In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Joel Stein asks "How Jewish Is Hollywood?"
I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.
How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). ...
The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) ...
Ari Emanuel, who is the original for Jeremy Piven's "Ari Gold" character on HBO's Entourage, is the brother of Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel.
Whatever happened to Armenian moguls? It seemed like in the past there was often one studio boss who'd be Armenian.
In general, isn't it weird how it has become fashionable to be naive and less worldly, as evidenced by the drop in percentage of Americans who agreed with the factual statement "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews"? It used to be that people felt proud of knowing the score, of understanding the way of the world, of being clued in to how things work.
Today, though, it's cool to be ignorant. I don't think it's just people who actually know the facts about Hollywood and lied to the ADL to be safe. Judging from comments by countless anonymous people on the Internet, a lot of people are proud of being out of touch with what's happening. They want you to be aware that they've cultivated their cluelessness. It's really very strange for somebody like me who can remember back to the late 1960s. That era had its flaws, to be sure, but willful ignorance was not one of them.
The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.
As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you'd be flipping between "The 700 Club" and "Davey and Goliath" on TV all day.
So I've taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that's what we do best. I'm weighing several slogans, including: "Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!"; "Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible"; and "Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all."
I called ADL Chairman Abe Foxman, who was in Santiago, Chile, where, he told me to my dismay, he was not hunting Nazis. He dismissed my whole proposition, saying that the number of people who think Jews run Hollywood is still too high. The ADL poll, he pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs "do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans," and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to "weaken the influence of religious values in this country."
That's a sinister canard, Foxman said. "It means they think Jews meet at Canter's Deli on Friday mornings to decide what's best for the Jews." Foxman's argument made me rethink: I have to eat at Canter's more often.
"That's a very dangerous phrase, 'Jews control Hollywood.' What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood," he said. Instead of "control," Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry "happen to be Jewish," as in "all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish."
But Foxman said he is proud of the accomplishments of American Jews. "I think Jews are disproportionately represented in the creative industry. They're disproportionate as lawyers and probably medicine here as well," he said. He argues that this does not mean that Jews make pro-Jewish movies any more than they do pro-Jewish surgery. Though other countries, I've noticed, aren't so big on circumcision.
I appreciate Foxman's concerns. And maybe my life spent in a New Jersey-New York/Bay Area-L.A. pro-Semitic cocoon has left me naive. But I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.
I always thought The Larry Sanders Show had the most interesting take on this perpetual question. From an earlier article in the Los Angeles Times:
[Producer] Artie chews out [writer] Phil after his repeated homophobic jokes prompt a gay assistant (Scott Thompson) to hit the show with a sexual harassment lawsuit. “You know who runs this town?” Artie growls at Phil.
“The Jews?” Phil says.
“No,” Artie retorts. “The gay Jews.”
Interestingly, sometimes people go in the opposite direction and make inside jokes by portraying moguls as non-Jewishly as possible. In Evelyn Waugh's 1948 Hollywood novel The Loved One, the highest ranking figure in the studio is named Erikson, who speaks in "blunt Nordic terms." Similarly, in "Singing in the Rain," the upstanding but clueless 1920s movie studio mogul is named "R.F. Simpson" and is played by 6'-2" cowboy actor Millard Mitchell.
It's funny how history gets written. Back in Golden Age Hollywood, eight major studios were nepotistically run by Jewish moguls who hired their relatives and in-laws as executives, and the other studio was owned by Walt Disney, who nepotistically hired his relatives as executives. For decades now, a controversy has raged over whether Walt Disney was anti-Semitic. No comparable controversy exists over whether the other eight studios were anti-Gentilic. In fact, the term "anti-Gentilic" doesn't even exist. (As I recall, George Orwell had some insights into the political usefulness of the nonexistence of words.)
It's funny how history gets written. Back in Golden Age Hollywood, eight major studios were nepotistically run by Jewish moguls who hired their relatives and in-laws as executives, and the other studio was owned by Walt Disney, who nepotistically hired his relatives as executives. For decades now, a controversy has raged over whether Walt Disney was anti-Semitic. No comparable controversy exists over whether the other eight studios were anti-Gentilic. In fact, the term "anti-Gentilic" doesn't even exist. (As I recall, George Orwell had some insights into the political usefulness of the nonexistence of words.)
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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69 comments:
Back in the "golden age" of Hollywood, all the Jews in the business had hailed from Europe. Perhaps it was this element of exile which gave so many of the films a certain wistfulness. It even registers in the curious, unplaceable, array of anglocized accents.
I find Hollywood films pretty much unwatchable these days. While at best they can be "clever", too many seem to be the product of a kind of slick, spoiled-kid mentality, at one remove from the grain of life. And when they do play at seriousness, it often comes across as sentimental and kitschy (eg "Schindler's List").
