very thorough, obejective look at the founding of the motion picture industry in america. there is a lot of minutiae, so be prepared to focus. at the end of the day you'll be happy you did.

Gabler is a uniquely erudite cultural critic. This is the third book I have read by him and I am deeply impressed with the unusual breadth of his coverage. In this case, he writes about the founding fathers of Hollywood, the dictatorial dreamers and shapers of its golden age (to the late 1940s}. In his telling, they are all Eastern European Jews, striving to become part of the American dream and at the same time providing many of the images that entered the American psyche. They all started with the penny arcades at the beginning of the century, and built empires in which they exercised total control of content and creation.

This book is less about the economics of the studio system - cartels that manufactured films on lots, virtually owned the "talent" via long-term contracts, dominated the distribution of their films, and controlled many of the theatres that played them - than about the culture and ethos they were trying to create in their dictatorial domains. The era passed with the Supreme Court trust-busting ruling, political attacks during the McCarthy era, and the rise of independent talent in actors, producers, and writer-directors.

As Gabler sees it, these founders were fairly secular Jews, who wanted to fit into the American ideal of pseudo-aristocratic entrepreneurs (from poverty). This was the source of their maudlin, sentimental style and crude american ideals, each studio with its own peculiar character. I must admit, I find this angle of analysis, with all the objections one can make for its subjectivity, quite fascinating and given their power to shape things, dead on the mark.

Gabler tells the story in the form of serial biographies. It is a wonderful flowing narrative, superlatively written and with a genuine depth of historical understanding. Indeed, while I think this early book is somewhat weaker than his later books, Disney and Life" the Movie, I will read any book that this critic writes.

Warmly recommended. This is not my usual domain of interest, so the reading is often hard going for me, but I have learned an immense amount from this critic, who is a real intellectual.

I was shocked to have someone point out that there's 300 million people in the US population of which 79% are Christian. The law of averages does not support that 2.5% of the US population that are Jewish being so prevalent in the media. Or does it? This book suggest a reason for the Jewish at the forefront. Also there are equally talented Christian actors who would like leading roles over and over again too. So ask yourself where are the Christians???

Now if you look at who's who at the box office right now it gives credence to this book.

Who's who in movies? IRONMAN: Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow (both Jewish). THE INCREDIBLE HULK cameo Robert Downey Jr. SEX IN THE CITY (movie): Starring Sarah Jessica Parker (Jewish). She is the wife of Mathew Broderick (he is Jewish). INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL: Harrison Ford (Jewish). YOU DON'T MESS WITH ZOHAN: Adam Sandler (Jewish). TROPIC THUNDER: Starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. (again, all Jewish). Amazing, take a bow!

Further, what do Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. ALL HAVE IN COMMON?

Hint: They are blood brothers with Adam Sandler, Larry King, Jerry Seinfeld & Jon Stewart for example.

Give up? They ARE ALL JEWISH... Who knew? I didn't. Simply AMAZING...

[..]

Not that it was bad but I was disappointed in this book. The subjects that interested me the most, the majority of movies made then portraying characters that represented how the Jews viewed themselves in American society, the schisms between the more established Jews who had immigrated from Germany and the ones from eastern European countries, the muscling in and manipulation of Hollywood by Jewish political groups like the ADL and AJC, and the gradual evolution of Hollywood into a tool of global social engineering, were barely touched on. If you are more interested in personality profiles of the early Hollywood movie moguls then this book is right up your alley though.

Not that it was bad but I was disappointed in this book. The subjects that interested me the most, the majority of movies made then portraying characters that represented how the Jews viewed themselves in American society, the schisms between the more established Jews who had immigrated from Germany and the ones from eastern European countries, the muscling in and manipulation of Hollywood by Jewish political groups like the ADL and AJC, and the gradual evolution of Hollywood into a tool of global social engineering, were barely touched on. If you are more interested in personality profiles of the early Hollywood movie moguls then this book is right up your alley though.

