A new cable documentary profiles the Jewish immigrants who founded Hollywood, but lost their cultural identity.
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BY JOYCE MILLMAN | Jewish control of the movie industry has been a favorite theme of demagogues and anti-Semites for decades. From the House Committee on Un-American Activities to the protests against "The Last Temptation of Christ," Jews in Hollywood have been accused of everything from the communist brainwashing of American moviegoers to blasphemy. Canadian Jewish filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici knocks the wind out of such anti-Semitism in his documentary "Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream," which the A&E cable channel is airing on the eve of the Academy Awards (Sunday, 9 p.m. EST/10 PST). Basically, "Hollywoodism" says, Sure, the Jews run Hollywood -- wanna make something of it?

Based on film historian Neal Gabler's 1988 book, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," "Hollywoodism" chronicles the founding of the major Hollywood studios by Eastern European Jewish immigrants Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), the Warner brothers, Carl Laemmle (Universal), Harry Cohn (Columbia) and William Fox (20th Century Fox). Jacobovici and co-writer Stuart Samuels unspool clip after clip to support Gabler's thesis that these immigrants filtered their persecution at the hands of the Cossacks, and their wish to "fit in" in their new home, through the movies that defined the American Dream. Seldom making movies that were overtly about Jewish concerns or characters, the early moguls instead turned out such films as "The Grapes of Wrath," "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," movies that depicted America as a land of boundless promise where the little guy will always triumph against injustice. "Judaism equals Hollywoodism equals Americanism," goes the narration. Adds film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Hollywoodism ... is the ruling ideology of our culture."

Gabler's book, which concentrated on the lives of the moguls rather than their films, was also a bittersweet story of assimilation, and how, in striving to not "stand out," the moguls lost their Jewish identity. They moved to California to escape the tightly knit social strata of the East Coast, adopted gentile ways, changed the names of Jewish actors, maintained silence at a crucial period during World War II. They created a screen vision of a white-picket-fence America in which nobody with a recognizably Jewish name was ever the hero -- and so, as Jews, they ended up still being thought of as outsiders in the minds of non-Jewish Americans.

The documentary takes a more strident anti-assimilationist tone than Gabler did. Sometimes it works, as when the filmmakers contrast fascinating clips from New York-made Yiddish movies in which the secular world is always rejected with the happy Hollywood ending of Warner Brothers' "The Jazz Singer" (the Warners, unlike their fellow moguls, made movies with overtly Jewish themes early in their Hollywood career), in which the cantor's son finds a way to be true to his faith and get the gentile girl. More often, though, the anti-assimilationism of "Hollywoodism" comes off as self-righteous "more Jewish than thou" finger pointing.

And the obsessive focus on subtext pushes the documentary close to self-parody. In the "Hollywoodism" version, Hollywood western scenes of attacks on settlers by marauding bands of thugs are veiled substitutes for the pogroms against Jews; blacks on screen were stand-ins for Jews; "My Fair Lady" is about fitting in; "Superman" is about passing; and the Jews' struggle against persecution (as the documentary's narration goes) "was repackaged as the will of all common people to go on." For the ultimate proof of this, "Hollywoodism" jumps ahead to present-day Hollywood and gives us the scene in "Independence Day" where President Bill Pullman rallies the people of Earth against the alien attackers with a stirring (Zionist?) speech about "fighting for our right to exist."

Sure, it's always amusing to play spot the subtext, but is the "Independence Day" example accurate? Did the moguls give America a "Jewish ideology" or was it really the ideology of all persecuted peoples, and that's what captured the popular imagination?

For all its densely packed film history, "Hollywoodism" feels incomplete. Since the filmmakers go beyond Gabler's framework to talk about Hollywood in the present, it's inexcusable that they fail to consider Hollywood Jews who are making movies about Jews, not Jewish substitutes. Unbelievable as it may sound, "Hollywoodism" contains not a single mention of Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen or Mel Brooks. But then, you suspect, that would water down Jacobovici and Samuels' romantic populism and academic wigginess. "Schindler's List" and "Funny Girl" are too obvious for them.

Anyway, by focusing solely on movies, the filmmakers may have rendered "Hollywoodism" irrelevant. TV has long since replaced movies as the dominant shaper of mass culture. And the portrayal of Jews on TV could take up an entire documentary of its own.

Early Jewish TV stars like George Burns and Jack Benny followed the moguls' formula, becoming gentile-ized versions of themselves on their sitcoms. The practice exists today in shows like "Mad About You"; Paul Reiser's character was established early on as being Jewish, but the subject is rarely revisited. There's the triumphant example of Jerry Seinfeld, of course, who is Jewish on his show and didn't change his name. But even though "Seinfeld" is the first sitcom to make babka and kreplach integral plot devices, it still had to bow to the network's too-Jewish fears -- in the "Seinfeld" pilot, Kramer was named Hoffman, but it was changed because you couldn't have a Seinfeld and a Hoffman on the same show. And does anybody really believe that George Costanza's parents are not Jewish?

Mirroring the way many of the moguls divorced their Jewish wives and married non-Jewish women once they got to Hollywood, shows like "L.A. Law," "thirtysomething," "Mad About You," "Dharma and Greg" and even the cartoon "Rugrats" prominently feature interfaith couples. Even "The Nanny," which is practically a Yiddish burlesque, is getting ready for an interfaith marriage now (although the differences between Jewish nanny Fran Fine and WASP employer Maxwell Sheffield are presented more as matters of class than religion). And it seems like the only time Jewish characters show up on "NYPD Blue" and "Brooklyn South," two Steven Bochco cop shows, is when they're comic-relief Hassidics (perhaps to distinguish them from all the secular Jews on those shows who have blended in so well, they've become invisible).

Clearly, TV has inherited a lot of the baggage of the Hollywood moguls. But because the filmmakers don't deal with it, "Hollywoodism" is kind of like the Promised Land glimpsed from across the river, but remaining out of reach.
SALON | March 19, 1998