Here's a little xmas present from Taki. He provides clueless gentiles a glimpse into how things actually work in the media business.
http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_invention_of_christmas
"Although I’m sure he will deny it, Rupert Murdoch was visited by six rabbis around this time last year and was asked to fire one of his most popular Fox TV commentators, Bill O’Reilly. The Irishman is too Christian, was the complaint. Murdoch being who he is did not fire O’Reilly, but did tell him to lower his Christian rhetoric around Yule time. The rabbis, needless to say, were out of line."
Six rabbis visit Murdoch and ask for O'Reilly's scalp? Yes the inventors of the kosher system understand chain of command and how to apply pressure to a choke point.
The reader is left wondering how many times the rabbis have been successful in the past.
pretty amazing comment thread on the la times article. latimes.com and usatoday.com seem to actually be embracing the free speech concept. not so the wall street journal!
another good question is "how jewish is the federal reserve?"
especially the chairmanship of the federal reserve? does he always have to jewish?
Yes, the entertainment industry has always been overwhelmingly controlled by Jews. Now we know why Hollywood takes such a prominent role in the culture war. Under this kind of influence is it any wonder why or country has changed so much in so short a time.
The term "anti-Gentilic" wouldn't really make sense. All ethnic groups are ethnocentric. Should we have a work for Greek Orthodox people who are nepotistic within their community and wouldn't dream of marrying outside it? (anti-non-Greek-Orthodox?)
"especially the chairmanship of the federal reserve? does he always have to jewish?"
Volcker was not Jewish. Martin was not Jewish. Miller was not Jewish.
Unawareness of ethnic origins is part of globalization. Globalization in turn is arguably the triumph of Anglo-American Protestant capitalism, and Protestantism has a universalist strain.
In my day-to-day work, I'm mainly surrounded by middle-class European and Asian professionals of many ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We have a tacit agreement that we are all equal before God (in whom we do not believe, but still). This makes a huge taboo of ethnic stereotyping, no matter how true or false it may be.
All this helps us get along, I guess. It gives us a code to relate to one another by, just like mainstream Christianity did maybe 50 years ago.
Memes like this universalist ignorance of ethnicity must be adaptive, otherwise they wouldn't exist. This one evolved in high-status groups like Ivy League students and their adult counterpart, Davos Man. Now that the We (the default in-group) are transnational, noticing ethnicity is not as cost-free as it was when We were Anglos or Christendom or whatever.
Obviously anyone who is awake and observant can see reality not just in conventional terms but as it is, too. Waking up is an anxious process, however.
The absence of certain terms, such as the converses of anti-Semitism or misogyny, is part of the wake-up call. As a young man, goy-bashing and man-hating were much bigger problems for me personally then their flashily named converses, but they aren't part of the pantheon of conventional terms.
Great damage control. That's the benefit of running things.
The real loss of the dominance of Hollywood by Jews is that it leads Christians to not even try to become directors, etc.
The result is the loss of talent in the industry. I find that almost the only movies of interest these days are from foreign countries. And as I look back at older Hollywood films that have a good reputation, I see that they also are biased, wherever it is possible to be biased, and hence disappointing.
If there is no possibility for bias, sometimes the old movies are excellent. Anything with Fred Astaire dancing.
I refuse on principle to watch any film starring Adam Sandler.
Steve, since you are a sometimes movie reviewer, do you have any thoughts on why the old Jewish Hollywood movie moguls were so much vastly superior at producing classic, high quality films than their incompetent heirs?
I think it started when the Jewish movie producers stopped worrying about funding movies that would sell to a white gentile audience and became totally obsessed with driving their personal political message.
While this had been building up under the surface previously, Jewish movie producers started letting their political biases overwhelm and suffocate their own movies starting in the mid to late 90's, IMO.
Just for the record, the term "anti-Semite" was invented by anti-Semites who thought it sounded classier than "Jew hater." Most complaints about the term seem unaware of this.
There is a Family Guy episode where Peter thinks of himself as a media/Hollywood mogul and you can see him wear a Davidstar around his neck. I always thought that was interesting.
They have had more Jewish jokes. In one episode Peter receives help from a Jewish accountant and he is so impressed that he exclaims 'Is there nothing you people can't do? Well besides manual labor" LOL. In the same episode a flashback scene shows a Louis Farrakhan-type Black denouncing whites on stage and a Jew is standing behind the scenes telling him what to say. Needless to say, this particular episode got banned.
I watched Altman's "The Player" on TV last night. The protagonist Griffin Mill seems gentile , with Jewish rivals--whom he triumphs over: Daniel Kahane, the writer whom he murders, and whose girlfriend he later marries, and Louis Levy, his rival in the studio. I wonder if Altman (Catholic, I think) was exaggerating the prospects for gentile success--or how concerned he was with this issue. It's a great movie anyway, but in this prism it's even better.
At the very high levels Hollywood is still very much a nepotistic old boy's club, so the continued dominance by the same ethnic group isn't terribly surprising. You get a lot more of a mix at the levels just below studio head, with lots of Irish and white ethnic names and even a few mormons. The place that's most interesting is among writers, especially television writers, which appears to have undergone a lot of gentilization (is that a word?) over the last fifteen years or so.