Neal Gabler explores the fascinating question of how Hollywood was created primarily by a remarkable group of men who fit into a remarkably small demographic: European Jewish immigrants, most of them poor, most of them from Manhattan's lower east side, none of them practicing Jews, most of them from families with weak father figures. But together they moved to an almost completely protestant city and created the most successful form of popular entertainment in America, presenting an idealized version of American life for a nation in a constant for new national myths. The most fascinating thing about the book is the gap between the mythical world that they were presenting and their own backgrounds. For Louis B. Mayer, Andy Hardy's America was for him the real America, an America where there were strong nuclear families headed by strong fathers, doting neo-Victorian mothers, and obedient, respectful children. Economically most people were Middle Class, the tenor distinctively Middle American, and almost always Christian. Gabler argues that for most of these men, what they provided was not America as it existed, but the America that they wanted to be a part of.

Almost all of the major studios were founded by men who more or less fit Gabler's description. There are a number of major and minor characters in Gabler's story, the most prominent being Adolph Zukor, who was instrumental in creating Paramount; Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal; William Fox of Fox Pictures, which later merged with Twentieth Century; Louis B. Mayer, who built MGM into Hollywood's largest studio; Harry and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; and the belligerent Harry Cohn of Columbia. There are in addition a number of crucial supporting characters, none more important than the legendary Irving Thalberg (I knew very slightly Thalberg's son, also Irving, an academic philosopher who spent his career in Chicago and who quietly funded liberal political causes--he paid for the Chicago Seven's legal bills at their trial--while quietly pursuing his university career), the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald's last novel THE LAST TYCOON. We also meet the Schenck brothers, Nicholas and Joseph, the Rabbi of Hollywood Edgar F. Magnin, theater chain owner Marcus Loew, and an uncountable number of smaller figures.

One of the most striking aspects of the biography is how utterly these men suppressed their Jewish backgrounds in their films. Although THE JAZZ SINGER is the story of the son of a Jewish son rejecting the culture of his cantor father (Gabler points out that the son's story was also the story of the moguls), the vast majority of movies produced by Hollywood in the twenties, thirties, and forties contained no identifiably Jewish characters. Although an astonishing number of the people producing the movies were Jewish, it was as if they felt compelled to completely erase Jews from their idealization of American life. The was more than mere assimilationist aspirations; it was as if they were trying to expunge the weak fathers of their youths, the poverty they knew growing up, and become a part of a nation that largely rejected them. For two or three decades, at least, they could maintain this myth, but in the forties and the HUAC committee of the U.S. House of Representatives they found their fiefdom increasingly under attack for the industry's supposed inculcation of un-American (i.e., Communist) values. Many of their attackers persisted in the fascist depiction of Communism as an essentially Jewish cast of thought (in Hitler's writings there is no clear distinction between Jews and Communists, and at least one part of his motivation in attacking Russia was to attack what he weirdly considered a Jewish nation).

This is not a perfect book. For one thing, the scope is simply too large for any one book to undertake. And inevitably there are either serious omissions or details that don't quite tell the whole story. For instance, Gabler attempts to characterize the more plebian tendencies at Warner's by mentioning that one of their stars was Rin Tin Tin, which seems to hint at how far down the ladder they were in the Hollywood pecking order, but failing to note that for most of his life Rin Tin Tin was the number one box office star in Hollywood. Also, there is amazingly little discussion of the many Jewish performers in Hollywood. Some are mentioned in passing (such as Groucho Marx, noting his famous reply to the attempt by the Jewish country club Hillcrest to recruit new members following the stock market crash, that he wouldn't want to be a member of a club that would accept someone like him as a member), and Edward G. Robinson gets a few mentions, but for the most part actors are ignored. This is overwhelmingly a book about the top brass. And one can take issue with some minor depictions, such as the long discussion of the nature of Universal in the thirties, but no mention of the man who is most responsible for the visual look of those films and the director of all their major achievements, James Whale. The implication is that the distinctive look of Universal films was not determined by the former art director Whale. But this is all nitpicking.

