THE ACADEMY MUSEUM HAS A JEWISH PROBLEM

WHO'S BEHIND IT IS THE QUESTION

The Academy Museum with Renzo Piano-designed Sphere (thewrap.com)

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures got off to a rocky start, to say the least, upon its long-awaited, much-heralded opening on September 30, 2021.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of cinema history could tell that something was hugely amiss when the Jewish founders of Hollywood and heads of its major studios—Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner Bros., RKO, Columbia, Universal, and United Artists—were nowhere to be seen in a museum dedicated to the industry they’d created. Imagine by comparison a US history museum that failed to mention America’s Founding Fathers, much less give them pride of place, and you have some idea how gargantuan a gaffe this was.

And they didn’t get away with it.

The outcry from a wide swath of the movie community, not merely its sizeable Jewish contingent, was immediate. As was the mea culpa from the Academy Museum, which promised to redress the admitted “oversight” with a permanent exhibit devoted to the Jewish moguls.

And finally, close to 3 years later, on May 18, 2024, “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of the Movie Capital” was unveiled to hoped-for fanfare. What the museum got instead was another pie in the face, only this time with charges of antisemitism written all over it.

On June 10th, the museum received an open letter from a group called United Jewish Writers signed by some 350 Hollywood professionals, stating, “While we acknowledge the value of confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, antisemitic.”[1] Among the A-list signatories were Friends alumnus David Schwimmer, TV writer Barry Schkolnick (Law and Order, The Good Wife), film producer Lawrence Bender (Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting), TV writer/producer Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and sports and entertainment executive Casey Wasserman.

Having already received “a string of angry letters,” the museum responded even before receiving the open letter: “We take these concerns seriously . . . and will be implementing the first set of changes immediately—they will allow us to tell these important stories without phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes.”[2]

And they kept their word, somewhat to my chagrin.

I’d visited the exhibit on June 7th, just a few days before the flap hit the fan, and not knowing what to expect, my reaction was rather muted. I was pleased that the Jewish founders were finally getting their due. I felt the exhibit’s size could have been larger given the subject’s significance. I had some druthers about the short film that accompanied it and wished the Jewishness of RCA head David Sarnoff and Keith-Albee Orpheum co-owner Martin Beck, whose companies merged with Joseph P. Kennedy’s Film Booking Office to form RKO, had been mentioned. I didn’t find anything to write a letter about, however, mainly because—being well versed in Jewish mogul history and somewhat exhausted by having viewed other exhibits—I didn’t bother to read much of the printed material, which is where the exhibit’s critics’ chief complaints were hidden in plain sight.

I was therefore floored a few days later when I learned what all the shouting was about:

• That the “golden age” of Hollywood was called a time of “oppressive control” by the Jewish moguls.

• That Universal founder Carl Laemmle’s “Uncle Carl” moniker derived from “nepotism.”

• That Harry Warner used a “frugal approach” and younger brother Jack was a “womanizer.”

• And that Columbia’s Harry Cohn, admittedly the most off-putting and vulgar of the bunch, was a “tyrant and a predator,” prone to the “casting couch,” with an office patterned after that of Mussolini.

What the hell?

Besides the incongruity of including uncomplimentary descriptions of the moguls in an exhibit purportedly celebrating their seminal role in the “making of the movie capital,” all the insults—except for the womanizing and Mussolini worship—emitted a distinctly antisemitic odor.[3]

Harry “King” Cohn and his (Jewish) Three Stooges, 1934 (hollywoodhistoricphotos.com)

I knew a blog was staring me in the face but before I could write it, I had to smell the stench for myself and had to hurry if I wanted to get to the exhibit before it’d been deodorized.

Alas, when I returned to the museum on June 15th, I was a day late and $19 dollars short—that being the discounted admission price for “more experienced adults,” as the box-office attendant referred to me and explained, in response to my question about the Jewish exhibit, that some changes had been made, “for the better.”

Not what I wanted to hear, but all was not lost, for I was still eager to see how the sanitizing, bowdlerizing, airbrushing, euphe-mystifying had been accomplished on such short notice.

And as if Tinker Bell had sprinkled the exhibit with fairy dust, here’s what I found:

• “Oppressive control” had dematerialized.

• Laemmle was still “Uncle Carl” but no longer a nepotist.

• “Frugal” Harry Warner wasn’t a tightwad, just “rigidly conservative,” and reformed womanizer Jack Warner was now merely “brash and irreverent.”

• As for Harry Cohn, the tyrannical Harvey Weinstein mentor: he’d come out of sensitivity training with a more palatable “reputation as an authoritarian,” though his Mussolini-styled office was still intact, “built to intimidate anyone who entered.”

I also re-viewed the short film on the moguls titled From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood (an uncredited homage, I’d like to think, of my own co-edited anthology, From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood).[4] The United Jewish Writers had slammed the film as well, with producer Schkolnick grousing that it implied that “these Jewish founders were responsible for all the ills of Hollywood.”[5] Not so, in my opinion, for the great bulk of the film bears the stamp of and often quotes directly from Neal Gabler’s largely laudatory, Jewish founders bible, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, with Gabler himself acting as consultant.

“Uncle Carl” Laemmle on screen in the exhibit’s viewing room (Josh White/Academy Museum Foundation)

I do agree that presentist PC does somewhat mar the film, such as in unfairly giving the impression that Jewish mogul-produced films singlehandedly reinforced racism and homophobia when, first, homosexuality was declared taboo and its exclusion strictly enforced by the Catholic-founded Production Code Administration headed by Joe Breen, whose virulent antisemitism is displayed in the film; and second, that racism wasn’t a Jewish invention but par for the course across Jim Crow-era media and society.