As screenwriting has become less Los Angeles insular and nepotistic and more open to anyone with a high verbal IQ, there's been an influx of smart young writers from around the nation and from a variety of backgrounds. There's still a big Jewish presence, especially in comedy, but you hear older Jewish writers express surprise and not a little dismay at being a minority on a mostly gentile writing staff.
A stroll down the picket line during last year's WGA strike revealed a lot of Jews, but a minority among the Irish and German Catholics, Scots-Irish, and surprising number of Italians, Greeks, and Christian Arabs.
Take another look at William Cash's "Kings of the Deal"
http://www.olimu.com/Notes/KingsOfTheDeal/KingsOfTheDeal.htm
So I guess all that furious denouncing of William Cash by the likes of Barbra Streisand and Leon Wieseltier is … no longer operative.
Check out Steve's piece from 2006
Tendencies
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/06/tendencies.html
what are you referring to re: orwell? any particular passages?
i'm 32, and while the majority of the producers seem to be jewish, movies themselves seem to be less jewish now than they were 20 years ago. there seem to be far less jewish directors, writers, and actors. there are still some, but not like there used to be. i would say white gentiles are now the predominant creative group.
jews did most of the entrepreneurial work to create hollywood, so i don't mind them passing along most of the executive jobs. the problem of course is that jews are also the group most interested in constantly lecturing white gentiles about how wrong it is for them to do the same thing.
probably the most troubling thing is how jews slowly take control of other enterprises that white gentiles have created, then start in right away with double attack of passing the top jobs along only to other jews while again lecturing white gentiles about how wrong they are to try to keep anything for themselves, and oh, better turn over some of your jobs to blacks, whitey.
considering jews now control baseball, basketball, and ice hockey (ice hockey being the most incredible, since jews do pretty much nothing in ice hockey), it's amazing the NFL has resisted a total jewish takeover.
white gentiles did and still do most of the work in video games, but i wonder how jewish the executives of video game companies are now. i wouldn't be surprised if jewish guys have taken control of them as well. harder to force the evil white males to replace themselves with blacks in that industry, though.
Hi.
Please investigate how many of the people in the FED top positions are Jewish.
I did something like that back in the day (back in the day means May 2008)...
...and was staggered, just flabbergasted (read - mouth on the floor, drooling) on the results of my quick Google investigation.
http://americangoy.blogspot.com/2008/05/about-federal-reserve_05.html
uhh lets shorten it
http://shorturl.info/346
"So, lets sum up this racist, clearly rambling, anti-semitic, bigoted, idiotic, anti-humanity rant.
Jews make up about (roughly, according to all sources) 2% of the population of the United States of America.
All five (out of five) of the Federal Reserve Board are Jewish.
They are joined at the top when a vote needs to be taken by the Fed organization in the so called Federal open market committee (or FOMC) by five representatives selected from the regional Federal Reserve Banks (there are 12 of these).
So, of the 12 presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks, three of them (and four was the magic number, as Mr. Moskow, the "Wikipedia non-Jewish Jew", used to be the Chicago Fed Bank president) are Jewish.
So, on top, 5 out of 5 Board Members of the Fed are Jewish.
Just below, 3 out of 12 are Jewish (perhaps the ratio is bigger, but I need proof for this somewhat respectable blog).
Take this for what it's worth, but we need a black guy on the Board. A woman. A Chinese-American. A gentile, perhaps (ooooops)."
Joel Stein: "But I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them."
Followed by the sound of crickets.
Waspy McNation Founder: "It would be nice if we could remain influential in our own nation." Followed by denunciations and imprecations. The bigotry!
Steve --
You have a huge blind spot in your analysis of nepotistic ethnic networks.
All those guys you mention are HIRED HANDS.
Let's review: Rupert Murdoch, not a Jew, Time-Warner, owned mostly by big investment funds, not Jewish. Most of the Studio execs (who are hired and fired more frequently than football coaches) are not Jewish. Only Sumner Redstone really stands out as Jewish.
Most of the Jews in Hollywood are actors or particularly, actresses.
Meanwhile as the first Anon points out, most Hollywood films are terrible, written, directed, and produced by WASPs from Harvard for WASPs from Harvard. Think the "Harvard Mafia" that runs the Simpsons, or SNL, or pretty much most studios.
When Jews ran Hollywood, it was a family owned enterprise dominated by entrepreneurial men who lived and died by their ability to make money by making solidly Middle Class and Pro-American movies like "Yankee Doodle Dandy" or "It's A Wonderful Life" or "Casablanca." Hecky Mayer "invented" his birthday to be on the Fourth of July. Deeply assimilated Jews made both Golden Age Hollywood and Comic books. Casblanca and Superman.
Now we get execs out of Harvard in huge public companies where compensation is due to personal networks in rapid turnover positions, not bottom line results. Which is why we have dogs like "Redacted," or "Towelhead," or "Rendition," or "Lions for Lambs" which make almost no money in the box office but get lots of Wall Street investment money (based on Harvard WASP social networks). Though that's in question now of course.
