Are Jews Responsible For Lack of Diversity in Hollywood?

[Riaz Haq]

''The Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas - so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination.''  Neil Gabler "An Empire of Their Own"

The 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report released this week by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA suggests that the media and entertainment industry is dominated by white men.

The UCLA report finds that only 16.7 percent of film leads, 17.8 percent of film directors, and 11.8 percent of movie writers between 2011 and 2013 were people of color. What the report fails to mention is the obvious fact that most white men dominating Hollywood are Jews.

How dominant are Jews in the American media and entertainment industry? Jewish-American journalist Joel Stein answered this question as follows in a piece he wrote for the Los Angeles Times back in 2008:

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 (Screen Actors Guild) 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.

I think the reason for such absolute Jewish dominance of the entertainment landscape may have something to do with the fact that "Jews Invented Hollywood" when some of the Jewish producers moved from East Coast to sunny Southern California for abundant, cheap, non-union labor. It's a fact that's been well documented in Neal Gabler's "An Empire of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood".  Gabler summed it up as follows: ''The Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas - so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination.''  The most famous of these "Hollywood Jews" were Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Harry Cohn and the Warner Brothers. However, I still find it hard to explain how such dominance has been maintained over a century.

In my view, ethnic, racial and gender diversity sought by the authors of the UCLA Diversity report is a good thing. However, I believe diversity of opinion in the mainstream media and entertainment industry is far more important in terms of shaping of public opinion to serve the best interest of people of the United States. Such a diversity of views in the US media would have helped keep this country out of unnecessary costly wars such as the Iraq war in recent years.  That's the kind of diversity we all should be striving for.

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[Riaz Haq]

INC: Hollywood's Lack of Diversity Looks a Lot Like Silicon Valley's

In a snapshot that looks an awful lot like Silicon Valley's tech sector, the Hollywood Diversity Report found that minorities in film lagged by more than 2-to-1 in lead roles and by 2-to-1 as directors, with women lagging by 2-to-1 as leads and by an overwhelming 8-to-1 as directors. TV was even worse: Minorities in leading roles on broadcast shows lagged by 6-to-1, while women lagged by more than 50 percent.

Although the report's co-authors, Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon, admitted that they did not analyze data from 2014-2015, Hollywood hasn't fared much better in recent months, at the least in terms of diversity recognition in film. Look no farther than the overwhelmingly white and male Oscars ballot this year, prompting the Twitter backlash #OscarsSoWhite in the weeks leading up to the awards ceremony. (Director Ava DuVernay was notably snubbed for Selma, which was the first ever feature-length film made about Dr. Martin Luther King. And David Oyelowo, who played King in the movie, was also conspicuously absent from the list of Best Actor nominees.)

So what gives? It's not a lack of consumer demand for diversity. In fact, the study found that broadcast TV casts with 41 to 50 percent minority actors scored the highest ratings in both black and white households. Rather, the issue stems from the agencies, guilds, studios, and networks that do the hiring, according to the report's authors, which they described as "an industry culture that routinely devalues the talent of minorities and women."

Sound familiar? EBay, the most gender-diverse tech company based in Silicon Valley, is composed of 76 percent male workers globally. And in the world of entrepreneurship, only 4.2 percent of women founders receive venture capital, according to the Center for Talent Innovation. On top of that, just 15 percent of minority-owned firms received VC funding in 2013, compared to 22 percent of businesses overall, Forbes.com reported. Hurdles for women in business aren't just financial, either: Sexism in tech is alive and well, if these boneheaded comments are any indication.

The reason executive suites hire so few women and minorities may have to do with the fact that "people have a better eye for talent when it looks like them and has the same background as them," as Time Warner's executive director of diversity and corporate social responsibility told The Hollywood Reporter. And while those recruiting efforts may not be malicious, they do tend to make matters worse (and less diverse). Silicon Valley tech companies reflect a similar tunnel vision when they recruit from the same brand-name schools and startup circles again and again.

