Victims rule8

24 (pt. 1)
JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA

"There is a new age of commercialism in American media, with
its concentration of power and its widening breech between the
public interest and the interests of the very few. In the coming
century, the questions about the integrity of America's information
and media ownership are likely to be as fundamental to society as
the purity of the water we drink or the air we breathe."

-- Thomas Maier, p. 13

"So here I am again in purse and wallet country ... briefcases,
hold-alls, canvas football-bags -- the swag that's forever
associated in my mind with being Jewish. Cheap and ugly objects,
made for others' tastes, never one's own; Jews always
second-guessing the gentiles, making little Hollywoods, little
Broadways, returning gentile ideas to the gentiles, giving a Jew's
idea of what is gentile back to gentiles, wherever they go ... If
that is a Jewish tune to which the Lauren Bacall and Faye
Dunaway look-alikes are dancing in Beverly Hills, then I wish
someone other than Jews had written it."

-- Howard Jacobson, Jewish author, 1995, p. 26, 208

"I wonder if any of our immigrant grandparents could have
imagined that on the eve of the 21st century, Jews would
comprise 11 percent of the United States Senate, dominate the
entertainment industry as never before, while at the same time
boasting the most popular professional wrestler as well as the
most notorious spy in the country?"

-- Jonathan Tobin, Jewish author, 1-4-99, p. 5

"Non-Jewish participants [in a Los Angeles-area survey
sponsored by the Zionist women's organization Hadassah],
most of whom did not grow up with Jews or know them personally,
had vivid resentments toward Jews for their economic success,
seeing them as 'insular,' superior and rich. They repeated the
canards that Jews own the media, run the studios,
own the Wilshire/Fairfax district.
Jews were praised for their work ethic
and strong family solidarity, but were regarded with suspicion,
as being important behind-the-scenes players,
lawyers who took advantage of their
clients and media manipulators who slanted
the press in the O. J. Simpson case."

-- Marlene Adler Marks,
New Jersey Jewish News, 4-23-98, p. 5]

           "It just seems the whole world is Jewish ... The Jewish
Connection can be found in so many people, places ...
         and even animals."

-- M. H. Goldberg, Jewish author, 1976, p. 105]

           "Given their skills and experiences, Jews today have excellent employment opportunities ...
Jews are represented among those men most active in promoting reform
in top-level positions in banking, government, and the media."

-- Michael Paul Sacks, 1998, p. 265, Jewish author
commenting about Jews in Russia

    "The main complaint heard [in Israel] is that for some reason
        Jews are the imaginative leaders in this field [movies] almost
       everywhere except Israel, and guess why. The real 'why,' the truly
stinging insinuation, is that in Israel there are too many Jews
   who have to deal with each other."

-- Jay Gonen, Israeli author, 1975, p. 274

"Only the blind cannot see that whoever controls the cultural

apparatus ... also controls the destiny of the United States and

everything in it."

-- Harold Cruse, Black intellectual, The Crisis of

the Negro Intellectual, (in Kostelanetz, p. 107)

"Two-thirds of Americans," notes Bill McKibben, "tell researchers they get 'most of their information' about the world from television ... [Most] American homes have TVs ... on an average of seven hours a day ... As many as 12 percent of adults (that is, one in eight) feel they are physically addicted to the set, watching an average fifty-six hours a week." [MCKIBBEN, p. 18] "Twenty years ago," noted Neil Postman in 1985, "the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture." [POWERS/ROTHMAN/ROTHMAN, p. 41]

"Most Americans are basically," noted Jewish author Herbert Schiller in 1973,

"though unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice

informational bind. Variety of opinions on foreign and domestic

news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists

in the media. This results essentially from the inherent identity of

interests, material and ideological, of property-holders (in this case

the private owners of the communications media), and from the

monopolistic character of the communications industry in general."

[SCHILLER, H., p. 19]

The ABC, CBS, and NBC television and radio networks were all controlled and developed to power by Jews: David Sarnoff at NBC, William Paley at CBS, and Leonard Goldenson at ABC. As late as 1985, "Leonard Goldenson, ABC's founder, was still very much in charge, and his network ... was still the Number One in America." [WILLIAMS, p 5]

Paley, the second mogul, achieved control of CBS in 1928 and headed it for nearly the next sixty years. Early investors in the company included other Jews of Paley's original Philadelphia home, including Ike Levy and Jerome Louchheim. One of Paley's biographers noted that he "had an insatiable appetite for power [SMITH, S., p. 15] ... CBS shaped and reflected American society to a greater degree than its rivals ... The flickering images on CBS represented the soul and sensibility of Bill Paley." [SMITH, S., p. 16]

     "Officially, [Sarnoff, the third mogul] did not head RCA until thirteen years after its founding," notes Carl Drehr, "actually, as commercial manager, for all practical purposes he ran it almost from the beginning." [DREHR, C. p. 52] By 1936 David Sarnoff was both president of RCA (later CEO) and chairman of the board of NBC (he founded NBC in 1926 as a radio company). [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 162] His son Robert became the CEO of NBC in 1955. In 1956, says a biographer, Sarnoff "brought the issue of nepotism [about the appointment of his son to head NBC] in the open." "When a man stands in the way of his son's progress," Sarnoff told an NBC staff convention, "he is not thinking of his son, he is thinking of himself." [LYONS, p. 312-313] "David Sarnoff," notes Edwin Emery, "retired in 1970 to the honorary chairmanship of the Radio Corporation of America, which he had built. RCA was a two-billion dollar business and the largest communication organization in the world. His son Robert became both President and Board Chairman of RCA and father and son sat on the NBC board [a subsidiary of RCA]." [EMERY, p. 606]

     "Both Paley and Sarnoff," notes Chaim Bermant, "have shown a consistent interest in Jewish affairs. The latter was for many years on the board of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and both he and Paley have been generous supporters of the Weizmann Institute of Science [in Israel]." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 105]

      (The pattern of television ownership in England has been the same. As Bermant observes: "In Britain, until 1955, radio and television were a state monopoly ... In 1955, however, commercial television was launched and in time comprised three networks and several smaller regional companies. The networks, Associated-Rediffusion, Associated Television and Granada were headed by Emil Littler, Lew Grade, and Sidney Bernstein respectively, all of whom had spent a lifetime in show-business ... and all three were Jewish.") [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 105]

Despite corporate buyouts and the labyrinthian nature of business takeovers, restructuring, et al, Jewish management and control over the decades has remained dominant; in 1993, for instance, the Chief Executive Officers for the three major American television networks and the four largest film studios were all Jews. [MACDONALD, p. 129] (In 1998, in a survey, the Anti-Defamation League solicited opinion about the fact that "the presidents of the three national television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, are Jewish." [ADL, NOV 1998] In the film world, noted J. J. Goldberg in 1996, "virtually all the senior executives at the major studios are Jews." [GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 288]

While Jews make up merely 2.5% of the American population, in a 1990 issue of Premiere magazine, the first thirteen individuals identified "as the most powerful people in Hollywood," were Jewish. [WHITFIELD, p. 83] In the same year, as noted by American Film magazine, the chairmen of eight of the top ten movie and television companies were Jewish. [STAUTH, p. 44] In an October 1994 issue of Vanity Fair, ten of eighteen deemed important faces in the changing world of "media megacorporations" were Jews. [HALBERSTAM, p. 12]

     In 1999, the Los Angeles Jewish Times ran an article entitled "Yes, Virginia, Jews Do Control the Media." "Four of the largest five entertainment giants," it announced, "are now run or owned by Jews. Murdoch's News Corp (at number four) is the only gentile holdout -- however Rupert is as pro-Israel as any Jew, probably more so." [LOS ANGELES JEWISH TIMES, p. 14] (And who is the Executive Vice President at the News Corporation? Gary Ginsberg.) [WEINTRAUB, B., 3-4-01] "Time-Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, News Corporation and Universal rule the entertainment world in a way that the old Hollywood studio chiefs only dreamed of," noted the Jewish Week in 1999, "And, after all the deals and buyouts, four of the five are run by Jews. We're back to where we started, bigger than ever." [GOLDBERG, J.J., 9-17-99, 12]