I do have to take strong issue with one of the current featured reviews that criticizes the book because he believes that the American depicted in the movies was very much the America he knew in the forties and fifties. First, the book deals mainly with America in the twenties and thirties, a bit less with the forties, and the fifties almost not at all, so the time framework of his criticism is off. Second, how can anyone argue that the movies were not an idealization if one knows any American history at all? Certainly the poverty that my parents and grandparents knew growing up in Arkansas during those decades was almost completely ignored, THE GRAPES OF WRATH aside (and the subject of that film were very much my people). Any informed demographic study of the period will show that the depiction of women in the films was wildly out of kilter with the actual lives of women, many of whom had to take jobs even in the thirties, forties, and fifties to enable families to make it financially (the fifties is the only decade in American history of which the so-called traditional American family is even somewhat true). And Hollywood films of the period are notorious today for their depiction of race relations. Anyone stating that the Hollywood film in any conceivable sense depicted America as it really existed beggars credulity.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone either interested in the history of the movie industry or how immigrants sought to integrate themselves in their new nation. The book contains a wealth of information and I can't imagine anyone know coming away from it not merely entertained but better informed.

The 400 pages could have been 41, this longest prologue to a story does not start before it is well concluded...can take months of originally enjoyable casual reading to come to no real end...finished.

With it read myself I might suggest don't read it alone, don't waste it, take it as a box of chocolates (yep!) and do not leave yourself alone on stage. This is narrative, spiceful, and just a script. This is not standalone monologue. This is not a work that works by itself. Your bedmate should set down her or his own book to share this when you peep out intrigued. Ah, the best of you can bring Gabler's work to a useful point as you together add your pages.

Or get out of bed. This is weak as a book, fantastic as a subject, great as a discussion. This is, for the first part, brilliant writing - but nothing is worth buying if not on sale.

You must know Hollywood history before, above and beyond this incisive intake. Or, even more daunting, when you have read the book start right over and read it again.

That I did not do.

Who reviewing has read this whole, entire thing? Oh, come on! This is a classic skip the pageser. Yes I read all but the last two pages, finally crowning the author with the good ole good intentions star. I read it whole, crowwed in pride for fortisimilitude, I did, until the last I suppose 100 pages, maybe 200, but I can't tell you the beginning as I got to the end.

Plus, I smell a rat. A pitch with no production. Read the script; again, all 400 pages. Listen to the Firesign Theater: this book becomes the story of the little guy to finish the mural.

Like the history of a town, or a building, much less a man or a group of men, the construction of "Empire" is half the story, the lives in it not even the other half; the decay, decline, rot and remembrance are the full story, the lesson, the book. That's not here. Gabler gives, finally, a cruelly brief conclusion to the men and their properties he takes up hours of our lives founding. If he even does that well. And he don't: get the manuscript off to the printers. That hurts.

This book just gets started. That is no compliment. And by golly no insult. Like many great writers, this work is more an invite to sit with Gabler and talk than to read.

I seek a complimentary review, not to undo my admiration, nor my own perfidiification, but to add to it. Do undo my frustration in digesting this huge volume and my Philistine assumption on it's conclusion that it's intention was to make 400 pages printed.

Can we suspect this is just a touch of the brilliant Neal Gabler, and this book reveals how damned hard it is to write a complete story of an incomplete mission.

Film scholar and critic Neal Gabler offers a surprisingly well-researched, academically sound, and insightful study of the scions of early Hollywood and their vision for America. Ironically, and somewhat paradoxically, he finds that the early movie industry was largely founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. As outsiders in WASPish America, they nonetheless excelled at creating a vision of the United States that incorporated some of its most cherished principles and desires. Such studio executives as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and the Warner brothers ensconced a vision of America at its best that stood far removed from the reality of their lives.

As Gabler wrote of these industry leaders: "What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country....something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America. Something drove them to deny whatever they had been before settling here" (p. 4). Gabler believes that these Jewish leaders "colonized the American imagination" (p. 7). Over time, their films embodied American values; the irony is that they were made by people alienated from that culture. As Gabler concludes, "the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction" (p. 7).

