Hollywood Hates Jews

“I’ve had someone say to me, ‘Let’s not forget what Hollywood is made up of. Be careful,’” Guy Pearce told a Jewish writer at Vanity Fair in response to a question about his attacks on Israel.

In an industry where talent has been cancelled for the most minor perceived offenses against political correctness, Pearce’s remarks went unnoticed and he was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for playing an antisemite on screen in The Brutalist and in real life.

Contrast that with the backlash against ‘Karla Sofia’ Gascon, starring in Emilia Perez, the Oscar frontrunner, over old Spanish-language tweets speaking out against Black Lives Matter and Islam, which he has already apologized for several times.

Pearce’s friend was wrong. He had nothing to worry about from Hollywood. Jews however have plenty to worry about from Hollywood as the Oscar nominations once again show.

The Brutalist, a fictional exploitation of an equally fictional Holocaust survivor oppressed by American capitalism and racism, has received ten nominations. Brady Corbet, who wrote, directed and produced the movie, is non-Jewish and has promoted an anti-Israel documentary.

Like last year’s nominee, Zone of Interest, the movie exploits the Holocaust to score points against America. Most current Holocaust movies see Jews as vehicles for contemporary agitprop by non-Jewish liberals like Corbet or Jews like Zone’s director Jonathan Glazer or A Royal Pain’s star Jesse Eisenberg who symbolically shed their Jewishness as part of their promotional campaigns.

“We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness,” Glazer had declared at the Oscars last year. Jesse Eisenberg, whose movie’s depiction of the Polish role in the killing of Jews borders on Holocaust denial, told Bill Maher that he had obtained dual citizenship in Poland.

“A lot of American Jews of Polish descent, you know, have this kind of like negative attitude towards Poland that Oh, it’s anti-Semitic,” Eisenberg complained.

The symbolic shedding of Jewishness, the criticism of Jews and the embrace of antisemites has become an almost mandatory ritual in an industry formerly created by Jews, but where it is trendy to despise Jews and career suicide to stand up for them.

“From ‘A Real Pain’ to ‘The Brutalist’ and beyond, Jewish movies were everywhere in 2024. What does it mean?” the JTA asked. What it means is that these movies aren’t Jewish. They are the work of people who hate Jews and Jews who hate themselves.

Two years after life fundamentally changed for Israeli and American Jews, the industry continues to roll out highly fictionalized prestige Holocaust movies and neurotic shlock about Jewish hipster losers.

Only one movie, September 5, the story of the media coverage of the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, dealt with anything remotely relevant to Jews after Oct 7.

And it was limited to one Oscar nomination.

The Academy Awards did not choose to recognize any of the documentaries about Oct 7, but did nominate, No Other Land, an anti-Israel agitprop doc also promoted by Brutalist’s Corbet.

It would be tempting to pretend that this is a recent problem, but it’s an old Hollywood tale.

The Pawnbroker, a 1964 Oscar nominated movie about a Holocaust survivor, featured a grotesque stereotype played by Rod Steiger whose experiences in the Holocaust have made him selfish and miserable, exploiting minorities for money, until he is finally redeemed by unselfishly coming to care for them.

Call it a liberal Christmas Carol parable for Holocaust survivors who needed to get over it. The New York Times compared the movie’s Jewish Holocaust survivor protagonist, to “the somber shadow of the legendary, ageless Wandering Jew… who taunted Jesus on the way to Calvary and was condemned to roam the world a lonely outcast until Jesus should come again.”

The Pawnbroker and Nazi propaganda shared the conviction that Jews were horrible people, where they differed was the idea that liberalism could redeem the Jews from damnation.

Understand that and you also understand Glazer, Eisenberg, Hollywood and the pathologies of Jewish liberalism which came to welcome any taunt and act of contempt from the Left.

Jews created Hollywood and were disproportionately responsible for its golden age. They could bring legends to life, invent gangsters, swoosh heroes across the screen, and even make iconic Christmas movies, but the one thing they could not do was talk about themselves.

After the Holocaust, two movies about antisemitism fought it out at the 20th Academy Awards.

Gentleman’s Agreement made by Darryl Zanuck, who was not Jewish, after being barred from joining the Los Angeles Country Club because members assumed he was Jewish. Gregory Peck serves as Zanuck’s much more handsome stand-in as a non-Jewish man whose life falls apart when people start believing that he is Jewish. The movie was sympathetically directed by Elia Kazan, another non-Jewish Hollywood figure who was also often mistaken for Jewish.

Jewish studio heads, including Sam Goldwyn, had pleaded with Zanuck not to make the movie to avoid causing problems for Jews. Instead it won a bunch of awards and everyone agreed that now that it was done with, Hollywood never needed to talk about Jews or antisemitism again.

Up against it was Crossfire, a much more baffling movie about an antisemitic murder, whose plot only makes sense if you understand that it was originally about gay men in the closet.

You can see why the saving grace of Hollywood was that it didn’t make movies about Jews.

Holocaust movies safely boxed off the Jews as hollow figures, convenient victims on stage to provide commentary about some larger social or political issue, a handful of Zionist movies that quickly came and went in the sixties, and then a parade of neurotic postmodern creeps.

Hollywood’s Jews don’t like being Jewish. And so they don’t like Jews very much. Their idea of a Jewish character is a neurotic, because they’re neurotic, and grotesque because they see Jews as grotesque. The handful of Jewish talent who defy the Hollywood establishment and stand up for Jewish issues, Ben Hecht during the Holocaust, and Debra Messing, Julianna Margulies and Selma Blair after Oct 7, damage their careers while the ‘Guy Pearces’ flourish.

Jews showing up in Hollywood movies is rarely something to celebrate. And the Oscars will invariably dole out some awards to The Brutalist or A Royal Pain whose awardees will use their moment in the spotlight to denounce the Jewish State. The Hollywood Jews who couldn’t bother to be heard after Oct 7, or to even stand up for the handful of their colleagues, Jewish (and non-Jewish like Patricia Heaton), will applaud and help fund the next horrible ‘Jewish’ movie.

Hollywood would rather that Jews not exist. Jews should return the favor.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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