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CHAPTER TWO
THE JEWS CREATE HOLLYWOOD

Hollywood Created by Jews from Eastern Europe

Before we can turn our attention to the massive involvement of the Roman Catholic institution in the Hollywood movie industry, and ultimately its stranglehold upon the movies that were made, we have to look at the very creation of Hollywood itself. And when we do so, it becomes immediately evident that Hollywood was the creation of Jews from eastern Europe. It was their industry: “the American film industry, which Will Hays, president of the original Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, called ‘the quintessence of what we mean by “America,”’ was founded and for more than thirty years operated by Eastern European Jews who themselves seemed to be anything but the quintessence of America. The much-vaunted ‘studio system,’ which provided a prodigious supply of films during the movies’ heyday, was supervised by a second generation of Jews, many of whom also regarded themselves as marginal men trying to punch into the American mainstream. The storefront theaters of the late teens were transformed into the movie palaces of the twenties by Jewish exhibitors. And when sound movies commandeered the industry, Hollywood was invaded by a battalion of Jewish writers, mostly from the East. The most powerful talent agencies were run by Jews. Jewish lawyers transacted most of the industry’s business and Jewish doctors ministered to the industry’s sick. Above all, Jews produced the movies. ‘Of 85 names engaged in production,’ a 1936 study noted, ‘53 are Jews. And the Jewish advantage holds in prestige as well as numbers.’” ²⁸

When one looks at the major empire-builders of the great Hollywood studios, there is no denying it: the evidence is as plain as day. Universal Pictures was founded by Carl Laemmle, a German Jewish immigrant to America. Paramount Pictures was built by Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. The Fox Film Corporation was the work of William Fox, also a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the greatest of all the studios, was headed by Louis B. Mayer, a Russian Jewish immigrant. And Warner Brothers was the work of the brothers Harry, Sam, Albert and Jack Warner, sons of a Polish Jewish immigrant.

When these Jews arrived in America, virtually penniless, they turned their backs on their Eastern European roots, and embraced America wholeheartedly. They rejected their languages, their customs, and for the most part, their Jewish religion. They were Jews in ancestry only, and they wanted to be assimilated into America, as Americans. This was not easy, for at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, to be a Jew from Eastern Europe was to be an undesirable addition to the American melting pot, in the eyes of many Americans. Jews simply were not wanted, and were made to feel unwelcome. No matter how they tried, they were unable to fully assimilate into mainstream America. But they found that there was one business they could easily enter, and excel in: moviemaking.

At that time, the movie industry was new, and also somewhat disreputable; and these two factors made it possible for Jews to make their mark in the industry, for there were very few barriers to them entering into it and rising up within it. “If the Jews were proscribed from entering the real corridors of gentility and status in America, the movies offered an ingenious option. Within the studios and on the screen, the Jews could simply create a new country – an empire of their own, so to speak – one where they would not only be admitted, but would govern as well. They would fabricate their empire in the image of America…. They would create its values and myths, its traditions and archetypes…. This was their America, and its invention may be their most enduring legacy.” ²⁹

Yes: using what became their vast power over the masses through their movies, these Jews sought to literally mould America into their image. As we shall see, they were restrained from doing so as much as they would have liked by the domination of their Hollywood by Roman Catholic censorship throughout its “Golden Age”; but even so they did their best to portray an America on the big screens of the world that was not, often, the real America, but rather an America they visualised.

In aiming to fashion this America of their own making, they worked hard to re-create American values, traditions, etc., in their image. And although, as we shall see, throughout Hollywood’s “Golden Age” it was the Roman Catholic image of America that predominated, the Hollywood Jews nevertheless did succeed – in uneasy alliance with American Romanism, and then with more freedom once Roman Catholic domination ceased – to move America along a particular path. Today, the values and traditions of America are far, far removed from that of their great-grandparents’ generation; and America is infinitely the worse for it. Morally, America has collapsed; and ideologically, it has swung to the extreme left. And this, to a massive extent, is the result of what Hollywood succeeded in doing: changing the very values, outlooks, ideologies, traditions and morality of the American people. And of the world.