This is a very interesting and useful study of the role of film in defining the American character in the early twentieth century.

Here's an absorbing history of the movie industry. Neal Gabler claims that Adolph Zukor (Paramount), the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures) and the moguls of Fox Studios, MGM and Universal had a dream of what America was which they incorporated into movies and sold to the American public and the world.

Gabler claims that what these movies showed was not the real country at all. "Only this way," he writes, "could these immigrants satidsfy their hunger of assimilation into a country that had rejected them." In the end, he says, the fictive America created by these businessmen portrays an artificial "reality" that later generations of moviegoers took as truth.

I have two problems with the premise of this book: First, I know for a fact that the America portrayed in the movies of the '40s and '50s did exist and second, those moguls created their own social world, partly out of geographic necessity and partly because the work of filmmaking isolated them from the everyday work world.

I know the kind of family, community and lifestyle often portrayed in those "romantic" and "sentimental" movies (i.e. where family members and members of the community worked and lived together in mutual respect and affection) existed because I experienced it. The movies I saw as a child and as a young adult in the 1940s and 1950s mirrored the life I knew.

I understand that contemporary life is so different from life in those days that young people view what they call "sentimental romanticism" with disbelief. I pity them. The lives they seem to be living look shabby and disgusting to me!

It's an interesting premise but it's built on a false presumption!

The book will charm the moviephile. It's entertaining and well written and it gives a fascinating look at backstage Hollywood in a time when Hollywood enjoyed a great deal more respect than it does today.

Here's an absorbing history of the movie industry. Neal Gabler claims that Adolph Zukor (Paramount), the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures) and the moguls of Fox Studios, MGM and Universal had a dream of what America was which they incorporated into movies and sold to the American public and the world.

Gabler claims that what these movies showed was not the real country at all. "Only this way," he writes, "could these immigrants satidsfy their hunger of assimilation into a country that had rejected them." In the end, he says, the fictive America created by these businessmen portrays an artificial "reality" that later generations of moviegoers took as truth.

I have two problems with the premise of this book: First, I know for a fact that the America portrayed in the movies of the '40s and '50s did exist and second, those moguls created their own social world, partly out of geographic necessity and partly because the work of filmmaking isolated them from the everyday work world.

I know the kind of family, community and lifestyle often portrayed in those "romantic" and "sentimental" movies (i.e. where family members and members of the community worked and lived together in mutual respect and affection) existed because I experienced it. The movies I saw as a child and as a young adult in the 1940s and 1950s mirrored the life I knew.

I understand that contemporary life is so different from life in those days that young people view what they call "sentimental romanticism" with disbelief. I pity them. The lives they seem to be living look shabby and disgusting to me!

It's an interesting premise but it's built on a false presumption!

The book will charm the moviephile. It's entertaining and well written and it gives a fascinating look at backstage Hollywood in a time when Hollywood enjoyed a great deal more respect than it does today.

Neal Gabler explores the lives of the founding movie moguls of Hollywood in this work which is at turns funny and sad. Most of the moguls never had a very good family life either growing up or growing old, but the stories of the business and oddities of Hollywood are amusing.

One of the most interesting of Gabler's points is that each head of the studio made a certain style of movie that reflected his personality--whether that would be Mayer's idealized America or the Warners' stories of tough outsiders, for instance.

Gabler gives interesting insights into the struggle between Edison and the Jewish independents over who would monopolize the distribution and equipment for the business. It is suggested that this was fight between protestants on one side, and Jews and Catholics on the other, given the ethnic make-up of the two camps. Edison eventually lost out over an anti-trust suit and the movie moguls went on to pretty much monopolize the business until they lost an anti-trust suit in 1948.

