WHEN VICTIMS RULE

A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America

         
All Pictures Added by Gnostic Liberation Front

Page IX

24 (In three parts) (two on previous page)
Jewish Influence in the Mass Media (pt. 3) [513 Kilobytes] [about 103 paper pages] The mass media's censorship of critical stories about Jews or Israel; Jews and the "intellectual" and "radical" media; Jewish dominance in the music world; Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Jewish domination of the "agony aunt" field.

25. Literature - "Intellectuals" - "The Family" [274 Kilobytes] [about 59 paper pages] Jewish dominance of the "American intellectual elite"; the intellectual "Jewish Mafia"; seminal influence of the Partisan Review; the change from the Jewish intellectual base from the socialist camp to the affluent elite; the Jewish "explosion" of literary talent; "Being Jewish" as a marketable commodity; Jewish authors' return to traditional Jewish identity and linkage to the Holocaust; Jewish pre-eminence in sociology, anthropology, and other academic fields; Jewish chauvinism and ethnocentrism in literature; Jews of the poetry world; Jewish pre-eminence in the intellectual elite of Europe.

26. Modern Art [370 Kilobytes] [about 81 paper pages] Jewish pre-eminence in "high culture," including classical music and the visual arts; Jewish talent agencies; Jewish dominance in the entrepreneurial realm of the visual arts; predominance of Jewish art dealers, critics, curators; Jewish philanthropy to art museums ("he that pays the piper calls the tune"); Jewish dominance of the photography field; defamation of Christianity in the art world.

     In 1986 Ze'ev Chafets, an American Jew who had moved to Israel, returned for a while to the states to do a book about the American Jewish community; he entitled the resultant volume, Members of the Tribe. Following an AIPAC (the powerful Israel lobbying agency based in Washington DC) organizer who was "hunting Jews" across America, he noted an interesting incident at a Jewish gathering at the Stardust Motel in Moline, Illinois. Chafets writes that a fellow Jew sitting next to him in the audience poked the American-Israeli in the ribs, and then "tapped my copy of the Quad-City Times ("The Midwest's Most Exciting Newspaper") and whispered, 'This is a Jewish newspaper' ... The man was referring to ownership, not content ... Determined to make an impression, the man poked me again. 'See this motel?' he asked. 'It's a Jewish motel.'" [CHAFETS, p. 39]

 

     In 1999, the chairman of the Newspaper Association of America was Richard Gottlieb. He is also the chairman of Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, which owns 21 newspapers and 16 TV stations across the United States -- from Billings, Montana, to Madison, Wisconsin, to Lincoln, Nebraska. Lloyd Schermer retired as CEO of the company in 1999. A corporate subsidiary, NAPP Systems, constructs printing plates for about 350 newspapers in 30 countries. In Nebraska too, John Gottschalk is the chairman and president of the Omaha World-Herald company. He is also publisher of the Omaha World-Herald. [BATT, J., 3-24-2000]

     In northern California, in the heart of the internationally important high-tech area of Silicon Valley, David Cohen controls an area-wide empire as the Publisher/CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Newspapers (SVCN Inc.). Cohen founded Metro, "Silicon Valley's weekly alternative newspaper." A SVCN subdivision is Metro Newspapers. Metro, in turn , "purchased the Los Gatos Weekly and the more than 100-year old Los Gatos Times-Observer, which were combined as the Los Gatos Weekly Times. In 1991, the company acquired the weekly Saratoga News and the Willow Glen Resident ... In 1993, Metro Newspapers began publishing a newspaper in Cupertino, and acquired its competitor the Cupertino Courier, in 1995. The company founded The Sun in 1993. The most recent addition to the community family was The Campbell Reporter, which began publishing in March, 1999." [CUEPERTINO COURIER, 4-11-01]

    In Colorado, Edward Lehman publishes a few small town newspapers, including the Longmont Daily Times-Call, the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald, and Superior in Lafayette. The executive roster for all these papers includes Edward Lehman at the top, Dean Lehman as president, and Lauren Lehman as vice-president. (Ruth Lehman is the Associate Editor at the Longmont journal).
 

 

     In 1975, in New Hampshire, journalist Kevin Cash wrote an entire volume criticizing the concentrated media and political power of newspaperman William Loeb. Loeb owned New Hampshire's two major newspapers -- the Manchester Union Leader and the New Hampshire Sunday News, as well as the Vermont Sunday News, and a few smaller New England area papers. Loeb was also in the habit of writing regular editorials in his newspapers. "The truth is," wrote Cash, a former reporter at the Union Leader, "is that [Loeb's papers] are to a large extent monopolistic in nature within the limits of New Hampshire." [CASH, K., p. 3]  Loeb was of Jewish heritage (both parents were Jewish); he once published in one of his papers, however, his father's 1906 Episcopal baptismal document, signed by American President Theodore Roosevelt (his father was Roosevelt's executive secretary).

 

     In Pittsburgh, Paul Block (1877-1941) owned the Pittsburgh Evening Sun, the Pittsburgh Morning Post, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as well as the Toledo Times and Toledo Blade. [GREENBERG, M., p. 53] His sons, William and Paul, also later added television and cable stations to their mini-empire. Elsewhere, "in 1978, the Samuel Horvitz Trust [run by three sons and an employee] owned five monopoly newspapers in Ohio and New York, cable systems in Ohio and Virginia, and construction firms in Ohio, and was a major landowner in Florida." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 42]

 

       In a review of Jewish book publishing in the United States to 1976, Jewish author Charles Madison noted the following Jewish-founded, or purchased, firms (some still exist, some are now defunct, some are absorbed by others):

 

       Simon and Schuster (Richard L. Simon; Max L. Schuster)

       Knopf (Alfred A. Knopf)

       Random House (Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer)

       Pantheon (founded by Kurt and Helen Wolf)

       Viking (Harold Guinzburg)

       Dover (founded in 1943)

       Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux   - (The father of Roger Strauss --

             president of the publishing company -- was in turn chairman of the

             Board of the American Smelting and Refining Company. From

             1955-65 Roger was also chairman of the board of American

             Judaism magazine).

       Grove Press (1947) - which controlled Evergreen Books and the

             Evergreen Review.

       Praeger (1950)

       Basic Books (1952) - Its founder, Arthur Rosenthal, later became

             Director of Harvard University Press.

       The Free Press (1947) - Its founder, Jeremiah Kaplan, joined Crowell-

             Collier, which had acquired MacMillan, as a Vice-President.   

       Atheneum (1959)

       Crown Publishers (1936)  (headed in later years by Nat Wartels, "a legend in the               
             business") [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 250]     

       Academic Press

       International Universities Press

       Twayne Publishers (1948)

       World Publishing Company (1905)

       Frederick Ungar (1941)

       Harry Abrams (1950) - mostly art books.

       George Braziller (1955)

       Tudor - mostly music books.
       [MADISON, CHARLE;, 1976]

     "One year,' says famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz in her autobiography,,

     "when I cam back from Paris, I foolishly risked a certain jail sentence by
      bringing for, buttoned into my blouse, a copy of the utterly pornographic
      Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller, an erotic masterpiece that Jeremy rented
      out to his friends as twenty-five cents a day. I'm not taking all the credit,
      but eventually he [Jeremy Tarcher] became the first and best publisher of
      New Age books in the United States." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 147]
      [Krantz notes that her novel Mistral "was quickly bought for France by
      Edition Stock, whose publisher, Jean Rosenthal, as it happened had
      translated my other novels into French."] [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 313]

 

 

      In a continuing trajectory of percentage of ownership, by 1968 Roger Kahn noted that "Jews own perhaps half the major book publishing houses: Random House, Simon & Schuster, New American Library, Alfred Knopf, and Atheneum are a few that thrive under the leadership of Jews." [KAHN, R., p. 5] "Owners of new [early to mid-20th century publishing] concerns, "notes Jay Gertzman, "most of them young Jewish men (Horace Liveright, Thomas Seltzer, Ben Huebsch, Max Schuster, Alfred Knopf) had begun to specialize in presenting European writers to an American audience curious about their sexual frankness and Marxist ideas. Established houses, such as Doran, Houghton, Appleton, and Doubleday, did not do so, and some of their executives resented their parvenu colleagues. Modernist writers especially owed their exposure to Jewish firms." [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 114]

 

      In the 1980s, Crown Books, headed by Robert Haft (who also founded the Trak Auto supply chain), rose to become the third largest bookstore chain with nearly 250 outlets throughout America. At its peak the firm was a national giant with nearly 10,000 employees and valued between $500 million to $1 billion (the company drastically weakened with in-house, intra-family legal feuds between Robert and his father Herbert, a Jewish immigrant from Russia). The Brentano's bookstore chain was also founded by Jewish entrepreneur August Brentano in the late 19th century.  Abraham Rosenbach and his brother Philip were used book sellers from 1903 until the 1950s. In 1928, the New Yorker called Abraham "the most famous dealer in rare books." "If Gutenberg [Bible] sales are taken as the measure of a dealer," says Guy Lesser, "Rosenbach would have to be reckoned history's most successful [book dealer], judging by his transactions over ... four decades." [LESSER, G., JAN 2002, p. 48, 46] "Whiskey, cigars, deep-sea fishing, and women (to put the last politely)," adds Lesser, "in roughly that order, after books, seem to have been his passions." [LESSER, G., JAN 2002, p. 48]

 

     Jewish publishers also brought out the inexpensive series for mass appeal, including the Little Leather Library, the Little Blue Books, and the Modern Library (Horace Liveright); Jewish entrepreneurs also initiated the "Book-of-the-Month Club." "As an author and editor, [Mortimer] Adler built a publishing empire on an unlikely foundation: the philosophic system of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. That system influenced his work as compiler of the Great Books of the Western World and as editor of Encyclopedia Britannica." [D'Alessio, F., 6-29-01] In 2001, Michael Ross, the publisher of the World Book Dictionary, removed the verb "jew" (traditionally meaning "beat down in price") from the volume. [LEVINE, S., JUNE/JULY 2001]

      Other Jewish book publishers include Westview, Stein and Day, Holmes and Meier, Price Stern Sloan, Lyle Stuart (the founder, Lyle Stuart, was born Lionel Simon), Ottenheimer (a Baltimore publisher with 200 titles a year), and Schocken.  In England, Lord George Weidenfeld not only controls a well-known namesake publishing house, he is also chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain. From England, Andre Deutsch's namesake company published Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, Arthur Schlesinger, and other prominent authors. In Canada, Avie Bennett is president of McClelland & Stewart  (1992).

