The Berman Archive is committed to supporting the ways we engage with American Jewish history. A big piece of that history rests in Hollywood, where a group of mostly Jewish immigrants created the entertainment industry we know today. This history has been in the midst of a years long debate connected to the Academy Museum of Motion pictures, which opened in 2022 in Los Angeles.
When the museum opened, it was welcomed with fanfare and abrupt blowback. In the museum’s effort to present an inclusive story of American film, they left a few key things out. Missing from the inaugural slate of exhibits was any focus on the Jewish immigrants who built the film industry in Los Angeles and would become moguls of iconic studios such as Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, and Universal Pictures.
Museum officials heard the criticisms and pledged to properly recognize the contributions of the industry’s Jewish founders with a dedicated exhibit reflecting their legacy. The new exhibit opened earlier this year and focused squarely on the development of the industry by a group of entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants. The exhibit was curated by film historian Dara Jaffe and advised by Neal Gabler who co-authored this report held by the Berman Archive on Jews in television. Problem solved, right? Not quite. Now, rather than excluding Jewish narratives from film history, the museum is under fire for portraying the industry’s founders in a critical light.
This month, New Yorker writer Michael Schulman—who wrote a book last year on the history of the Oscars—wrote what should be the definitive take on this whole Jewish film historical debacle. His assessment of the discourse around the exhibit was so spot on and historically grounded, we reached out to him to see if he’d agree to an interview. He did.
Given the larger conversation about antisemitism in America, what has been the reaction to the article?
To be honest, I was expecting a barrage of angry e-mails and tweets the day it was published, but the reception has been extremely positive. I think a lot of people who were following this controversy, including Jews, felt that the backlash to the museum was misplaced, but they may not have been as loud a group as the museum’s critics. I did get one very kind but anxious e-mail from the daughter of a Holocaust survivor who wondered if Jews should be “spitting in our own soup” during this time of rising antisemitism. I told her that I sympathize tremendously with that feeling—because it is a scary time—but part of what I love about being Jewish is that we analyze, we argue, we hold ourselves to account, and we think things through. That’s why we’re the “People of the Book”!
In your piece you surface pre-edited portions of exhibit display text that were deemed too controversial. You published these texts to highlight the nature of the controversy because that’s your job as a journalist. What do you think is the obligation of museums to their audiences on this score?
I had no problem quoting the since-expurgated words in my piece, because I didn’t think they were that controversial to begin with. I’ve read some of the same exact adjectives in biographies of the studio heads and even used them in my own book, “Oscar Wars.” As a Hollywood historian, I’m used to seeing Jack Warner called a “womanizer,” or Harry Cohn a “predator,” or the studio system “oppressive,” because those are well-established truths. The job of a museum, I think, is to inform the public, and what frustrated me walking through the revised exhibition is that these truths are now being withheld from museumgoers.
How do you hold Jews in positions of power to account without affirming antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish cabals? That’s a question we’re constantly reckoning with when it comes to Israel, and the Academy Museum controversy is something of a microcosm.
You say the outcry against the exhibit is, ultimately, a stand in for how we talk about Israel and Jewish power, which both really exist AND inflect antisemitic tropes. How should cultural institutions represent complicated histories in an even-more complicated present?
That’s a tricky question, and I’m not sure I have the answer. It’s a Catch-22: how do you hold Jews in positions of power to account without affirming antisemitic tropes about nefarious Jewish cabals? That’s a question we’re constantly reckoning with when it comes to Israel, and the Academy Museum controversy is something of a microcosm. One perspective is that we should suppress critical speech, because it might have the byproduct of reinforcing those tropes, but I don’t agree. I think that we need to let the truth, not fear, guide us, especially when it comes to history. But it’s important to acknowledge that antisemitism exists as well. The Jewish studio heads were victims of antisemitism and capable of victimizing people—including other Jews, such as blacklisted artists. It’s difficult to hold both things in our minds and understand how they may have reinforced each other, but that’s far preferable to stamping out the bad stuff.
Is a historically minded, accurate and uncontroversial exhibit on Hollywood’s Jewish founders possible?
I’m not sure it is, if you look at what’s happened over the past few months. I would say that it’s historically minded and accurate to present Harry Cohn as the man who built Columbia Pictures and as a notorious sexual predator, but many people in Hollywood found that to be offensive. The #MeToo movement put an important new lens on gender dynamics in Hollywood, and to write that out of history is, to my mind, a huge step backwards. So what do you do? Include that in the story and invite controversy, or excise it at the expense of historical accuracy? Obviously, there needs to be a certain balance, and the exhibition’s critics felt that it tilted too negative. I felt differently. As I said in the piece, this isn’t the same as, say, a great artist who was terrible to women in private. These were businessmen who built vast systems of power which shaped decades of popular culture, so in order to understand them you have to look at how they used (or misused) that power.
What the exhibit lacked, and you were able to fill in with your piece, was a bit of nuance around what it meant for these men to be Jewish. What are some elements of the moguls’ Jewish identity/history that complicate the totalizing and simplified version offered by the museum?
I’d actually say that the exhibition was much more nuanced than the open letter critiquing it let on. The half-hour video that still plays there, narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, does a good job explaining how antisemitism drove the studio founders to build their own industry out West and embrace American assimilation, but also how fear of marginalization shaped some of their worst decisions, such as forming the backlist or excluding minorities from movie screens. A museum exhibition can only go into so much detail, and there’s much more to be found in books, such as Neal Gabler’s “An Empire of Their Own.” In “Oscar Wars,” I write about the brilliant comedic actress Judy Holliday, who was raised by leftist intellectual New York Jews and won Best Actress in 1951 for playing a dumb blonde in “Born Yesterday.” She was one of many Jews targeted by the blacklist at that time, and there’s an incredible story of how she cleared her name by playing dumb at her Senate hearing—essentially, convincing her inquisitors that she was as innocently bird-brained as her most famous character. A bravura performance!
Do you use archival research in your work? What’s a favorite American Jewish piece from an archive you could share with our readers?
I did a lot of archival research for “Oscar Wars,” much of it at the Academy’s own Margaret Herrick Library, in Beverly Hills. One of the coolest things I found there was a memo by Adolph Zukor, the Jewish head of Paramount. The studio’s war epic “Wings” won “Outstanding Picture” at the first Academy Awards, in 1929, but Zukor declined to travel from New York to L.A. to accept the statuette in person. Instead, the Academy decided to film a short “talkie” of Zukor accepting the prize, which was then projected for the audience at the awards banquet. I realized that I was looking at a draft of his speech—and since it was delivered before the ceremony, that meant it was the first Academy Awards acceptance speech ever! I don’t know if that counts as “Jewish”—these men were mostly secular—but it was a major Oscar moment involving one of the Jewish moguls. Hey, maybe they should have put that in the museum…