The reason why Jews have predominated in the movie business from the beginning was that in the early days of film, it was considered a slightly disreputable business to be in and white gentiles had no great desire to enter into a venture considered to be a novelty to make some fast cash. The Jewish businessmen saw the movies as something more than a novelty and sought to make them more high-brow by filming critically acclaimed plays and literary works. This was done also to bring in the middle class into their already working class customer base.

Gabler shows how many of the movie moguls wished to present themselves as totally assimilated Americans who made themselves over to look like the high class gentiles of the Eastern Establishment. But at the same time they saw themselves as Jews and their enemies saw them as Jews too. The years of blacklisting communists is covered in which some gentiles complained about the moguls employing communist Jewish writers for their films. (The moguls themselves were Republican and many of their writers we're Jewish communists.)

Hollywood is shown to be place where there is no real friendship and materialism reigns. In their cutthroat business, those on top are celebrated as long as they stay successful and those who have fallen are forgotten. This rule even applies somewhat to the movie moguls of this era. Anyway, one gets the impression it's more fun to watch the movies than to be in the business of making them.

.
These stories of Hollywood's original film moguls are as personal and insightful as they are legendary.

While today's movie executives seem to be both disposable and interchangable, these industry giants created a mammoth enterprise that will last for the ages. Hollywood's early movie magic endures because these entrepreneurs were driven with a passion to shape their own legacy and to obtain the recognition they craved.

This reader would have been interested in understanding how these moguls related to the independent studios, including the Walt Disney Studio. Some critics have accused Walt Disney of having anti-semitic attitudes, while none have sufficientely documented such an extreme conclusion. Based upon the cooperative working relationships with the other major studio heads (including those at MGM, Columbia, RKO, and others), there seems to be evidence supporting a profitable exchange of ideas and creative talent between the studios that would undermine those proposing such anti-semitic rhetoric. Within this exchange, clearly Walt Disney benefitted from these relationships, and his early successes certainly had the attention and admiration of his competition. Sufficient documentation exists in support of these complimentary relationships that capable researchers should be able to bring a more substantial review to contemporary readers.

Of particular interest would be the seemingly competitive struggle between Jack Warner and Walt Disney during the 1964 Oscar race (My Fair Lady vs. Mary Poppins). Additional analysis of this aspect of Hollywood history would be beneficial.

Gabler's work is a triumph in documenting the essential backstory of Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker. Brilliant!

Dave Mason is Southern California author and Disneyland historian. He is owner of the internet's premier vintage Disneyana auction site,... His next book, "The Merchants of Main Street" is scheduled for release in early 2004.

I had to see the movie for some odd reason. I agree with the last review on many points. The film makes it sound like the Jewish people were the sole inventors of film. It is horribly cliched, and makes etremely odd, partial points, like that "My Fair Lady" is an example of the jews trying to fit in. It plays out like a script written by the moguls themselves. Waste of time.

This is, to the extent of my explorations, the only book on what would seem to be a pair of significant questions about American mass culture: why did the Jews take control of the motion picture industry in its earliest days; and how did that fact shape their creations and the culture they influenced? For its uniqueness, its thoroughness in investigating the relationships of the early film moguls to their religious heritage, and its wealth of detail regarding their lives, I applaud it. I find myself, however, yearning for a second book, or a revised edition, for this first exploration leaves much untouched.

Neal Gabler states early on that the moguls' vision of "America" shaped not only the fictional realities of their films but the reality of America itself, in that it was through Hollywood that we developed much of our self-image. Apart from passing mentions, however, such as noting that our later vision of a lost, small-town America was largely shaped by memories of the Andy Hardy series beloved by Louis B. Mayer, he does not develop that important thread.

There are also a few frustrating narrative lapses that set me to reviewing the index to see if I'd missed something (which I hadn't). The author leads us through the story of Paramount's Adolph Zukor, whom he presents as perhaps the most important and emblematic of the moguls, to a point at which Zukor is poised to seize a commanding role in the national distribution of films. Gabler then cuts away, and when we return to Zukor we find that his expansionist efforts have failed and his position at the studio is now in jeopardy, though we are not shown how.

