The Academy Museum Still Has A Jewish Problem

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles has a Jewish problem. When it opened in 2021, the museum excluded Jews from the conversation about the glorious history of the movies. When its many Jewish donors and patrons protested, the museum promised it would do better. So this year it put up “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders And the Making of A Movie Capital,” an exhibit so blatantly antisemitic that even the most fervent Jew-haters agreed it went a little overboard. The museum vowed to correct the error.

I finally got to the Academy Museum when I was in L.A. last week on a side quest. And I can report that it hasn’t corrected its Jewish problem. The antisemitism in Hollywoodland doesn’t blare anymore, but it’s not subtle either. All you have to do is look, and not very hard, before you find it.

When the Academy Museum opened Hollywoodland earlier this year, in a small side room next to an exhibit featuring Captain America’s shield and the Barbasol can from Jurassic Park, it festooned the walls with words like “tyrant,” “oppressive,” “womanizer,” “predator,” “offensive,” “racial oppression,” “nepotism,” and “offensive.” You know, the characteristics you typically think of when you think of Jews. They fell just short of using an image of Fagin from Oliver! as the mascot for the exhibit. Needless to say, the Jews of Hollywood didn’t like this. Many of them, including Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and Friends star David Schwimmer, signed a letter of protest. When you’ve pissed off the Schwim, you’ve gone way too far.

People criticized the exhibit as “uninspired,” and called it a “shtetl.” L.A. Magazine quoted one Hollywood screenwriter, Keetgi Kogan, as saying: “Immigrants don’t create racism and sexism in America, and blaming these Jewish immigrants for the ills of that era is not just unfair but offensive. And despite what some may say, assimilation isn’t about benefiting from white supremacy, it’s about survival. It’s about playing by someone else’s rules because you don’t have the power to be yourself. And that’s what these Jewish men did. They tried to play by America’s rules and are now being scapegoated for America’s ills.”

The Academy took the nasty words off the wall, but still kept the rotten meat in the sandwich. Hollywoodland is a festival of darkness, a compendium of subtle and not-too-subtle antisemitic sentiment. It essentially divides into three small parts. The first is an interactive real estate map that shows how, in little more than 100 years, Jewish entertainment moguls transformed Los Angeles from an oil-industry backwater into one of the great cities of the world. The map seems almost regretful and apologetic about the gentrification and overdevelopment, which would be an interesting point to make in a 1990 L.A. Weekly article, but seems a little strange in a La Brea Tar Pits-adjacent temple to the art of the motion picture.

Down the center line of the room, you have short bios of each of the eight major entities that made up the old Hollywood studio system. You learn just a little about Louis B. Mayer, The Warner Brothers, the “United Artists” of Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks, and the other cigar-chomping moguls who created Hollywood. It’s weak sauce, barely a line in a Wikipedia entry. They are essentially national-parks placards to be skipped over on the way to view the glories of the costumes of Black Panther or some such thing.

But the worst and most problematic of what remains in Hollywoodland after David Schwimmer cried foul is a short film. In this documentary-style piece of anti-Jewish propaganda, Ben Mankiewicz, himself the product of one of the great Hollywood Jewish families, essentially excoriates the Jewish studio heads for creating a false white-bread cinematic vision of America, one that was racist, sexist, and homophobic, and one that was also self-hating, denying their own Jewish identities to make a buck. Shame on you, Ben Mankiewicz, for reading that script out loud. They did not pay you enough. Then the film has the nerve to end by saying, “but that’s OK, because now we have Steven Spielberg.”

Elsewhere, the Academy Museum celebrates diversity, as well a modern institution should. It contains loving tributes to the making of Boyz N The Hood, and to the films of Pedro Almodovar and radical Chicana filmmaker Lourdes Portillo. The Museum celebrates historic Oscar wins by deaf actors, female directors, and South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook. It devotes more time to the making of The Godfather, the greatest film saga in Hollywood history, celebrating Italian and Sicilian culture despite the fact that the film depicts the lives and businesses of some of the most morally compromised people who’ve ever lived.

But all we get about Jews is that they were sexual predators who hated themselves. The only places you see anything remotely resembling detail about the actual lives of Jews in Hollywood and the struggles they face come in a brief mini-essay about the Hollywood blacklist in the main Oscar room, and in some of the bios of the stars in a floating exhibit about the making of Casablanca, where you learn that the Nazis used the image of Peter Lorre in an anti-Semitic propaganda poster. Hollywoodland contains no such subtlety.

Where is the Vito Russo ‘Celluloid Closet’ treatment that shows where filmmakers and studio heads managed to sneak in references to Judaism despite the general anti-Jewish sentiment at large in America? What about Charlie Chaplin, who was not Jewish, but was Jew-ish, standing up to the Nazis and depicting Jewish ghetto life in ‘The Great Dictator’ when it was actually brave to do so?

And while there might not have been a lot of Jewish content in the golden age of the studio system, after 1960 or so, there was a deluge. But the exhibit doesn’t contain one mention of Exodus, or Fiddler on the Roof, or Yentl, or the films of Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, The Coen Brothers, or, god forbid, David Mamet. Let’s also not forget the incredible contribution of Jews to Los Angeles life. The exhibit doesn’t mention synagogues, or delis, or summer camps, the bulwarks of safe and assimilated, but still proud, Jewish life in postwar America. Why not dig up Ben Stiller’s Bar Mitzvah invitation, or Ben Hecht’s tallis, or the fossilized remains of a poppyseed bagel with schmear? Why not include images and clips from Dirty Dancing, or a life-size hologram of the Hebrew Hammer? Let’s have some fun with this.

Jews know the greatness of their cultural heritage, even though a lot of Jews don’t seem to like themselves much these days. But the exhibit is open to all, and if people who don’t know much about Jewish culture in L.A. or beyond go to Hollywoodland, they might just leave thinking “oh yeah, Jews are kind of oppressive and creepy.” In a world where Jewish authors have to cancel events because they are deemed “Zionist” or because they want to appear on stage with a rabbi, Hollywoodland just throws a little more fat on the fire. Something is clearly rotten at the heart of the Academy Museum. If you keep telling people that Jews are “meh,” people might actually start to believe you.