When will California's darlings finally make greater strides in hiring casts of characters that finally reflect reality? Not soon enough.

http://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/hollywood-s-lack-of-diversity-looks-a-...

[Riaz Haq]

Silicon Valley, to my mind, is about equality, empowerment and equal access. Consequently, it's been very disturbing to see technology companies such as Apple and WhatsApp meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while disregarding that his country treats its non-Jewish population like second-class citizens and implements harsh military rule on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

Silicon Valley's model of empowerment and equality couldn't be more different from Israel's technology hub or its practices of technology disenfranchisement for Palestinians. The agreement between Gov. Jerry Brown and Netanyahu dangerously ignores the underlying differences and implicitly condones effective technology apartheid.

If Apple CEO Tim Cook were a Palestinian living in Ramallah, he would not be able to use any iPhone applications, including WhatsApp, on the local cell network. Globally, over 2 billion people have 3G access, including Israeli settlers living in the West Bank, but Palestinians are prohibited by Israeli military dictate.

If I want to Skype with a relative, it costs 25 cents per minute, but calling a nearby Israeli settler is only 2.3 cents per minute.

Want to live tweet a photo using 3G? Forget about it. In the West Bank, only Israeli settlers have that privilege.

Starting a company is no easy task for Palestinians. Mobile entrepreneurs? Try building a mobile startup without 3G.


On average, 10 Palestinian structures, including homes, are demolished weekly. A programmer living in Gaza needs to figure out how to work with only a few hours of electricity per day. Twenty-two unarmed Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in the West Bank in 2013 alone. Amnesty International recently released a report titled "Trigger-happy Israeli army and police use reckless force in the West Bank."

It's time that we put aside all the excuses that support this discrimination and use technology for empowerment, connection and engagement. There's simply no reason that Palestinians should not be afforded the same technology opportunities as their Israeli counterparts.

Silicon Valley leaders missed an important opportunity to use these meetings to insist on equal opportunity and access for all people, including Palestinians committed to developing technology skills and startups like their Israeli counterparts. These business ties should be conditioned on Palestinians having their freedom, equal rights and equal access to technology and the startup opportunities that our industry represents.

Sam Jadallah is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. He wrote this for www.mercurynews.com.

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_25315043/sam-jadallah-netanya...

[Riaz Haq]

Slavery and the Jews
A review of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One


WINTHROP D. JORDAN 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/09/slavery-and-th...

Almost as soon as it appeared, in 1991, The Secret Relationship generated a controversy that centered more on its intentions than its scholarship. The noise level was heightened in 1993 by the turmoil that swirled around Professor Tony Martin, of Wellesley College. A tenured professor in Wellesley's Department of Africana Studies, Martin assigned to one of his classes portions of the book, which singles out Jews for special prominence in the Atlantic slave trade and for having played a particularly prominent role in the enslavement of Africans in the Americas. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and wrote a brief book to refute the charges. The title of Martin's book, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches From the Wellesley Battlefront, gave a clear preview of his opinions. It was a mixture of discussion, factual refutation, and angry recrimination. This last predominated, with paragraphs that opened using language like "To the Jews, and to their favourite Negroes who have insisted on attacking me I say . . ." His views on The Secret Relationship's use of historical materials amounted to a barrage of enthusiastic endorsements. Ironically, Martin's assertion that "Jews were very much in the mainstream of European society as far as the trade in African human beings was concerned" was very close to what many Jewish scholars had claimed some thirty years before.

Martin, in one of his endorsements, made a startling assertion concerning slave ownership by Jews: "Using the research of Jewish historians, the book suggests that based on the 1830 census, Jews actually had a higher per capita slave ownership than for the white population as a whole." The Secret Relationship does in fact approach making that suggestion, and since the claim would appear to be a pivotal one, it is worth examining.

