jews pull off psy-op in Hollywood with demand "Where are the jews?"

[yankeedoodle]

So, we have this bizarre bullshit story about a museum in Hollywood that is funded by jews, and, yet, the jews claim that it doesn't recognize their contribution to the history of Hollywood, because, as you know, it is a "anti-semitic trope" that the jews run Hollywood, so maybe the museum is trying to protect the jews from criticism, but the clueless jews don't like it, and demand that the world know that the jews are responsible and run Hollywood.  But, relax, everybody will soon know - it official, it's in a museum - that the jews set-up and run Hollywood. 

Others have defended the museum, saying it couldn't present 100 years of history all on its opening night.

"We didn't get to opening night with the origin story, but we got to opening night with what was relevant to the audience we were playing to and needed to include," said Sid Ganis, an honorary trustee. "I have friends who said to me, 'Where are the Jews?' It's in the eyes of the beholder. They're there, and they will be there in a bigger, more prominent way pretty soon." [emphasis added]
[...]
The museum is planning a new exhibit for next year that will focus on Hollywood founding fathers, he said. Originally planned as a temporary feature, it will be made a permanent exhibit in the wake of the complaints.

Absence of Jewish legacy at LA's Academy Museum of Motion Pictures spurs outcry
https://www.timesofisrael.com/absence-of-jewish-legacy-at-las-academy-museum-of-motion-pictures-spurs-outcry/

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which aims to enshrine a century of movie-making in Hollywood, is facing criticism because its exhibits exclude the Jewish filmmakers who played key roles in launching the industry.

Donor and influential academy members have complained that there is no mention of the mostly immigrant Jews who established the industry after escaping persecution in their home countries, Rolling Stone magazine reported.  https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/academy-museum-motion-pictures-jewish-representation-1283537/

Some patrons have threatened to pull support over the issue, sources familiar with the developments told the magazine in a report published Thursday.

The museum opened on September 25 last year with a star-studded event but already at the time some were raising questions about what was missing from the displays.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was at the gala opening, told the magazine of his disappointment at what appeared to him to be a "glaring omission."

"As I walked through, I literally turned to the person I was there with and said to him, 'Where are the Jews?'" he said.

"I would've hoped that any honest historical assessment of the motion picture industry — its origins, its development, its growth — would include the role that Jews played in building the industry from the ground up," Greenblatt said.


The absence has been noted by various media outlets, drawing criticism from The Forward, Air Mail, and Bari Weiss's Common Sense website on the Substack platform.

However, a source familiar with programming at the museum told Rolling Stone that there wasn't enough pressure from influential figures to include Jews.

"A lot of people who might have fought harder for the representation of Jews were just really laying low," the unnamed source said.

"It's a conspiracy of silence and that's deeply upsetting," Greenblatt said

"By not including the founding fathers out of the gate, they were making a massive statement," said academy member and film financier Ryan Kavanaugh. "As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, it's just shocking that they erased the contributions of a group who faced severe antisemitism — they couldn't get bank loans, they couldn't own homes in LA, and yet they still created this industry that is the bedrock of the LA economy and touches people around the world."

"Instead of, 'Look at what they were able to do,' it's just wiped out," complained Kavanaugh, who founded Triller, a video-sharing social media network. "It goes against everything that our industry says they stand for."

Exhibits at the museum after it opened tended to focus on more contemporary figures, with one academy member saying it gave the impression that "the film industry was created 10 years ago. They erased the past. And I find it appalling."


Haim Saban, whose $50 million contribution to the museum was the largest single donation, said he and his wife Cheryl had spoken with the museum's management and that they were taking their feedback "seriously."

The Sabans "firmly believe that the Jewish contributions to the film industry, from its founding to today, should be highlighted," he said.

Others have defended the museum, saying it couldn't present 100 years of history all on its opening night.

"We didn't get to opening night with the origin story, but we got to opening night with what was relevant to the audience we were playing to and needed to include," said Sid Ganis, an honorary trustee. "I have friends who said to me, 'Where are the Jews?' It's in the eyes of the beholder. They're there, and they will be there in a bigger, more prominent way pretty soon."