Look at comedy: once dominated by Jews out of the Catskills, now a WASP/Harvard-National Lampoon affair with Tina Fey being the role model.
As far as "discrimination" by the old-line Jews who ran Golden Age Hollywood, Jews were fairly rare in acting roles, and the execs (who were mostly figureheads under the big guys) were relatives, but writers and directors were mostly non-Jews. Guys like Howard Hawks, John Wayne, John Ford, Jimmy Stewart, John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, etc.
Now, there are a lot of Jewish actresses but relatively few Studio heads with real power (i.e. ownership) who are Jews. Only Redstone really qualifies and unlike Mayer or Warner or Goldwyn, he is not hands-on.
The Culture Wars which are real are being waged by the socially dominant group which is the Harvard / Yale mafias run by WASPs. Stephen Gaghan (Syriana, Traffick) or Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly) are far more important (writer-producers) in Hollywood's culture war than guys like Iger.
A guy like Iger is a hired hand, who will be fired at some point, and has little day-to-day operational control (unlike the classic Golden Age Moguls). His whole ability to get pay raises and the NEXT job is a personal network of "important people" who have clout, such as Whedon, or Gaghan, or George Clooney (none of whom are Jews btw).
Meanwhile, due to Hollywood's relatively closed shop, guys like Gaghan or Whedon even if they don't make money for studios have lots of clout, mostly because they have the "correct" and ultra-hip politics and cultural attitudes. THEY are the guys who really run Hollywood.
Steve, you write about Hollywood but you don't understand how it works. When turnover of execs is high (and it is) in publicly owned Studio companies (Disney, Time-Warner, CBS-Viacom, Sony, News Corp are all publicly owned), the real power accrues to the writer-producers-directors who have personal patronage networks. Such as George Clooney pal Steven Soderbergh (Swedish not Jewish). Really only News and CBS-Viacom are dominated by single majority shareholders (Murdoch and Redstone). They are not day-to-day either.
The network that Controls Hollywood is the WASP-Harvard mafia. Which is inevitable when high turnover, and ability to construct personal patronage networks determine the "next" job.
I don't think it's just people who actually know the facts about Hollywood and lied to the ADL to be safe.
I wouldn't be so sure. That the Jews run Hollywood is hardly a well kept secret. One needn't scour the angrier pages of the internet to find this information.
People do claim to be more oblivious than they really are on issues they perceive to be bias oriented or racially charged.
"Anti-Gentilic" is a nice start on a search for the appropriate term.
Judeoracist or Judeobigot would be good terms for the likes of Abe Foxaman or Alan Dershowitz.
Judeofascist would be a good term for the radical Zionist/West Bank settler types.
Interesting how the few people who have the guts to state the obvious are often Jews themselves. Joel Stein, Ben Stein, Mickey Kaus, Eric Alterman.
It's really very strange for somebody like me who can remember back to the late 1960s. That era had its flaws, to be sure, but willful ignorance was not one of them.
I'm wondering how well you actually remember the late sixties. Maybe you were just sheltered.
I was a public social worker in San Francisco in the late sixties. That's where I first observed willful ignorance up close.
The evidence about all sorts of liberal conceptions was all about us, but almost no one recanted or even spoke up. The reason was that, belief in the preposterous in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, was seen as a virtue.
It's the main reason you can never win an argument with an ideological liberal - they view their refusal to accept demonstrated facts as evidence that they are indeed worthy. Contrary evidence is seen by liberals as a kind of test created by the devil as his way to challenge them.
There is also "cognitive dissonance". Festinger's book When Prophecy Fails examined the beliefs of cultists teday after their doomsday prophecy didn't occur. They believed harder than ever.
We see plenty of cognitive dissonance this week as major TV newscasts have environmentalists on screen exlaining how the blizzards are proof of global warming. They have had their faith tested but they have met the challenge - any one can believe in global warming when the thermometer soars. It takes a particularly true and noble fellow to remain unshaken in his belief in global warming while he freezes to death.
So it is with the unacceptable idea that there are Jews in Hollywood and the media. You think the argument is won just because of overwhelming statistics. To the true believer your statistics only prove that you are a bad man. The fact that those statistics are undeniable only means that for the modern liberal there is more virtue to be had in denying them.
Steve, I was looking at the latest appointments by Obama like Labour, a mexican immigrant 2nd generation ...did you see if there is any Stupid White Man beside Biden ? I mean that the white males seem all jews, I cannot recall one non-jew, male and white, everybody seems to be female, minority or jew
James Kabala:
I believe that the proper term is "antisemitic" rather than "anti-Semitic," although a lot of people use the second version.
Secondly, I always thought that the term "antisemitism" is useful because it distinguishes people who have racial animosity toward Jews from those with a religious animosity (that is, whether they hate people of Jewish background who belonged to other religions).
I think this is an important distinction to make - not that either form of anti-Jewish bigotry is acceptable, but it is always useful to have precise terminology.
