July 25, 2008

My colleague Danielle Berrin asked that question last week of Irv Weintraub, COO of the William Morris Agency. His response:

“I’m not sure I want to answer that question.”

I will. People “think Jews run Hollywood” because it gives folks like Bill Donahue a big bulls-eye for shotgunning blame for the degradation of moral values. “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular … I like families.  I like children.  They like abortions,” is my favorite utterance from the Catholic League leader.

More cynically, those who consider their communities victims of Hollywood need villains. And Jews have always been an easy target. It doesn’t help that there are, in fact, a disproportionate number of Jews in positions of power in the entertainment industry; there also are a disproportionate number among the bottom feeders just scraping by.

Why?

Weintraub went on to say he was no historian but suggested that maybe—just maybe—Jews were drawn to the arts because of a penchant for creativity. I’d say a bit more emphatically that, Yes, Jews have a 3,000-year history of story telling, a skillset that comes in quite handy in Hollywood. The clearest example of this, obviously, is the Bible, followed, though not too closely, by “The Big Lebowski.”

Based on this tradition, and the fact that the movie business was originally an immigrant industry, it should be no surprise that there is a strong Jewish presence in Tinseltown. Here is how I explained this phenomenon last month in a sarcastically headlined post “Yes, Virginia, there is a Jewish media conspiracy.”

Today’s Hollywood Jews are familial and cultural heirs to the town their ancestors built. Neal Gabler recognized that with his definitive 1988 book “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” This was not an anti-Semitic text, but a keenly observant cultural history. The big difference between Gabler’s book and, say, those of Kevin MacDonald, is that one offers telling portraits of a peculiar phenomenon while the other blames the protagonists for a conspiracy to corrupt American attitudes.

There is no Jewish plot to control our minds through entertaining, godless propaganda; there is an ancient affinity for telling stories. And, as I’ve mentioned before: If Jews really worked in media to get out a unified message at the expense of their gentile neighbors, they sure do a poor job.

Spring Street now has a sign welcoming you to Zell Hell.

This banner appeared this morning on the parking structure for the Los Angeles Times, which has gotten thinner, sloppier, shallower and lighter—much lighter—on staff since Sam Zell took over last year. Problems have well outpaced those at the Daily News.

Christians United for Israel held their annual conference this week—a story I willfully ignored—and it seems leader John Hagee, the megachurch pastor whose 15 minutes as a political powerplayer ended oh-so abruptly in May because of this sermon using theodicy to explain the Holocaust, made a very strange appeal to the memory of the 6 million Jews and millions of other “undesirables.”

The phrase “never again” is one Jews often say when referring to their commitment to prevent another attempt to destroy the Jewish people; some organizations, like Jewish World Watch, have incorporated this message into their mission to prevent genocide anywhere and against anyone. But some folks like to use this phrase for emphasizing a commitment to far more than preventing murder, such as the killing of Hagee’s political career.

At CUFI’s conference, Hagee’s address included this bit of self-pitying:

His routine litany of “Never agains” punctuating pledges to protect the Jews from terrorists, Iran and anti-Semites was rounded out with a new promise Tuesday night: “What will I say the next time I’m asked to endorse a presidential candidate? Never again.”

For those who can’t enough of the Christian victimization shtick, Chuck Colson, President Nixon’s chief counsel who found God in prison, says gay marriage (“marriage,” he calls it) is an act of “soft despotism.”

I always thought my gangster roots were on the Italian side of my family. My sister often joked that some distant relative of ours was mobbed up. They weren’t, but considering all the Italians and Jews in my family that came through New York, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone along the way was a nogoodnik. Or a not-so-nogoodnik. Generations removed from Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, the image of Jewish gangsters is more cool than criminal.

Moment magazine devoted this month’s cover story to this topic.

“There were Jews who said, ‘We’re oppressed and we need some tough Jews,’” Jonathan Sarna, the eminent American Jewish historian, told the magazine. “People admired them for being ‘alrightniks,’ for ‘making it’ in America.”

Moment plays this as a new trend, but it’s not. Jews have been writing about their gangster past for more than 30 years, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America,” “But He Was Good to His Mother …” and “Tough Jews” among them. The best book on this topic, for the way it blended social history with familial stains, was Eric Konigsberg’s “Blood Relation,” which I blogged about in November. The book, by recounting the thug life of Eric’s great-uncle Kayo Konigsberg, shows that Murder Inc. and gangster Jews were always revered by their own. Here’s what U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said about growing up with the Kongisbergs:

“We loved the fact that he was one of us. I mean, here’s a guy who had—you know, he wasn’t just an accountant like Meyer Lansky. I remember teasing one of your father’s cousins about him. She’d get upset, but most of the Jewish kids I knew were sort of worshipful of Kayo.”

The Kosher Nostra, of course, is not a thing of the past.

It appears ChristianityToday.com’s survey of evangelicals voters, which showed Barack Obama edging John McCain, was as inaccurate as it was unscientific, at least for Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The latest results from the Quinnipiac Poll found McCain the evangelical favorite by 62 points—78 percent to 16 percent—in Colorado; that’s James Dobson country.

But the poll also showed, as Spiritual Politics notes, that evangelical support for McCain, though still the favorite, was not as overwhelming in the upper Midwest: 60 percent to 27 percent in Michigan, 62 to 30 in Minnesota and 54 to 34 in Wisconsin. Those numbers, though still losers, could set off that “political earthquake” John Green at Pew warned us about.