So far over 290,000 people have purchased tickets for the museum on Wilshire Boulevard, including veterans of the movie industry. Museum director and president Bill Kramer said the administration is attentive to the feedback.

"I've had sit-downs with four Academy members and two donors who wanted to better understand why they weren't seeing an exhibition on the primarily Jewish founders of Hollywood, and we take that note very seriously," he said. "Representation is so important to us, including our Jewish founders. If we are not talking about them in enough detail or more prominently, we want to hear that and we want to respond to that. We heard these notes, and we get it. And we're really happy to be able to make a change and are going to course correct."

The museum is planning a new exhibit for next year that will focus on Hollywood founding fathers, he said. Originally planned as a temporary feature, it will be made a permanent exhibit in the wake of the complaints.

Also, a six-week film series, "Vienna in Hollywood: Émigrés and Exiles in the Studio System," launched in December mostly features Jewish filmmakers, a move welcomed by Saban.

"We have no doubt that as the museum's dynamic exhibitions continue to rotate, Jewish contributions will continue to be represented among the many important stories about the history, art, and artists of the movies," he said.

[yankeedoodle]

Jewish stories were excluded from a new movie museum. Is Hollywood's push for diversity leaving them behind?
https://www.jta.org/2022/03/24/culture/jewish-stories-were-excluded-from-a-new-movie-museum-is-hollywoods-push-for-diversity-leaving-them-behind

A new museum about the history of Hollywood will have a permanent exhibition devoted to the contributions of Jews after early criticism that Jews were omitted.

The change was announced this week in the lead-up to this year's Academy Awards, which features a slate of nominees more diverse than in the past. It caps a period of intense discussion about how Hollywood includes Jews — and how it does not.

Whether in their depictions on screen, the actors cast to play them or acknowledgement of their historic role building up the film industry, Jews over the last few months have been vocal about their impressions of being left out of the current Hollywood conversation.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opened last fall in Los Angeles, is exhibit A in this purported oversight. Overseen by the Oscars' governing body, which described its mission as "radically inclusive," the museum's announcement of its new permanent exhibition focused on Jews came only after the academy admitted it had initially sidelined or ignored Hollywood's prominent Jewish founders.

Jewish visitors to its unveiling, including prominent donors to the museum, such as Haim Saban, publicly voiced their concerns that Jewish stories were being overlooked in the industry's historical narrative.

Among the figures who had little or no prominence in the museum's storytelling were Jewish studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers; prominent directors like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch; stars like Hedy Lamarr; and screenwriters like Herman Mankiewicz (subject of the recent biopic "Mank," which starred non-Jew Gary Oldman).

Figures such as these molded the early years of Hollywood, even while all but hiding their Jewishness from the general public, according to historians of the era such as Neal Gabler, whose book "An Empire Of Their Own" explores the central Jewish role in the creation of Hollywood.

These early Jews' films rarely, if ever, dealt with Jewish characters and themes. "Gentleman's Agreement," a landmark 1947 film about antisemitism, neither starred nor was directed or produced by Jews (though co-writer Moss Hart and Laura Z. Hobson, whose novel the film was based on, were Jewish). Some of these showbiz legends were refugees from Europe, and their backgrounds of escaping (and continuing to operate under) extreme antisemitism informed their desire to keep their Judaism under wraps.

The Academy's initial omission of such Jewish figures, and their self-imposed cultural erasure, stood out in stark contrast to the museum's emphasis on people of color and women in early Hollywood. One anonymous insider told The Hollywood Reporter the exclusion was a symptom of "overcorrection due to wokeness."

Criticism of the museum arrived in the middle of other ongoing conversations about Jewish representation in modern Hollywood. Jewish actress Sarah Silverman recently popularized the controversial term "Jewface," previously used by academics to describe secular Jews dressing up like Hasidic ones in Yiddish theater, to describe a different phenomenon: non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, in popular works such as "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic "On The Basis of Sex." An upcoming biopic of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, scheduled for release this year, casts non-Jew Helen Mirren in the role.

Just this week, an anonymous Oscar voter interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter questioned whether Rachel Zegler, the Colombian-Polish star of Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" remake, is diverse enough for the role she played, based solely on her name.