In a very real sense, “they colonized the American imagination.” “Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made. Ultimately, by creating their idealized America on the screen, the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction.” ³⁰ For one thing is absolutely true: “The people who peered at the flickering shadows in the peep shows and nickelodeons at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t realize that they were participants in an experiment that would revolutionize the way Americans spent their leisure time.” ³¹ And not just Americans, but the whole world. Who could have imagined that those silent, black and white, grainy early picture shows would become the dominant entertainment-idol of the world within a few decades? Perhaps the early Hollywood Jews could not see that far into the future, but they certainly discerned that they were onto something. Something big. Something bigger, perhaps, than anything that had gone before.

Those early Hollywood Jews, also, used their power over the lucrative Hollywood empire to establish themselves as a Jewish aristocracy, with palatial homes and all the trappings of American Capitalism. They always sought to have the best of everything. Their wealth was their way of forsaking their poor Eastern European Jewish roots and being accepted into high-class American Gentile society. They even embraced the Republican Party, viewed as the party of conservatives and Capitalists. And yet they were accused of being Communists. What, then, is the truth?

The truth, as we shall see, is that although that first generation of Hollywood Jews were more often than not Capitalists rather than Communists, they themselves were for the most part very immoral in their lives (despite having their own warped sense of “morality”), and the movies they made were used for the purpose of lowering the morals of America, which played into the hands of the Communist movement; and thus Hollywood did promote certain Communist goals even when it was under the control of the first-generation Jews, for although their political ideology was Capitalistic their morals were far from conservative or in accordance with Protestant America. And then also, as time went by the later generations of Hollywood Jews were, certainly, all too often outright Communists or Communist sympathisers, causing Hollywood to take a far more radicalised turn to the left. All this will become clear as we proceed.

Paramount Pictures

Adolph Zukor, who would build Paramount Pictures, was never interested in the Jewish religion, even as a boy being raised by an uncle who was a Judaic scholar, although he was fascinated by the story and the characters of the Old Testament Scriptures. When he came to America he deliberately did everything he could to show that he had no ties to the religion of Judaism at all. He wanted to fully assimilate into Gentile America, and because anything Jewish would mark him as different, he dropped it all.

When he got into the infant movie industry, Zukor’s desire was to make quality feature films, artistic films, because he believed this was his ticket to acceptability in higher-class, genteel America. Politically he was a Republican, and wanted to aim his films not at the working classes, but at the higher classes of American society. He knew that films were generally considered only as suitable entertainment for the working classes and he wanted to change that image of them. And to a large extent he succeeded, doing very well for himself in the process.

In 1910 he bought the rights to exhibit a film on the “Passion Play” in New York and New Jersey, even though he was told it was a very foolish business venture. He knew that a film depicting Christ might, at that time, anger the high authorities of the Roman Catholic “Church” in America, so he proceeded cautiously; but the film did very well financially. Zukor became a real power in the industry, and he enjoyed it. He was ruthless, and once he had his sights set on acquiring control of Paramount Pictures, it was only a matter of time before he did.

Paramount films in the 1920 s and 1930s were sophisticated. Zukor was so convinced of the importance of intellectual upliftment and the part that movies could play in this, that he even set up a school at Paramount for the purpose of teaching young would-be actors decorum, including literature, sociology and sobriety classes. Said a Paramount executive, Walter Wanger: “We were always trying to lift public taste a little bit. Zukor and Lasky were dedicated men who would produce pictures that they thought should be done, even though they weren’t going to be profitable.” ³² But let it not be thought that this meant Paramount movies were moral. “Paramount pictures… didn’t ennoble the audience; they whisked them away to a world of sheen and sex where people spoke in innuendo, acted with abandon, and doubted the rewards of virtue. Paramount’s was a universe of Marlene Dietrich’s smoky come-ons, of Chevalier’s eyebrows arched in the boulevardier’s worldliness, of Mae West’s double entendres sliding out the comer of her mouth, of Gary Cooper’s aestheticized handsomeness, and of the Marx Brothers’ leveling chaos.” ³³ It was, therefore, the purpose of Paramount to create “classy”, sophisticated films, but not moral ones.

Universal Pictures

Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures, was a very different character. He opened his first theatre in 1906, and even at that very early period of movie history it was evident that many movies were morally offensive. The movie houses themselves were often viewed as dark places of iniquity – and not without reason. But Laemmle, wanting to change this unsavoury image, deliberately named his new theatre “The White Front” so that even its name would conjure up an image of respectability and good clean family entertainment. Laemmle became very successful financially, and by 1909 claimed, with some justification, that he was the largest film distributor in America.

Laemmle’s success was largely attributable to the fact that he recognised America’s expanding working class and booming immigrant population were on the lookout for cheap entertainment – and the movies were cheap. They were not well made, they were short, they were usually based on incidents from American life and history, but they were cheap. And for immigrants, the movies were a kind of introduction to American life, the life they were trying so hard to assimilate into. In the Jewish ghettoes of New York, the movies were extremely popular.

In 1909 Laemmle decided to enter into movie production himself, promising film exhibitors “the grandest American-made moving pictures you ever saw.” An advertisement declared: “My motto will be: The best films that man’s ingenuity can devise, and the best films man’s skill can execute.” ³⁴ Laemmle’s desire was to make films that would uplift the movie industry, and make it respectable.

By 1913 he was a power within the industry and a wealthy man, earning an estimated $100 000 a year and having a personal fortune of over $1 million. He formed another distribution company and named it Universal, because, he said, the company would be supplying “universal entertainment for the universe.” ³⁵

As studios increasingly gravitated from New York to Hollywood in California, and the studio bosses with them, Laemmle eventually bought a massive mansion in Beverly Hills, California.

He could be brutal too – he once sent a group of thugs to seize the studio of the member of a faction trying to claim control of Universal. But by 1915 Universal was under his control; and as Neal Gabler writes in his history of the Jews in Hollywood, “From this point on, the Jews would control the movies.” ³⁶

Universal films were at one time suggestive and pushed the boundaries, but later they were aimed more decidedly at rural America. Universal became best known for its westerns and horror films in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The Fox Film Corporation

Turning now to the Fox Film Corporation, we find, once again, a very different type of Jewish character. William Fox was loud, ambitious, and got things done. Once he had his foot in the door of the movie industry, he went from strength to strength. He aimed to provide cheaper entertainment for the masses. And his formula worked: he became a millionaire in a short space of time.

But there was also more to it. Fox, like so many of the other Jews in the movie industry of that time, saw his rise in the industry as a way to climb the social ladder. Fie bought a large estate on Long Island, New York, among the rich Gentile gentry, renamed it Fox Hall, and lived an autocratic life there, lording it over his extended family and demanding absolute obedience from them all. Family members lived in fear of him. And yet, despite his best efforts to assimilate into upper- class American society, he was acutely aware of the fact that he was still a Jewish ghetto boy who made good, and who would never really be fully accepted into the high society he craved.

Fox believed in his own version of God, not in the Judaism of his father; he also believed in numerology, which was divination through numbers. His wife claimed she was psychic, and Fox himself claimed he could enter men’s minds and read their thoughts.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Next we turn to Louis B. Mayer. This was a man who wanted to do everything better, and to a greater extent, than anyone else. The studio he would ultimately come to control, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had to be the biggest, the greatest, and the best.

He obtained a theatre in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1907, renovated it, and began to show what he deemed good, clean, respectable, family- oriented pictures. He went from strength to strength, acquiring other theatres, becoming wealthy and well-respected in middle-class society. He saw films as a means to inculcate values, and he sought to become a kind of “father figure” in society, something which he sought after all his life.

He formed the Louis B. Mayer Film Company; and then later he and some others formed a company for financing feature film production. This company was first called Metro Pictures (the “Metro” part later becoming the first initial in MGM), and Mayer was president of its New England branch.

As he grew wealthier, Mayer joined a middle-class Conservative Jewish temple, and began to live somewhat more lavishly. He also moved now into movie production itself, not just movie distribution, and relocated – as all the movie Jews had begun doing since 1907 – to California in 1918. By the time Mayer arrived, over 80% of the world’s movies were being made in Los Angeles.

Here he began to hobnob with industrial, political and religious leaders. One of these was the powerful newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst – a Roman Catholic. Hearst admired and respected Mayer, and this meant much to the latter. They would talk about all kinds of things, and Hearst would even consult with Mayer about the running of his Hearst Corporation.

This relationship with a prominent Roman Catholic would not be the only one Mayer would cultivate.

At this stage he was not as powerful as other Jews in the industry, but that was soon to change. Marcus Loew, another Jew from New York who owned a long string of movie theatres, bought Metro Pictures, which Mayer had once been connected with, in 1919, and later bought Goldwyn Pictures, which had also been started by Jews. And after negotiations with Mayer, Loew bought Mayer’s studio, and Mayer became vice-president of Metro-Goldwyn. In 1926 it became Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Mayer suddenly found himself a major player in the film industry.

He believed in making what he considered were quality films with moral messages. He once told an MGM writer, “I worship good women, honorable men, and saintly mothers.” ³⁷ In this he was different from the other Hollywood Jews – but not too different. It was his own version of morality, after all, and although it was more conservative than the others, that is all that can really be said for it. Mayer believed in the institution of the family, in virtue, and in America. He was a Jew, but a proud American Jew. And he was seeking to fashion the America of his imagination.

He idealised his female “stars”, and at MGM they always had to be depicted so as to make them look as good as possible. The MGM actresses were always to be beautiful or sensual, clever, but also remote and cool: actresses such as Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford personified the MGM “look”. As for the male “stars”, they too were generally cool, sophisticated, well-dressed, as personified by Clark Gable. And yet at the same time, Mayer had a view of America that was more domestic, moral according to his own lights, and down to earth. In many MGM movies of this kind, motherhood was exalted, and children learned from their parents. Mayer, therefore, was a strange mixture: on the one hand wanting to use his films to influence the morality of America, and on the other hand promoting a fashionable, glamorous, idealised view of women in particular.

By the early 1930s, MGM was the greatest studio in Hollywood, thanks in large part to Mayer’s efforts.

Warner Brothers

Turning next to the Warner Brothers studio, the two brothers most crucial to it were Jack and Harry Warner, both of whom had volatile tempers and who hated each other to boot. Harry had been bom in Poland, Jack in America. Harry was conservative, moral according to his own lights, a family man. He was a religious Jew, and believed in racial and religious tolerance. Jack, on the other hand, was a more assimilated American than Harry, and rebelled against the Judaism of his father. He was crude, vulgar and loud, openly boasting about his sexual affairs. Unlike the other Hollywood Jews, he did not care a whit about being respectable and acceptable in polite society.

Another brother, Sam, was the one who convinced the Warners to go into the movie business as exhibitors. Harry was the leader of the brothers. They started their business in 1903, and rapidly began to get rich. They then moved into movie production. Harry based himself in New York, where another brother, Albert, would work with him, and Sam and Jack went to Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this way the Warner brothers were strategically positioned in the two main centres of film production. In time they forsook distribution and focused on production alone.

At first the Warners were very much the outsiders in Hollywood Jewish circles, but they did not care. They were not trying to ingratiate themselves with genteel society. When other studios were unsure of supporting the newly-invented sound movies, thinking the use of sound might be just a temporary fad, Warner Brothers pitched in. They saw sound as the wave of the future, and they were right. With the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927 – a movie with sound that revolutionised the industry – Warner Brothers moved up into the top ranks of studios.

Jack Warner, always a rebel against his father’s Judaism, shacked up with a Roman Catholic actress, Ann Page Alvarado, even before his own divorce, or hers, had been finalised. This disgusted Harry, and the rift between them widened.

Warner Brothers’ films deliberately put across a message of being films with a conscience, films in which the poor and weak were shown to be pitted against the rich and strong. Jack once told a reporter that films could and did play an all-important part in the cultural and educational development of the world. Surprisingly, this statement was in line with brother Harry’s own beliefs – and it was not often that Jack was found expressing what his older brother believed. Many of their films depicted both the contributions of Jews to society, and their victimization by society. Many of them, also, exposed prejudice in society in general. Others portrayed the weak and marginalised in a good light, taking on the might of the privileged, even when this meant that “heroes” engaged in antisocial behaviour. This raised the ire of many, who saw such films – rightly – as essentially promoting civil disobedience, the uprising of the lower classes. To this Harry replied: “The motion picture presents right and wrong, as the Bible does. By showing both right and wrong, we teach the right.” ³⁸

It sounded good, but it was not true, for in the words of the Hollywood Jews’ biographer, Neal Gabler, Warner Brothers movies took a more ambivalent attitude towards American values than any other Hollywood studio. “Out of this mix of energy, suspicion, gloom, iconoclasm, and liberalism came not only a distinctive kind of film, but also a distinctive vision of America – particularly urban America. It was an environment cruel and indifferent, one almost cosmologically adversarial, where a host of forces prevented one from easily attaining virtue.” ³⁹ In other words, Warner Brothers produced films which attempted to alter American society by portraying urban America as a dark, cruel place where the poor and marginalised needed to rise up and change things. This was incipient Gramscian Marxism; cultural Communism, the means whereby the Italian Communist, Gramsci, had said America would be communised. Change the culture, change the traditions, and you will change the country. America today is, tragically, living proof that Gramscian Communism worked.

Columbia Pictures

As for the founder of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, he was a Jew at war with the world. People hated him, and he did not care. He was a spiteful, vengeful man and a bully, a man who loved power and who wielded it mercilessly. He greatly admired the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, made a documentary on his life, even visited him in Rome and decorated his own office like Mussolini’s, proudly displaying a photo of the dictator there. And he copied Mussolini in his own personal style. “Cohn epitomized the profane, vulgar, cruel, rapacious, philandering mogul, and Red Skelton spoke for many when he said, after thousands attended Cohn’s funeral, ‘Well, it only proves what they always say – give the public something they want to see, and they’ll come out for it.’” ⁴⁰

Cohn turned his back completely on his religious Jewish upbringing. He did his best to push the fact that he was Jewish right out of his life. He married a Roman Catholic and ignored all Jewish festivals and other aspects of Judaism. Whereas other Hollywood Jews got rid of their Judaism so as to be accepted into American Gentile society, Harry Cohn went further – he held it in contempt. He once said, when asked for a contribution towards a Jewish relief fund, “Relief for the Jews! How about relief from the Jews? All the trouble in this world is caused by Jews and Irishmen.” ⁴¹

He was also extremely immoral in his personal life, having many affairs with many women. He divorced his first wife because she could not have children and because she was not attractive enough, in his view, to be the wife of so great a man as he fancied himself to be. He married his new wife, a young, attractive actress and a Gentile, three days after he divorced his first wife. Within a year she bore him a son.

As for the films Columbia made in the 1930s and 1940s, in some ways they resembled those from Warner Brothers: they were so often about the poor against the ruthless rich, the individual against the corporation, and the traditional against the new. The Columbia films may not have been as class-conscious as Warner Brothers films were, and the heroes were more middle-class than lower-class, with ethnicity nowhere near as prominent; but even so there was a resemblance to Warner Brothers’ offerings.

The Religion (or Lack Thereof) of Hollywood’s Jews

Edgar Magnin was the rabbi to many of the Hollywood Jews. He was the rabbi in Los Angeles, not only by his own admission but by that of many others too. In 1914 he had been invited to become the associate rabbi of B’nai B’rith, which was Los Angeles’ first Jewish congregation. It was what was kn own as a Reform Jewish congregation. The controversial and liberal Magnin later became the chief rabbi there. He was truly “one of the boys”, mixing with the wealthy Jewish elite of Hollywood and never too interested in religious Judaism himself, despite being a rabbi. He overlooked their sins, and they loved him for it.

Magnin called for an Americanized Judaism, where Jews were fully assimilated as Americans; and this was a doctrine well received by the Hollywood Jews, for they had turned their backs on Orthodox Judaism. One after the other joined Magnin’s B’nai B’rith – Carl Laemmle, Harry and Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, William Fox, and literally dozens of film executives, directors and actors. But they joined, not because they wanted their Jewish religion, but rather the secularised “religion” preached by Magnin. Very few of them were religious. They attended Magnin’s ornate and lavish Wilshire Boulevard Temple on Jewish holy days, and they gave generously to Jewish welfare organisations and other Jewish causes; but that was all. Partly, they supported such groups with their money because it was just what Jews did; partly, because philanthropy was a status symbol, a sign of respectability; partly even, perhaps, because they felt a certain amount of guilt at having turned their backs on their Jewishness; but never did they do so because of any real religious feelings. The Hollywood Jews deliberately distanced themselves from the Jewish religion as far as possible.

And they were always cautious, even in their giving to Jewish causes. They did not want to be associated (at least at first) with any Jewish political causes. When Ben Hecht, a radical Jewish-American writer in Hollywood, tried to raise funds to support a Jewish group in Palestine which was aiming to use terrorism to drive the British out, he found no sympathisers among the Hollywood Jews. They did not want to do anything that would jeopardise their assimilationist efforts into American Gentile society. They wanted to be seen as Americans, not Jews.

But their opposition did not last. As Nazism grew in strength in Europe, the Jews in Hollywood softened in their stance, and began to show an interest in supporting the Jewish political cause in Palestine. In 1942 the younger-generation Jews in Hollywood, especially, were supportive of efforts to form a Hollywood organisation to combat growing anti-Semitism in the United States, in particular when they felt such anti-Semitism was directed at the movie industry.

One of the primary movers and shakers in this regard was Mendel Silverberg, a powerful Jewish lawyer in Hollywood with close connections to the Chandler family, who owned the Los Angeles Times, and to the Republican Party. He became closely associated with Hollywood’s elite Jews, although he himself was only nominally Jewish. He was very useful to the Hollywood Jews in combatting growing Nazi sympathies in Los Angeles in the early 1930s. They formed what was called the Community Committee, with Silverberg as its chairman. Its name was later changed to the Community Relations Council, and its purpose was to be the official liaison between Jews and Gentiles in Los Angeles. Silverberg also sat on various other Jewish committees.

Prior to World War Two, the Hollywood Jews saw no value in making films promoting Jews or Judaism. They wanted to assimilate into Gentile America, not stick out as Jews. Jewish actors and actresses even changed their names to make them sound more Gentile. But with the rise of Hitler and Nazism and the horrors of World War Two, the Hollywood Jews began to see the value of using their immense power and influence, via their film studios, to promote a positive image of Jews. A new Jewish organisation was created in 1948, called the Motion Picture Project, which enabled each major Jewish organisation to have some say over the way Hollywood would portray the Jews. It would be used to review scripts, influence producers, and inform the Jewish organisations of any films that would either benefit Jews, or harm them. Silverberg correctly saw that this was an attempt to censor the movie industry. The Hollywood Jews now felt the pressure, channelled through the Motion Picture Project, from such Jewish organisations as the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League.

As an alternative to Hollywood’s liberal rabbi, Edgar Magnin, there was Max Nussbaum, who came to Hollywood in the 1940s to lead the Jewish congregation at Temple Israel. This temple had been founded by important men in the movie business, essentially as an alternative to Magnin’s version of Judaism. For although Magnin was very popular, both with non-Jews and with many of the elite Hollywood Jews, not all liked him. One even called him “Cardinal Magnin” because of his closeness with Roman Catholics. ⁴² This alternative rabbi, Nussbaum, and his Temple Israel, was more pro-Jewish, committed to Jewish tradition and ritual. Nussbaum himself had escaped Hitler’s madness in Germany and made his way to the USA. He was a fiery and eloquent speaker. He attracted many, just as Magnin did, but for different reasons. And during and after World War Two he began to attract more Hollywood Jews than Magnin was doing.

The reason for this was that the second-generation Hollywood Jews, as a result of the war and Hitler’s Holocaust, were far more interested in their Judaism, and also in being involved in Jewish social activist causes. For although Nussbaum was religiously conservative, he was socially activist, supporting various causes including the establishment of the state of Israel.

The Surprising Influence of Romanism Over Some Hollywood Jews

There was another powerful, albeit at first surprising, influence over some of the influential Jews of Hollywood: Roman Catholicism. One writer recalled that when it came to religious matters, the Hollywood Jews were always “very tender with the Catholics.” ⁴³

Louis B. Mayer was closer to Roman Catholicism than Judaism. His daughter Edith said her father was “very Catholic prone. He loved the Catholics.” ⁴⁴ This was a true statement. Mayer was a close friend and admirer of New York’s powerful Roman Catholic cardinal, Francis Spellman. A large portrait of Spellman hung in Mayer’s library. According to Magnin, Mayer admired power and importance, which was the reason he admired Spellman and Romanism. According to his grandson, Danny Selznick, Mayer was attracted to Roman Catholicism because of its respectability, and also because Mayer, as head of MGM, identified with the pope of Rome. These may indeed have been some reasons for Mayer’s fascination with Romanism, but clearly there was more to it. Still, he was not above making use of his friendship with Spellman to get his own way when a movie was going to be banned by the Roman Catholic “Church”. He would call Spellman and seek his help.

He was an admirer of other prominent and conservative Roman Catholics as well, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy. Mayer fully supported McCarthy’s efforts to rid the U. S. government of Communists. At a Chamber of Commerce dinner in his honour in 1954, Mayer said, “The more McCarthy yells, the better I like him. He’s doing a job to get rid of the ‘termites’ eating away at our democracy…. I hope he drives all the bums back to Moscow. That’s the place for them.” He also said: “Why is it that there are so few Catholic converts to Communism? It is because they learned the love of God when they were children. Why don’t Jews and Protestants do the same thing?” ⁴⁵ Yes, Mayer esteemed Roman Catholicism very highly.

It was not just Mayer, however (although he was the closest of all Hollywood’s top Jews to Rome). Other Hollywood Jews were under Rome’s spell as well, to varying degrees. Harry Cohn, for example, was friends with the cardinal, Spellman, and whenever he was in New York he would visit Spellman. Cohn’s first wife had been a Roman Catholic, and his second wife was a convert to Roman Catholicism who was very devout; and Cohn allowed her to raise their children as Roman Catholics. There were rumours that Cohn himself would convert to Romanism, but he never did. Still, there were strong influences at work.

The Politics of the Hollywood Jews

Politically, because they wanted to be accepted into American society so much and because the Republican Party was seen as the party of the American elite, most of the Hollywood Jewish elite were Republicans. And they certainly were among the country’s elite by the mid-1950s, with 19 of the 25 highest salaries in the USA being paid to movie executives, and Louis B. Mayer, the highest-earning movie man, earning over $ 1 million, which was more than any other American was earning at that time. Mayer would always entertain important senators, congressmen, and other officials whenever they were in Los Angeles. This enabled him to rise within the ranks of the Republican Party, and when Californian Herbert Hoover became president in 1928, Mayer and his family were invited to the White House. It was even rumoured, some years later, that Mayer himself might run for president.

The Warner brothers were really the only major Democrats among the Hollywood Jews – and only for a brief period. Prior to 1932 they too had been Republicans, but in that year Jack and Harry Warner met with top Democrats in New York and were brought on board the campaign to get Franklin Roosevelt elected. It is likely the Democrats sought for the Warners’ support because it was well known that they were considered the “outsiders” in Hollywood. Harry was quoted by Jack as saying, “The country is in chaos. There is a revolution in the air, and we need a change.” ⁴⁶ In Hollywood Jack worked to get Roosevelt elected. When Roosevelt became president and Jack was invited to the White House at various times, Jack claimed he was simply the court jester of the White House because he was a humorous man; but in truth there was far more to it than that. Warner Brothers threw its weight behind Roosevelt and the president knew it.

Nevertheless, by 1936 the Warners were Republicans again, after Harry Warner saw Roosevelt as having turned his back on him in an hour of need. “It was the last time any of the first generation of Hollywood Jews would support a Democrat.” ⁴⁷

Conclusion

Thus, the first-generation Jewish creators of Hollywood were, for the most part, men who abandoned their traditional Judaism; who were Capitalists, not Communists; some of whom were attracted to, and influenced by, Roman Catholicism; and many of whom were immoral in their personal lives and produced immoral movies, lowering the morals of the world. And thus they played into the hands of international Communism’s assault on America and the entire western world. Furthermore, the next generation of Jewish Hollywood leaders leaned far to the left.

This then was the Jewish industry which the powerful American Roman Catholic institution sought to influence and control for its own ends.