There still seem to be a few Jewish directors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_American_film_directors
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ciPYLQUERCs/SMwbyM_qsTI/AAAAAAAAAKA/Yzv6v2A1DFs/s1600-h/vanity_fair_180.jpg
"This tiny Connecticut university, with a total enrollment of 2,700, has turned out a shockingly disproportionate number of Hollywood movers and shakers...
Disproportionately Jewish, of course. The gentiles for the most part are merely "talent."
I believe the Cash piece discusses gentiles wanting to enter the business trying to appear Jewish...
"the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels . . . the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time." Leslie Fiedler
I repeat: all commenters are expected to adhere to masculine white standards of argumentation when discussing grownup matters. No phrasing statements as questions, no use of passive tense, no moral equivilency. You *will* accept these conditions, and you *will* like them, understood?
Jeez, man, what's your problem?
"Just for the record, the term "anti-Semite" was invented by anti-Semites who thought it sounded classier than "Jew hater." Most complaints about the term seem unaware of this."
-James Kabala
Nope.
"The word antisemitic (antisemitisch in German) was probably first used in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider in the phrase "antisemitic prejudices" (German: "antisemitische Vorurteile").[7]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite#Etymology_and_usage
Anon - what are you referring to re: orwell? any particular passages?
I take it that Steve is referring to newspeak generally. If a concept doesnt have a word to describe it that it helps to undermine the very existence of said concept.
So, there is a term to describe antipathy to jews - anti-semitic, but no commonly used word to describe the opposite; jewish antipathy to gentiles.
If everyone would just use a common, value neutral term like ethnocentric...
Here are a few paras extracted from that wiki page:
In the novel [1984], it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year".
The basic idea behind Newspeak is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State.
The ultimate aim of Newspeak was to reduce even the dichotomies to a single word that was a "yes" of some sort: an obedient word with which everyone answered affirmatively to what was asked of them.
We are supposed to believe that jewish dominance in the mass media is due to merit and not the fact that racist jews discriminate against non-jews in hiring. Yet anytime people of European ancestry are more successful at something than say blacks are, jews insist that it's only because racist whites are discriminating.
I don't know how Testing99 can put WASPs and Harvard in the same sentence with a straight face. I went there in the mid nineties, and it was 40% Jewish and 20% asian. Calling the Harvard Lampoon WASPy must be some sort of April fool's joke. Wake up guy, this isn't the thirties.
"Most of the Jews in Hollywood are actors or particularly, actresses.
"Meanwhile as the first Anon points out, most Hollywood films are terrible, written, directed, and produced by WASPs from Harvard for WASPs from Harvard. Think the "Harvard Mafia" that runs the Simpsons, or SNL, or pretty much most studios."
testing99 is awesome. WASPs from Harvard. Fur coats. Penants. Awesome.
There's Hollywood the movie, which is what testing99 is talking about, and Hollywood the reality, which Joel Stein and everybody else I know talks about. Man, this guy sure runs some loopy charades here.
Steve, next time I write to your AOL account and invite you out to dinner, take me up on it. Get ye down the 101 and we'll hit Musso and Frank's. I've got tons of inside stuff on this industry from three sides - the corporate, the creative, and the production. For a movie/culture reviewer like yourself, I'd guess the anecdotes could be pretty informative.
Okay, time to 23 skidoo and stuff a phone booth with my Harvard chums.
testing99: I generally enjoy your comments, but your claims about "the Harvard/Yale mafias run by WASPs" are just silly.
When last I ran the numbers, I found that, today, at both institutions, compared to the population as a whole, white gentiles are MORE UNDER-REPRESENTED THAN BLACKS.
Maybe things have changed, drastically, in the last year or so, in which case I need to run the numbers again.
But I tend to doubt it.
Proper White Person, since you're making demands of the commenters here, I assume you must be Steve in disguise, n'est-ce pas? (Oops, another one of those gay questions. Have I been kicked out of the white club yet? - another one!)
well if it were admitted then the obvious next question - why - answer jews favor jews.... and that would open a whole can of worms - why did the wasps voluntarily give up and share power when the jews did not reciprocate. ?
Well, here's one for Joel Stein!
"white gentiles did and still do most of the work in video games"
Are you blind? (Hint: They don't have eyes shaped like any of those guys.)
"I went there in the mid nineties, and it was 40% Jewish and 20% asian. "
I keep on seeing different numbers for the Jewish percentage at Harvard.
The New York Observer gives 21% even. http://www.observer.com/node/41543
Any reliable sources?
Merry Christmas, Steve:
White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire
“We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.” — President Bush, Oct. 15, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html?pagewanted=1&hp
DK is right. People are well aware of who runs Hollywood, the Mainstream Media, and Wall Street. We've just been conditioned not to ever publicly comment on it unless it is to our most trusted friends and relatives. Even then, we have to whisper.
The good news is that Hollywood, MM, and Wall street all seem to be self destructing.
