At the Academy Museum, a new permanent exhibition explores how LA’s movie industry — over 100 years old — developed through the lives of its early Jewish studio owners. Before the exhibition was created, the public criticized that it was omitting these seminal figures from the story of Hollywood. After it debuted, some said it was antisemitic because Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Bros., Harry Cohn, and other Jewish men were portrayed negatively.
Michael Schulman wrote about the controversy surrounding the exhibition. He’s a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears.
In June, the museum changed the wording of the exhibit after receiving a letter signed by prominent Jewish leaders and Hollywood creators, including actor David Schwimmer and writer Amy Sherman-Palladino.
The letter said the exhibit overemphasized the flaws of the Jewish studio founders, Schulman tells KCRW, and double standards were at play because nowhere else in the museum were people vilified when they were meant to be celebrated.
“They felt like some of the words used to describe these studio founders were in the vicinity of certain Jewish tropes. They emphasize words like ‘oppressive,’ ‘womanizer,’ ‘predation’ — stuff that all sounds really bad when you take them out and put them in a list.”
In Schulman’s estimation, the people featured in the exhibit were complex individuals who formed the industry and turned movies into a mainstream art form. They also, however, created a hierarchy of power that was oppressive and controlling.
“I found that the exhibit was pretty balanced. It not only talked about these individual men and the way they misuse power, but also about the antisemitism that they themselves experienced, and the way they had the finger on the pulse of popular tastes, rising up from the vaudeville world.”
He continues, “I thought it had a really nuanced way of describing what made these men successful, but also what made them, in modern parlance, problematic.”
Schulman also visited other parts of the exhibit and says other Hollywood figures face criticism.
“When you walk through it, yes, there are very laudatory exhibitions on women in film and individual filmmakers like John Waters or [Hayao] Miyazaki, but they also really take a hard look at Hollywood's past and the Academy's own past. There's a very self-critical room with a timeline of all 90-something years of the Academy Awards. And they call out the segregated table we're Hattie McDaniel had to sit when she won for Gone With the Wind and the way that Asian characters were treated and stereotyped, all sorts of things.”
So how much has the exhibit changed? Schulman says the Academy was legitimately worried about being seen as antisemitic. As a result, he says it’s been sanitized.
He points to a section on the Warner Bros., in which the word “womanizer” was deleted to describe Jack Warner. “That struck me as like, why? Womanizer isn't a Jewish stereotype.”
However, Schulman takes issue with a section on Harry Cohn, who harassed and stalked Rita Hayworth, and threatened to put a mob hit on Sammy Davis Jr. unless he broke up with Kim Novak and married a Black woman instead.
“He was just a brute and a predator. And there was a sentence in his wall text in the museum that said he had a reputation as a tyrant and a predator. And they took out ‘tyrant’ and ‘predator,’ and changed it to ‘authoritarian.’ … As someone who has read up a lot on Harry Cohn and knows that this was a pretty reprehensible human being … I stood and read the new text and just felt like this is just such a step backward.”
Schulman calls the exhibit fascinating because it’s where legitimate concerns about antisemitism and the place of Jews in America are butting up against Hollywood’s ethos following MeToo.
He adds, “The exhibit was probably never going to satisfy the people who called for it because what they wanted was something that would epitomize Jewish pride and the Jewish place in the industry. And I felt like they picked the wrong people for that job. And my cheeky suggestion in the end of the piece is maybe they should have just skipped these guys, and done a show about Jews in comedy with Mel Brooks and Judy Holliday and people who everyone pretty much loves.”