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Introduction: The Hollywood Question
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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1 hava tirosh-samuelson, daniel bernardi, and murray pomerance Introduction The Hollywood Question This book sets out to mark a new and challenging path to the understanding of the role of Jews and their experience in Hollywood filmmaking. Since the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry at the turn of the last century, Jews have contributed—as executives, producers, directors, writers, and performers—to the building and development of the studio system, the star system, and the arts and sciences of the Hollywood style. Thus, in a central and influential way, they have been concerned with the construction of the American Dream, or at least the Hollywood version of that dream. The promise, opportunity, and material success that shaped the cultural and collective identity of this nation of immigrants have been inspired, and to some degree structured, by a Jewish minority that embraced the majority culture more than at any other time in their long diasporic life. Our multidisciplinary approach looks with new light at the Jewish experience on film. If our joint examination stands upon two fundamental questions—what is the historic presence of Jews in America? What involvement has the Jewish presence brought to Hollywood specifically and American popular culture broadly?—the studies herein do not pause to elaborate on them directly, so we raise them here. What follows in these pages is aimed at any interested reader, scholarly or not, who is a lover of Hollywood film and interested to know more about it; and any reader, Jewish or not, who cares about the nature and complexities of Jewish experience , especially as it relates to cinema. American movies may not exactly constitute a picture of our culture, but they surely make a picture for us, one that we gaze at with seriousness and also a certain loss and regaining of self. And Jewish experience is one of the repeating, pervad- 2 Introduction ing motifs in that picture, a motif, we believe, worth considerably more attention than it has received. Jews in America Present in America since 1654, Jews sided more heavily with the rebellious colonies during the revolution for independence, receiving full citizenship by the end of the eighteenth century and sharing in the economic expansion and industrialization of the nineteenth (Hertzberg; Diner; Diner and Grunberger). Unlike Europe, in America “Jews could reside anywhere, they could own land, engage in retail trade and become artisans and craftsmen ” (Farber 35). Between 1820 and 1880, 250,000 Jews came to America from small cities in central Europe, seeking in the new land the promise of a better life. These Ashkenazi immigrants, most from German-speaking families, joined the largely Sephardic Jewish population in America that numbered a few thousand and was concentrated in major port cities (e.g., New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, Newport, and Savannah). Although the newcomers were skilled laborers in weaving, shoemaking, tailoring, and baking, in America they found their livelihood mainly as peddlers and small shopkeepers, usually trading in dry goods as agents for more established Jewish businesses in urban centers (Ashton 48–49). Peddling brought the Jewish immigrants to smaller towns and rural areas in the South, Midwest, and West, expanding Jewish populations in mid-size cities as part of the rush of western migration in the United States from 1830 to 1870. By 1877, Jews were nearly 8 percent of the California population and synagogues could be found throughout the continent in expanding cities as well as in smaller towns. By the end of the century, a new Jewish business elite comprising bankers (e.g., Schiff, Seligman, Lehman, Kuhn, and Loeb) and department-store magnates (e.g., Strauss, Bloomingdale , Gimbel, and Altman) had emerged, part of an upward mobility in the North spurred in part by the economic demand created around the Civil War. Throughout the nineteenth century, the goal of many American Jews was integration into the gentile world, accomplished mainly through intermarriage. According to Jonathan Sarna, “some 28.7 percent of all marriages involving Jews . . . were intermarriages” (45). The particular makeup of American culture and politics allowed Jews to enjoy life unencumbered by religious persecution, although social discrimination and exclusion remained prevalent. Of course, there were also periods of acute anti-Semitism (Dinnerstein; Gurock). Nonetheless, the United States Constitution made it possible for Jews to defend their rights in American law courts, and many [3.235.227.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:24 GMT) 3 Introduction Jews believed that American principles echoed Judaism’s values (even if the application...