Hollywood Exaggerates Because Jews Control the Media

This claim is the antisemitic trope of “Jewish control of the media” applied to Holocaust memorialisation. The trope is one of the oldest and most thoroughly debunked antisemitic claims in modern political discourse; it predates the Holocaust by decades and was a staple of Der Stürmer and Goebbels’s propaganda. The claim has no substantive engagement with the actual production history of Holocaust films, books or television, with the actual ownership structures of the entertainment industry, or with the historical reasons for the volume of cultural attention to the Holocaust. Its purpose is not to advance an empirical thesis about cultural production; it is to insinuate Jewish conspiracy as the explanation for the prominence of Holocaust memory.

The actual record of Holocaust films

The major American Holocaust films and television productions of the past five decades include a series of works whose production histories are well documented and which do not bear out the conspiratorial framing. Holocaust (the 1978 NBC miniseries) was written by Gerald Green (Jewish), produced by Robert Berger (Jewish), and broadcast as a public-service educational programme; it brought Holocaust awareness to a mass American audience for the first time. Sophie’s Choice (1982) was directed by Alan Pakula (non-Jewish in his immediate identification, of mixed Jewish ancestry), based on the novel by William Styron (non-Jewish), starring Meryl Streep (non-Jewish). Schindler’s List (1993) was directed by Steven Spielberg (Jewish), based on the novel by Thomas Keneally (Australian Catholic), produced by Spielberg’s company Amblin Entertainment, with Spielberg famously refusing his director’s fee and donating the proceeds to the foundation that became the USC Shoah Foundation. Life is Beautiful (1997) was an Italian film by Roberto Benigni (Catholic). The Pianist (2002) was directed by Roman Polanski (Polish Jewish), based on the memoir of Władysław Szpilman. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) was a British production based on John Boyne’s novel (Irish, non-Jewish, and the novel itself has been criticised by Holocaust historians for its inaccuracies). Son of Saul (2015) was a Hungarian film by László Nemes. The list is multinational in its production base and varied in the religious and ethnic background of its principal creators.

Some of the major films were directed or produced by Jewish film-makers; others were not. The pattern of involvement by Jewish creators is unsurprising given the historical fact that the Holocaust was a crime against Jews and that Jewish film-makers have particular reason to want to address it. This is the same pattern by which African American film-makers have made many of the major films about slavery and the civil rights movement; Irish film-makers have made many of the major films about the Troubles; Vietnamese film-makers have made many of the major films about the Vietnam War. The pattern reflects the proximity of the subject to the makers, not a conspiratorial control of the cultural apparatus.

The “Jews control the media” trope

The trope of Jewish control of the media has been studied as a phenomenon in its own right. The standard scholarly treatments include David A. Hollinger’s Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (1996), Eric L. Goldstein’s The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (2006), and Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988). The historical fact at the centre of the trope is that the founders of several of the major Hollywood studios in the 1910s and 1920s (Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers, Samuel Goldwyn) were Jewish, generally first or second generation immigrants from Eastern Europe, drawn to the new and despised industry of motion pictures because the established Anglo-American business networks were closed to them. This historical fact has been weaponised by antisemitic discourse from the 1920s onwards as evidence of “Jewish control”; it is in fact evidence of Jewish exclusion from older industries combined with entrepreneurial success in a new one, a pattern visible in many other immigrant communities in American history.

The contemporary American media landscape includes multiple major corporate ownership groups (Disney, Comcast, AT&T/Warner, Sony, Paramount, Netflix), only some of whose senior management is Jewish at any given moment. The conspiratorial framing of “Jewish control” maps onto the actual ownership structure of the modern American entertainment industry only loosely and selectively. The conspiratorial framing has, however, been remarkably persistent. It is the same trope, in continuous transmission from Der Stürmer to current internet antisemitism.

The volume of Holocaust cultural production

The volume of cultural production about the Holocaust is real and reflects several factors that have nothing to do with conspiratorial control. The Holocaust is, on any honest measure, one of the central events of twentieth-century European history; cultural production about central events is naturally large. The Holocaust has been within living memory until very recently; the urgency of memorialisation while survivors were still alive drove substantial cultural and educational investment from the 1970s onwards. The Holocaust is the modern paradigm case of genocide in international law and ethics; it is therefore continuously studied in academic, legal and ethical contexts that generate further cultural attention. The descendants of the affected community are concentrated in the cultural and academic centres of the West (the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, France, Germany), where they have been able to support the production of memorial works. None of these factors is conspiratorial.

The output is also varied in quality. Some Holocaust films are of high seriousness and historical accuracy (Shoah, Son of Saul, The Pianist); others are sentimental, simplified or historically misleading (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, certain made-for-television productions). The variation is the same as in any other body of cultural production about historical events. Generalising about it as a controlled stream of disinformation requires ignoring the actual variation.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it imports an old and dishonest antisemitic trope into the discussion of cultural memory. The trope’s purpose is to insinuate that Jewish people coordinate to manipulate public consciousness through ownership of cultural institutions, and that the prominence of Holocaust memory is a product of this coordination. Neither half of the claim is true. The cultural production is varied and multinational; the ownership structures of the modern media industry are not a Jewish project; the prominence of Holocaust memory has historical reasons rooted in the event itself rather than in conspiratorial control. To accept the claim is to accept the antisemitic trope, with all its political consequences.

Who actually owns the major Hollywood studios? Who has made the principal Holocaust films? Why does the Holocaust receive substantial cultural attention?

See also

• Der Sturmer and the Pornography of Hate
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• Schindler’s List
• Life is Beautiful

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Sources

• Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Anchor, 1988
• Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew, Frederick Ungar, 1982
• Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, third edition, Cambridge University Press, 2003
• Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005
• Anti-Defamation League, “Jewish Control of the Media” trope analysis, https://www.adl.org
• Stephen J. Whitfield, “Hollywood and the Holocaust”, in Modern Judaism, 26:3, 2006
• Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films, Continuum, 2011
• Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust, Temple University Press, 2003
• Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin, 1999, on the historical reasons for the volume of American Holocaust cultural production
• Yosefa Loshitzky (ed.), Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, Indiana University Press, 1997
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Holocaust Films” and “The Holocaust in Popular Culture”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org