I recommend this as a fascinating beginning to an exploration. I hope there will be more books like it to develop the story further. Perhaps, in time, we will even see books that will treat the same questions with regard to popular music, comedy, and other fields so shaped by the Jewish people.

Gabler's An Empire of Their Own is an outstanding sociological, political, literary, and historical review of the important role mostly immigrant Jews played in the first few decades of Hollywood as the film capital. He doesn't pull punches, but gives findings that can be viewed as positive or negative--a welcome approach instead of a biased approach giving only one side. He shows the seven major producers (and many others in lesser detail) to be human beings, with strengths and weaknesses. The bigger picture, including an insight into the personal lives of the producers and how this affected their movies, is very good. He also does a good job of explaining how anti-Semitism played a real role in the lives of these Jewish producers, but how their personal styles also were sometimes not admirable. I have used the book in my Sociology Through Film: Jewish Images class, and rate it very good.

Gabler's book took me a while to get through (mostly since I read it before going to bed and I was always exhausted), but was worth the journey. Gabler writes vividly (with constant analysis) of the who and the WHY of early Hollywood. He deals with their stories, motives, and dreams. It is a fascinating history and social history--for those into religion and cinema. It gets a bit long at the end--the Red Scare seems to go on forever and confusing, but worth the trip. Gabler sheds light an important part of history. Thanks, Neal.

When Siskel and Ebert left PBS for greener pastures at Buena Vista in 1982 an equally competent and even brighter team of movie reviewers, Michael Medved and Neal Gabler replaced them. Unfortunately these replacements never achieved the soaring if ephemeral popularity of the originators of Sneak Previews.

All too soon Jeffrey Lyons replaced Neal Gabler before we got to know him. In 1988, Gabler's book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Created Hollywood, was published.

Here, the Golden Age of Hollywood is presented as an Age of Brass. We get to know on a first name basis the small group of Jewish immigrants, from the turn of the last Century rejected from mainstream American corporate business but with equally human hunger for comfort and wealth. They left their father's limited little businesses to jump on the Thomas Edison often-derided risky bandwagon of moving pictures and realized its true promise. They did this not out of the motive of a pioneer's dream of courageous exploration and but with the lust for gold of the Conquistadors.

Neal Gabler's book is a competent work. It offers an erudite tour through the various personalities in the early years and the reasons why this most unlikely group, using the most powerful and influential medium ever invented actually shaped the American Dream that we know today.

I chose to read "Empire," after seeing several highly complementary reviews. It was entirely too repetitive. The basic theme is that the eastern european jews who came to the new world and eventually founded the great Hollywood studios carried several traits in common and a desire to beat the gentiles at their own game while relinquishing ties to their judaic pasts.

Swell. But how many times do I need to read it? And how profound is it to inform readers that too great a focus on material success and skirt chasing often has deliterious effects on one's home life and spiritual life? And that capitalism can be cruel? If you want to read about the world that these truly impressive studio moguls founded, I would suggest "City of Nets" by Otto Friedrich.

This book by Neal Gabler is a well written account about those individuals that initiated the biggest movie studios of all time. From Adolph Zukor and Paramount to Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures to Louis B. Mayer and MGM, this book offers a riveting synopsis of what drove these men to so the things that they did and to make the decisions that they made. I highly recommend this book to anyone that is seriously in search of information on the origins of some of the most powerful companies with such a profound impact on American thought.

BNS FOREVER.

This book shows more than anything that Jewish influences and 'propaganda' in hollywood remain a serious problem even today.

I merely wish to correct a factual error which appears both in the book and in the TV doc: Lee J. Cobb's original surname was not "Jacoby". He was born LEO JACOB. Heaven knows where Mr. Gabler came up with "Jacoby". It's pure fiction. What actually happened was this: When at age 18 Lee was about to enter upon an acting career, his (our) father suggested the name-change, to which Lee instantly agreed. I am, after all, Lee's brother so I trust the above will be given due credence. And I do wish subsequent editions of the book will include this correction. Thank you.