That the moguls should be rendered squeaky clean, however, is also misguided, as another US history museum analogy illustrates. For any exhibit on America’s Founding Fathers (except in red states) would be remiss today if it didn’t point out some of their failings: such as that Washington and Jefferson, along with 8 other of the first 12 presidents, were slave owners (only John and John Quincy Adams refrained out of principle), and that Jefferson fathered one or more children with one of his enslaved women, Sally Hemings.

Airing a little dirty laundry in public, in other words, isn’t altogether unjustified, nor need it negate the notable figures’ other achievements. The crucial difference with casting aspersions on Jews as Jews, of course, is that finding fault in a few WASPs doesn’t implicate the entire group, whereas negative Jewish stereotyping plays into centuries of demonization and scapegoating of the Jewish people, not only in the past but stubbornly persisting to the present, as the pre-scrubbed Jewish founders exhibit, “intentionally or not,” reminds us.

Interestingly, one floor down from the Jewish founders exhibit another Jewish-related exhibit, while not making up for the former’s faux pas, does show that the museum, on occasion, can get it right. Titled “Significant Movies and Moviemakers,” the exhibit rotates its subjects over time, and at this moment happens to feature Casablanca—not only one of Hollywood’s most revered classics but in content and production personnel also one of its most Jewish films.

Though what first catches one’s eye is a large-screen video dutifully highlighting the Rick-Ilsa romance and Sam’s timeless rendition of As Time Goes By, the true focus of the exhibit lies elsewhere: with an homage to the film’s disproportionate number of largely Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany and descendants of earlier Jewish immigrants, on and behind the screen. Prominent non-Jewish émigrés such as the Swedish Ingrid Bergman and German Conrad Veidt aren’t neglected, but the exhibit clearly makes no bones about the film’s abundance of Jewish cast and especially crew members: from actors Paul Henreid, whose Austrian Jewish father had converted to Catholicism to avoid antisemitism, and the German Peter Lorre, to legendary German composer Max Steiner, Oscar-winning Jewish American screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch (who based the story on a play co-written by the Jewish Murray Bernett), and Oscar-winning Hungarian director Michael Curtiz.[6]  

No need to rectify this exhibit, from a Jewish standpoint. But a curious discrepancy remains, between the museum’s going full bore, sans glitches, in celebrating Jewish contributions to Casablanca and its blind spot, or even grudge, regarding the Jewish moguls.

Whether some of the animus stems partly from a form of guilt by association with Harvey Weinstein—whose sexual harassment is touched on in another section of the museum in relation to the #MeToo movement—gains currency from the fact that the museum director during the lead-up to the Jewish founders exhibit, Jacqueline Stewart, and the exhibit’s curator, Dara Jaffe, are women. Whether Stewart departed from the museum just weeks before the controversy because of her own doubts about the exhibit or because she saw what was coming and didn’t want to take the heat is unclear. Alma Har’el, however, an Israeli American film director who served on the museum’s inclusivity committee, “resigned after touring the exhibition.”[7] 

And now this:

On June 16th, one week after the scandal erupted, a group called StopAntisemitism jointly posted a demand on Instagram for the museum to fire Dara Jaffe, whom the group holds responsible for the Jewish founders exhibit and calls a “toxic leftist radical” who is engaged to an Egyptian, Omar Madkour, “who appears to be in this country illegally [no evidence was provided] and calls for violence against Jews on Instagram [a screen shot of his private account was provided].”[8]

"Hollywoodland" curator Dara Jaffe (Credit: StopAntisemitism via Instagram)

I’ve suspected since the initial, unconscionable exclusion of the Jewish founders that an antisemite or two was lurking among the Academy Museum’s decision-makers, a sense that the recent exhibit only reinforces. And as curator of the exhibit, Dara Jaffe (despite her Jewish-sounding name) does emerge as a logical suspect. Innocent until proven guilty, of course, and no comment, either from Jaffe or the museum’s newly appointed director, Amy Homma, has yet been forthcoming.

Stay tuned for further developments.

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NOTES

Thanks to Dorsay Dujon for her assistance.

[1] Josh Rottenberg and Stacy Perman, “Jewish founders exhibit criticized,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2024, E1, E3; E3.

[2] Ibid.; also Robin Pogrebin, “Amid Outcry, Academy Museum to Revise Exhibit on Hollywood’s Jewish Roots,” June 14, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/movies/academy-museum-jewish-exhibition.html.

[3] Adam Chitwood and Sharon Waxman, “Academy Museum Deletes ‘Tyrant,’ ‘Predator’ and ‘Frugal Approach’ from Jewish Founders Exhibit,” June 13, 2024, https://www.thewrap.com/academy-museum-jewish-exhibit-changes-antisemitism.

[4] Michael Renov and Vincent Brook, eds., From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press for the USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, 2017).

[5] Rottenberg and Perman, “Jewish founders,” E3.

[6] Other Jewish émigré actors in smaller roles include Curt Bois, Joy Page, S. Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey, and Lotte Andor.

[7] Pogrebin, “Amid Outcry.”

[8] Tess Patton and Benjamin Lindsay, “Jewish Group Demands Academy Museum Fire ‘Radical Leftist’ Curator of Hollywood Jews Exhibit,’ June 16, 2024, https://www.thewrap.com/jewish-group-demands-academy-museum-fire-antisemitic-curator-dara-jaffe.