 

     By the late 1990s, Golden Books Family Entertainment, "the nation's largest producer of children's books," was headed by Jewish publisher Richard Snyder (who replaced Richard Bernstein). The next four top executives at the firm were also Jewish: Steven Grossman, James Cohen, Ira Gomberg, and Ian Reich. [HOOVER, p. 255]

 

 

      Alfred Lilienthal, a Jew and lifelong crusader against Zionism and Jewish chauvinism, wrote in 1982 that

 

      "All the leading magazines, ranging from Commentary, Esquire, Ladies

      Home Journal, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and U.S.

      News and World Report have Jews in key positions as publishers,

      editors, or managing editors.  No one is able to criticize Jews -- or

      even take Israel to task -- for fear of being out of line with the boss ...

      There is [also] the constant overriding concern of the media about losing

      advertising ... at times making a mockery of  'freedom' of the press ...

      [LILIENTHAL, p. 219] ... It would be futile to list the number of top

      Jewish editors and writers across the country. Many of the largest

      book publishers, including Knopf, Random House, Holt, Liverwright,

      Viking Press, Simon and Schuster, Van Nostrand Reinhold, and

      Lyle Stuart are Jewish-owned, directly or by Jewish-controlled

      interests (including CBS, RCA, Music Corporation of America

      [MCA], Litton's, and Gulf and Western. In other firms such as

      Macmillan and Grosset and Dunlap, one will find editors-in-chief or

      presidents who are Jewish." [LILIENTHAL, p. 220]

 

        In the same year, Jewish literary agent Bill Adler (formerly the Executive Editor at Playboy when Mike Cohn was Director of Playboy's book division) wrote a volume entitled Inside Publishing. Some of the (Jewish) power people in his New York publishing world included

 

    * Richard Snyder: CEO, president and Chairman of the Board of

           Simon & Schuster

    * Joni Evans: (Snyder's wife), president of Simon & Schuster subsidiary,

           The Linden Press

    * Robert Gottleib: President and Editor-in-Chief of Alfred A. Knopf

    * Louis Wolfe: President and CEO of Bantam Books

    * Marc Jaffe: Editor-in-Chief of Bantam Books

    * Hillel Black: Editor-in-Chief at William Morrow

    * Nat Wartels: Chairman of Crown Publishers

    * Jonathan Segal: Editor-in-Chief of Times Books

    * Helen Meyer: President of Dell Publishing)

    * Phyllis Grann: Publisher of G.P. Putnam's Sons

    * Jim Silberman: President of Summit Books

    * Howard Kaminsky: President and Publisher of Warner Books 

       [ADLER, B., 1982]

 

      Adler's favored choice for assignment as writing "collaborator" with celebrities was Mickey Herskowitz. Herskowitz wrote books for Bette Davis, Dan Rather, Gene Autry, Jimmy the Greek, and others. In the "book packaging" field (where literary agents produce anthology-type volumes commissioned by publishers) Lyle Kenyon Engel was "one of the most prolific book packagers over the years." [ADLER, B., 1982, p. 89]

     Jewish actor Kirk Douglas has written some books about his life; he notes his surprise when he discovered that

      "my editor Ushi was becoming fascinated with Judaism [she eventually converted to it].       
      Out of the blue, in the fall of 1993, she announced that she was going to Israel. A whole       
      month in Israel would cost her a mere $950 plane fare, food and lodging included. Could       
      that be true? Oh yes, but she was doing it through an organization called Volunteers for
      Israel, which basically meant she was going into the Israeli Army for three weeks."      
      [DOUGLAS, K., 1997, p. 125]
 

    

       "Any roll call of the most respected and/or powerful figures in the publishing world," wrote Robert C. Christopher in 1989 in a book about the decline of WASP institutions," whether in editorial or executive positions, has to include a sizeable number of Jews; among those who automatically come to mind are Robert Bernstein, Jason Epstein, and Joni Evans at Random House, Richard Snyder and Michael Korda [also author of Power: How to Get It and Success!] at Simon and Schuster, Simon Michael Bessie at Harper and Row, Howard Kaminsky at Hearst and Marc Jaffe at Houghton Mifflin." [CHRISTOPHER, p. 222]  "I don't want to sound chauvinistic," said Jason Epstein in 2001, "but [Jewish publishers] were smarter than their gentile colleagues." [GREEN, D., 5-31-01]

 

     Others Jews in positions of power in earlier years (as noted by Martin Greenberg in 1979) included the publisher of Collier's and the Women's Home Companion, founder and editor of the National Guardian, the editor and founder of AB Bookman's Weekly, the editor of the Saturday Review, senior editors at Time, Forbes and Newsweek, the editor of Variety, a member of the Board of Editors for Fortune, the editor-in-chief of Redbook and on and on. [GREENBERG, 1979]

 

     More recently, take, for example, a 1996 report in Advertising Age that noted that Ellen Levine, the editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping, was having a spat with her publisher, Alan Waxenberg, and that Jerry Kaplan was one of those being considered to replace him. [KELLY, p. 47] In 1994, Barbara Grossman left Simon and Shuster to become the publisher at Viking where Peter Mayer was the Viking Penguin CEO. In the same era, Joni Evans (born Joni Goldfinger) became the head of the Turtle Bay imprint at Random House. Tina Brown, also Jewish, was described by one London newspaper as "the most famous woman editor in the world ... [She is] the worst social climber since Kong lumbered to the top of the Empire State Building." [LANGTON, J.]

 

      In England, in 1998 the (London) Daily Telegraph noted Gail Reubuck, "daughter of affluent Baltic Jewish immigrants," as "the most powerful figure in British publishing," and "recently voted Publisher of the Year." [CAMPBELL, p. D4] Another example is Richard Malina who started out as a lawyer for Grosset and Dunlap. By 1985 he was the President of the publishing division of Doubleday; in 1987 he became the Executive Director and Publisher of the Jewish Publication Society. [GODFREY, p. 2] 

 

      A mere random look at a few 1998 issues of Publishers Weekly evidenced the following items: Al Silverman retired as "Editor-at-large" at Penguin. He was also the former publisher and editor-at-large at Viking, and chairman and CEO of the Book of the Month Club. Mark Lieberman was the Executive Vice President of Cahner's Publishing Company, which publishes Publishers Weekly where Sybil Steinberg was the Senior Editor for Fiction. Jane Friedman was the CEO and president of HarperCollins. Martha Levin was named the new Vice President and editor-in-chief at Hyperion (moving over from a position as Senior Vice President at Doubleday. Lucianne Goldberg was noted as the literary agent for Linda Tripp (who exposed the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Goldberg -- formerly Steinberger -- is the wife of Sid Goldberg, former editor of the North American Newspaper Alliance, and later vice president of United Media, a syndicator of news stories. One of Lucianne's own novels is Madame Cleo's Girls, a "frothy tale about three high-class prostitutes.' [HUBBARD, p. 111])  The Bantam Doubleday Dell International CEO in 1998 was Stephen Rubin. The president and editor-in-chief of Summit Books was still Jim Silberman. Marc Jaffe was publisher of his own imprint at Houghton Mifflin. Others afforded news making mention in the Publishers Weekly issues were Jonathan Karp, an editor at Random House, Esther Newberg, an agent at ICM; and agents Daniel Greenberg and Al Zuckerman of James Levine Communications. The Horowitz-Rae book manufacturing company was also noted as sold.

 

      Such Jewish prominence today is all over the map. Michael Hoffman is the Executive Director of Aperture, probably the most influential "art" photography journal and book publisher. Michael Hirschorn is editor of Spin, "the bible of alternative music." Alan Light is Editor-in-Chief of Vibe magazine. George Hirsch is the vice-president and publisher of Runner's World. Nat Lehrman was the publisher of Playboy. (Richard Rosenzweig was Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's personal Executive Assistant, Bobbi Arnstein his personal secretary, and Howard Shapiro his chief legal counsel. By the 1990s, Shapiro was third in command of the Playboy empire, behind only Hefner and his daughter). Peter Bart is Editor-in-Chief at Variety. Michael Solomon was named editor of Premiere in 2000. Lesley Seymour is the editor of Redbook. Merle Ginsberg is the Entertainment Editor for Women's Wear Daily. David Bauer is one of the Executive Editors at Sports Illustrated. David Fine is SI's photography editor. Todd Gold recently left the editorship of People magazine to found a company with fellow Jew Adam Werbach, recently stepped down as the president of the Sierra Club.

 

     Milton Esterow is the publisher and editor of both ArtNews and Antiques World. He is also co-editor and founder of the American Art Journal.  Jonathan Steinberg -- son of notorious corporate raider Saul Steinberg -- publishes Individual Investor magazine. Steven Brill founded American Lawyer and a media watchdog journal called Brill's Content (editor-in-chief: David Kuhn, formerly executive editor of Talk magazine), and the Court TV program on television. (A rival, Peoples' Court, features presiding Jewish judge Jerry Sheindlin and commentating attorney Harry Levin. Another court TV program, Judge Judy, features Jerry Sheindlin's wife, Judy, at the helm.) For years Jerry Finkelstein published the New York Law Journal. Janice Kaplan is the Executive Producer of TV Guide Television. Jane Goldman is the Executive Editor of California Lawyer. Rae Anne Marsh is the managing editor of Arizona Corridors Magazine.  Steven Cohn edits the Media Industry Newsletter. Rachel Newman edits Country Living. David Klinghoffer is the literary editor of the National Review. Debbie Rosenberg is the Managing Editor of Biography. Robert Epstein is the Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today. Adam Garfinkle is the Executive Editor of the National Interest. Michael Berman co-founded George magazine. Baltimore's Style magazine is owned by the Baltimore Jewish Times.  Michael Gewanda became the editor of Time (Australia) in 1993. Peter Newman edited Canada's prominent weekly magazine, Maclean's. Peter Eisenman was "the father of two architectural publications of note, Oppositions and Skyline." [ARONSON, S., 1983, p. 303] And on and on and on.