I merely wish to correct a factual error contained in Neal Gabler's otherwise highly readable book. And the error appears in the TV documentary as well. My brother Lee J. Cobb's original surname is NOT "Jacoby" but Jacob. The play on the surname "J. Cobb" was actually conceived by our father, Benjamin Jacob. I cannot imagine how this bit of misinformation took root. And it seems somehow to be spreading. Of course, I will enlighten the author as well.

Insightful analysis of how the wide-open land of opportunity was not an ever-present American ideal but was in fact invented by those who most wanted it to be: poor, persecuted immigrants. Unlike the racist and elitist establishment cinema of the East Coast, Jewish Hollywood promoted recurring themes of equality of opportunity -- haunted by nightmares of persecution. The movie 'Hollywoodism' may be in some ways better than this book, because you can see the evidence for yourself. Nonetheless, recommended.

On Sunday, March 22, 1998, A&E presented a documentary based on Neal Gabler's "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. The presentation was entitled "Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream". I quote the ad: "Theprogram shows viewers the development of movies from a startling new perspective, revealing that classic Hollywood themes of white picket fences, little guys fighting the odds, outsiders who become insiders, and the lone hero riding off into the sunset, were dreams born in the oppressed Jewish [shtetls] of Eastern Europe." This "newperspective" was so startling that this viewer was forced to wonder if Mr. Gabler [or the creators of the documentary] is completely unacquainted with the theatrical (and literary) fare of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as much that has been done since the founding of Hollywood. I will present only two examples to demonstrate my astonishment (perhaps others will occur to those who also saw this program). 1- The "documentary" claims the American musical to be a Jewish invention (with a side comment on the existence of Cole Porter as an anomaly) due to Irving Berlin and "Teams" like Learner & Lowe and Jerome Kern (I was unaware that Jerome Kern was a team). I mention only one progenitor by way of example: Despite any number of film cuts showing Jimmy Cagney singing and dancing from the numerous musical works of George M. Cohan, George is not mentioned as one of the more prolific, popular, and influential originators of the American musical. Perhaps the author(s) were misled by the name of Cohan (not, alas, Cohen) which is a fine Irish name but sounds very similar to the Jewish one (a fact George commented on as being to his advantage). 2- The frequent insistence that the "white picket fence", the importance of mother, the children, and the "family" was an invention of Jewish immigrants suffering from the horrors of Russian pogroms seems to discount the entire nineteenth century German, French, English and American Romantic tradition (Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa Mae Allcott, to mention a few). I suggest the author(s) read "Little Women". I fear the author(s) have fallen into the contemporary trap of feeling compelled to devise a new and different "hook" on which to hang their material, to the point of obscuring the very real contributions made by the Jews in both the theatrical and motion picture world. Despite a rather plausible view that the HUAAC brought about the fall of these moguls, I suspect the reasons were somewhat more complicated: Economic changes made the old studio system impossibly expensive. Much of the monies now came from Eastern financial institutions. Television had been born and was beginning to supplant Hollywood in a number of critical B-movie areas. International distribution was assuming much more importance (we now supply at least 80% of the entire world's movie fare). Theatre artists (particularly directors and actors) wanted to move on to independent productions, etc., etc. There is no need to insist that these movie moguls created the world in seven days. Much of it was quite adequately created by other people (i.e., My Fair Lady was, after all, drawn directly from the non-immigrant Irishman, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and did not spring full blown from the Jewish immigrant's need to express the plight of the outsider who was forced to learn to speak English). In creating the ultimate American Dream, the author(s) could have had the decency to mention (although they showed a number of film cuts) the contributions of that distinctly non-Jewish immigrant, Frank Capra. The brilliance of these Jewish immigrants consists in the ways in which they comprehended and grasped the evolving "American Dream", articulated by every generation and country of immigrant aspirations, and how they developed the organization and machinery to produce the incredibly various celluloid manifestations of those dreams.