In order to assess such a claim, one must resort to details. Martin's purported actuality is wrong on its face if applied to the "white population" of the United States "as a whole," because in 1830 only a handful of white northerners still owned slaves. Jews were concentrated in the North, and they constituted a very small minority there. Even if the statement is taken as applying only to the states in the American South that had not adopted gradual emancipation laws, it remains badly flawed. A careful and honest footnote in The Secret Relationship reveals that "Jewish scholars" had concluded that Jews in the South lived mostly in towns and cities. Neither this book nor Martin's explains the significance of this fact. In actuality, slave ownership was much more common in southern urban areas than in the southern countryside. The relatively high proportion of Jewish slaveholding was a function of the concentration of Jews in cities and towns, not of their descent or religion. It is also the case that urban slaveholders of whatever background owned fewer slaves on average than rural slaveholders, including those on large plantations. Thus the proportion of slaveholders has never been an accurate measure of the social or economic importance of slaveholding, unless it is assessed on a broadly regional or state-by-state basis. In this instance, as in so many others, the statistical data do not stand up and cry out their own true significance.

[Riaz Haq]

ZAKARIA: Louis Menand is perhaps the foremost historian of America's cultural and intellectual landscape. His last book, "The Metaphysical Club," won the Pulitzer Prize. His new one, "The Free World," has received even more rave reviews.

He teaches at Harvard University and writes for The New Yorker.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2107/04/fzgps.01.html

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you, when you look at American culture today, what does it look like, you know, compared to the period you've just written so much about? MENAND: Well, the period I wrote about is the period right after the

Second World War, from about 1945 to 1965, the early Cold War years. So, comparing that period to today, I think we would say that today cultured America is doing extremely well.

I mean, we have to bracket the pandemic period, when cultural industry struggled a bit, but on the whole there's just an enormous amount of product out there. People are creating it. People are consuming it. People go to museums. They buy books. They download music. They stream everything.

And all those things are infinitely more accessible than they were 50 years ago. And I think they're more central to people's lives -- plus the bar to entry for creators of culture and consumers of culture is just very low. Anybody, pretty much, can record a song and post it on Spotify or YouTube, and almost anybody can listen to it there.

And, remember, video games are culture. TikTok is culture. Music videos are culture. And all these products now circulate worldwide.

I would even say that criticism is in great shape because the Web is filled with criticism. A lot of it's very learned and sophisticated, and it's all very easily accessible. So I would say, by that measure, I would say culture today is very strong.

ZAKARIA: What about -- the big difference that strikes me is -- between culture today and the period you were writing about in this book, which is -- and you alluded to it at the start -- which is it's totally decentralized now. There are no gatekeepers. You don't need to go through a certain set of established avenues or things like that, whereas culture in the 1950s, '60s was still very hierarchical.

Is that a good thing, that it's become so completely democratized, or does it mean, sort of, anything goes and standards have gone down?

MENAND: How could it not be a good thing?

You know, when I started out writing for magazines in the 1970s and 1980s, it was all print, and there were relatively few publications where, you wrote a review or wrote an essay, people would pay attention to it. So the gate was very narrow to become part of the critical conversation in a public way. Just very few people could get into those -- those journals and those venues.

Today is completely different. Anybody can write a review on Amazon. Believe me, they do.

[Riaz Haq]

Kyrie Irving Boosts Antisemitic Movie Peddling ‘Jewish Slave Ships’
The video is based on a venomously antisemitic book which asserts that "many famous high-ranking Jews" have "admitted" to "worship[ing] Satan or Lucifer."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/kyrie-irving-boos...

HOURS BEFORE ANOTHER Brooklyn Nets loss on Thursday, noted “free-thinker” and basketball player Kyrie Irving took to Twitter to boost a movie and book, Hebrews to Negroes, stuffed with antisemitic tropes.

