A mere half-year after Kristallnacht, the successful Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht wrote a celebrated book of short stories, one of them a chilling narrative of the German pogrom. Several years later, he wrote a Broadway play about the brave Jews fighting for the establishment of Israel. This was all in addition to a series of speeches and articles excoriating those who stayed silent in the face of undeniable anti-Jewish mass violence.
There is a clever echo of this in a recent Hollywood Reporter story about the film historian Sam Wasson. In response to Hollywood’s continued expressions of contempt for the Jews of the industry’s past and present, Wasson is publishing and reissuing the 1931 novel Rabbi Burns, by Aben Kandel, a nearly century-old satire based on the life of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s longtime rabbi, Edgar Magnin.
The Hollywood Reporter describes the book as “What Makes Sammy Run? meets Elmer Gantry…. about a Los Angeles rabbi who considers leaving his pulpit for a high-level studio post while building a new house of worship for his industry-oriented congregation that might rival Sid Grauman’s movie palaces.”
“It’s frank and funny and fearless about Jewishness,” Wasson told THR.
The explicit reason for the reissue of a century-old “frank and funny and fearless” book about Jews is last year’s complete debacle at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Opened in 2021 in Los Angeles, the Academy Museum is the film industry’s monument to itself. When it launched, the museum had one noticeable omission: it had completely ignored Hollywood’s Jewish founders. After criticism, the museum decided to make it worse by commissioning an exhibit on Hollywood’s Jews—an exhibit that was itself anti-Semitic.
The prevailing theme, said showrunner Keetgi Kogan, was “that these Jewish immigrants were grasping social-climbers who chose to assimilate into American society on the backs of exploited women and people of color.”
As LA Magazine explained: “a linguistic smorgasbord of tired antisemitic tropes are used to paint a portrait of each founder; words like ‘oppressive’ and ‘controlling’ describe the Jewish studio heads. Laemmle, an entrepreneurial visionary who became president of Universal, is cited for his ‘nepotism.’ Harry Warner is described as ‘a womanizer’ and ‘frugal.’ Harry Cohn, co-founder of Columbia Pictures, is noted for being a ‘tyrant and predator,’ a businessman who ‘modeled his office after Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini.’”
All of that led to the reissue of Rabbi Burns, a move that reminds the American Jewish community to take their story into their own hands.
Hollywood has a consistent modern track record of ignoring Jewish concerns unless those concerns are expressed publicly and with some force.
To take one recent example: There was a notable lack of activist pins at last month’s Oscars despite the post-Oct. 7 trend of film and television stars wearing an intifada-inspired anti-Zionist pin at award ceremonies. Those same stars freed their lapels this time. The reason: Many of their Jewish colleagues and peers in Hollywood properly called them out.
The Brigade, a group of about 700 Hollywood creatives, wrote a scathing letter to Artists4Ceasefire, the organization that took as its emblem a bloody red hand signifying a moment during the Second Intifada when a Palestinian man murdered an Israeli Jew, defiled his body, and held up his bloody hands to a cheering crowd of pogromists.
“That pin is no symbol of peace,” the Brigade wrote. “It is the emblem of Jewish bloodshed.
“In 2000, Palestinian terrorists in Ramallah lynched two innocent Israelis, ripped them apart limb by limb, and held up their blood-soaked hands to a cheering mob. That infamous image is now your ‘ceasefire’ badge.
“And on the very day it was discovered that the Bibas babies—innocent Jewish children—were strangled to death by the terrorist’s bare hands, you asked Hollywood to wear it with pride.”
There was never any possible “peaceful” excuse for wearing the pin, nor could anyone claim ignorance. The red right hand is among the oldest symbols on earth, always used to symbolize bloody vengeance. The actors who wore the pin represent a morally bleak cross-section of humanity, and the fact that it took their Jewish peers’ public objection for them to stop parading around in an artistic rendering of Jewish blood further confirms the need for Jews to speak at full volume.
American Jews have to make some noise if they want to be heard. And as a bonus, they create great art when they do so.
