Less than a month after unveiling a long-awaited exhibit on Hollywood's Jewish founders, the Academy Motion Picture Museum announced it will review the exhibit following criticism that it perpetuates anti-Semitic tropes.
The exhibition, titled “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Creation of a Film Capital,” highlights the key role of Jewish immigrants such as Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn in establishing the film industry. The museum, designed to celebrate Hollywood's rich and complex history, faced fierce criticism when it opened in 2021 for omitting Hollywood's Jewish roots, an omission it spent more than two years working to address with a permanent exhibit.
But shortly after the new exhibit opened, some within the industry's Jewish community criticized it as a biased and overly negative portrait of Jewish Hollywood moguls, one that perpetuates anti-Semitic stereotypes.
On Monday, a group called United Jewish Writers sent an open letter to the museum objecting to its use of words like “predator,” “tyrant,” “oppressive” and “womanizer” to describe Jewish executives at the exhibit, suggesting they were being held to an unfair standard.
“It is the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate,” reads the letter, which had garnered about 350 signatures as of Monday, including actor David Schwimmer, writer Amy Sherman-Palladino and the executive of sports and entertainment Casey Wasserman. “While we recognize the value of confronting Hollywood's problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibition, which blames only Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, anti-Semitic.”
In response to the growing outcry, which included a series of angry letters to academy leaders, the Academy Museum said in a statement Monday that it would take immediate steps to address the criticism.
“We take these concerns seriously and are committed to making changes to the exhibition to address them,” the museum said, adding that the first set of changes would be implemented “immediately” to “tell these important stories without using phrases that may unintentionally reinforce the stereotypes”.
An exhibit at the Hollywoodland exhibit.
(Joshua White / JWPictures / Academy Museum)
The controversy over the exhibit comes just weeks after the academy announced the departure of the museum's director and president, film historian Jacqueline Stewart, who will return to teaching at the University of Chicago. Neither the museum's newly appointed director, Amy Homma, nor the curator of the Hollywoodland exhibition, Dara Jaffe, were immediately available for further comment.
Lawrence Bender, a prolific film producer whose credits include “Pulp Fiction,” “Inglourious Basterds” and “Good Will Hunting,” was among those who signed the open letter, saying he was deeply disturbed by the exhibition's repeated focus on alleged moral failures. of the first Jewish film executives.
In one case, the exhibit notes that Columbia Pictures founder Cohn's office was said to be modeled after Benito Mussolini's, associating the mogul with the Italian fascist dictator. “I felt like, 'Wow, this is what they're choosing,'” Bender said. “It was a short paragraph and they can't help but describe the negative parts of his personal lives.”
“These guys were the creators of our industry, these are incredible movies made over the years, but there is no love and joy in movie-making, nothing about the fact that these guys built this incredible world,” Bender added .
To Bender, the relatively small, dimly lit exhibit location on the museum's top floor “feels like the old days of the shtetl, a Jewish ghetto.” “People in the movie business know how to be creative and the rest of the museum is very well done,” he says. “This is done in such a terrible way. This is not unconscious.”
A video narrated by Ben Mankiewicz introduces the exhibition.
(Joshua White / JWPictures / Academy Museum)
Veteran television writer and producer Barry Schkolnick, whose credits include “LA Law,” “Law and Order” and “The Good Wife,” also signed the letter denouncing the exhibition. Visiting the exhibit recently, Schkolnick says he was dismayed by the accompanying 30-minute documentary, “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” which he says unfairly projects current attitudes around issues of race, gender and other social concerns. about the founders of Hollywood.
“There was an implication that these Jewish founders were responsible for all of Hollywood's ills,” says Schkolnick, who found the tone of the exhibit in stark contrast to other current exhibits celebrating “The Godfather” and the work of director John Waters. “Grafting 2024 onto a piece about the 1930s and 1940s, including using words like 'ableism,' just didn't make sense to me. “It felt like a low blow.”
The exhibition has also received positive reviews, including in Jewish publications. Sharon Rosen Leib, great-granddaughter of former Fox Film production chief Sol M. Wurtzel and a consultant on the exhibition, wrote in the Forward that she “captures the humanity of the founding Jewish magnates with empathy and wide-angle nuance.”
For the academy, the controversy highlights the continuing challenges it has faced in trying to present a single, unified version of Hollywood history that is acceptable to everyone. During the museum's long and often difficult development, the organization wrestled with thorny questions about what stories would be told and how the film industry's own historical problems with racism and sexism would be reflected, an issue increasingly urgent in the wake of # OscarsSoWhite and the #MeToo movement.
In the end, 17 working groups were formed to represent each of the branches of academia (from acting and directing to executives and public relations) in the development of the exhibitions. An Inclusion Advisory Committee was tasked with helping highlight the work of diverse filmmakers and exposing historical omissions.
In recent weeks, amid growing criticism of the Hollywoodland exhibition, one member of that committee, Israeli-American director Alma Har'el, resigned. Har'el declined to comment on her resignation.
The Hollywoodland exhibit was inspired by the work of cultural historian Neal Gabler, whose 1988 book “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” is considered the definitive work on the industry's Jewish founders. Gabler acted as an advisor to the exhibition and spoke and signed books at its opening, but was not immediately available to comment on criticism of the exhibition.
The museum itself has received major backing from some of the most powerful Jewish figures in Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg, whose name adorns a gallery on the first floor, and Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban, who donated $50 million to complete construction.
To address the criticism, the museum said it is “convening an advisory group of experts from leading museums focused on the Jewish community, civil rights, and the history of other marginalized groups to advise us on complex questions about context and any necessary additions to the exhibition narrative… We are deeply committed to telling these important stories in an honest, respectful and impactful way.”
Speaking to the Times on Tuesday after that announcement, Bender said he remains skeptical.
“I'm not holding my breath,” Bender says. “It's not that the exhibition is a small thing. It needs a major overhaul and it needs to be done by someone who truly believes in the love of film and the people who created this business… I don't get the feeling they really care. I feel like they are trying to appease people.”