 

     "White and Jewish," Ben Burns (originally Bernstein) even "made a career in black journalism, editing the Chicago Defender and helping found Ebony magazine." [GROSSMAN, p. C1]  He also edited Sepia, "a white-owned magazine for blacks." [ZALLER, p. 30]  A more recent black-based magazine is the musical "hip-hop" The Source; by the mid-1990s it boasted a newsstand circulation larger than Rolling Stone. The Source "speaks to young black males," noted USA Today, "in a language they can understand. More than 60% of its readers are African-Americans. Over 80% are under age 25." Featuring "shock covers" and articles like the one about bulletproof vest clothing fashions to ward off "a 44 magnum at close range," the publisher of The Source, Peter Mays, is also Jewish. [HOROVITZ, p. 1B] In 1998, Elinor Ruth Tatum became the publisher of her father's newspaper, the Amsterdam News, New York City's oldest and largest African-American newspaper. Ms. Tatum's father is Black; her mother is Jewish. [JET, p. 32]

 

     The Detroit News is both published and edited by Marc Silverman. Howard Kleinberg was, until recently, the editor of the Miami News. Martin Baron edits the Boston Globe. Phil Bronstein is the executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner and the second Jewish husband of non-Jewish actress Sharon Stone (his father was a former director of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation). (Michael de Young, also Jewish, founded the rival San Francisco Chronicle). Jeff Cohen became the Houston Chronicle chief editor in 2002. Tom Rosenstiel is the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. ABC's Peggy Wehmeyer, a self-described Protestant, born of a Jewish mother, is "the only network correspondent specializing in religious and spiritual issues." [SHISTER, G., 9-11-99, p. G2] At least half of the ten members (Jonathan Alter, Howard Fineman, Michael Isikoff, Debra Rosenberg, and Ron Haviv) of Newsweek's "political team" covering the 2000 American presidential campaign were of Jewish heritage. [NEWSWEEK, 11-20-2000, p. 4] And if you want to write regularly for editor Steve Wasserman's Los Angeles Times Book Review, and you're not Jewish, the odds are heavily against you. His stable of "Contributing Writers" is Anthony Day, Michael Frank, Jonathan Kirsch, Jonathan Levi, Suzie Linfield, Suzanne Mantell, and Benjamin Schwarz. Politically conservative commentator David Horowitz would argue that you'd have to be left-wing too, noting that:

 

     "I knew Wasserman as a former Berkeley radical and protégé, in

     the 1960s, of a Times contributing editor, Bob Scheer ... After the

     1960s, Scheer had ingratiated himself with Hollywood's bolsheviks,

     married a top editor at the Los Angeles Times, and become a figure

     of influence in the paper's hierarchy, which enabled him to secure

     Wasserman his job." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 189]

 

     Longtime media critic for the Los Angeles Times has been Howard Rosenberg. In a 1991 column he wrote that

 

     "The mail is coming in about my column endorsing KCET's recent

     presentation of the controversial film 'Stop the Church,' and nearly

     all of it is critical and angry. Most writers accused me of being

     rather a fence sitter and biased against Catholicism. Some note that

     I am Jewish." [ROSENBERG, H., 9-16-91, p. F1]

 

     The Washington Post media reporter is another Jewish Howard, this one Kurtz. Until his death in 1997, across the continent, Herb Caen was for fifty years a "legendary San Francisco columnist" and the city's "most beloved institution." [SCHEER, R., 2-4-97, p. B7; DOUGAN, M., 2-7-97, p. A1] Looking back into earlier years, Dennis McDougal singles out (Jewish columnists) Joyce Haber (of the Los Angeles Times) and Irv Kupcinet (of the Chicago Sun-Times) as prominent media loyal public supporters/defenders of Hollywood lawyer/mobster Sidney Korshak. [MCDOUGAL, p. 396]

 

     In 2000, journalist Katherine Ross wrote about the case of fellow journalist Lynn Hirschberg:

 

     "She is the premier chronicler of the entertainment elite for

     the New York Times Magazine ... On the beat for almost 20

     years, Hirschberg stands at the nexus of the Los Angeles

     entertainment and New York publishing worlds ... Hirschberg's

     pieces almost always deify or demonize. 'She can make your

     career,' says publicist Bumble Ward." [ROSMAN, K., 5-2000]

 

     Hirschberg started out with help from David Rosenthal, "then the assistant manager at Rolling Stone and now the publisher of Simon and Schuster's adult-trade division." "Hirschberg," adds reporter Ross,

 

     "doesn't just profile and befriend the powerful. Like most other

     successful operators, she is savvy at facilitating business deals

     for friends that will leave those friends in her debt. In 1993, for

     example, Hirschberg brokered a Time magazine cover story about

     her then close friend, the producer Scott Rudin, written by her

     friend Philip Weiss ... [Also] consider her close alliance with

     Peter Kaplan, the editor of the New York Observer, a weekly

     newspaper popular in New York's media circles. Kaplan and

     Hirschberg have never worked together, but their friendship

     has benefited both." [ROSMAN, K., 5-2000]

 

     All these people are Jewish.

 

     Does all this massive Jewish predominance in the mass media, internationally, and their collective sense of destiny in history; upper echelon cliques; widespread allegiance to Israel; intense sense of collective community; concerted economic and ideological pressures to encourage pro-Israel/Jewish views; the systematic political pressures and omnipresent lobbying maneuvers of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee; and many other multi-million dollar lobbying groups whose fundamental purpose is to control information about Jews and Israel, mean nothing, as so many Jews insist? Let us take but one aspect of the systematic censorship throughout American culture by the Jewish community: the state of Israel. This is what Paul Findley, for twenty-three years a United States Congressman from Illinois had to say about his book that described the Jewish-American lobby for Israel in America, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby (the book was eventually published by a small publisher, Lawrence Hill, and made the Washington Post's ten top books list for nine weeks):

 

       "My quest for a publisher began in March 1983 and was predictably

       long and frustrating. Declining to represent me, New York literary agent

       Alexander Wylie forecast with prophetic vision that no major United

       States publisher would accept my book. He wrote, 'It's a sad state of

       affairs.' Bruce Lee of William Morrow and Company called my

       manuscript ‘outstanding,’ but his company concluded that publishing it

       'would cause trouble in the house and outside' and decided against

       'taking the heat.' Robert Loomis of Random House called it an

       'important book' but reported that the firm's leadership decided the

       theme was 'too sensitive.' Twenty other publishers said no." [FINDLEY,

       THEY, p. viii]

 

     When in 1986 Israeli defector Mordechai Vanunu had his photographic evidence of the inside of Israel's nuclear weapons plant published in England, it should have been a major news story. Jerry Oplinger, a former White House aide, was amazed at how little attention the mass media gave it, saying: "I couldn't believe those guys. There was nothing [significant] in the [New York] Times, [Washington] Post, and Wall Street Journal. Everybody in the arms control business was amazed that there was nothing. To me and my close friends, it was really discouraging." [HERSH, p. 308]

 

       In the London Independent, in 1998 Robert Fisk wrote an entire article about the mass media's systematic bias and censorship of stories relating to Israel. Among the Fisk's list of outrages, is the fact that

 

      "the New York Times ... ran a syndicated account from an Israeli paper

       of an Israeli soldier's life in Qana before the massacre [when Israeli

       troops fired a missile into an Arab ambulance in Lebanon]: but the New

       York Times deleted a paragraph about how the Israeli troops had stolen

       cars from their Lebanese owners and looted houses -- thus even

       censoring the Israeli press ... History continues to be short-changed in

       the American media ... Academics may one day decide how deeply the

       American public has been misled by the persistent bias of the US media,

       and the degree to which this has led them to support US policies which

       may destroy America's prestige in the Middle East." [FISK, p. 14]

 

      Norman Finkelstein, a well-known Jewish critic of Israel, tabulated the articles about torture in the Middle East in the New York Times between 1981 and 1991. He found over 80 articles -- 26 articles about torture in Iran, 15 in Turkey, 14 in Iraq and 8 in Egypt. "Consider how the case of Israel was treated," he wrote,

 

      "Except for a brief period under [Israeli] Prime Minister Begin,

      torture was practiced continuously from the early 1970s against

      Palestinian detainees ... [The Times] has probably devoted as much

      space to coverage of Israel [on other matters] as the entire Arab

      world combined. Yet for the full decade under consideration

      (1981-91), the Times found space for only five items on Israeli

      torture of Palestinian detainees ... Not once did the Times even hint

      at the not trivial fact that Israel's torture of Palestinian detainees in

      the Occupied Territories is 'virtually institutionalized' (Amnesty

      International) and 'systematic and routine' (B'Tselem)."  [an Israeli

      human rights organization] [FINKELSTEIN, 1996, p. 67]

 

     In 1982 the Times' Foreign Correspondent to Israel, Thomas Friedman (also Jewish) ran into trouble with his Jewish superiors for telling the truth about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Friedman filed a report with his employers about the "indiscriminate" bombing of the Arab community there. New York Times editors censored the adjective. Friedman "then sat down and wrote one of the most indicting messages the Times ever received from a correspondent, that his editors were 'afraid to tell our readers' about Israel's 'apparent aim of terrorizing its [Beirut] civilian population ... I am filled with profound sadness by what I have learned in the past afternoon about my newspaper.'" [GOULDEN, p. 323] Friedman was immediately called back to the states and warned that "if you ever pull a stunt like that again, you are fired. Understand?" [GOULDEN, p. 323]

 

     In 1994, the Jerusalem Post noted another case of Jewish lobbying-censorship of the American mass media, this time of the work of Time magazine reporter Murray Gart:

 

      "Time was planning to publish a list of Israeli agents in Washington

      submitted by the Mossad to the CIA. [Howard] Teicher's name [a Jewish

      National Security Agency adviser] was purportedly on the list. Time

      never ran the story, the editors pulled it out of the magazine virtually

      at the last minute." [RODAN, S., 1994, p. 18]

     Thomas Kiernan notes the case of non-Jewish mogul Rupert Murdoch, so beholding to the Jews who helped him get a foothold in the world of international mass media:

     "[ABC head Leonard] Goldenson's personality and lectures thus had the effect of
     sharpening Murdoch's sympathy toward Israel. As a result, his Australian papers
     took a decidedly pro-Israel tone during the early 1960s -- a fact that didn't please
     his surrogates in the top editorial chairs. The eventual resignation of Douglas Brass
     as editor for the Sydney Mirror, for instance, is said by some in Murdoch's organization
     to have come about over that issue ..." [KIERNAN, T., 1986, p. 78]

     In a discussion of the reportage at Murdoch's New York Post, Kiernan observes

     "I was witness to some of the Post's coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
      in the summer of 1982 and of the subsequent siege of Beirut. Throughout that
      period, the paper was without a single reporter on the scene, yet its stories were
      laced with un-attributed 'eye-witness' descriptions of Arab atrocities and Israeli
      heroics, many of them invented in its New York newsroom." [KIERNAN, T.,
      1986, p. 262]

     In May 2001, during the latest Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israeli rule, the Anti-Defamation League announced that their recent survey showed that "56 percent of major newspaper editorials took a strong pro-Israel stance." [TEITELBAUM, S., 5-25-01] This was despite the fact that representatives of organizations as diverse as Amnesty International, the European Union, the Red Cross, and YMCA were criticizing, and often condemning, the brutal policies of the Israeli state. Incredibly, even as most of those who headed press organizations were emphatically pro-Israel, Howard Goller, chairman of the Foreign Press Association, publicly complained that "twenty foreign correspondents in the West Bank and Gaza have been shot at and hit [by Israeli troops] with live ammunition or rubber coated-bullets since the start of the intifada ... Worse still, he says, the Israeli government is refusing to deal with the matter." [HAUSMAN, T., 5-25-01]

 

      Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman note the case of British author David Irving, who faced the destruction of his decades-old writing career when he started addressing the Jewish community critically:

 

     "After Irving testified for the defense in ["Holocaust denier" Ernest]

     Zundel's 1988 'free speech' trial in Canada, various governments filed

     notices of entry denial and deportation against him. As he recounts

     on his Web page, his publishing firm, Focal Point, has received

     notices from the bookstores in England canceling distribution of

     [his book] Hitler's Wars and other titles. 'Following complaints from

     valued customers we no longer feel able to stock this title,' read one

     notice from a Sheffield bookstore in July 1992. Also in the same year,

     the director of Media House Publications in Johannesburg, South

     Africa, informed Irving that with regard to Hitler's War, "I don't

     want any copies on our premises. We have had some incidents

     already. Many of our book buyers are Jewish. It is much easier

     for [my staff] now to say, 'We don't stock the book.'" [SHERMER/

     GROBMAN, 2000, p. 50]

    

     Filmmaker Tom Hayes calls the mass media's wall of censorship surrounding the state of Israel "the Information Blockade." This systematic censorship is important in keeping Americans ignorant about the truths concerning Israel, including the details of the staggering sums of money -- approximately $78 billion -- American taxpayers have funneled to that other country (instead of to themselves) since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, [APAS, p. 106] let alone the myriad of moral injustices perpetuated upon others by the Jewish nation. [See later chapter]  Arthur Hays-Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, noted the behind-the-scenes economic intrigues and mass media power of pro-Israel Jews as early as 1946:

 

      "I dislike the coercive methods of Zionists in this country who have not

      hesitated to use economic means to silence persons who have different

      views." [LILIENTHAL, p. 124]

 

     Those who would like to criticize Israel, notes Jewish French scholar Maxime Rodinson, "remain silent, either because they are not in a position to write or speak publicly, or because they fear the reactions of their immediate environment or the broader public. I understand them very well. Moreover, publishers, newspaper editors, and radio and television producers, also tend to be afraid to let them speak; they suffer constant blackmail from Judeo-centrists." [RODINSON, p. 15]

 

      Ze'ev Chafets notes a 1979 article that got past the censors in Newsweek; it read:

 

       "With the help of American Jews in and out of government, Mossad

       [Israel's intelligence agency] looks for any softening in U.S. support

       and tries to get technical intelligence the Administration is unwilling to

       give to Israel."

 

      The normal chorus of Jewish complaint and pressure to censor any similar future statement was soon to follow. As Chafets observes, "the editor of Newsweek later admitted that Newsweek's insinuation that American Jews are disloyal to the United States 'reflects an anti-Semitic stereotype' and informed the Anti-Defamation League that 'we have engaged in some consciousness raising on this subject and I do not expect a recurrence.' The letter to the ADL was signed by the magazine's editor-in-chief: Lester Bernstein [also Jewish]." [CHAFETS, p. 281]

 

     Also in the 1970s, CBS news commentator Jeffrey St. John made a similar mistake about speaking openly of Jewish dual loyalty on the radio program "Spectrum." He had the courage to observe that

 

     "American public opinion is shaped largely by a pro-Israeli viewpoint.

     And when someone suggests we should begin changing our policy, 

     as an American oil executive did recently, the pro-Israel propaganda

     machine in America crucifies him in public ... Emotions, not reason,

     govern our policy towards Israel ... The issue is whether you are

     an American first and a Jew second and if forced to choose, which

     commands your loyalty first." [LILIENTHAL, 1983, p. 450]

 

     St. John was gone from CBS soon afterwards. Likewise, CBS newscaster Eric Severeid took heavy Jewish lobbying heat in 1975 for daring to say that "A growing number of American Jews are ... torn in a soul-searching internal debate as to just where their loyalties should lie and how far they should go in honoring them." [LILIENTHAL, 1983, p. 449]

 

     In 1994 after rejections from numerous publishers, John Sack, a respected Jewish journalist for Esquire and other magazines for nearly 40 years, managed to get his manuscript (An Eye for an Eye, about the "vengeful" Jewish heads of post-World War II concentration camps for Germans and Poles) published by Basic Books. (The book was originally commissioned with a $25,000 advance by the Henry Holt publishing company. When Sack's final manuscript was completed, it was abandoned by the firm). "Major U.S. newspapers and publishers," noted the Associated Press, "shied away from the manuscript before Basic Books finally put out the English edition in 1993." [BAJACK, INTERNET]  The editor for the volume at Basic Books, Steve Fraser, noted that

 

      "We concluded it ought not to be suppressed -- which is what was

      happening. I take my vocation as a publisher seriously enough to feel

      that it is my responsibility to publish something that's important even

      if the rest of the industry is afraid to do that." [WIENER, p. 24] 

 

     Terry McDonnell, one of Sack's editors at Esquire, was one of those refusing to publish any of the investigators articles about the Jewish commandants of concentration camps. "[Other publishers are] scared," he told Sack. "And I'm scared too." [LOMBARDI, p. 18]

 

      Sack had researched the facts of the volume for seven years. "Although Sack's facts were not disputed," notes the Associated Press, "the book was slammed as sadistic sensationalism in a review by powerful German [Jewish] critic Elke Geisel, whose seething polemic called it 'vile docudrama' and 'a gift to neo-Nazis.'"  "[Sack's book] is the greatest filth," added Ralph Giordano, a German Jewish writer who never read the book in question, " ... [it is a] vulgar artistic fetish."  [AP, INTERNET] (Press censorship about Jewish history even occurs in Poland, presumably because the new capitalist state must seek so much western/Jewish economic aid in rebuilding their nation.  In 1994 the Gazeta Wyboroza, one of Poland's most-widely read newspapers, covered an investigation of fifteen former officers of the Office of State Security [Poland's communist secret police]. "The paper is avoiding any mention of Jews," notes Jewish journalist Carol Oppenheim. "I think there is widespread opinion of the dominance of Jews in the Communist Party," said Michael Cichy, the cultural editor of the paper, "but mention of this in the Polish press is taboo." [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

 

     In response to Jewish outrage that such truthful information be published, the new head (Viktor Niemann) of the publishing house that printed Sack's book in German, R. Piper, decided to destroy all 6,000 copies in its warehouses. "It was the fourth time," notes the Associated Press, "that Sack's story ... had been bought by a publisher who subsequently decided against printing." [BAJACK, INTERNET] "It is tragic," wrote Sack in response to his German publisher's actions, "that 'An Eye for an Eye' is not being published in Germany now and that Germans have nowhere to learn the truth." [SACK, p. A18]

 

     When the TV news show 60 Minutes investigated one of the Jewish subjects of Sack's book, Shlomo Morel, Sack's broader story "looked as if it might take off," said Carol Oppenheim, "and it sent shock waves through the Jewish community."  "A feature by '60 Minutes' that backed up Sack seemed to promise major attention and at least minor bestsellerdom," noted the Washington Post, "but the rest of the media either attacked or ignored the book. The general tenor was summoned up in Miami Jewish Week: "Do me a favor -- don't read this book." [STREITFIELD, p. D4]

 

     In 1994, John Lombardi wrote a disturbing article for New York magazine about the Sack story and the massive censorship surrounding it. Lombardi called his piece "The Book They Dare Not Review: An Inconvenient Holocaust Story." Lombardi formerly worked at Advance Publication's GQ magazine, the periodical that had initially paid Sack $20,000 to research and write about the Jewish concentration camp overseers, only -- after the article had been typeset -- to quietly kill it.

 

     The most venomous attack on Sack's book came from the New Republic (owned by avidly pro-Israel publisher Martin Peretz). Sack wrote a point by point rebuttal to their review, but the magazine refused to publish any of it in their Letters to the Editor section. "But," noted the Nation, "the magazine made the remarkable decision to sell him ad space to run it ($525 for five column inches). The ad was typeset, but the magazine then chose to reject it."  [WIENER, p. 287]  Leon Wieseltier, the Jewish literary editor of the New Republic, was even quoted as saying, "I'm not embarrassed to say that as part of my job of policing the culture, I felt that the sooner we stopped this book, the better.... It's one of the stupidest books I ever read, and I frankly resolved to do as much damage as I could." [LOMBARDI, p 18] Elan Steinberg, spokeswoman for the World Jewish Congress impugned the veracity of Sack's dozens of interviews with Jewish (and other) eyewitnesses to Jewish-created atrocities, saying: "You cannot rely on witnesses ... [because] you're insulting the memory of 6 million [Jewish Holocaust] martyrs." [LOMBARD, p. 18]

 

     In 1997, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC suddenly cancelled a lecture by Sack about his book and his findings therein. "The invitation to give your lecture was issued without my knowledge," wrote Director Walter Reich to the Eye for an Eye author, "Having had the opportunity to examine the matter, I have determined that holding the presentation would not be compatible with the Museum's programs." [STREITFIELD, p. D1]  In turn, Sack decided to rent (for $301) a room at the nearby National Press Club to discuss his book and the censorship around it. There is no record in the major national computer research database of America's newspapers that Sack's press conference was ever reported upon.