"I know they're emphasizing that they cast Latino and Latina actors this time, but the actress who plays Maria is named Rachel Zegler, so I think that's a little overstated," the Academy member said, as their justification for not voting for the film — in what could be interpreted as an insinuation that Zegler is Jewish and therefore does not count as diverse. Zegler is Latina and not Jewish.

Allison Josephs, a writer and activist who runs the Orthodox-focused media organization Jew In The City, says how Jews are portrayed onscreen has real implications for how they are treated in real life.

"Jews aren't considered a minority in Hollywood. We're considered white," Josephs told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, adding that depictions of Orthodox Jews in particular are "two-dimensional." Her writing on such negative portrayals has prompted apologies and episode retractions from major producers.

This week, Josephs announced that Jew in the City would be opening a "Hollywood bureau," intended to be a Jewish parallel to the NAACP, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment — existing organizations that push for positive Black, Muslim and Asian depictions onscreen.

The bureau would advocate for Jews in Hollywood by helping place observant Jews in entertainment production roles, as well as through representation awards; a "minority impact study" to determine if negative depictions of Jews onscreen lead to more antisemitic incidents in real life; and a media consultancy. Josephs is also at work on a documentary about Jewish representation in Hollywood.

With screenwriter Yael Levy, Josephs also coined what they call the "Josephs test" for judging an Orthodox character's onscreen portrayal, in the model of the Bechdel Test, a popular analysis tool for onscreen depictions of women coined by comics artist Allison Bechdel. (There's also the Kranjec Test, to assess whether Torah study includes women sources.)

The Bechdel Test's criteria calls for a film to feature two named female characters who have a conversation with each other about something other than a man. The Josephs test calls for a film or TV show to feature Orthodox characters who "are emotionally and psychologically stable" and can "self-actualize without leaving their Judaism behind" — in contrast to popular Netflix shows "Unorthodox" and "My Unorthodox Life," both of which feature protagonists who exit Orthodox Judaism.

"Basically every show and movie fails the Josephs test except for [Israeli movies and TV shows] 'Shtisel,' 'Fill the Void,' [and] 'Ushpizin,' because they all were made by or worked with actual Orthodox Jews," Josephs said.

Only one film released this year had a positive enough depiction of Judaism, in Josephs' eyes, to be eligible for a Jewish representation award: the music documentary "Rock Camp: The Movie," whose central subject is an Orthodox music agent.

She's not alone in wanting better onscreen depictions of Jews. In an op-ed last year, Malina Saval, Variety's features editor and a former screenwriter, lamented what she saw as "the watering-down of Jewish representation in TV and film," criticizing the so-called "self-loathing Jews" onscreen, like Woody Allen and Larry David, whom she believes help provide a safe psychological distance between the audience and a positive view of Judaism.

But the Academy is committed to a course correction around Jews, the museum's director and president, Bill Kramer, wrote in a joint op-ed this week with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

"As a cultural institution that seeks to elevate underrepresented and untold stories of the film industry, the Academy Museum has a responsibility to examine and explore the experiences of oppressed and marginalized groups in cinema, including the Jewish community," Kramer and Greenblatt wrote, adding that the museum and the ADL would be partnering on public programming to educate the public about the role of Jews in Hollywood and in combatting antisemitism.

The Academy museum's new permanent exhibit focusing on Jews, with the working title "Hollywoodland," will open next year. In the meantime, Jewish Oscar viewers still have a few rooting interests this weekend: director Steven Spielberg, actor Andrew Garfield and screenwriter Maggie Gyllenhaal, among other Jews, are all up for awards.

[abduLMaria]

If you have any doubt about who runs Hollywood, watch "The French Connection".

Plenty of Italians and African Americans ... plus the French smugglers.

Not a SWEJ in Sight.

But the Director of the movie is a Jewish Ukrainian, aka a Khazarian.

And received an Academy Award for it.

I couldn't finish the movie.  It is just too crappy.  Can't believe it got an Academy Award - but, understanding that the SWEJ do run Hollywood, it's not surprising.

Watch the Gene Hackman driving under the train tracks chase scene.

THAT cinematographic piece of garbage got an academy award.