    Since Australian-born Rupert Murdoch is the lone non-Jew in the aforementioned pantheon of elite media moguls, it is appropriate to examine his relationship to the Jewish community. As one of his biographers, Thomas Kiernan, notes:

     "The most important impact of 1962 on Murdoch, though, was his trip to the
     United States to buy television programs ... The chief executive who impressed
     Murdoch more than any was New York's Leonard Goldenson, the head of the
     American Broadcasting Company ... At the time, Goldenson was turning the
     small, feisty ABC television network into a legitimate rival of the twin Goliaths,
     CBS and NBC. His method was to pursue 'down-market' programming, a
     combination of entertainment and news shows designed to appeal to the coarser
     tastes of the American public. ABC became known as the 'schlock network
     during the 1950s ... Goldenson's approach to television in America was similar
     to Murdoch's newspapers in Australia [p. 75-76] ... [Murdoch] and Goldenson
     became fast friends ... In time, Goldenson became Murdoch's newest mentor ...
    Goldenson's Jewishness also had a significant impact on Murdoch ... As for
     the stereotype of Jews being financially aggressive, brash, devious, cutthroat,
     pushy, and concerned only with making money -- well, he certainly possessed
     many of those traits too ...[p. 76-77] ... Goldenson, like many of his
     ambitious New York counterparts, made no effort to disguise his Jewishness.
     If anything, they wore it on their sleeves, mostly out of their pride in Israel.
     In a place like New York, it was almost fashionable to be a Jew in the 1950s,
     especially if one's ambitions were focused on achieving a niche in the city's
     establishment ... [p. 77] It was easy for him to identify with these New York
     Jewish counterparts. When the time came for him to make his permanent
     move into the United States fifteen years later, it was to them that he would
     turn largely for support. And they would respond eagerly, but not just because
     Murdoch represented a source of busness. They felt they could 'trust' him
     on Israel. Leonard Goldenson had not let a meeting with Murdoch go by
     during his trips to New York without giving him a dissertation about Israel
     and its imporance in the global scheme of things." [KIERNAN, T., 1986, p. 78]

"What binds [the Hollywood elite] is a sense of interlocking ventures and relationships," said a Jewish observer, William Isaacson, Time Inc.'s media editor, in 1994, "The old establishment was a club. The New Establishment is a network." [CASH, p. 15] In a 1980s study, 59% of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty most economically successful movies produced between 1965 and 1982 were also found to be Jewish. [LIPSET, p. 4] (See Martin Greenberg's The Jewish Lists for a sampling of such people). As early as 1936, one study found that "of 85 names engaged in [movie] production, 53 are Jews. And the Jewish advantage holds in prestige as well as numbers." [GABLER, p. 2]

In 1980, film scholar Patricia Erens noted that "the list [of Jewish screenwriters in Hollywood] is long. A recent survey indicated that seventy to eighty per cent of the Screen Writers Guild was composed of Jews, a trend dating back to the 1930s." [ERENS, P., 1980, p. 116] (Prominent among them were Julius and Phil Epstein, Carl Foreman, William Goldman, Ben Hecht, Garson Kanin, Howard Koch, Abraham Polansky, Herman Mankiewicz, Morris Riskin and Budd Schulberg). "Composing [music for movies]," adds Erens, "has been another area of high concentration for Jewish artists." In this genre, Erens notes Burt Bacharach, Irving Berlin, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrman, Marvin Hamlisch, Jerome Kern, Alfred Newman, Andre Previn, Miklos Rozsa, and Max Steiner. [ERENS, P., 1980, p. 116]

(Great Britain? "Writing a musical is the most intimate thing you can do without taking your clothes off," noted England's Jewish Chronicle in 2002, "So says Britain's most prolific [and Jewish] lyricist, Don Black. He should know. Currently the favored lyric partner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Black, who grew up in Hackney and whose uncle was a rabbi, has worked with some of the greatest names in popular music -- people like Elmer Bernstein, Quincy Jones, John Barry, Jule Styne, Maurice Jarre. The list is almost endless, and this week sees Black's 18th musical, 'Romeo and Juliet,' open in London's West End.") [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 11-1-02, p. 44]

"Hollywood," notes film critic Lester Friedman, "was a town dominated by Jews from its earliest days down to the present time." [FRIEDMAN, L., 1982, p. vii] As early as 1925, Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel "was the leading movie theatre impresario in America." [GABLER, N., 1988, p. PHOTO SECTION CAPTION] He was also known for his movie theatre "palaces." Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the iconic site where Hollywood stars dipped their hands and feet into fresh cement, was owned by Sid Grauman, also Jewish.

Early Jewish film directors are many, including Billy Wilder, Eric Von Stroheim, Josef Von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, William Wyler, Hal Wallis, William Wanger, Robert Wise, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Rossen, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, and Cecil B. DeMille (who had a Jewish mother). In later years came Peter Bogdanovich (half-Jewish), William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, and many others. More recent Jewish academy award-winning directors include Sydney Pollack, Stephen Spielberg and Barry Levinson. Jewish influence in movie-making also has a strong international complexion: Polish-born Roman Polanski (Chinatown; and Czech-born Milos Forman (Amadeus) are among the many prominent movie directors who are also Jewish. Jews were also prominent, even dominant, in the pre-World War II years in the German film world (from which many Jewish filmmakers -- the likes of Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger -- moved to America). In Russia, "Mikhail Romm," notes Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff, "[was] considered the greatest Soviet filmmaker since his fellow-Jew, [Sergei] Eisenstein." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 86]

As Louis Rapoport notes:

"[Joseph Stalin] was not pleased by the fact that there was a highly

disproportionate number of Jews in the Soviet film industry, as in

the other arts: for example, directors Sergei Eisenstein, Mikhail Romm,

Mark Donsky, Leonid Lukov, and Yuli Reissman; actors and actresses

Faina Raneskaya, Mark Berness, Daniel Segal, Solomon Mikhoels, and

Benjamin Zuskin; scriptwriters Vasily Grossman (the novelist-journalist)

and Yevgency Gabrilovich; and cinematographer Boris Volchok."

[RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 82]

"The motion picture industry," notes Charles Silberman, "was largely a Jewish invention." [SILBERMAN, p. 147] "All the large Hollywood companies, with the exception of United Artists (a distribution company established by Hollywood actors who feared the big producers would restrict their artistic freedom) were founded and controlled by Jews," notes the Encyclopedia Judaica, [United Artists, however, was controlled by Jews later] ... An even more important influence in the film industry ... were the independent producers, among whom Jews were in the majority." [ENCY JUD, p. 445, 449]

     In the earliest years of the movie and entertainment industry, Jewish filmmakers often popularized negative images of the Jewish community. "Some of the worst offenders," says Nathan Belth, "were themselves Jews." [BELTH, p. 46] The "so-called 'Jew movies' were produced at the rate of one every two week." [BELTH, p. 50] These centered on highly unflattering Jewish characters -- smugglers, robbers, lustful "Yiddish sports," and miserly swindlers. In 1916, the Anti-Defamation League convinced Carl Laemmle (the Jewish head of Universal film studios) to avoid making any movie that "held Jews up to ridicule or contempt ... By 1920 the policy enunciated by Laemmle became the general practice among movie makers." [BELTH, p. 50] (Even Jewish comedian Jack Benny's "tightwad" persona was a "Jewish character.") [FAINBOLD, N., 6-5-98]

     "Despite the powerful Jewish role in [early] motion pictures," says Milton Plesur,

     "that industry also had its anti-Semitic features. Whenever a producer wished to
     depict a betrayer of public trust, a hard-boiled, usurious money lender, a
     crooked gambler, a grafter, a depraved firebug, a white slaver, or other
     villains of one kind or another, the charcter was often represented as a Jew ...
     When one of the many theatres owned by Jews boycotted a movie with the
     usual stereotypes, Rebecca's Wedding Day (Chicago, 1916), Hollywood
     got the message and agreed to cease producing anti-Semitic films."
     [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 34]

Jews have long been active in establishing themselves and networking throughout the American theatrical and entertainment worlds. "The Broadway musical," says Charles Silberman, "generally considered the most characteristically American theatrical form, has been largely an American-Jewish creation ... Composers and lyricists who have given the Broadway musical its distinctive shape have almost all been Jews -- people such as Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, Ira Gershwin, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, Rogers and Hammerstein, and more recently Frederick Loewe, Marvin Hamlisch, and Stephen Sondheim. [SILBERMAN, p. 147] The team of Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe produced Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Paint Your Wagon, Gigi, and other major musical plays. "The wellspring of the American musical," says Gene Lees, "is to be found in the opera-bouffee of Jacques Offenbach, a German Jew by birth though he lived and worked in Paris and his shows were in French." [LEES, G., 1990, p. 12] "With the exception of Cole Porter," notes the London Guardian, "almost every writer of musicals in the pre-rock [music] era was Jewish, even if their names sometimes suggested otherwise." [ARNOT, C., 10-4-2000, p. 6]

      "At the turn of the century," Jewish performers Lewis Fields and Joe Weber "were the most beloved and ambitious of comedy teams." [FIELDS/FIELDS, p. xiii] Vaudeville star Sophie Tucker "raised several million dollars for Jewish causes." [ANTLER, J., 199,7, p. 140(d)] Unknown to most Americans, an estimated 80% of America's professional comedians in recent history were/are Jewish, [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 170; SLAVIN, p. 18] from Milton Berle (Berlinger), Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky), Woody Allen (Alan Konigsberg), Eddie Cantor (Isidore Iskowitz), Fanny Brice (Fania Borach), Pee Wee Herman (Paul Rubenfeld), Soupy Sales (Milton Hines), Joey Bishop (Joseph Abraham Gottleib), Buddy Hackett (Leonard Hacker), Alan King (Irwin Kniberg), Gene Wilder (Eugene Silverstein), Gilda Radner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers (Molinsky), Jerry Lewis (Joseph Levitch), Mel Brooks, Pinky Lee, Billy Crystal, Totie Fields, Red Buttons (Aaron Chwatt), Allen Sherman, Henny Youngman, Shecky Green, Zero Mostel, David Steinberg, Shelly Berman, Jack Carter, Mort Sahl, Myron Cohen, and Rodney Dangerfield (Jack Cohen) to the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges (Moe and Curly Howard/Hurwitz, and Larry Fineman). "Nearly all the American comedians and comediennes whose names have lingered," says Chaim Bermant, "from Fanny Brice to the Marx Brothers, and from Jack Benny to Lenny Bruce, have been Jews. If Hollywood was a Jewish industry, no part of it was so exclusively Jewish as laughter." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 101]

    One of the best known comedy clubs in metropolitan Los Angeles is "Budd Friedman's Improvisation in Hollywood." [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 286]

     Even in Australia, there was the Jewish comic Harry Van Der Sluice (1892-1954): "Using the stage name Roy Rene, he became Australia's most celebrated comedian, portraying the character known as 'Mo.' With his 'Jewish' nose, humour, gesture and stage make-up -- a black ... beard and moustache -- Roy Rene resembled the personification of an anti-semitic caricaturist's dream." [RUBINSTEIN, H., 1988, p. 185]

     "When I started doing stand-up comedy in New York in 1978," says Mark Schiff,

      "we created our own little shtetl. All I saw every night, either walking the streets
      or in a comedy club, was mostly other Jewish comedians. About 80 percent
      of the comics I worked with were Jewish. I personally knew a therapist that
      was treating 10 different Jewish comics at the same time." [SCHIFF, M.,
     11-16-01]

      Lenny (Leonard Schneider) Bruce's humor, says Barry Rubin, portrays "almost everyone [as] really Jewish, meaning different, oppressed, alienated. Gentiles were hypocrites, secret anti-Semites." [RUBIN, p. 110] John Stewart (Leibowitz) "is Generation X's Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce -- a comedian who unapologetically filters his political satire through a Jewish sensibility ... he sometimes refers to Christians as 'you people' ..." [FORWARD, 1-5-01]

      Comedian Jackie Mason is even an ordained rabbi. He was an early supporter of political racist Meir Kahane. "Democratic principles shouldn't apply to Israel like they do to America," he told a Jewish journalist. [FRIEDMAN, R., 1990, p. 222] Early in her media career, talk-show host Sally Jessy Raphael interviewed Mason on a live radio broadcast:

"I was just beginning to feel that the interview was going pretty well

when all of a sudden he reached under my sweater, unhooked my

bra, and cupped my breasts in his hands. I was repelled. I was shocked.

I was scared. I was dumbfounded. But there was absolutely nothing I

could do about it but try to get the interview over as fast as I could. I

was on live radio, after all." [RAPHAEL, S., 1990, p. 21]

George Burns recalls the political activism of fellow Jewish comedians Georgie Jessel, Eddie Cantor and Jack Benny:

"George had just come back after raising something like $25,000,000

in bonds for the new nation of Israel. 'That's a lot of money, Georgie,'

I said, 'How'd you raise so much?

'It wasn't that difficult, Natty," he explained, "I just left no Cohen

unturned ... [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 178] One night, I remember, [Jack

Benny] had dinner at Cantor's house and Eddie started telling him about

Israeli Bonds. Jack made out a check right there for $25,000." [BURNS,

During the 1950s and 1960s, notes Irv Saposnik,

"Sid Caesar, Alan King, Morey Amsterdam, Jack Carter, Buddy

Hackett, Sam Levenson, Jackie Mason, Jan Murray, and Joey Bishop

(among others) became household fixtures. Suddenly, Jewish

comedians were everywhere: Milton Berle on the Texaco Star

Theatre, Eddie Cantor on the Colgate Comedy Hour, Sid Caesar

and company on Your Show of Shows, and a whole comic avalanche

on the Ed Sullivan Show ... Psychoanalysis and stand-up comedy

offer a distinct way of looking at the world. Both present the abnormal

as normal, the neurotic as necessary, the outsider as the true insider.

No wonder Jews invented both." [SAPOSNIK, 1998]

Joan Rivers explains the psychology of what she believes to be the successful comic who "makes it to the top":

"The conventional diagnosis of comics holds that they are

hypersensitive, angry, paranoid people who feel somehow cheated

of life's goodies and are laughing to keep from crying. I agree, but

I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for

revenge. We can deflate and punish the pomposity and the rejection

which hurt us. Comedy is power. We can be in control... People

want to be around somebody who entertains them -- but

simultaneously they fear us. The only weapon more formidable

than humor is a gun ... [RIVERS, p. 24] ... If you have reached

the top in comedy, you are, in your own way, a killer -- but every

killer is bandaged. And the anger is never out of you." [RIVERS,

     p. 150]

     Mel Brooks is more explicit about this. As one news report noted:

        "There's a very serious reason Mel Brooks makes so many jokes about being
     Jewish. The writer-director of such classic films as 'Blazing Saddles' and
     'History of the World: Part I' says his humor stems from a deep-seated
     anger about anti-Semitism.
        'Yes, I am a Jew. I AM a Jew,' he says on '60 Minutes,' which airs at
     7 p.m. EDT Sunday on CBS. 'What about it? What's so wrong? What's
     the matter with being a Jew? I think there's a lot of that way deep down
     beneath all the quick Jewish jokes that I do.'" [ASSOCIATED PRESS,
      4-12-01; updated 4-16-01]

     "Right after Christmas 1983," say Jewish satirist and publisher Paul Krassner, "I was booked as the opening act for [comic] Professor Irwin Corey, the seventy-two-year-old 'world's foremost authority' in a four-day run at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley. Backstage, Corey told me how he used to read Nazi hate literature to get him in the mood to perform." [KRASSNER, P., 1983, p. 279]

     Krassner relates also the following tale:

"At the Five Spot, a jazz club on the Lower East Side, I was wondering aloud [in his stand-up comedy routine] how the Virgin Mary felt when her period was late, and a somewhat tipsy man came out of the audience toward the stage. 'Hey, listen,' he said. 'I happen to be a Catholic, and I don't appreciate your talking that way about the Holy Mother.' He looked like he wanted to hit me. I stood holding the microphone stand between us, ready to protect myself with it. 'I'm sorry if I offended you,' I said, 'but don't you think you should consult your priest before you slug me?' The audience laughed, the guy realized where he was and went back to his seat. So this was comedy." [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 34]

Jewish comic Bobby Slayton, self-described as the "Pit bull of Comedy," noted a Phoenix newspaper in 1998, "despises conservative white Christians, and doesn't fear their warnings of hell 'because the Jews'll cater, the blacks'll entertain, the homos'll decorate, and it'll be one big fuckin' party." [MOORHEAD, M.V., 3-19-98] Another Jewish comedian, Robert Schimmel, was noted in 2000 as "America's newest comedy star, fresh off his first HBO special and his third major-label release." [SELVIN, J., 3-10-2000] "Schimmel," declared one reviewer, "is one of those men who leaves audiences breathless with his potty-mouth talk about fucking his daughter's boyfriend and jacking off to porn." Schimmel once talked about the death of his 11-year old son to cancer on the Howard Stern radio show, joking that "well, the Make-a-Wish Foundation came to us. Derek was really sick, and they wanted to make his wish come true. So I told them his wish was to watch Dolly Parton blow me." [SCHOENKOPF, R., 2-19-99, p. 29]

Jerry Sadowitz, a Jewish comedian from Great Britain, was "beaten up by members of his audience on stage in Canada for being so rude about the Francophone population." Sadowitz is also a British TV star. As the Times [of London] reported:

"'It's very childish and very offensive,' explained Sadowitz, when

asked to describe his new X-rated late-night sketch show, Bib and

and Bob." [EDWARDS-JONES, I., 4-25-98]

Another Jewish British comedian, Ian Stone, has a stand-up routine guaranteed to offend fellow Jews, entitled "A Little Piece of Kike." "I knew that using the word [kike] would get peoples' noses up," he says, "because they're Jewish noses, what noses!"
[GIBB, E., 8-9-2000, p. 3]

     As Rabbi Daniel Lapin complains, "Some of the most notoriously foul-mouthed and obscene-minded entertainers are Jewish and earn no reproof for their public aggrandizement of filth." [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 293] "From the first," adds Jewish author Ellen Schiff, "Jewish comedians and comediennes have provoked laughter by breaking the rules. They are loud and vulgar; they shamelessly call attention to their physicality ... [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 95] ... The caricatured comic Jew who pokes fun at himself (and everything else) as one ethnic among others is essentially an American Jewish creation. Responding both to opportunity (theatres by the turn of the present century were largely controlled by Jews) and to cultural conditioning ... Jewish performers scored conspicuous success in vaudeville and burlesque as well as in drama." [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 84] As the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California noted about Jewish author Arthur Asa Berger (author of "The Genius of the Jewish Joke") and the Jewish impact on American humor:

      "While assimilation is a big concern in the Jewish community, Berger contends
     that conversely, Jewish culture has 'Yiddishized American humor.' 'When Jews
     disappear,' he joked, 'the Jewish humor will be written by non-Jews because
     they've been Yiddishized and they'll be able to carry it on." [FAINGOLD, N.,
     6-5-98]

Long time Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, noted biographer Laurence Leamer, "had something else going for him. He was a WASP in a profession full of Jewish comedians. The television executives knew that much of their audience was in Topeka and Peoria and other stations in the heartland, where the borscht belt was considered an item of apparel." [LEAMER, L., 1989, p. 135] Even the people writing the jokes for comedians have usually been Jewish. "A lot of great comedy writers started in radio," noted comedian George Burns. "For some reason, a lot of them were Jewish." [BURNS, G., 1989, p. 138] (Among Burns' own "top writers" was fellow Jew Sid Dorfman). [RANDALL, T., 1989, p. 123]

"The storefront theatres of the late teens were transformed into the movie palaces of the twenties by Jewish exhibitors," says Neal Gabler about the early twentieth century, "And when the sound movies commandeered the industry, Hollywood was invaded by a battalion of Jewish writers, mostly from the East. The most powerful talent agencies were run by Jews." "Jews," notes Joel Kotkin, "also accounted for a large portion of the agents and, often working under Anglicized names, many of the actors as well." [KOTKIN, p. 60] The most pre-eminent "talent agency," the William Morris Agency was founded by Zelman Moses -- who renamed himself William Morris. Its major modern day rival, Creative Artists Agency, was founded in 1975 by another Jewish entrepreneur, Michael Ovitz, and other defectors from the parent firm. Yet another who got his start at William Morris was David Geffen, who has risen to become one of the biggest record company, and mass media, executives in Hollywood. At powerful William Morris, "it was no accident," says Frank Rose, "that a mostly Jewish agency handling mostly Jewish performers in a business that smacked of the underworld should employ an Episcopalian ... to sell its acts to Madison Avenue." [ROSE, p. 70] (This strategy closely parallels that of Sigmund Freud's early psychoanalytic movement when it was almost all Jewish. Freud appealed to his Jewish followers, explaining the reason he selected non-Jew Karl Jung to head the International Psychoanalytic Association: "Most of you are Jews, and therefore you are incompetent to win friends for the new teaching ... It is absolutely essential that I should form ties in the world of general science." [GROLLMAN, E., 1965, p. 101] This strategy of hiding the Jewish hand has also been true in the Jewish-dominated world of socialism and communism. As Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robet Lichter note: "The same pattern characterized the Socialist Party of America. Until 1918 SPA drew its greatest relative strength from non-Jewish areas of the country. Nonetheless, Jews already dominated the party's organization, aside from the very top leadership (i.e., Eugene Debs and his immediate followers). By 1920 Jews constituted the main prop of both the party leadership and cadres, a position they maintained through the 1960s. They tended to avoid the very top leadership positions, however, lest attempts to develop a broader base be weakened ... The American Communist party would soon follow the same pattern ... Indeed, when instructed to change their names for party purposes, most American Jewish communists chose non-Jewish pseudonyms." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 99, 100] )

Indeed, a Jewish criminal underworld, as well as (to a lesser degree) the Italian mafia, has long held influence in Hollywood [see, for example, Dan Moldea's Dark Victory, focusing on MCA, about the subject] and its Nevada playground, Las Vegas. (Eventual TV star Milton Berle got fellow Jewish comic Henny Youngman a gig in New York early in their careers, by virtue of the fact that "I knew a lot of the mobsters around time, and they had just opened a new place on the first floor of a brownstone [Club Abbey].") [BERLE, M., 1974, p. 130] In a battle for Columbia Pictures between brothers Harry and Jack Cohn in the late 1930s, for instance, Harry received economic help from Jewish "crime boss" Abner Zwillman. [MOLDEA, p. 88] Mobster Joseph Stacher was also a "silent partner" in the firm. [MCDOUGAL, p. 420] Joseph Schenck, also Jewish, the head of 20th Century Fox, was "convicted of perjury during government investigations into bribes he and other studio bosses had paid to ... union racketeers connected with the mafia." [WOLFE, D., p. 197] "Behind the case was union business," says Mary Ellin Barrett (Schenck's "god daughter"), " the paying off of racketeers to grease the wheels of Hollywood productions, something all the big studios, including 20th-Century Fox, were suspected of doing. 'Joe took the rap for a lot of guys,' my father [Irving Berlin] would say later, and try to explain how it was that Uncle Joe, though engaged in questionable dealings, had been a form of Hollywood hero; that the other studio chiefs, also dealing in illegal payoffs, had families; Joe, the only one without children, had volunteered to stand for the rest." [BARRETT, M. 1994, p. 196]

William Fox, of 20th Century Fox, spent five months in prison for tax evasion in 1943. [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 419] And when Jewish "labor lawyer Sidney Korshak ... arrived in Hollywood [in the 1940s]," says Dan Moldea, "a new, more ambitious and sophisticated era of the Mafia's penetration of the film industry had begun." [MOLDEA, p. 86] Korshak had connections and friends throughout the Hollywood world. "To scores of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials," wrote Seymour Hersh, "Korshak is the most important link between organized crime and legitimate business." [MOLDEA, p. 278] In 1978 a California Attorney General report listed Korshak as one of the "Mob figures" in the state. [MCDOUGAL, p. 420]

Among those many in Hollywood who worked with Korshak was Charles Bluhdorn, who had gained control of Gulf +Western (of which Paramount studios became a subsidiary) in 1966. "Bluhdorn seemed to have few qualms about turning to gray money," says Peter Biskind, "He was under investigated by the SEC through the '70s, and he was close to Korshak, the real Godfather of Hollywood ... [BISKIND, p. 144] ... Everyone who worked for him was certain [Bluhdorn] was Jewish, but he took great pains to conceal it. Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak told [producer Robert] Evans that his sister went to synagogue with Bluhdorn in Chicago, but the Gulf + Western chief always professed ignorance of Jewish holidays." [BISKIND, p. 143] Film director Don Simpson called Bluhdorn a "mean, despicable, unethical, evil man ... He had no problem breaking the law. He was a criminal." [BISKIND, p. 144]

(Bluhdorn's Gulf + Western corporation was a many-tentacled monster. "There is hardly a major issue in the news that does not affect Gulf + Western," noted investigative journalist Ben Bagdikian in 1983, "Almost every American buys the company's goods." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 31] The company controlled over 100 other firms, including TV production center Desilu Productions, clothing lines Kayser-Roth, Catalina, Cole of California, Jonathan Logan, Oscar de la Renta; nuclear power and mining interests; racetracks, professional sports teams, insurance companies, farm supplies, and missile parts. "It once owned 50 percent of UPITN, which provided television news for networks in eighty countries ... and it owns 8 percent of the arable land of the Dominican Republic." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 30-31])

Eventually Paramount's (Jewish) head of production, Robert Evans, decided to do a film version of the popular book about the Italian mafia, The Godfather. But when he and the number two man at Paramount, Peter Bart (also Jewish), "screened [old] mob movies, [they] realized they had all been written and directed by Jews. Evans concluded he needed an Italian if he was going to 'smell the spaghetti.'" [BISKIND, p. 142] Enter Francis Ford Coppola.

Noting the importance of being Jewish in Hollywood, in 1994 William Cash noted (in a British journal, The Spectator) that:

"In Hollywood, the most obvious Jewish Club are in the sideshows,

the lawyers, talent agencies, and management and production offices.

Birgit Cunningham ... told me that when she worked as a personal

assistant to Vic Sutton, the Jewish head of the fast track LA

commercial talent agency, Sutten, Barth and Vennari, her boss

would often -- if signing a deal -- bluntly ask if they were Jewish.

'I was surprised,' she said, 'I mean, in England, you'd never hear

someone ask, 'Are you Anglican?'" [CASH, p. 15]

Throughout the history of Hollywood, note David Desser and Lester Friedman, "the Jewish film producers, known not entirely affectionately as movie moguls, employed a veritable army of talent both in front of and behind the camera, many of whom were Jewish. The number of Jewish writers and actors, in particular, is amazing, as are the number of [Jewish] émigré directors who started in the 1920s." [DESSER, p. 27]

Among Hollywood's many public promotions is Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis. [See earlier chapter on its use in Jewish theories of anti-Semitism] The New York Times notes that "since the 1920s Hollywood has been fascinated -- off and on screen -- by psychiatry ... Despite the erratic matter in which it was practiced, psychoanalysis struck a chord with the Hollywood elite. Writers were particularly enthralled by the new science." [FARBER, p. 22] "As they evangelized psychoanalysis," note Stephen Farber and Marc Green, "the Hollywood elite led the way in making the Freudian science -- with all its contemporary offshoots -- an integral part of American life." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 7] "Suddenly," says Dr. Louis Jolyon West, "psychoanalysis was no longer seen as a quaint and slightly perverted Jewish conspiracy to subvert the world's morals. After World War II, psychiatry became respectable." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 70]

How entwined this secular Jewish world view of guilt, sexuality, and neurosis has been in the heart of Hollywood may be measured in the flurry of 1990s books about the subject, including titles like Farber and Green's Hollywood on the Couch; Lebeau's Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis and Cinema; Bergstrom’s Endless Nights: Cinema and Psychoanalysis; and Kaplan's Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Among the most obvious of the self-conscious psychoanalysis promoters is director/actor Woody Allen, whose stereotypical on-screen neurotic Jewish persona centers on psychotherapists to explain the world to him. In real life, notes Allen's former lover, Mia Farrow, "that Woody had been in psychoanalysis two or three times a week for about thirty years was astonishing to me." [FARROW, p. 223-224]

Among the prominent Jewish psychoanalysts who have set up shop in Tinseltown over the years included Otto Fenichel and Ernst Simmel (see earlier chapter about their thoughts on anti-Semitism), Karl Menninger, Margaret Hohnehberg, Lawrence Kubie, Philip Solomon, Joshua Hoffs, Leo Rangell, Rudolph Loewenstein, Mildred Newman, Bernard Berkowitz, and David Rubenfine. May Rom (originally: Minyetta Belyoshi Ichi Minya M'Aike) set up her practice in Hollywood in 1946.

Jewish therapist Frederick Hacker set up a clinic in Beverly Hills and was "the first analyst to become a millionaire" in Hollywood. [FARBER/GREEN, p. 118] Analyst Milton Wexler was struggling for years to hustle one of his own screenplays; he finally found a taker in one of his own patients, director Blake Edwards. [FARBER/GREEN, p. 215] Another Jewish therapist, Gregory Zilboorg, exploited one vulnerable patient so much that he "was making himself the manager of his patient's business." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 63] When O.J. Simpson was jailed after accusations that he murdered his wife, therapist Saul Faerstein outraged Simpson's lawyers with a bill for $25,000 for his first month of part-time work with the notorious patient. [SCHILLER/WILLWERTH, p. 165] Jewish director/screenwriter Norah Ephron even married her psychiatrist. [ABRAMOWITZ, R., 2000, p. 63] (She was also once the wife of famous Washington investigative journalist Carl Bernstein). [GROSSVOGEL, D., 2000, p. 184] Actress Esther Williams (and Cary Grant) first took LSD in 1959 as experiments at the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills, headed by Mortimer Hartman and Arthur Chandler. [WILLIAMS, E., 1999, p. 12]

Another therapist, Eugene Landy, raised eyebrows by claiming 25 percent of royalties on some of his patient's songs: Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. [FARBER/GREEN, p. 216] Landy's therapy fee was $5 a minute ($300 an hour). [WILSON, p. 276] Between 1983 and 1986 he was paid $35,000 a month ($420,000 a year). Landy also became a half partner with Wilson in a "creative partnership" to share profits in "recordings, films, soundtracks, or books." In addition, he was also paid $150,000 a year from 1987-1991 from a special Beach Boys fund. In sum, he made nearly $3 million as Wilson's psychoanalyst. [HILBURN, p. 63]

Wilson, burned out on drugs in the 1980s, had ceded complete control of his life to his therapist. Landy's accountant's son, Scott Steinberg, even moved in with Wilson to oversee his personal world. Therapist Landy became Wilson's "executive producer, co-producer, business manager, co-songwriter, and business adviser." [WILSON, p. 351] Pushed by fellow Beach Boys and Wilson's wife, the Board of Medical Quality Assurance, a California medical ethics organization, eventually charged Landy with unethical conduct. Landy surrendered his license to practice therapy for two years. [WILSON, p. 352] Other Jewish therapists, at various times, for the famous Beach Boy included Harold Bloomfield, Solon Samuels, and Lee Baumel.

(The economic exploitation of vulnerable patients by their psychoanalysts is apparently an ethical norm of the psychoanalytic community. At a meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Jewish psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaoeff Masson notes his initial introduction to the "political realities of psychoanalysis. I ought not to have been shocked, but I was. As I've indicated earlier, I knew of the practice of soliciting money from patients, but this was the first time I was directly involved. About twenty analysts, most of them holding some official position or other, had gathered together to discuss the funding of the new chair of psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A million-dollar endowment was needed. How to get it? The solution, said one prominent analyst from Chicago, was easy, and had been used several times. 'I would ask each of you to compose a list of your wealthiest patients, with their names, addresses and phone numbers. We will then circulate this list within this group. The next stage is for some of us to contact these people, without, of course, telling them how we have their names, and asking them if they wish to donate money for the chair.' This was, by any standard I knew, unethical behavior, but nobody in the room voiced any objection." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 187-188])

Such a profiteer of the therapist-patient bond was George Pollock (president of both the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and the American Psychiatric Association), who was eventually sued by the son of one of his deceased patients (Anne Lederer) who claimed that the "doctor" brainwashed his mother into leaving him her fortune. Jewish therapists Martin Wasserman and Melvin Heller also entered lucrative careers as "media consultants." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 242] Another, analyst Carol Liebeman, started out as a cabaret singer. She remained a member of the Writers' Guild of America and ran ads in its house organ, noting her psychological services to improve screenplays. Therapist Evelyn Silvers even started out as a fashion model, and was a pretty backdrop for TV's "The $64,000 Question." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 290] New York therapist Louise Kaplan's book, entitled Female Perversions, was translated into a movie in 1997. Directed and co-screen written by Susan Streitfeld, the film features "a sexy, high-powered attorney who sleeps with both men and women." [SKALR, R., 1997, p. 9]

Dr. Martin Grotjahn counted Warren Beatty, Vivian Leigh, Danny Kaye, David Geffen, and many others as patients. Phil Cohen had Sterling Hayden, Lloyd Bridges, John Garfield, among others. Judy Garland's Jewish psychoanalysts included Ernst Simmel ("five days a week on her way to work") and Herbert Kupper. She first went to one at the encouragement of her lover, Joseph Mankiewicz, also Jewish. [SHIPMAN, 1993, p. 142] Another therapist, Frederick Hacker, used "to accompany Garland to [her movie] rushes, where she judged her work." [SHIPMAN, 1993, p. 201]

Marilyn Monroe is another who fell under the dominance of a string of Jewish analysts, and a Jewish world, including, most famously, Ralph Greenson (born: Romeo Greenschpoon) who was her therapist when she (allegedly) committed suicide. "Like many of his colleagues at the time," notes a Good Housekeeping review of a book by Donald Spoto about Marilyn,

"Greenson relied heavily on drug therapy for his patients, routinely

prescribing barbiturates and tranquilizers or having patients' other

doctors do so. He referred Marilyn to internist Hyman Engelberg

[also Jewish], who prescribed many of the medications Greenson

ordered for her. Greenson would also regularly meet with Marilyn

at his home and even asked his daughter to befriend her, disastrously

unprofessional tactics that increased Marilyn's dependency on him ...

Her friends noticed that the more Marilyn saw Greenson, the more

miserable she became ... Greenson encouraged Marilyn's deep

dependency on him (he was seeing her twice daily)."
[GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, 1993, p. 212, 214]

The incestuous nature of Hollywood life may be noted in Greenson's case: his sister Elizabeth "was married to Milton 'Mickey' Rudin, an entertainment attorney who was one of the town's major power brokers." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 93] Rudin was Jewish and also Monroe's lawyer. He was also an attorney and publicist for Frank Sinatra, who, early in his career, was also a patient of Ralph Greenson. [KELLEY, K., p. 208, 305]

Marilyn Monroe's publicist, Arthur Jacobs, was also Jewish. So were her agents at MCA, Jay Kanter and Mort Viner. Many of the directors of her films were also Jews (for example, Billy Wilder of Some Like It Hot and George Cukor of Let's Make Love). Natasha Lytess, her personal manager, and a woman she lived with at one time in Hollywood, was the subject of talk about Monroe's rumored lesbianism. Lytess was also Jewish, from Austria. [LEAMING, p. 31] In the quest for Monroe's career, says Barbara Leaming, "Marilyn's relationship with Nathasa was ... mutually exploitive." [LEAMING, p. 31] Milton Greene, also Jewish, a fashion photographer "with whom she'd reportedly had a fling during the late forties," was another early personal manager. [MCDOUGAL, p. 216] Charles Feldman was also once her agent.

Monroe, early in life, had resolved to sleep with anyone who could help her attain fame and fortune in Hollywood. Close friend Ted Jordan notes that she had "sex with anybody she thought might be able to advance her career." [JORDAN, p. 121] "It is clear," notes Anthony Summers in his biography of her,

"that Marilyn made judicious use of her favors. A key beneficiary,

reportedly, was the man who got Marilyn that vital first contract at

Fox -- Ben Lyon. According to writer Sheila Graham, Lyon had

been sleeping with Marilyn and promising to further her career...

Lyon called the casting director for Sol Wurtzel, a B-movie producer

of the time [and Monroe was awarded a small part in the 1947 film

Dangerous Years]." [SUMMERS, A., 1985, p. 35]

Garment millionaire Henry Rosenfeld was another Jewish sex partner on the road to fame. "She would join Rosenfeld at his home in Atlantic City for trips in his speedboat and for quiet evenings of talk and laughter." [SUMMERS, A., p. 45] Jewish mobster, and Hollywood powerbroker, Bugsy Siegel also had sex with Marilyn. [JORDAN, p. 84, 87] Ted Jordan (born Edward Friedman) even wrote a book about his early sexual experiences with Monroe -- they began on his fourth date with her when she was 17. Then known by her real name, Norma Jean, Monroe was soon sleeping with Friedman's uncle, Ted Lewis (original name also Friedman), who, "with his clarinet and distinctive style of old favorites, was among the hottest acts in show business." [JORDAN, p. 73]

"I learned," says Jordan,

"that at one point in their little backstage meeting, Ted had slipped

Norma Jean a piece of paper with his telephone number on it. Soon

they were meeting in hotel rooms whenever Ted was in town ... Soon

he was pulling strings for Norma Jean, trying to hook her up with an

agent who would do her the most good ... As Norma Jean had vowed

to me, whoever she had to fuck, she was prepared to do it. And, for

good measure, she did the same with [prominent, and Jewish, gossip

columnist] Walter Winchell." [JORDAN, p. 75]

Lewis, notes Jordan, "began an affair with the then-unknown model and introduced her to narcotics." [JORDAN, photo section] A key agent in accelerating Monroe's early career was Johnny Hyde (like many Hollywood Jews, born in Russia, and a veteran of vaudeville.) She was also his mistress -- he soon fell in love with her, and wanted to leave his wife for the actress. (He was 53, she was 23). Hyde, notes Ted Jordan, "not so coincidentally ... was Ted Lewis' personal manager." [JORDAN, p. 85] "In making Marilyn known," says Fred Guiles, "[Hyde] flexed a lot of muscle. The simple fact is that Johnny Hyde was the chief architect of her fame and her eventual legend." [GUILES, p. 147]

"By 1953," says Jordan,

"... [Monroe] could be virulently anti-Semitic (a prejudice that grew

as she got older). To my discomfort she would sometimes refer to

Joe Schenck, the mogul [and another sexual stepping stone], as 'that Jew

shit' and to other Hollywood personalities as 'Jew' this or that.

Occasionally I would have to remind her that I was half Jewish."

The Hollywood world and its pressures of being a sex goddess of course destroyed her. Monroe's physician Hyman Engelberg and her therapist Romeo Greenson were the first to her death scene, reported to be a drug overdose, but they didn't call police for four hours. One investigative author, Donald Spoto, in a 1993 work, even burdens Greenson with the responsibility for killing her, directing that a female employee "administer [to Monroe] ... a fatal barbiturate-laced enema." (In this scenario, Greenson's motivation was that Monroe was trying to free herself from Greenson's influence and control, and had fired him.) [WOLFE, D., p. 99] In this scenario too, Monroe did not realize that this enema was abnormal. [SPOTO, D., 1993, p. 218] A friend of Monroe's recalls that she was beginning to feel that Greenson was "trying to substitute himself for everything she'd built up those past years. She decided he was anti-everything she wanted. She was radically turning on Greenson and Mrs. Murray, the woman he'd put with her, she felt, to spy on her." [STRASBERG, p. 250-251])

The famous movie star's alleged suicide has always been controversial, and there are various conspiracy notions about who would want her dead. Greenson's secret life is much clouded. As well as being a therapist, he was, like a number of Hollywood people, an activist Communist Party member; he was also part of its international Comintern. Whatever Greenson's role as a listener of movie star's confessionals, his communist ties have profound implications because Monroe had romantic affairs with President John F. Kennedy and knew a great deal about behind-the-scenes politicking, perhaps including plans against communist Cuba and Fidel Castro. Everything Monroe knew, per "opening up" in therapy, she undoubtedly told her psychotherapist. As Donald Wolfe notes:

"Once Marilyn Monroe became Greenson's patient, he became one of

the most important Comintern operatives in America; he had access

to the mind of a woman who often shared the bed with the president

of the United States and was an intimate of the attorney general

[Kennedy's brother, Robert] ... As Greenson has correctly stated,

Marilyn Monroe had a tendency to 'get involved with very destructive

people, who will engage in some sort of sado-masochistic relationship

with her.' Ironically, among these people was her psychiatrist

[Greenson], her physician [Engelberg], and her housekeeper, Eunice

Murray [who was appointed by Greenson to live with Ms. Monroe

and report back to him], who joined in a conspiracy to survey

Marilyn Monroe within a sphere of influence designed to gather

intelligence from her relationship with the president of the United

States and the attorney general." [WOLFE, D., p. 386]

Greenson, once noted his sister, Elizabeth, also had "strong ties to Israel." [KELLEY, K., p. 305]

Marilyn Monroe's road to psychoanalysis was directed upon her by the influential Jewish acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, who is usually credited with spawning the "method acting" genre, made famous by the likes of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Brando's first Jewish analyst, says the famous actor, early in his career, was Bela Mittelman, "the coldest man I've ever known ... [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 124] ... Acting afforded me the luxury of being able to spend thousands of dollars on psychoanalysts, most of whom did nothing but convince me that most New York and Beverly Hills psychoanalysts are a little crazy themselves, as well as highly motivated to separate patients from their money while making their emotional problems worse." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 243] Brando was not much endeared to Lee Strasberg either, calling him "an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio, and he tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshiped him, but I never knew why.") [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 85]

Strasberg's daughter, Susan, notes that her father "sent numerous actors to psychiatrists, and many doctors sent their patients to class because they felt his work helped theirs in analysis." [STRASBERG, S., 31] Susan Strasberg herself used to argue with Marilyn Monroe about whether she or the famous sex goddess "needed therapy more." [STRASBERG, p. 138] As Barbara Leaming observes:

"It was said that the master teacher Lee Strasberg could open

inner doors that one scarcely knew existed. Some admirers called

him the Rabbi. Some compared him to a psychiatrist or a highly

judgmental Jewish father ... Strasberg focused on psychology.

He ran his workshop as though they were group therapy sessions...

Strasberg often advised actors to enter psychoanalysis in order

to put them in touch with emotionally-charged material they could

use in their work." [LEAMING, p. 156-157]

"Under [Lee] Strasberg's influence," note Stephen Farber and Marc Green, "Marilyn became an earnest devotee not just of method acting, but of Freudian analysis as well." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 83] Monroe's one-time husband, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller, also had his own Jewish psychoanalyst: Rudolph Loewenstein. [WOLFE, D., p. 307] Monroe even had sessions with Sigmund's Freud daughter, Anna, also a therapist, in London. [WOLFE, D., p. 300] "The significance of [Monroe's reliance on psychoanalysts] for psychoanalysis," notes Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, "was that Monroe left a substantial part of her estate to further the work of Anna Freud, whom she had seen briefly for analytic help in 1956 (Anna Freud wrote about her that she was paranoid with schizophrenic traits), and this bequest was undoubtedly achieved through her analysts, who were intimately connected to Anna Freud." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 129]

As Masson, a former official at the Sigmund Freud Archives, further notes about the ethical undercurrent of such funding:

"It is not, in fact, uncommon for analysts to solicit, usually through

roundabout methods, former patients for money to support analytic

projects. Chairs of psychoanalysis in medical schools at various

universities have been partially endowed through former patients.

There was also the case of the Centenary Fund, named for the

centenary, in 1956, of Freud's birth. [Marilyn Monroe's therapist]

Romi Greenson had organized this fund for psychoanalytic research

in Los Angeles ... I felt then, and still do now, that it is an exploitation

of the emotional relationship with a patient to solicit money, in whatever

form, directly or indirectly. It seems to me that the patient, or ex-patient,

is in no position, emotionally speaking, to refuse ... I find it wrong and

morally distasteful." [MASSON, J. M., 1990, p. 130]

Another Jewish Hollywood therapist, Judd Marmor (born Judah Marmorstein), candidly wrote an article in 1953 about the trap vulnerable patients would inevitably find themselves in under the control of a psychoanalyst. Its theme we have run across before, as being quintessentially "Jewish." Marmor's piece was entitled "The Feeling of Superiority: An Occupational Hazard in the Practice of Psychotherapy." "Marmor," note Stephen Farber and Marc Green, "pointed out the neurotic needs that may drive a person to become a psychiatrist -- a hunger for prestige as well as a desire to solve one's own internal conflicts." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 135] "[The] ego-seductive aspects [of the field of psychoanalysis]," noted Marmor, "tend to foster such defensive arrogance to a greater extent, perhaps, than do many other professions." [FARBER/GREEN, p. 135] A Monroe friend once stated that "I felt [Ralph Greenson] had a big ego, like a lot of doctors he wanted to be God, and of all the analysts in L.A. she found him. Inger Stevens was his patient too. She killed herself later." [STRASBERG, p. 250] As Greenson, Monroe's analyst, once claimed, "I can count Marilyn to do anything I want her to do." [WOLFE, D., p. 422]

"I was a patient of five different psychiatrists," says Marlon Brando,

"Based on my experience, most psychiatrists are people who feel

comfortable trying to control other people because they can't handle

themselves. Their experiences have overwhelmed them and they believe

they will be able to cope only if they are in a controlling position over

others. I've known a lot of them, and some of them have been among

the nuttiest people I've ever met ... [One of them] spent a lot of our

sessions asking for money." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 366]

Yet another tragic Hollywood movie star "goddess" driven to a psychological abyss was Frances Farmer, one of the most famous film faces of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Farmer's demise is particularly disturbing. Ardent rebel and idealist, she was attracted to the largely Jewish New York communist world before she became a movie celebrity, even visiting Moscow in 1935. Attracted to serious theatre, in New York she was "escorted around the city by a delegation of local communist leaders and -- through an introduction written by [Jewish friend] Sophie Rosenstein -- [Farmer] got herself invited to a party given by members of her cherished left-wing Group Theatre" where she first met famous Jewish playwright Clifford Odets. [ARNOLD, W., p. 50] (Supposedly anti-capitalist and anti-materialist, the Group Theatre grew out of meetings at Harold Clurman's home. Eventually he, fellow Jew Lee Strasberg and "WASP shiksa" Cheryl Crawford were the Group's early directors. [SMITH, W., p. 213, photo] Clurman was also the aforementioned Stella Adler's husband.) William Arnold notes the illusory idealism of the famous (largely Jewish) Group Theatre: "The Group actors, far from being the artistic purists [Farmer] had always believed them to be, all seemed to want to go to Hollywood and make piles of money (which, eventually, most of them did)." [ARNOLD, W., p. 90]

Both Farmer's mother and sister Edith believed that such "communists" destroyed her. [ARNOLD, W., p. 94] (For her part, Frances despised her mother and placed enormous blame for her troubles upon her. In the third page of her biography she even quotes a "Jewish saying" about mothers, and bemoans her lack of a good one). [FARMER, p. 12] William Arnold, who interviewed sister Edith, notes that she believed "the Communists drove Frances crazy. [Edith] seemed particularly bitter towards the Group Theatre and its left-wing members who, she said, took criminal advantage of France's kind nature and then harassed her into insanity." [ARNOLD, W., p. 94] During the McCarthy-era communist probes, eight Group Theatre members were identified as members of a communist cell -- Joe Bromberg and Lewis Leverett were its "co-leaders." [SMITH, W., p. 157] (Generally speaking, Jewish left-wing radical Saul Alinsky once noted that "few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s.") [ALINSKY, S., 1971, p. xiii]

Farmer's rise to acting stardom was meteoric. Within two weeks of moving to New York City to live, and within weeks of returning from Moscow, she was signed by agent Shepard Traube who managed to get her hired by Paramount Pictures top talent scout in New York, Oscar Serlin. Although Farmer reached Hollywood stardom by age 21 (with the film "Come and Get It" in 1936), she returned to New York -- because of personal conviction to the legitimate theatre, and for little pay -- to star in Odet's play entitled Golden Boy. The largely Jewish cast, some with changed names, included Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, Lee J. Cobb (born Lee Jacob), John Garfield (Garfinkel), Martin Ritt, Howard Da Silva, Robert Lewis, Michael Gordon, and Roman Bohmen. By now too, Farmer had begun a troubling affair with Odets, a married man -- a relationship that was to hasten her road to psychological destruction and a mental institution. In her autobiography, Farmer wrote that:

"Odets was a strange, almost ugly man, but he was everything I

could ever imagine, at the time, admirable in a man. He was a fiery,

fascinating intellect with strange sexual drives, and I reacted like a

smitten schoolgirl. I believed in him passionately ... I drowned myself

in his doctrines and political theories, and had he not severed the

affair, I probably would have followed him to his far-left politics...

Odets maneuvered me as he would a character in one of his plays.

He toyed with my attitudes and reactions. He was a psychological

button-pusher ... One moment he would marvel at my brilliance and

minutes later he would curse me for my stupidity. Sometimes, locked

with me in his apartment, he would plead like a schoolboy for

love and favors, and then, suddenly and with insulting accusations,

he would assault me as if I was a streetwalker ... He would insult

me in front of everyone, belittling my performance [in Golden Boy],

and he was satisfied only when he had reduced me to tears and set

me sobbing to my dressing room.

There were times after such incidents when he would not speak

to me for two or three days. At other times, he would force his way into

my dressing room and make a great point of not only locking the door

behind him, but further securing the room by propping a chair under

the doorknob, and then he would tear off his clothes and scream his

love and need for me with all the fire and passion of a Rococo Thespian.

He would threaten to take his life and mine, unless I loved him...

His sexual appetite was a complicated maze of weird manipulations.

He would deftly maneuver me to a point of fulfillment, then

withdraw and mock what he termed my base and disgusting desires.

After searing my feminine spirit in this bed of humiliation and

degrading me in every possible manner, he would begin again with

the shyness of an innocent lad and explore me with tender

This was no ordinary man. He was a creature who pried open the

psyche with the intention of sticking it with pins. I cannot say that I

loved him; a more apt description would be a passionate hatred

coupled with a physical fascination. Whatever it was, it did much to

destroy me. Whereas I had once lived secure within myself, after

Odets I became a bundle of raw hesitant nerves, confused and

almost without purpose." [FARMER, p. 193-194]

"Looking back," notes Margaret Brenman-Gibson, "Group members, all of whom had watched the [Farmer-Odets] affair with unusual concern, agreed that this seemed to be the trigger for her life's descent, during which she became addicted to alcohol and to drugs, was jailed, reviled, beaten, and for seven years, institutionalized by her mother as a lunatic." [BRENMAN-GIBSON, p. 579] As one Group member recalled, Odets was "so kind and tender a man who obviously revered his dead mother and whose empathy with women could be so delicate, could nevertheless be so exploitatively cruel with some women." [BRENMAN-GIBSON, p. 579] A Farmer wrote herself, "My artistic id was clobbered to shreds and the emotional trauma with Odets finished the job." [FARMER, p. 578] Institutionalized against her will, Farmer endured electroshock therapy, various drugs, and possibly a lobotomy.

She died in 1970. A decade later, Farmer's horrifying story was afforded renewed interest in Hollywood. Jewish producer/comedian Mel Brooks embarked on a movie project (Frances, starring Jessica Lange). Brooks' film featured a character named Harry York who "appears repeatedly to bed and befriend the doomed actress Frances Farmer in her downroad spiral through alcohol, despair and a Dickensian insane asylum." [HAMMER/PILCHER, p. 38] William Arnold, author of a biography of Farmer (Shadowlands) eventually sued Brooks and his partners (Jonathan Sanger and Marie Yates), charging that the York character was an invention in order to avoid linking the film's screenplay to Arnold's book. "The lawsuit," said People Weekly, "raises doubts about the business practices of Mel Brooks, whose company produced Frances -- and about the veracity of the film itself." [HAMMER/PILCHER, p. 38] The Harry York character was eventually declared by the Brooks team to be a real-life character, Stewart Jacobson, an ex-convict and convicted pimp who claimed to know Farmer as far back as high school. The outlandish assertions made by Jacobson (highlighted in his claim to have set up a Farmer affair with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas), charged Arnold, was merely a contrivance for "stealing my book." "Mel Brooks is a crook and an incredible cheat," agreed producer Noel Marshall, who was scheduled to originally produce the film.

*******************************************

The Jewish business network that built Hollywood, observes Claire Pajaczkowska, "provided an opportunity for a relatively small managerial elite to formulate American culture as it should or could be. It has been said that 'Hollywood' -- the American Dream -- is a Jewish idea in a sense; it's a Jewish revenge on America. The genius of future moguls was a complex one, partly sheer business ingenuity, partly ruthless risk taking, and a kind of competitive solidarity.... They were also closely associated with the meretricious, ostentation of the industry, with poor morals, bad taste, and the industrialization of art." [PAJACZKOWSKA, p. 238] As Marlon Brando once noted, "I've never had any respect for Hollywood. It stands for avarice, phoniness, greed, crassness and bad taste." [BRANDO/LINDSEY, 1994, p. 153-154] Or as film critic Kenneth Turan noted in an introduction to David Freeman's book A Hollywood Education: "Freeman knows that the movie business is more than any old conniver's paradise, it is one where the grail is a whole new persona. Because stakes are so high, because 'in Hollywood, what you succeed with and what you fail with are virtually the same,' everything, even your most personal life, is a viable tool to get ahead. Mind games, hidden agendas, backstabbings, and all around venality, they all pass without so much as a second glance. Everything is excused in pursuit of the dream." [FREEMAN, D., 1992, p. 7]

"[A]s I heard about Hollywood," wrote prominent science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, in a reflecion on his career, "I liked it even less. Walter Bradbury of Doubleday would travel to Hollywood once a year on business. When I had lunch with him after such a visit, he would be drawn and strained. He hated the people he had to deal with there, phonies, one and all, he said, and not to be trusted an inch." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 365]

The literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote

"Perelman; Hollywood. Jewish girl, very nice and intelligent. Not fancy,

who had lost her husband out there after three years -- her theory [is]

that Jewish men thought themselves ugly, so they had to keep proving to

themselves what they could do in the way of getting Gentile girls."

"In olden times," said the great journalist and muckraker, Upton Sinclair, "Jewish traders sold Christian girls into concubinage and into prostitution, and even today they display the same activity in the same field in southern California where I live." [GOULD, p. 305] The Hollywood rulers, noted Hollywood rabbi Edgar Magnin, "were men who made all that money and realized they were still a bunch of Goddamned Jews. Sleeping with a pretty gentile girl made them feel, if only for a few minutes, 'I'm half gentile.' No wonder they made idols out of shiksa goddesses." [RUBIN, p. 78] This kind of sexual predation, if we are to believe what some Jewish scholars have to say about it, has root in the psychological insecurities of Jewish identity. The (Jewish) Forward, reviewing a biography of (Jewish) writer Arthur Koestler by (Jewish) scholar David Cesarani, notes that