 

       "It would be tempting to simply dismiss this painful book as the work of an anti-Semitic crackpot, as many have," wrote Jewish author Carol Oppenheim, "The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time have ignored An Eye for An Eye [i.e., not reviewed it]. But John Sack is a noted journalist with some forty years experience. His work on the Vietnam War is studied in college classes. And he is also a Jew." [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

 

     And what are we to make of the case of Victor Ostrovsky, former Mossad agent and author of 1990's By Way of Deception, an expose of the international workings of the Israeli Mossad organization? Although Israel managed to briefly, and literally, ban his book in America through the American courts, the censorship was soon lifted. [See earlier discussion] "We will get to him by other means, we will break him economically," the head of the Mossad, Israel's CIA, then told the Israeli media. "I'm now convinced," wrote Ostrovsky in 1997, "that I am the target of a broad collusion between elements of the Israel government and their gofers, mostly in the American Jewish community ... My second book was ignored ... A speaker's bureau in Toronto, which seldom had trouble arranging speaking engagements with student and other groups eager to have me as a speaker, found that the engagements were cancelled before I could appear." [OSTROVSKY, 1997]

 

    When Ostrovsky appeared on Canadian national television, Yosef Lapid, the former chief of Israeli television, declared on the same show, via satellite from the Jewish state, that Ostrovsky's assassination by the Mossad could cause diplomatic problems now that he lived in Canada, but "I hope that there would be a decent Jew in Canada who would do the job for us."

 

     Ostrovsky was later stunned that no North American media outcry rose against this call for his assassination on live public television. (Recall, in contradistinction, the mass media outcry against Iran's death sentence on author Salmon Rushdie. Iran, of course, is a declared arch-enemy of Zionism. And what, one wonders, would happen to a former president of CBS who called for murder?) But Lapid? Nothing. A reporter from USA Today interviewed Ostrovsky about Lapid's public threat and planned to write a story about it, but, "while I was still in his office," laments Ostrovsky,  "his editor told him by telephone to kill the article." "The same people," wrote the former Mossad agent, "who presumably would praise someone from the CIA or the U.S. armed forces who exposed serious wrongdoing in those institutions were now hard at work to smother my criticisms of an intelligence agency for a foreign country that, to put it as charitably as possible, does not have America's best interests at heart."

 

      Eventually he sought to sue the man who called for the call to kill him, but Ostrovsky's lawyer soon bailed out, explaining "that the safety of his staff would clearly be jeopardized if he proceeded." Soon thereafter, Ostrovsky had financial problems with both his publishers, HarperCollins and, in Canada, Stoddart. His agent suddenly refused to return his calls and in due time his "house burned to the ground. The fire marshal's report declared it arson." In 1997, Washington publisher Regnery backed out of a plan to publish his next book, already listed in its upcoming books catalogue. "It suddenly occurred to me," Ostrovsky wrote,

 

     "for the first time, that the forces of racism, bigotry and apartheid

      may win, even here in North America. In calling out, finally, for help,

      I suddenly fear that I will only be shouting into the wind. To all who

      believe that 'it can't happen here,' I say beware. It is immensely

      satisfying to take a stand and speak out against coercion and tyranny.

      But ... although your friends cherish you, they may choose to do it

      from a distance." [OSTROVSKY, V., 1997, p. 37, 84-85]

 

       In another case of covert censorship, in 1996 the London Sunday Telegraph took note of an unusual article by American Jewish journalist Philip Weiss:

 

      "A studied silence has greeted the cover story in the normally

      scrupulously liberal New York magazine which claims that Jews

      in America wield so much power and influence that they need no

      longer fear the shadow of anti-Semitism. The magazine refuses to

      discuss the article, as apparently does the author, Philip Weiss ...

      The weekly must have known it was inviting trouble. Even the cover

      seemed a calculated risk: a photograph of the American flag with

      some of its stars replaced by the Star of David. American magazines

      rarely confront the issue of Jewish influence so directly.... Richard

      Goldstein, a columnist for the Village Voice, has already remarked

      that the fact Jews have achieved so much influence despite the anti-

      Semitic views of many Americans is 'less a paradox than a time-bomb.'

      The irony, of course, is that the issue is one that has been privately

      discussed among Jews for decades." [LANGTON, p. 24]

 

     In another censorial case, 1989 BBC reporter Alan Hart complained that United States publishers were afraid to publish his less-than-condemning book about PLO leader Yassar Arafat because they "privately feared a backlash from supporters of Israel." The volume, Arafat: A Political Biography, had already appeared in three editions in Great Britain -- first published five years earlier. Over 40 American publishers had passed on publishing Hart's work until Indiana University Press decided to do it. In a formal statement, the university publisher remarked that it was "not unaware that some form of self-censorship might have been the cause" for the lack of American publisher interest. [ABRAMS, G., 6-19-89, p. 5, 1]

 

      In 1996 the Christian Science Monitor noted the attack upon a famous Catholic cleric in France, headlining its article: "Cleric's Comments Ignite the Fury of French media." The origin of this controversy stems from a book by Roger Garaudy: The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics. Garaudy, as noted earlier, wrote this volume that criticized Israel, Zionism, and the Holocaust as Judeo-centric propaganda; it has been effectively banned in France. The author, an 82-year old former Resistance fighter against the Nazis, was also once a Communist member of the French parliament (expelled from the party in 1970 for criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and later a convert to Islam. He was fined $20,000 by a French court for writing his book, which, declared the court, "questions all Jews, not only Israelis ... Far from merely criticizing Zionism ... Roger Garaudy embarked on a virulent and systematic questioning of crimes against humanity against the Jewish community." [ROSENBERG, C., 2-27-98]

 

      The Christian Science Monitor noted that Garaudy's book was available in only one bookstore in Paris, and it was not possible to even order the work in many of the others. The Monitor also noted that most of the critics of the book have not read it and that "Garaudy's book does not deny that millions of Jews were murdered by the Nazis."  "A "prominent jurist," Francois Terre, called the 1990 Gayssot Law (that "makes it a criminal offense to challenge the facts of the Holocaust") totalitarian: It was "a law that kills historical research and dishonors France ... Even politicians who oppose the law have been reluctant to speak out against it." [CHADDOCK, G., 7-25-96, p. 5]

 

     The Catholic cleric Abbe Pierre fell into the controversy surrounding the book soon after. Pierre, noted the Washington Post, was "France's most admired man ... For five decades [he] ranked consistently at the top of the popularity polls in France for his defense of the downtrodden. As a champion of street people and a former activist in the anti-Nazi resistance, Abbe Pierre commanded universal respect and unrivaled media coverage." [RANDALL, J., p. 7-3-96, p. A27] Pierre's activities in the French underground also included smuggling Jews to safety. He is the founder the Emmaus foundation, 350 centers around the world for the homeless and poor.

 

     The cleric's problems began when he publicly came out in support of Garaudy. Knowing the author for fifty years, Pierre attested to his integrity. "I think the average Frenchman," said Pierre, "will say with relief the taboo [about how the Holocaust may be examined] is over. You will no longer be called anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic for saying a Jew sings out of tune." [RANDALL, J., 7-3-96, p. A27]  Unfortunately for Abbe Pierre, however, not understanding the power of such forces against such an open comment, this was a gross miscalculation.

 

     The 83-year old cleric was barraged with critical attack from all sides -- from the French media, civil rights groups, and eventually -- seeking to assuage vociferous Jewish complaint -- the Church itself. France's chief rabbi called Pierre's words those of an anti-Semite. The president of the Jewish Consistory of France declared that: "[Abbe's] continuous support of Roger Garaudy is unacceptable." [PHILLIPS, I., 5-39-96, p. 13] Under an avalanche of criticism, Pierre took refuge in a monastery in Italy. For a while the old cleric continued to defend his position, digging himself deeper into controversy, noting that Jewish suffering was only part of the calamity of World War II. He also "said that according to the Bible, the Jews committed a genocide comparable with the Shoah when they entered Palestine 12 or 11 centuries before Christ." Addressing Zionism, he called it "a world conspiracy," that it was "based in the United States with world ramifications," and he implored people to have "the honesty to look at the truth."  Zionism, said the cleric, "want[s] the empire promised to Abraham. And this movement is plotting worldwide for that." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 6-17-96] [See later chapters for discussions of Zionism]

 

     The attacks upon Frances national "saint," suddenly fallen, continued. Months later a British newspaper noted that "it is clear that the debate left him traumatized. His conversation [now] is scattered with references to his friendship, help towards, and empathy, with the Jews." [FINANCIAL TIMES, 6-21-97]  The Washington Post's reporter Jonathan Randall ended his report on Pierre with a suggestion of senility in the old man. Quoting Charles DeGaulle, Randall concluded his piece, saying: "Old age is a shipwreck." [RANDALL, J., p. 7-3-96, p. A27]

 

       Overwhelmed by the attacks against him, Pierre finally publicly surrendered. "The attacks of which I have been targeted have been beyond all measure," he said. "I have greatly suffered." [PHILLIPS, I., 5-30-96, p. 13]  He announced that "I have decided to retract my statement, and to bow entirely to the sole opinion of the experts of the Church," also adding that his comments had been "exploited by elements who dangerously toy with the anti-Semitic, neo-fascist, and neo-Nazi currents that I have fought and will always fight against." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 7-23-96] 

 

     A controversy of a somewhat related vein occurred in Montreal, Canada, a year before the Abbe Pierre story. A prominent Canadian Jewish lawyer, Julius Grey, faced an avalanche of Jewish condemnation and outrage when he freely noted in a lecture at John Abbott College that "I think the Holocaust and anti-Semitism is being used by some elements and Israel and the Jewish community to keep people in the fold. What is happening is a fake alarmist mentality, because there is effectively no anti-Semitism in North America ... [Modern teaching about the Holocaust] is turning it into a political incident. Each ethnic group creates its own martyrology, that we're good and kind and we've been mistreated." [CHERNEY, 4-25-95]

 

    Response to Grey's comments was overwhelming in the Jewish community. Mike Cohn of the Canadian Jewish Congress told a reporter that "in the many years I've been at the congress, I don't remember getting this many phone calls from irate members of the community." [CHERNEY, 4-26-95] In the flurry of subsequent editorials about the controversy, one non-Jewish commentator noted that "the effect of the reaction to Grey's remarks could be to intimidate, to stifle open debate, to chill free expression. For after seeing what happened to Grey, others may think twice about expressing unconventional opinions and ideas." [MACPHERSON, D. p. B3] The original (Montreal) Gazette reporter who reported the Grey story later wondered in a later article about "the rush to discredit and silence Julius Grey ... [Does] a writer need ... a special license to deal with the Holocaust, or a lawyer need to get permission from the community's institutions to talk about it ... Could that ... silence dissent?" [CHERNEY, E., 4-29-95, p. B6]

 

      Elsewhere, in the more personal realm, when Tom Bower sought to publish his unauthorized and highly critical biography of Robert Maxwell, the British Jewish media baron invoked litigation involving at least twelve lawyers, a number of accountants, and two private detectives in researching Bower's background. Failing in the courts to stop the book, Maxwell's army of censors intimidated -- by economic threats and intimidating legal innuendoes -- much of England's publishing world. Wholesale book distributors and most British bookshops knuckled under to Maxwell's power, and didn't carry the book. The mogul even bought a paperback company that held the rights to Bower's pending volume in order to effectively censor it. [BOWER, p. ix-x]

 

     In 1997, in a story about Jewish South African mogul Sol Kerzner, the New York Times noted that:

 

        "In an early test of press freedom under South Africa's new

        constitution, a well-known international casino magnate has

        delayed the publication of a book about him and is trying to

        ban it.  The book, 'Kerzner Unauthorized' ... profiles Sol Kerzner

        [who] made his fortune operating [casinos] under apartheid in

        south Africa's black ‘homeland’.... [He] has threatened to sue

        local newspapers if they excerpted it. As a result, a major Sunday

        newspaper withheld publication of an excerpt from the book."

        [MCNEIL, p. A3]

 

        The author of the Kerzner volume, Allan Greenblo, is credible; he is himself the CEO of two major South African publications -- the Business Day and the Financial Mail. (Perhaps he himself is Jewish?)

 

     Jewish author Steven Weinberg (author of Armand Hammer: The Untold Story) was even sued by corrupt Jewish mogul Armand Hammer. "After The Untold Story was published in England, Armand filed the most expensive libel action in British history, suing Weinberg on 157 counts of defamation." [BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 449]

 

     In 1988, yet another Jewish business mogul family (Canada's Reichmanns, at the time owners of the largest real estate empire on earth) sought to censor the truth about their past.  The (Montreal) Gazette notes that:

 

      "These are dangerous waters for any journalist. In 1988, Toronto Life

       magazine was hit with a $102 million libel suit for publishing an article

       by freelance writer Elaine Dewar which investigates [patriarch] Samuel

       Reichmann's murky past as an egg dealer in pre-war Austria and then

       as a currency speculator in wartime Tangiers. Toronto Life's eventual

       apology and out-of-court settlement suggested that 'libel chill' can be

       an effective deterrent for any wealthy family seeking to keep a curtain

       of privacy around itself." [HADEKEL, p. I]

 

      In the same realm, as microcosm for the whole problem of censorship and self-censorship in the mass media world, in reviewing Jewish Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz at the peak of his power, Robert Slater noted that

 

      "As the most powerful person in [Hollywood], Ovitz had the power,

      if he chose, to use it in order to punish any critic who went public by

      denying him or her all access to his stable of stars. The mere possibility

      that he exact such punishment was enough to silence his critics ... No

      Ovitz critic was willing to speak out either on or off the record."

      [SLATER, p. 202]

 

     In August 1992, John H. Richardson, a senior writer at Premiere magazine in Los Angeles, finished a story about Jewish madam Heidi Fleiss and her drug and prostitution ring in the Hollywood community. The entertainment magazine, dependent upon cooperation with the movie world for its very existence, decided against publishing the piece. The Entertainment Weekly also developed an article about the story, but threats of legal action from attorneys for Columbia executive Michael Nathanson killed the story. The Hollywood Reporter also had an article about Fleiss too; this too was aborted when Nathanson threatened to "destroy [each reporter's] reputation" if the story was published. [KENNEDY, D., 8-20-93]

 

     Reporter Dan Moldea experienced a similar situation when he dared to write an expose (published in 1986) about mogul Lew Wasserman at MCA. Moldea who has written about crime for over twenty years (including books about the murder of Bobby Kennedy, the Teamsters Union, and corruption in professional sports), noted that "Writing Dark Victory [about Wasserman] was the only time I ever really feared for my career. I felt raw power coming at me like a rifle shot." [MCDOUGAL, p. x] "Moldea," notes Dennis McDougal, "maintains that he was followed and his phone lines tapped during the year he worked on the book. He is certain that Lew Wasserman targeted him for harassment." [MCDOUGAL, p. x]

 

     Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Knoedelseder also faced blatant censorship when he tried to write about the Wasserman-MCA-Mafia world, which extended to powerful influences in the Reagan White House (Wasserman was Reagan's Hollywood agent). The reporter, notes Dennis McDougal,

 

     "changed his mind about his newspaper's independence.... Somewhere

     in plusher, upper reaches of the Times, beyond the hard scrabble

     cubicles of the newsroom, Lew was enjoying lunch with the newspaper's

     executives ... Knoedelseder's stories about MCA and the derailed Mob

     probe [at Los Angeles City Hall] began to get rejected regularly by his

     editors. He was instructed to switch interests and write about something

     other than MCA for a change. Before the year was out, stories about

     MCA and the Mob ceased to appear in the paper at all, and Bill

     Knoedelseder quit his job at the Times." [MCDOUGAL, p. 468]

 

    In 2000, Los Angeles Times reporter, Kim Murphy, a 17-year veteran newswoman, wrote some articles about the community of "Holocaust Deniers" and alleged right wing political groups that led to many Jews "accusing the Times of legitimizing the views of anti-Semites." The first article addressed controversial British historian David Irving who had attempted to, in effect, sue the international Jewish lobby that had destroyed his writing career. Murphy's attempts at objectivity rankled a lot of Jews and the reporter soon found herself under fire. "The story outraged members of the Los Angeles Jewish community," notes Eric Umansky, "The controversy even found its way into the Times newsroom." At close quarters, fellow Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Abramson, of course Jewish, decried Murphy's work, as did another Jewish newsman, David Lauter, the Times religion reporter, who said, "Kim is a very good reporter. But I think she screwed up on this particular subject." The Times' executive editor, Leo Wolinsky, also Jewish, "signed off on Murphy's second story after asking her to quote more sources critical of Irving." Murphy publicly defended herself, insisting that

 

     "The Holocaust was horrible, "[but] it's my profound belief that

     there are no questions that can't be asked. This is an issue of

     political correctness. There are just certain things you are not

     allowed to say, even in this country." [UMANSKY, E., 9-2000]

 

     During the era of the 1980s Savings and Loan scandals across America, Wall Street Journal reporter Charles McCoy was set to run an article about the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's questionable decision to allow J. Livingston Kosberg's First Texas Savings and Loan (fourth largest in Texas) to acquire Gibraltar Savings (the state's largest S&L whose principal investor was Saul Steinberg). Connected to the deal was yet another influential Jewish entrepreneur, Robert Strauss, former chairman of the Democratic National Party and head of the Jimmy Carter campaign against Ronald Reagan. Reporter Martin Meyer notes that

 

     "In my presence [Strauss] chewed reporter McCoy out on the telephone

     for a quarter of an hour, informing him that he (Strauss) was close to

     Warren Phillips [also Jewish], CEO of Dow Jones, and thus McCoy's

     employer, and Strauss would have his ass if there was stuff in the story

     of which Strauss disapproved ... [So] McCoy wrote carefully, and you

     had to know what the numbers [in his story] implied to know what the

     story said."  [MEYER, M., p. 14]

 

     "The deal shouldn't have been approved at all...," remarks Meyer, "First Texas was a sinking ship, losing money on its lending operations ... [But] with Strauss on one side and [Jewish junk bond manipulator Michael] Milken on the other, the Bank Board was completely surrounded by political influence ... First Gibraltar's star board member was [also] Strauss' son, Richard (who was further blessed in Dallas by his aunt, the mayor)." [MEYER, M., p. 13-14]

 

      In 1992, director/actor Woody Allen faced public embarrassment when actress Mia Farrow (who had a common law relationship with him for many years; she was also once married to Jewish conductor Andre Previn) accused Allen of having an affair with one of their teenage adopted daughters, and that he had repeatedly sexually molested another daughter, a young child. Criminal charges, however, were another story. Allen conceded, and defended, his sexual relationship with the older daughter but denied any other incidents with others. Paul Williams, the New York Child Welfare worker on the case, noted that

 

     "based [on the child's] demeanor and her responses to my questions,

     and my conversations with the caseworker in Connecticut, and

     my experiences from interviewing hundreds of children who have

     been abused, I concluded that abuse did occur and that there was

     a prima facie cause to commence family-court proceedings against

     Woody Allen. Then the barriers came down. There came a litany of

     reasons why we should not go forward. My superior said that Woody

     Allen is 'an influential person,' she talked about his films, and his

     'position.' As more evidence came through interviews, I insisted that

     the case should have been filed. Managers at the Child Welfare Agency

     responded that 'pressure [to drop the case] is coming all the way from

     the mayor's office [Jewish mayor: Ed Koch]." [FARROW, p. 311]

 

      The case was dropped. A child custody trial featured Allen represented by six different law firms. [FARROW, p. 316] Later, the Connecticut state attorney, Frank Maco, announced that "probable cause" for Allen's arrest existed, but that by then Farrow had decided a public trial would be extremely detrimental to the abused child. [FARROW, p. 329]

 

      In 1997 Peter Watson's sensational expose of the systemic corruption within the Sotheby art auction house (headed by Jewish real estate mogul Alfred Taubman) "sparked scandalous headlines on both sides of the Atlantic when it was released in Britain." [NY POST, 2-2-98] "Now that [the book] has finally arrived [in America]," noted the New York Post, "the press doesn't seem to be showing much interest. So far, only the weekly New York Observer has reviewed it -- and even that is going Sotheby's way." [NY POST, 2-2-98]  The American publisher of the book, Random House (owned by Jewish mogul Si Newhouse) backed its publication up three times and revised part of the European version. The Post suggested that "Sotheby is getting kid glove treatment thanks to Alfred Taubman getting a favor from Random House owner Si Newhouse -- an avid collector known to spend millions at auctions." [NEW YORK POST, 2-2-98, p. 12]

 

     In 1999, independent journalist and art critic Hector Feliciano found himself facing a $1.8 million lawsuit at the hands of the (Jewish) Wildenstein family (Daniel, Alec, and Guy). Feliciano had dared to write about the family's clandestine art dealings with the Nazis during Hitler's looting of Jewish-owned art treasures. "They're suing me," said Feliciano, "so that other journalists will think twice about writing about them." [GOLDBERG, J. J., 6-18-99, p. 14]

 

     Dissident ("self-hating") Jews too are not immune from enforced censorship about public criticism of their community. British reporters Christopher Reed and Eleanor Mills note a well known case in Hollywood:

 

     "An example of Tinseltown shyness about criticism of Jews is Budd

     Schulberg's book What Makes Sammy Run? Now 82, he wrote the

     classic about a ruthlessly ambitious Hollywood type called Sammy Glick,

     in 1941. Five attempts to film it have failed. After reading the book,

     MGM studio chief Louis Mayer said Schulberg should be deported.

     It was pointed out that the author was not only born in America, he

     was the son of the head of Paramount." [He was also Jewish] [REED, p.

     2]

 

     "The charge of anti-Semitism was laid on the book," notes the Los Angeles Times, "although Schulberg pointed out that all of Sammy's victims were Jewish too ... These days, Schulberg fears that What Makes Sammy Run? has become what he calls 'a handbook for yuppies.'  'It's a new handle on Sammy," Schulberg says, "Sammy's credo of success at all costs and it doesn't matter how you get there makes the book seem not truly merely entertaining but a Bible of sorts." [CHAMPLIN, p. F1]  (Along the same censorial lines, in 1963, Jewish cinema verite documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles' unforgiving film about Hollywood producer Joe Levine evoked such anger in the Hollywood community that "members of the Oscar screening society reportedly found 'Showman' so anti-Semitic that they watched only five minutes before walking out." [JEW JR LA, 1-16-98, p. 26] (Levine, notes Thomas Hoving, "earned his millions by buying nonentities such as the Italian Hercules films starring Steve Reeves and Godzilla, the Japanese monster movie, and hyping them shamelessly." [HOVING, T., 1993, p. 396]

 

     Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls wanting to play the lead acting role in What Makes Sammy Run? "I had several meetings with Lew Wasserman, then the president of MCA," Fisher says,

    "the talent agency that represented me. I wanted to play the lead, an aggressive
     producer named Sammy Glick, maybe the ultimate Jewish hustler. I knew a lot of
     real Sammy Glicks and I felt confident that was a character I could play.
     Wasserman decided Sammy Glick was 'too Jewish, too negative.' He hated the
     concept and did not want the picture made. I think he decided it was bad for 
     the Jews." [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 90]
 

 

     Angry reaction by the Jewish community to members of their own depicting such Jewish "success stories" is not uncommon. The (Montreal) Gazette noted Mordechai Richler as one of Canada's best known writers, but

 

   "caustic, controversial, and often crude ... [Richler's novel] Dudley Kravitz

     remains the best-selling of Richler's works. A comic extravaganza of a

     coming-of-age novel, it tells the story of a 'scheming little bastard,' a

     coarse, driven, young Jew determined to make something of himself at

     any cost. A critical success both in Canada and beyond, the book

     inspired a raging controversy and denunciation by the Jewish community

     that Richler [who is Jewish] was an anti-Semite." NAVES, p. 12

 

      In the movie making world, in 1996 actor Arnold Schwarzenegger learned a bit about Jewish censorial power when he dared to consider to make a film about a real life character, a Nazi captain named Osterman who refused to kill a group of British prisoners during World War II. His interest came in the wake of Jewish director Steven Spielberg's colossal hit Schindlers List, where a Nazi saves Jews. Scheduled to begin shooting in ten weeks, the director of Schwarzenegger's project backed out of the film. "Other directors," noted the London Sunday Times, "have privately admitted they are avoiding a film that might offend the powerful Jewish lobby in Hollywood ... According to Hollywood reports, Joel Schumacher, who is directing the latest Batman film, offered Schwarzenegger a short word of advice about making the film, 'Don't.'" [HARLOW]

 

     In 1999, in an overtly censorial and revisionist move, the British ITV television company announced that it was sweetening the unpleasant Jewish "Fagin" character in their new filming of Charles Dickens' classic novel Oliver Twist. In the new version too, he would not be Jewish. "We don't want a Fagin that is a Shylock character," said the ITV Director of Programming, David Liddiment. "This decision," noted critic Rhoda Koenig, "exemplifies not only a lack of understanding of our literary heritage, but a contempt for the past itself. It is also an example of the sentimentality, arrogance, and cowardice that are now passed off as 'sensitivity' and 'responsibility' ... Why have we become so illiterate, so phony, and so craven? " [KOENIG, 7-7-99, pl. 13] Dr. David Parker, curator of the Dickens House Museum in London, responded, saying: "This softening of Fagin is done to political correctness. Literary stereotypes, however objectionable, should not be lightly cast aside." [HELLEN, 1-17-99]

 

      In 1997 the mainstream Jewish Thought Police struggled to censor (and failing that, at least marginalize) a book by a Jewish author, Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein, described in the (Jewish) Forward as "a notorious ideological opponent of the state of Israel," a man who characterized a more favored -- and best-selling -- Jewish author as a "Zionist propagandist who distorted evidence in order to legitimate the existence of the state of Israel." [MAHLER, p. C1] Hearing that Finkelstein's book, A Nation on Trial, was set to be published by the Henry Holt publishing firm, "the literary editor of the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, was so startled by the news that he put in a call to Michael Naumann [also Jewish], an old friend and the publisher of Holt, assured that [Naumann] could not be familiar with Mr. Finkelstein's work." [MAHLER, p. C1]  The Anti-Defamation League was among those who publicly rallied against the publication of the "anti-Zionist and anti-Israel" work. "There seems no question," noted the Forward, "that the book is something of a hot potato. An esteemed historian who initially agreed to write the prologue to the book, Istvan Deak, a professor of Central European history at Columbia University, suddenly changed his mind." [MAHLER, p. C1]

 

     In the violent criminal underworld, vengeful censorship actions can be more draconian. Jewish journalist Robert Friedman was forced to go into hiding in 1998 when authorities informed him that Russian Jewish mobster Seimon Mogilevich (described by the Village Voice as "the World's Most Dangerous Gangster") was overheard contracting for Friedman's murder because of the journalist's expose about him.

 

     Various forms of censorship by the powerful -- usually by economic blackmail and intimidation -- is not uncommon in the mass media world, creating an environment of people worried about their careers and fear of their bosses, thereby becoming overly protective of Jews/Israel from criticism. Even leaving aside, for example, the issues at stake in the simple fact that the vast Newhouse media empire -- like so many others -- is Jewish-owned (a subject whose political implications publishers are certainly forbidden to address), any criticism of the Newhouse organization is smothered because of its omnipresent economic clout, media interconnectedness, and long arm of vengeance. Even in the academic world. Take the case of the Columbia Journalism Review and its Jewish editor, Suzanne Levine, who in 1992 wanted to find a writer willing to address the many negative changes affecting the New Yorker magazine after the Newhouses took it over. Thomas Maier notes that:

 

      "Levine went through numerous contacts until she found an out-of-state

       editor willing to accept the assignment. 'Why me?' asked the editor, Eric

       Utne, who runs his own alternative magazine. 'You're the perfect person

       to do it,' the Columbia Journalism Review told him. When Utne pressed

       for the real reason, he was told flatly, 'Because no one else will touch

       it.'" [MAIER, p. 347]

 

     In 1998, a small publisher, Seven Stories Press, published an "unauthorized biography" of the Newhouse family. A reviewer in the New York Times Book Review noted that "Citizen Newhouse was initially signed with Viking, but new management there took the unusual step of canceling the book when it was done -- a decision itself that was the subject of news articles and gossip columns. [Author] Felsenthal said that once she turned in the manuscript, Phyllis Grann, president of Penguin Putnam, Inc., parent of Viking, told her she couldn't publish it because too many people mentioned in it were friends." [GOLDSTEIN, T., p. 17]

 

     And what -- away from the mass-produced popular press -- of Jewish dominance of the more "high-brow" reading? The most widely-read American "intellectual periodicals," remarks W. D. Rubenstein,  "are either Jewish or contain a disproportionately Jewish input."  [RUBENSTEIN, p. 64] His list is five journals long:  Commentary, The Public Interest, the New York Review of Books, the Partisan Review, and the New Republic.

 

      Commentary is a house-organ publication of the American Jewish Committee (Jewish editors Elliot Cohen and then Norman Podhoretz),   "Commentary," wrote Richard Curtiss in 1998, "... has been around so long that probably few Americans even recognize it as the Israel lobby's principal national publication." [CURTISS, p. 9] In a 1990s survey of "3,000 prominent Americans" Commentary was ranked third behind the New England Journal of Medicine and Foreign Affairs among "most influential" print and electronic media. It was ahead of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. [TWERSKY, p. 40] "Many Commentary authors," says David Twersky, "have gone on to serve in government as a result, in large measure, of being read by the right people at the right time." [TWERSKY, p. 41] Such Gentile authors have included Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Daniel Moynihan (Commentary is well known for its "neoconservative" flavor).

 

    "[Editor Norman] Podhoretz's struggle with his Jewishness," notes Twersky, "is central to the evolution of Commentary ... [It] came to be defined by the desire of Jewish intellectuals to create a space for modernism without discarding their Jewishness." [TWERSKY, p. 43] Yet, according to editor Murray Polner of a second American Jewish Committee-published journal, Present Tense, (1973-1990), this second publication was founded  "because Commentary wasn't Jewish enough." [TWERSKY, p. 58] Former non-Jewish journalist Scott McConnell notes the unpleasant experience he had when (years after his employment at Commentary) he bumped into Podhoretz at a dinner party:

     "Norman was standing across a round table from me, looking older and frailer (and
     thus in a way sweeter). When I approached him, hand extended, his distaste in
     putting forth his own was palpable. 'I always liked you Scott. But you wrote an
     anti-Israel piece, and I'm very ideological on that subject' ... To be charged with writing
     an 'anti-Israel' column is no small thing -- it has been known to get people fired ...
     The U.S. gains nothing for its own reputation or interests by backing Israeli
     policies that are unjust to the Palestinians, reviled throughout the Arab world and
     opposed by most of the world's governments. In political Washington (as at some
     Hamptons dinner parties), life may go more smoothly if one doesn't do or say
     anything that irritates right-wing Zionists. As my encounter with Norman reminded
     me, the consequences of speaking out sincerely can be quite unsettling. But it|
     it is still the right thing to do." [MCCONNELL, S., v.14, ISSUE 30]

 

