Jews and Hollywood
Important men in cinema:
- Carl Laemmele built Universal;
- Adolf Zukor and Jesse Lasky were the architects of Paramount;
- Louis B. Mayer and the Schenks built Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer;
- Harry Cohn created Columbia.
These men were all either Eastern European Jewish immigrants or first generation Americans who were children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. These were the men who shaped the films of Hollywood and ushered in a new age and art form into America.
Whether they chose to be open about their Jewish heritage or not, (which when revealed led to some Anti-Semitic movements to expel Jews from Hollywood altogether) they undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping the industry. We still benefit from the movies of these studios today.
The Jazz Singer
This film was the first “talkie,” involving both music and a little dialogue and earning it a permanent status in the history of film.
Video on the history and significance of the film:
Quick summary:
It takes place in the Lower East Side it’s starts off with a young boy, Jackie Rabinowitz, who is disobeying his father’s wish for him to be a cantor at the Orchard Street Synagogue. His dad beats him and he runs away from home.
He goes to San Francisco, changes his name to Jack Robin. Eventually he gets a chance to go on Broadway, but the night of his premiere, his dying father is too ill to sing for the day of atonement and jack has to decide to take his fathers place and please his parents, giving up his opening show.
This movie shows the difficulties that face children of the new world and their parents of the old just like the The Bread Givers. The child of the new world doesn’t want to live in his father’s world of the past.
But for this story, family trumps personal goals and Jack Robin becomes Jackie Rabinowitz once more.
Deciding moment in the film where Jack sings in his father’s place:
Yiddish Cinema
During the early half the twentieth century, feature films in the Yiddish language were produced in and around New York City.A direct offshoot of the Yiddish theater, these films, as well as those produced in Poland, Russia, and Austria, ranged from farce and musical comedy to melodrama and tragedy
During the “Golden Age” of Yiddish film, 1936 to 1939, more than two dozen films opened in New York City to encouraging box-office income, only to be curtailed abruptly by the onset of World War II.The films capture the language and life-style, as well as the values, dreams, and myths of the world of Yiddish culture and immortalize some of the greats of the Yiddish theater.
Films
The earliest films produced after World War I and in the 1920s. The first surviving film, East and West (1923) was actually filmed in Vienna; it starred Molly Picon. The film is a hilarious depiction of a young American secularized Jewish woman in conflict with the traditions of her European Jewish family she is visiting. The film provides a great vehicle for the comedian to cross-dress, satirize parochial religious practices, and strut her way into a new medium.
The following clip from the film displays the initial culture clash well:
