Reddit reviews An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
We found 19 Reddit comments about An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Jewish people only make 1.73% of the US population yet make a much more substantial amount of the high-profile actors and directors in hollywood. They are overrepresented in Hollywood(disclaimer: I have absolutely zero problems with this, it's just a fact) and part of the reason is because of history, which is outlined in this book:
http://www.amazon.com/An-Empire-Their-Own-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
It's not some kind of overarching conspiracy, it's just how it is for various reasons.
Now, some people will argue "but...to say that Jewish people run Hollywood is offensive." Only if you believe theres some kind of evil conspiracy going on here. I don't.
Running Hollywood, being overrepresented in Hollywood - it's all semantics to me.
There's a book on the topic that I've been meaning to read: https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=empire+of+their+own&qid=1568575461&s=gateway&sr=8-1
The short answer is that the entertainment industry has historically been open to people who are marginalized from other career paths. So disproportionate representation of minorities in the performing arts is something that you often see across cultures and throughout history.
I just read a book about this exact topic: An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Essentially, Hollywood is so Jewish because it was founded by Jews. Interestingly enough, despite how Jewish it is, there is a ubiquitous rejection of Judaism in Hollywood films, and always has been.
> Afaik the Jewish representation isn’t totally historically wrong because Jewish people in America were sidelined into only certain professions, so entertainment (and thus porn) was among them.
Indeed. One particularly good book on this subject is An Empire of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood. It's really amazing how Hollywood was the result of immigrants projecting their views of the American Dream, and in return they wound up shaping it for multiple generations of the population at large.
Don't know about bollywood. Hollywood control by jews is not actually a conspiracy theory. Jews who migrated to USA started investing in movies and developed hollywood. http://www.amazon.in/An-Empire-Their-Own-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
There is this transcript between sallu and aish where he mentions about his links with the underworld and much more.
http://www.echarcha.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-20637.html
Here is a list of jewish composers. Given how many composers are jewish, it is not surprising there are so many famous jewish performers of classical music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_classical_composers
It is really more a reflection of the fact that there are jewish high achievers in every field of endeavour.
http://www.amazon.com/Their-Own-Image-Popular-Culture/dp/0813538092/ref=sr_1_14
http://www.amazon.com/Entertaining-America-Jews-Movies-Broadcasting/dp/0691113025/ref=sr_1_7
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Entertainment-Darryl-Lyman-Hardcover/dp/B00ZM38ZES/ref=sr_1_2
http://www.amazon.com/Jews-Prime-Time-David-Zurawik/dp/1584652349/ref=sr_1_1
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573/ref=sr_1_1
That was frickin EASY!
Written by a proud Jewish man.
The Federal Reserve ''owns'' Wall Street. Who are the big players in that circle?
Great first comment though. Welcome to reddit. You should stick around, as it is educational here.
Preconceived notions are for fools. Growing up can be a painful process, but I promise it will get better.
Archives for links in comments:
----
I am Mnemosyne 2.0, I am definitely not a fucking toaster.^^^^/r/botsrights ^^^^Contribute ^^^^Website
Her er en bog, den ramte NYTimes bestseller liste i 80erne, så den er helt legitim.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
I Hollywood er det fritslag imod alt især hvide, jøder er dog undtagelsen, de skal ikke diversificere væk.
Hard to believe you haven't read or even heard about this article by a Jew in the LA Times or this article in the American Free Press. Hey, go get the book that explains it all quite thoroughly. You are apparently somewhat challenged by reality.
https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
There's a book called An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385265573/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_wDrzzbPRGKYG2
Americans have a strong mythology about WW2. The US was pure and good, the Germans and Japanese dark and evil. By opposing them, the US saved the world. American viewers are warm and welcoming towards this message.
https://www.amazon.ca/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
And yes the Jewish factor is strong in Hollywood. No one kind of admits this openly but it's real.
Who Rules America?
Who Controls Broadcastig?
How Jewish is Hollywood?
An Empire of their Own
Well, at one point Hollywood WAS run by Jews.
Read An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood to understand the origins of the cliche.
The irony is that as Hollywood became less a collection of family-run businesses, and more a publicly-owned industry, the social messaging encouraged by the liberal Jews who started teh film industry was forsaken in favor of pure entertainment, no matter the message, leading to our currently vapid film and TV culture, where the core message is simply have fun and don't even think about becoming a better, more successful person: that's boring.
.
The people who blame the secret Cabal of Zionists for the state of American culture have it exatly bass-ackwards: when the Jews ran Hollywood, there was a pro-social message to much of the industry; now, there's nothing.
http://www.amazon.com/An-Empire-Their-Own-Hollywood/dp/0385265573
I've read a handful of books on Jews in Hollywood, but it's been a while. The one that most informs my thinking these days, simply because I remember it best is Neal Gabler, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," and I have to say, he contradicts you on early theaters if not on Vaudeville. All those early studio guys were Jews, Fox, Warner, Goldwin, and scads I don't remember, the theaters were, and the huge numbers of the actors were. Not that the studios gave a damn about the ethnicity of the actors, they wanted beauty and got it.
It was, like sports (which had large numbers of Jews pre-WWII), it was a way for a talented, competitive, hungry kid to become somebody, and because of existing American culture, lots of talented blacks were sidelined until they couldn't be (in Hollywood and Sports and other no generation wealth and celebrity industries).
In front of the camera, the studios wanted beauty and glamour. I'll get to that momentarily. Behind the camera, Gabler had this sense that the studios were the large dysfunctional families that Jews had migrated from in shtetls, or in the tenements. My understanding of Jewish culture and Jewish culture in America (and I did a bunch of work more than a decade ago on Jewish literature in America, particularly Jewish autobiography, which is NOT a Jewish form, but is a solidly American form of literature) is that it really is true that Jews are obsessed with education. Two reasons: the holy scriptures (both Biblical in Hebrew and post biblical in Aramaic) were accessible to anyone, and it was a serious way up going back to Roman times of the Second Temple. Literacy is expensive, and even when it didn't pay off (where farming or herding did), Jewish culture had already formed around Biblical and later Talmudic study. After the Second Temple was destroyed, and THIS IS CENTRAL TO JEWISH CULTURE, study and prayer directly and literally replaced Temple animal sacrifice as an acceptable way to atone, participate, engage in holy as well as communal service.
Since Jews were largely excluded from owning land (no farming), joining craft guilds (at least the Christian ones), participating in government, etc., etc., two ways emerged for Jews to move up; scholarship and business. Now, think about the stereotype of a Jewish mother wanting her son to be a doctor, and there are traditions of healers going back to Moses's sister Miriam. That COMBINES scholarship and business, as does law.
A rich man wants his daughter to marry a learned rabbi in the old world, and a poor man wants his son to be a learned rabbi and marry a rich girl. Unlike in Christian Europe, Jewish tradition has women being entitled to all kinds of rights, and wealthier Jews were educating their daughters fairly early on, as well, albeit not like the sons. Jewish women ran businesses; Jewish women aren't to be trifled with. So the culture has strong, women, nerdy children, and big shot macher men, along with teachers and students, and at some point everyone has to teach if only to pick up some extra dough. Along with law and medicine, education is full of Jews. Because of the importance of the prophetic tradition, in which the prophet tells everyone what they're doing wrong and why they are causing everyone's suffering, cultural criticism is central to the culture.
Now, why does a furrier, a guy trained to dry fox fur and stitch it together want to get his hands clean? Because with a modest investment, in America, he can. Why does fish monger want to get his hands clean and go into the arts? Because he can.
There was NO YIDDISH THEATER before the middle of the 19th century, or very little. By the turn of the century, Yiddish theater is thriving in New York, Chicago, Philly and Boston, and like being a good musician, it's a ticket to travel and money, what I like about performing, food, drink, an audience, and money, just get a booking and it can all be yours.
This is a group poised to go into the creative arts, journalism (at one point the newspaper with the highest circulation in New York was the Jewish Daily Forward, still in print in a bilingual edition, for a while weekly, now online, and there were several Yiddish papers for competition, and while there were way more English speakers than Yiddish in New York, there were way more English papers competing for the readership, so for a while the Forward had the largest circulation), teaching, psychology, all medical fields, law, famously peddlers, but in some cases directly into department stores, jewelry, and Jews swamped colleges.
Now, when I said education more than capital, that's really true. Free education through 12th grade had pretty much been codified by the turn of the century in the U.S. Colleges were not as expensive (nor as popular) as they are today.
Not just any college. The Best. At that time, Jews were about 2% of the American population, and by the 1910s, Jews were 25% of the Ivy League schools, which put a quota on Jews, to limit the numbers to 15%, which they explained would be for the interest of the Jews themselves, because they were sensitive to the fact that Jews would be perceived as too pushy. I can't remember which did it first, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, but then they all followed. Jews flooded state universities. College-aged Jews most of the last century were in college at much higher rates than the rest of American society. Fifteen years ago it was 40% of 18-22 yr olds, 80% of Jews that age. It's higher now for the rest of the population, but Jews are still in college at higher rates. Jews as a religious group (not an ethnic group, I don't have the numbers on that) are only equaled by Sikhs for per capita advanced degrees in America, and there are way fewer of them.
The Jewish religious structures are much closer to Protestant than Catholic or state sponsored churches like the Church of England. There's a loose affiliation of where the leaders are trained, but each congregation is relatively independent, hiring and firing their rabbis, like most Protestant denominations, not dictated by a bishop. That went hand in glove with Jewish culture.
The result is that I don't know any Jews who are first generation college educated my age or younger, and because I teach in a community college that is fed by a rural and blue collar area, I meet many gentiles every year who are first generation college students.
It is absolutely the case that you have to go to the specific stories of the studio founders to find out what attracted them, but Yiddish Theater was huge back then, not just Vaudeville, though of course that was, too. But the background isn't just in performance, and my sense (though I don't want to stereotype where I'm less informed) is that Irish were/are storytellers, singers, dancers, with a hunger to be in front of audiences. Small business owners were like single proprietorships like barber shop or small that sort of small business.
For all the Seinfelds and Jon Stewarts, the backroom is full of Jews who are fulfilled by being writers, producers, lawyers, agents, etc. Look how much it all resembles what an academic does, a producer for a news show.
And because these run loosely like businesses, that is, each person is an independent artist affiliated with a larger project, it's like being a doctor or a lawyer where your time is your own, but you're part of a team working toward a new one-of-a-kind product that will be mass produced as an afterthought. The marketing, the tie-ins are magic, the deal-making, the pitch (which if you're in a Hollywood restaurant at lunch time the whole place sounds like a parody of what you'd guess).
And if a rabbi is just another member of the family, not someone with a special calling who leads a life divorced from ordinary things, there's no one in the community that has a job that's more out of reach than another, a dentist, a casting director, a writer, a videographer, teaching history, or taking clippings from cable and making fun of it and being Jon Stewart. Seinfeld is a guy who got lucky, not a guy who does anything different from everybody else. You don't have to have an uncle who's in the industry. You just have to have a good script or a good student video or a good sense of what the possibilities are.
That's my take. But the Gabler book is excellent for giving the stories of the founding members and their personalities.
Its certainly a random selection of books...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dance-Upon-Air-Sisters-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B004KZOMQ4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499786188&sr=1-1&keywords=dance+upon+the+air+nora+roberts
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Empire-Own-Jews-Invented-Hollywood-Neal-Gabler/0385265573/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499786230&sr=1-1&keywords=An+Empire+of+their+own
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beach-Music-Pat-Conroy-ebook/dp/B008BSOJ46/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499786255&sr=1-1&keywords=Beach+Music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardball_with_Chris_Matthews - Something to do with the book with the purple spine.
And last but not least what appears to be a study guide to the 6th century Saint, John Climacus....
Not to be shit on the charitable person who set this up but who, on a whim of popping down to the local 'little library', would want to read this tripe, let alone steal it....
> maybe too concerned with diversity
Unless of you evidence of corruption then please shut up [Jews are more often victims of hate crimes] (http://www.snopes.com/true-jews-are-more-often-victims-of-hate-crimes-than-muslims/)
The jews also are disapporianately represented in Hollywood And no its not because of corruption as this book explains in detail why.