The 2018 film was directed by Ronald Dalton, Jr., and based upon his 2015 book of the same name. A description for the film states that it “uncovers the true identity of the Children of Israel,” while a similar one for the book reads, “Since the European and Arab slave traders stepped foot into Africa, blacks have been told lies about their heritage.” Both suggest Hebrews to Negroes espouse ideas in line with more extreme factions of the Black Hebrew Israelites, which have a long history of misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and especially antisemitism.

The Black Hebrew Israelite movement is fairly broad, comprising organizations that (per the Anti-Defamation League) “operate semi-independently.” The movement generally coalesces around the notion that Black people are the real descendants of the ancient Israelites, with more extreme factions claiming that Black people have been “robbed of their identity as being ‘God’s chosen people'” (via the Southern Poverty Law Center).

It’s those extremist sects that have often parroted “classic” antisemitic tropes, like claiming European Jews (often referred to as the “synagogue of Satan”) wield outsized control over society, especially in industries like banking and the media. They’ve also pushed antisemitic claims that Jews are responsible for slavery and the “effeminizing of Black men.”

At one point in the purported documentary Irving shared, Dalton (who also narrates the film) brings up the “real truth about the slave trades.” He claims that, when teaching slavery, schools don’t mention the involvement of the Catholic Church, Arab, East African, or Islamic slave traders, or “the Jewish slave ships that brought our West African negro or Bantu ancestors to slave ports owned by [Jews].”

Immediately after, Dalton pivots to the mass media, calling it “the biggest tool of indoctrination, brainwashing, and propaganda that the world has seen” and adding that it’s been “helping Satan deceive the world” for centuries. To back up his claim, Dalton utilizes a fabricated quote that’s been a staple of antisemitic literature for decades. The quote — which details the supposed control Jews have over every facet of society — is attributed to Harold Rosenthal, an aide to former New York Senator Jacob Javits who was killed in a terrorist attack in Istanbul in 1976. The “quote” first appeared two years later, published in a pamphlet called The Hidden Tyranny by a man named Walter White, Jr., who appeared to make up an entire interview with Rosenthal to push this antisemitic theory.

In introducing the phony quote, Dalton pointedly describes Rosenthal as an “Ashkenazi Jew.”

Hebrews to Negroes, the book, contains even more instances of antisemitism. The book’s fourth chapter — “When Did Racism Towards Blacks Start?” — starts by falsely suggesting that anti-Black racism can be traced back to key Jewish texts. “Western Education and Religion tries to teach the world that blacks are cursed with their skin color by the Curse of Ham/Canaan. This is also taught in European Jewish documents and in the teachings of the Talmud book in Judaism. Some can say that it established the base for black racism even before the KKK.”

[Riaz Haq]

Everyone has a theory of contemporary anti-Semitism. Progressives tend to see the threats to American Jews emanating from the conspiracy-driven Right, with white supremacists and neo-Nazis taking their cues from dog-whistling Republicans. Conservatives observe that Jews frequently endure harassment, denigration, and violence from the anti-Zionist Left, which wields progressive academic theories to demonize them as complicit in white supremacy, if not perpetrators themselves.


https://www.city-journal.org/why-kanye-wests-anti-semitism-matters

These theories—admittedly simplified, but then again, the simplified arguments are the ones most frequently made—have some things in common. They are both elite-driven, seeing politicians and academics as the prime movers in a chain reaction leading to Jewish suffering. And they are, not coincidentally, convenient. Each side has a neat story to tell about who is responsible for the uptick in anti-Jewish violence in recent years: it’s our cultural opponents. And that seems suspiciously convenient.

That is not to say that neither side has a point. Clearly some anti-Jewish violence can be traced to malicious elites and their bad ideas or rhetoric. But most just doesn’t quite fit, as the experience of visibly Orthodox Jews here in New York suggests. Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews have borne the brunt of the assaults, harassment, and arson attacks, in neighborhoods with few Republicans (let alone white supremacists), at the hands of perpetrators who don’t seem steeped in postcolonial theory, to put it mildly.