"steve burton said...
testing99: I generally enjoy your comments, but your claims about "the Harvard/Yale mafias run by WASPs" are just silly."
Testing99's comments about just about everything are silly. As the "Man Who Goes by Many Names Here said..." pointed out (and quite amusingly too, I might add), Harvard hasn't been WASP dominated since at least the 70's, maybe the 50's. T99's assertion is an anachronism, like the tiresome meme pushed by Hollywood in movies like American Beauty, that America (outside of the coastal megaopolises) is some kind of sexually repressed squaresville central.
The best book on who runs Hollywood and how is HOLLYWOOD WARS by John W Cones. Interlibrary it if the $40 price tag is too steep. It lays out exactly how things work and I can't recommend it highly enough.
testing99 is right that the studio execs are hired hands, but he downplays the fact that the industry is a small, extremely inbred pool of people who practice reciprocal preferences and nepotism. Just as a Senator makes his real money after leaving office to become a lobbyist, a studio exec often makes his real money after getting canned by being given a production deal which no one ever expects to produce anything. Of course the top guys (both execs and agents) in Hollywood are Jewish. They always have been and likely always will be.
However as others have noted, they're not as dominant in the creative areas. I think the serious decline in Hollywood output over the last 25 years has to do with several things: Hollywood's Jewish elite not understanding or respecting the national culture and its inability to identify the proper artists to represent it; the nature of the medium itself, which is increasingly less relevant to the public; and the decline in Jewish ability over time. Hollywood may have remained quantitatively Jewish, but qualitatively. 50 years of Long Island has taken its toll on them.
Wow, that may be testing99's most absurd false claim yet.
If testing99 is 4 reel, I think he needs some 'testing' done on himself, if ya know what I mean.
OMG, watch out there paisans; better watch out tovarich there in Brighton Beach, the WASP/Harvard mafia is coming to get U!
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
"People are well aware of who runs Hollywood, the Mainstream Media, and Wall Street. We've just been conditioned not to ever publicly comment on it unless it is to our most trusted friends and relatives. Even then, we have to whisper. "
You give the man on the street (or the "people") way too much credit. Jews get filed away somewhere in their minds next to Armenian, Sebian, Ukranian, Lebanease or any other exotic sounding country they can't locate on the map. "Jews" simply means white(ish) ethnic group.
"I think the serious decline in Hollywood output over the last 25 years has to do with several things: Hollywood's Jewish elite not understanding or respecting the national culture and its inability to identify the proper artists to represent it; the nature of the medium itself, which is increasingly less relevant to the public; and the decline in Jewish ability over time."
First, I think you need to draw a distinction between movie Hollywood and TV Hollywood: TV Hollywood is generally higher-quality and more attuned to mainstream American culture. TV Hollywood is as dominated by Jews as movie Hollywood is, so the disconnect isn't Jew versus gentile, but left-wing movie Hollywood versus the rest of the country.
An example of the tone-deafness of movie Hollywood is the series of box office flop anti-war movies they've done over the last several years; these have been perpetrated by left-wing Jews and by left-wing non-Jews (e.g., Robert Redford).
On the other hand, TV Hollywood puts out first-rate shows such as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and 24. Joel Surnow, the creator of 24, is one of Hollywood's rare conservatives. The Sarah Connor Chronicles are probably the best show on TV right now, and that show was also created by a Jew. It also features heroic WASP characters and -- some iSteve readers will be ecstatic hearing this -- has portrayed Jewish characters in negative lights, e.g., a shifty Jewish diamond trader and the uber-Semitic Richard Schiff as a traitorous ally of Skynet.
- A Jew
Quick observations ... the Jewish movie moguls who ran Hollywood up through the 1960s were generally American patriots with little apparent interest in subverting traditional culture. It's their spoiled, sheltered children who hate America.
I've been inside the "campus" of Electronic Arts Canada several times. It's one of the largest such operations in the world. Most of the people who work there appear to be "white gentiles" (to borrow the term used by previous posters). There are notably some female graphic artists and team directors, but most of the employees are men between 20 and 45 years of age. While we're at it, a relatively large number of them are married with stay-at-home wives. When I inquired (diplomatically and tactfully of course!) about that I was told that most of them made enough money to comfortably support a family and since their wives didn't really have to work, they don't. FYI.
I keep getting these Joels and Joes and Steins and Kleins mixed up. And who was that cokehead who beat his little girl to death 20 years ago?
The most anti-Semitic thing Walt Disney ever did was to hire the Sherman brothers to write the music for The Parent Trap and Mary Poppins. It's like he wanted to say, "See, they're not all Richard Rodgers!"
Remember that Walt was a small-town kid who got burned in the Oswald the Rabbit deal. You could hardly blame him for being wary about Jews, and big-city folks in general, after that.
I believe that the proper term is "antisemitic" rather than "anti-Semitic," although a lot of people use the second version.
