Oscars

March 20, 2009

Hollywood and the Jews

By Rob Eshman

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Shortly after she received her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in the 2007 movie, “Michael Clayton,” Tilda Swinton spoke to reporters at the Governor’s Ball.

“It was a huge victory for the Celts,” she said, recapping the countries of origin of that year’s Oscar winners. “Spain, France, England — we all served as a reminder that it was Europeans that invented Hollywood in the first place.”

Well, kind of.

Those Europeans were named Fox, Zukor, Warner, Mayer, Selznick, Lasky, Goldfish and Laemmle. William Fox was originally Fuchs Vilmos. Schmuel Gelbfisz became Sam Goldfish became Samuel Goldwyn. They were Jewish. If you take a map of Poland, draw a 500-mile radius around Warsaw, you’d encircle every town and village from which these inventors of Hollywood came.

This is not a point of pride — OK not just a point of pride. It is a point of anthropology, of psychology, of religion. If you want to understand Hollywood, you must understand the Jews.

First and foremost, there is the storytelling.

Is it a coincidence that the people who told Western civilization’s oldest story are also telling its latest ones? For millennia Jews have conveyed their values through stories. We weren’t the first to discover how effective narrative is in entertaining, teaching and ultimately shaping reality, but we did become expert at it and raised the Word to the level of the sacred.

Walk into any synagogue, open the doors of the ark and there lies the story, written on the holy Torah. Enter any cinema, part the curtain, and there appears the story, filmed for the screen.

Movies are in the business of escape, and Jews are escape artists. A history of persecution has taught you the value of appearing to be something different you they are.

Harry Houdini was a Jew. He despaired of the movie business — “The profits are too meager,” he complained — but movies allowed Jews to do relatively easily what it took Houdini years to perfect: to disappear as one kind of man and re-appear as another, to escape your identity — Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss — and in the act of escaping, help others escape through entertainment.

In Houdini’s time, the first great movie star appeared. Broncho Billy Anderson starred in over 500 movies, most of which he produced and directed, as well. Broncho Billy was the Clooney, Downey and Pitt of his generation, except his real name was Max Aronson, and he was a failed Jewish door-to-door salesman from Little Rock, Ark.

In Hollywood you could wipe the past away. A Goldfish could turn into a Goldwyn and an Aronson into a cowboy. And no one would know — except your fellow escapees. The producer Sam Spiegel, escaping both his own sordid past and the Nazis, went by the name S.P. Eagle. When he was married, Billy Wilder sent a congratulatory telegram: “I’m S.P. Eachless ... What else is there to say except it’s S.P. Lendid!”

The persecution led to insecurity, but it also taught Jews to cope with insecurity — and that’s a very useful skill in Hollywood. Deals come and go away. Fame floods in then vanishes. Yesterday’s trend is tomorrow’s stale bread.

“Nobody knows anything,” that great seer and screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote about Hollywood. To succeed you need the instinct to know if the knock at the door is the mailman or the Cossack. You need to know when to stand by your project and when to grab your suitcase and move on. Jews built an industry reliant on wits, which are portable and in good supply.

I’ve said it before: The two greatest Jewish inventions of the 20th century are Hollywood and Israel. Both provided a means of refuge from the real world. Jews founded Israel to help Jews escape the world. They founded Hollywood to help the world escape reality.

In Hollywood, real men became ideal men, and real life became ideal life. Those two forces — the real and the ideal — are forever in conflict in the Jewish soul. Our stories and traditions present the world as it is — flawed, broken, bitter — but also as it should be — ideal, messianic, sweet.

Jews created an industry that struggles to blend the real and the ideal, art and money, the grinding reality of box office and the lasting impact of a perfect scene: the show and the business.

If God created man in his own image, Jews created Hollywood in theirs. And if you love movies like I do, for that you’d have to say, “Thank God.”

A version of this article appeared in print.

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