Modern Orthodox Jews like me, who do not wear distinctive clothes except for perhaps the yarmulkes on our heads, have felt it, too. Growing up in the New York area, I can recall being harassed twice in 20-odd years. In the past two years living in Manhattan, though, I have been yelled at and menaced numerous times, and on one occasion assaulted (and then followed through a subway station). Something has changed, and blaming elite opponents just doesn’t get at the heart of the issue. I have observed the people trying to make my life miserable; they are neither MAGA types nor campus progressives.

They are, in all likelihood, tuned into mass popular culture, however. Which is why the scandal of hip-hop and fashion mega-star Kanye West, who recently made a series of bizarre and flagrantly anti-Semitic public comments, deserves some attention. For better or worse, West is better known than, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Edward Said. He made his comments on radio shows and podcasts that enjoy big followings but evade outgroup attention, much less analysis. Perhaps his brand of vulgar anti-Semitism can tell us something about what is motivating similarly vulgar—in the sense of being both ugly and common—violence.

First, it’s notable that West’s anti-Semitism comes in the midst of what appears to be a mental breakdown. This suggests that we should not read too far into the motivations or culpability of West as an individual. But it also reminds us that anti-Semitism thrives within delusion and conspiracy theories. Indeed, those who attack Jews on New York streets are far more likely to parrot such conspiracies than campus buzzwords or white-supremacist slogans. Controlling such violence is a function of effective treatment—or at least incapacitation—of mentally ill individuals, whose rantings can quickly turn to something worse.

[Riaz Haq]

Barbara Walters, Celebrated Jewish TV Persona, Dies at 93 - World News - Haaretz.com

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2022-12-31/ty-article/barbara-wa...


Walters made history for women and Jewish anchors on mainstream television and was known for 'inventing intimacy on television'

[Riaz Haq]

Gentile News Network™
@Gentilenewsnet
But when I say this it's an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

https://x.com/Gentilenewsnet/status/1846975999650804034

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Rabbi Shmuley
@RabbiShmuley
Incredible. The new Prime Minister of Britain has a Jewish wife who is actively involved in the Jewish community and keeps tradition and observes the sabbath. President Biden has two of three of his children who married Jew’s. President Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. Kamala Harris is married to a committed Jewish husband.

https://x.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1810353861116223661

[Riaz Haq]

Amsterdam riots: what really happened | Media Watch

https://youtu.be/qQ0MJr6v0bI?si=VUv56E8pPGaIobBu

What really happened in Amsterdam’s soccer riots between supporters of Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv? We look at how the truth got lost in the rush to judgement.

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The Mayor of Amsterdam has said she regrets using the word 'pogrom' to describe the attacks on Israeli football fans in the Dutch capital following the match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and AFC Ajax.

https://www.euronews.com/2024/11/19/amsterdam-mayor-says-she-regret...

She also condemned Israel for its swift portrayal of the incident as an attack on Israelis, despite prior behaviour by Maccabi supporters in which they chanted anti-Arab slogans and tore down Palestinian flags.

"We were completely caught off guard by Israel. At 3am, (Israeli) Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu was already giving a lecture about what happened in Amsterdam, while we were still gathering the facts," she said in Sunday's interview.

The football match violence has rocked the Dutch government, with country's finance secretary announcing her resignation on Friday following comments by Hard-right Dutch political leader Geert Wilders.

Wilders last Wednesday blamed Moroccans for the attacks on Israeli football fans, claiming that "we saw Muslims hunting Jews" and added it was fuelled by "Moroccans who want to destroy Jews." He said those convicted of involvement should be deported if they have dual nationality.

Announcing her resignation, Morocco-born Nora Achahbar of centrist New Social Contract party said that "the polarising manners have had such an impact on me that I could, or would, no longer fulfil my role as state secretary."

"Polarisation in society is dangerous because it undermines the bond between people. Because of that, we start seeing each other as opponent instead of fellow citizens," she said in a statement.