--Glaivester
Glaivester writes intelligent stuff, but he's wrong on this. Europeans only capitalize proper nouns, but we Anglo-Saxons-- excuse me, Anglophones-- capitalize any part of speech if it's proper. So we get Semite/Semitic, Russia/Russian/Russify, etc. You could conceiveably write "Antisemitic", but "anti-Semitic"-- or "un-American", for that matter-- makes more sense, even if clumsy.
The Continentals have their way; we have our own. Please don't Euronate on it.
I skip the comments by testing99, mnuez and too tall jones. apologetics, excuses and lies.
anon:
"well if it were admitted then the obvious next question - why - answer jews favor jews.... and that would open a whole can of worms - why did the wasps voluntarily give up and share power when the jews did not reciprocate. ?"
I think white Anglo-Protestant culture has long defined openness and a lack of ethnocentrism as a virtue, so it's bad form and un-WASP to discriminate in favour of other WASPs, though a degree of nepotism may be permissible in some circumstances. This worked very well in Anglo-Protestant countries as long as non-WASPs were a small percentage of the population, only mass immigration of non-WASPs turned it into a bad strategy. Of course it was that strategy that made such immigration possible.
"I think you need to draw a distinction between movie Hollywood and TV Hollywood"
not really
"the Jewish movie moguls who ran Hollywood up through the 1960s were generally American patriots with little apparent interest in subverting traditional culture."
Check out the book "Red Hollywood." ...considers this work to demonstrate how the Communists of Hollywood were sometimes able to express their ideas in the films they wrote and directed...
Check out discussions at
http://www.homevideo.net/FIRM/
excerpts
In a sense, what we are seeing is one aspect of the Jewish-Gentile kulturkampf in modern America, one played out in the visual media. From the Jewish side, suspicion of and hostility toward Gentiles is common, which, given the long history of anti-Semitism, is psychologically understandable. Indeed, Hollywood insider Benjamin Stein confirms and analyzes this animosity. In the 1976 essay "Whatever happened to small-town America?" he explores television's consistent hostility to rural (read Christian) America:
The television shows and movies are not telling it "like it is"; instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely powerful section of the American intellectual community--those who write for the mass visual media. . . . What is happening, as a consequence, is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced in the same country. . . . Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed out on television screens and movie screens every day. . . . Television and the movies are America's folk culture, and they have nothing but contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk. . . . People are told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their society is in decline, it deserves to be.
America’s favorite bigot, a philo-Semite?
Posted on July 11, 2003 at 10:22:23 PM by Eire
In their analysis of Jewish themes and characters, the Pearls offer a fascinating look at how one of the most popular modern television stars taught tolerance through a wide range of scenarios:
By the end of his twelve years on prime-time television, Archie Bunker, Americans best-known bigot, had come to raise a Jewish child in his home, befriend a black Jew, go into business with a Jewish partner, enroll as a member of Temple Beth Shalom, eulogize his close friend at a Jewish funeral, host a Sabbath dinner, participate in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and join a group to fight synagogue vandalism. While the famed style of All in the Family (and its sequel, Archie Bunker's Place) was unique, its inclusion of Jews and Jewish issues was far from unusual.
Of course, neither Hollywood Jews nor most American Jews were as completely assimilated as the Pearls believe, as is evidenced by the very product these "Jewish producers, writers, and network executives" created from the late 1970s onward. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the emergence of Chanukah portrayals on TV. This progression is a metaphor for the growth in Jewish identification among many American Jews, as well as the growing number of Jewish themes and characters on television.
Chanukah made its TV appearance, the Pearls argue, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though "this newfound awareness of Chanukah was manifested merely through passing references on TV shows" featuring Christmas themes. What came to be known as the "Christmas-Chanukah season" evolved, however, and to the extent Christmas was minimized, Chanukah was emphasized. Through the 1980s Christmas and Chanukah shared a "Christmas spirit" on TV as shown in, for example, a 1988 Christmas episode of Day by Day, in which a toddler at a day-care center wears a large Jewish star and a menorah hangs on the wall.
The most interesting thing about the Terminator show (surprised Steve hasn't commented on it) isn't just how it showcases multiple working class white heroes (the mixed Connor-Reese clan come across as less WASP and more Scots-Irish) but how unapologetically it's set in the real Los Angeles of multiple mutually suspicious ethnic groups. Along with this comes a rare willingness to portray ethnic minorities in negative as well as positive lights-- the shifty, Talmud-quoting Hasidic diamond merchant and Schiff-portrayed Skynet collaborator mentioned earlier, but also nasty Armenian gangsters, Mexican gangbanger document forgers, a crooked black dentist, and so forth. Even the nice Japanese-American businessman with his sob story of family internment turns out to be a thieving con man. And the heroic black FBI agent turns out to be a believing Christian, with his beliefs portrayed sympathetically and Christian themes woven through the entire season. Even a nuclear power plant is portrayed as a prize to be fought over and a future headquarters of the human resistance, a la Niven and Pournelle.
