Lionsgate Entertainment),Jeffrey Katzenberg (CEO, DreamWorks Animation), and Avi Lerner (Chairman and Founder, Nu Image/Millennium Films) have all had open associations with the ADL in the past.

The reason for this disparity is that we live in a different age. In the postscript to my exploration of the manufactured rise of Spinoza in academia I commented that

It appears that Jews are becoming more and more flamboyant and confident (or aggressive) in asserting their dominance. While the ADL would like us not to think of Jewish power and influence at all, there are recurrent examples where Jews unabashedly assert their influence. … Jews see their future in a world where their claims of Jewish superiority are met with mere acceptance or apathy from the White population. This is neatly summed up in the 1979 ADL-sponsored book Anti-Semitism in America (by Harold Quinley and Charles Glock; New York: The Free Press). The authors state (p. 2) in relation to accusations that Jews are a moneyed elite that “a majority of Jews are in fact moneyed in the sense of having above-average incomes.” The writer added (p. 2) that 97% of American respondents to a survey on this fact said they weren’t bothered by it because they attributed it to individual merit, rather than seeing Jews as a group. This is precisely the goal sought by organizations like the ADL. The ADL’s enmity is aroused when, as Quinley and Glock put it (p. 3), discussion of such facts goes “beyond a simple recognition.”

So the ADL will be quite happy to place its name beside a list comprising the big-hitters of Hollywood Jewry — especially if it includes such loyal and hardworking members of the Tribe as the pathological Ryan Kavanaugh.

Just don’t question the deeper significance of that list, or Jewish control of Hollywood. Because that, dear friends, would be anti-Semitic.

Jewish assertiveness in Hollywood has also now culminated in a mirror image of the Gaza effort, with a pro-Israel open letter now claiming the signatures of 190 Hollywood celebrities. It’s clear even from a quick glance that around 95% of individuals on the list are Jewish. The vast majority of the signatories are actors like Roseanne Barr, Seth Rogen, and Aaron Sorkin. Some of the non-Jewish conformists included Minnie Driver, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone who apparently has some Jewish ancestry. As a publicity exercise this particular effort struck me as empty and derivative, even a little immature. But again, this isn’t about scoring moral points with the masses — this is about putting non-Jewish Hollywood in its place.

When it comes to putting the uppity goy actors in their place there has been no hesitation at all on the part of Jews like Mason, Kavanaugh, or the ADL to making very explicit the scale of Jewish power and influence in Hollywood, and the kind of consequences a renegade can expect. Organized Jewry and its muzzling arm, the ADL, are fully aware of the power they wield in Hollywood. The ADL stalks its prey with the term ‘anti-Semite’ as a safari hunter would a trophy with a high-powered rifle. One shot, one kill.

In the world of entertainment, there are few recoveries. In terms of raw power, the eighteen names on the ADL ad are more than match for the hundreds of celebrities who have signed open letters or penned offending tweets. The message might be lost on the public at large, but to those entertainers it is crystal clear — “We own you.”