Their dominance became a target for wave after wave of vicious antisemitism, from fire and brimstone evangelicals in the teens and early 20s who demanded the movies’ liberation from the hands of the devil…to Red-baiters in the 40s for whom Judaism was really a variety of communism and the movies their chief form of propaganda… Ducking from these assaults, the Jews became the phantoms of the film history they had created, haunting it, but never really able to inhabit it.
— “An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler
IN THE LAST MONTH, the culture wars raging around antisemitism have come home to roost at Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its new museum on Wilshire Boulevard.