Interestingly, sometimes people go in the opposite direction and make inside jokes by portraying moguls as non-Jewishly as possible. In Evelyn Waugh's 1948 Hollywood novel The Loved One, the highest ranking figure in the studio is named Erikson, who speaks in "blunt Nordic terms." Similarly, in "Singing in the Rain," the upstanding but clueless 1920s movie studio mogul is named "R.F. Simpson" and is played by 6'-2" cowboy actor Millard Mitchell.
I expect this is the default. Which is why I was rather surprised that The Producers gave its two protagonists Jewish names (Bialystok and Bloom). I expected them to get hate mail from the ADL.
"Even a nuclear power plant is portrayed as a prize to be fought over and a future headquarters of the human resistance, a la Niven and Pournelle."
James Cameron paid a Niven and Pournelle a lot of money for an option to film one of their end-of-the-world novels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL0E1xO-TlI
Simpsons Writer Mike Reiss at Harvard...
730 Verbal 780 Math
The Harvard Mafia...not too Waspy...
Walt Disney was anti-Communist. That's why he's considered anti-Semetic today.
"Without us, you'd be flipping between "The 700 Club" and "Davey and Goliath" on TV all day."
Sometimes, even Pat (Robertson) had some good news features, and Terry ???? was always more perky than Bawbwa Wawters.....
And I ALWAYS liked Davey and Goliath.
So, what's the problem, NU?
- Fr. John
Memes like this universalist ignorance of ethnicity must be adaptive, otherwise they wouldn't exist. This one evolved in high-status groups like Ivy League students and their adult counterpart, Davos Man.
Bob, have you met naturalistic fallacy?
How about Cancer, is that adaptive too?
And adaptive for whom? I suppose something about blacks' constitution (inter alia, obviously) made the transatlantic slave trade feasible; is that something adaptive too? For whom? Blacks, whites, or both?
Now I'd be the first guy to play Devil's Advocate in response, but let's be practical here.
(Sorry PWP, I love the rhetorical question and I'm not giving it up for you (We've only just met!))
Now that the We (the default in-group) are transnational, noticing ethnicity is not as cost-free as it was when We were Anglos or Christendom or whatever.
This is an odd statement; fish don't notice the water until you take them out of it; ethnicity only becomes salient in a multiethnic environment.
You get a lot more of a mix at the levels just below studio head, with lots of Irish and white ethnic names and even a few mormons.
Yeah, I for one am relieved there are lots of Irish filmmakers. We're in good hands there...
Oh wait, the Irish are second only to the Jews in the field of opposing Euro EGI, my bad.
the Jewish movie moguls who ran Hollywood up through the 1960s were generally American patriots with little apparent interest in subverting traditional culture. It's their spoiled, sheltered children who hate America.
Incrementalism.
From the Jewish side, suspicion of and hostility toward Gentiles is common, which, given the long history of anti-Semitism, is psychologically understandable.
Why is common suspicion of and hostility toward Jews on the European side never "psychologically understandable" given the long history of Jewish bigotry? Wait, let's go back a bit; given the long history of Jewish bigotry, why is suspicion and hostility toward Jews not common among Europeans?
Again, according to Evil Neocon, water's dry and the sky is green.
Do we go into detail about how water's actually wet, and the sky's actually blue?
Ethnic Jews may dominate Hollywood, but there is little Jewish about them. Their Jewishness amounts to Jewish humor, bagels and lox, and an excise to be an angry minority. Their lifestyles are an open assault on Jewish law, which they despise as much as they dislike Christian fundamentalists.
As for Stein, he is the leftist who wrote the anti-nationalist screed
Republicans are blinded by love and another one where he declared "I Don't Support the Troops"
Joel Stein hates the Torah, hates America, and is an Obama worshipper. He is a walking advertisement for antisemitism, which is why the LA Times employs him.
The SOB has openly said that he prefer Mein Kampf to the bible.
JS: Dude, I could read ‘Mein Kampf’ with the right lenses on and find something nice about it. You shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to find something nice about a text. I understand the context: You turn around and pity a people being killed, and, like, you turn to salt; God kills your first-born baby; God asks you to kill your child? I know you could come up with counter examples, but there’s enough slavery and murder in that thing ... I’d rather read ‘Finnegan’s Wake.‘
http://www.jewishjournal.com/thegodblog/item/joel_stein_mein_kampf_and_the_bible_20081107/
Don't take a thing this leftist antisemite says at face value.
"Well done Winslet, I told you, do a Holocaust movie and the awards come, didn't I?" Ricky Gervais said, sipping from a glass of beer on stage, before joking: "The trouble with Holocaust films, there's no gag reel (outtakes) on the DVD." - Golden Globes
Gee, Stevey-boy, it sounds like you want to add some Affirmative Action programs to Hollywood to get some non-Jews running things there.
In the real world, people vote with their feet, and with their wallet.
If the 98% of Americans didn't really like what the 2% are doing in Hollywood, they would stop renting movies and stop watching television shows.
If they're actually ok with it, but still enjoy kvetching about it... well, we the 2% are perfectly happy to make a living off of that.
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