How Jewish is Hollywood?

Pretty dang Jewish, says Joel Stein:

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). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

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) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)

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.

Great line. I'm a philosemite who tends to be comforted by the knowledge that Jews run things. Not everyone is, though. Steve Sailer, for example. Nevertheless, Sailer, who tends to notice these things, notices this thing, and asks an interesting question:

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.

You would be amazed, or perhaps not, by how hard journalists work to be blind to the obvious, because it interferes with their own biases. Take the blindness of journalists on how religion works. I keep bringing up journalism, because that's my professional milieu, and I keep shuttlecocking from highly disgusted to highly amused as I observe how strenuously we tribunes of truth-telling lie to ourselves and to our readers and viewers to protect our pieties.

Along those lines, I had to shake my head when I read this story about shots being fired at a Kwanzaafest event in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. We on the DMN's editorial board are engaged in a big, ongoing project to address the huge economic discrepancy between north Dallas, which is predominantly white and relatively prosperous, and south Dallas, which is predominantly minority, and relatively poor. We will analyze the problem from a thousand angles, but the one we won't touch, or will barely touch, is the role dysfunctional black inner-city culture plays in the chronic problems of south Dallas. We focus a lot on the unwillingness of white Dallas to engage black Dallas (by "black Dallas," we mean "poor black people in Dallas," not the black middle class), but we rarely if ever focus on non-racist reasons white people steer clear of black events -- like, for example, wanting to avoid occasions of violence -- and the fault black Dallas bears for its own lack of progress.

Likewise, there's a lot white Dallas would prefer not to see of its own complicity in the fate of south Dallas. But we at the paper have no problem pointing that out.