     The "New York Intellectuals [a group of influential social and political critics and theorists, whom Podhoretz calls "The Family"]," says David Twersky, were "a group made up largely (though not exclusively) of Jews ... writing in Partisan Review, and later Commentary and Dissent...., [they] helped fashion post-war American attitudes toward literature, culture, art and politics." [TWERSKY, p. 40] The Jewish author Irving Howe (himself benighted as one of "The Family") wrote in 1968 that

 

        "they have a fondness for ideological speculation; they write literary

         criticism with a strong social emphasis; they revel in polemic; they

         strive self-consciously to be 'brilliant;' and by birth -- or osmosis --

         they are Jews." [TWERSKY, p. 40-41]

 

      In a symposium in Commentary magazine in 1966, notes Arnold Eisen, "all the participants except the Reconstructionists and Rabbi Jacob Agus affirmed that Jews were God's Chosen People, and did so in the traditional terms of revelation, covenant, messiah, and exile, rather than by citing the Jewish contribution to civilization or explaining that, in fact, it was Jews who had chosen God ... Significantly, Commentary did not ask asks respondents whether the Jews were the Chosen People but in what sense they had been chosen." [EISEN, p. 149]

 

       The second of Rubinstein's "most widely read" intellectual journals is Public Interest, founded by Jewish conservatives Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell in 1973.   The third, The New York Review of Books, wrote Dennis Prager in 1980, "is still edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein ... most of its political writers were Jews, and its tone, in the words of Irving Howe ... was a 'snappish crude anti-Americanism."  Within a decade it was the "most influential magazine" among America's 275,000 academics. [KOSTELANETZ, p. 69]

 

     Jewish authors William Phillips and Philip Rahv (born Ivan Greenberg) were the founding editors of the reinstitution of the fourth of Rubinstein's noteworthy magazines, Partisan Review, in 1937. "The main difference between Partisan Review and Commentary," said Elliot Cohen, Commentary's first editor, "is that we admit to being a Jewish magazine and they don't." [PODHORETZ, p. 99-100] Even today, Partisan Review remains Jewish-dominated. The Editor-in-Chief remains William Phillips, the Editor is Edith Kurzweil, and Number three in the hierarchy is Associate Editor Steve Marcus. Joanna Rose is also Chairman of the Publications and Advisory Board.

 

     Lastly, of Rubinstein’s five seminal "high-brow journals,” The New Republic is still owned and edited by Martin Peretz, "one of the most militant defenders of Israel." [GOLDBERG, p. 299]  Peretz, once a bankroller of the left-wing Ramparts magazine, was described by a New Republic foreign editor as "a very emotional guy. He has certain passions in life, one of which is Israel. I hate to keep bringing in the Israeli thing, because I consider myself just as pro-Israeli, but it colored his whole view of the world." [CURTISS, p. 325] (Among other things, Peretz has served on the Board of Directors of Channel 7 TV in Boston. A Jewish friend, Robert Kraft, owner of the largest privately owned packaging company in America, also sat on the Board and was the station's number two shareholder). [WEINGARTEN, p. 4]

 

     In 1992, a 25-yeard old Jewish author, Ruth Shalit, "began interning at the New Republic. Practically overnight she became a star --a TNR Associate Editor writing cover stories for the political weekly as well as for the New York Times Sunday Magazine with a $45,000-a-year contract to do pieces for GQ." [SHEPARDl, p. 34]   She was also accused, notes the American Journalism Review, of "plagiarism, factual errors" and -- in one specific article -- racism, when she charged that the Washington Post "had lowered high standards in an attempt to diversify its newsroom and had softened news coverage of black politicians so as not to offend African-American readers." [SHEPARD, p. 34]

 

     In 1998, a (Jewish) Associate Editor at the New Republic, Stephen Glass, was even fired for fabricating the news stories he authored. Glass, noted the New York Times about the scandal, "had made up part or all of 27 articles he wrote." [NEW YORK TIMES, 4-18-00, p. C2] (A former editor of the New Republic, Michael Kinsley, also Jewish, today is the editor of Microsoft's Internet magazine called Slate. Michael Hirschorn edits rival Internet magazine Inside, and Scott Rosenberg is the vice president and "technology editor" of another of the major Internet magazines, Salon. Steve Waldman founded and edits the commercial religious web site, www.beliefnet.com )

 

      Other important intellectual journals over the years with links to the mostly Jewish "intellectual" clique include [d] Dissent, run by Irving Howe, Meyer Schapiro and Michael Walzer; Sol Levitas' New Leader; the New Criterion (publisher: Samuel Lipman); and the Menorah Journal; a periodical of entirely Jewish content. Hilton Kramer (for nearly twenty years a news editor and art critic for the New York Times) founded and edited the New Criterion; Peter Grose was managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Laurence Goldstein edits the Michigan Quarterly Review. Irving Horowitz founded the social-science periodical Transaction, now called Society, and Transaction Publishers. "Horowitz," writes fellow Jewish intellectual Nathan Glazer,

 

         "once an advocate of the generally undifferentiated poor and powerless

         and down trodden, has become over time much more concerned with

         one group in all its specificity: Jews ... Horowitz is much concerned

         with anti-Zionism, which he sees as extending to what he considers

         anti-Semitism -- even in sociology, with the large numbers of Jews

         working in it." [GLAZER, Decomp., p. 127]

 

     Theodore Solotaroff was the founding editor of the New American Review, as well as an Associate Editor at Commentary. Daniel Pipes is the founder and editor of Middle East Quarterly. At one point in time, "roughly half of all the articles of the American medical journals were authored by Jews." [KRAFETZ, p. 176]  Daniel Koshland, Jr., a descendant of the Levi-Strauss blue jean dynasty, is the former editor of Science magazine. In 1999, he donated $8 million to an Israeli university. [LUM, R., 11-19-99, p. 1A] And, as one Jewish observer noted in 1968, "For the last ten years 70 percent of the editors of the Yale Law Journal have been Jewish." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 224] Sam Bercholz, also Jewish, even founded Shambhala Books, "the first major publisher of Tibetan Buddhist works in this country." [KAMENETZ, R., 1994, p. 9]

 

     Billed as a left wing alternative to Commentary, and just as blatantly Jewish in concern, is Tikkun, the brainchild of editor Michael Lerner. In 1997 Lerner -- always heralding the beauties of Jewish values and ethics for the problems of modern society -- was exposed to be regularly (over a period of years) publishing "letters to the editor" written by himself under fake names. [KATZ, L, p. 3]  Lerner is publicly "known as Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's favorite philosopher." [COLLINS, L., 1994, p. 302]   In 1997, Danny Goldberg, the CEO of Mercury Records, became the publisher of Tikkun.

 

     The thinking of the educated public," wrote Charles Silberman in 1985," is strongly effected ... by a relatively small number of literary and intellectual magazines and journals ... Most of these publications are edited by Jews." [SILBERMAN, p. 145] Aside from the already mentioned publications, Silberman added Jewish editors William Shawn [original name: William Chon] of the New Yorker, Stephen Graubard of Daedalus, and Mitchell Levitas of the New York Times Book Review.  More eccentrically, I. F. Stone's Weekly was an expression of Stone's muck-raking "personal journalism." Likewise, one of the best known "liberal" periodicals in America, the Nation, is Jewish owned and edited (today by Victor Navatsky).   Another Nation editor, Katrina van den Heuvel is the granddaughter of MCA's Jules Stein. [MCDOUGAL, p. xi] Alfred Lilienthal, an anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Jew, wondered in 1950:

 

      "Who, I ask, are the liberals? The Nation Associates Freda Kirchway,

       Henry Wallace, Clark Eichelberger, Albert Barkley, William O'Dwyer,

       Ludwig Lewisohn, Abba Hillel Silver, all of whom have intolerantly

       and ardently supported Zionism? [LILIENTHAL, p. 145]

 

     In 1967, I. F. Stone (Isadore Feinstein) felt it necessary to write: "As a Jew, closely bound emotionally to the birth of Israel, [I feel] honor bound to report the Arab side, especially since the U.S. press is so overwhelmingly pro-Zionist." [LAGUEVIR/RUBIN, p. 327]

 

     Most of the best known "radical" and hippie 1960s-era newspapers were also Jewish-founded. These include The Realist (Paul Krassner, later an editor at Ramparts), the Berkeley Barb (Marvin Garson), Rat (Jeff Shero, who had funding help from Jason Epstein at the New York Review of Books, [NOBILE, p. 198], the East Village Other (Allan Katzman), and the Liberation News Service (Jesse Kornbluth and Marshall Bloom). [WHITFIELD, American, p. 145]  Arthur Kunkin, who eventually softened from being a "radical Zionist," founded the Los Angeles Free Press. [PECK, 1991, p. 22] Allen Cohen was "editor of the San Francisco Oracle." [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 152] Even in communist Russia, a Jewish author noted in 1969 that "younger Jewish intellectuals feature prominently in 'protest' campaigns, which here have taken the form of underground literature. Moscow's first underground magazine, Syntax, was founded by Alexander Ginsburg." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 100] Jeff Shero, editor of the above-mentioned Rat eventually "changed his name to Nightbyrd and launched a mail-order business selling drug-free powered urine." [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 228]

     "The leading exemplars of this genre [of radical journalism]," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, "such as the East Village Other, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and Detroit's the Fifth Estate, as well as 'alternative' papers like the Village Voice, the key personnel were invariably of Jewish background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 107] Today's versions of this include David Barsamian (founder and director of Alternative Radio), Michael Albert (editor of Z magazine), and Robert Weissman (editor of Multinational Monitor). Abby Goodman has for years been the news director at "progressive" Pacifica station WBAI in New York; she also hosts its national Democracy Now! program.

 

     Mother Jones, the well-known left-wing "social conscience" magazine, was largely founded in 1974 by the philanthropy of Adam Hochschild, heir to a fortune; he thereby became the magazine's original managing editor, as well as Board Chairman. Judging by his autobiography, Hochschild's commitment to create Mother Jones in behalf of the socially and politically dispossessed appears to have been, in major part, in atonement for the sins of his father. This man, Harold Hochschild, was the wealthy Jewish co-founder (and chairman) of an international mining syndicate that sent entire communities of Africans into holes in the ground for a miniscule wage, and engendered local wrath for its strip-mining in Appalachia, pollution of Indian fishing areas in British Columbia, and destroying Aboriginal lands in Australia. The younger Hochschild was even embarrassed to discover, while working on a series of exposes about the CIA as a staff member at an earlier left-wing journal, Ramparts, that for a decade his father was Chairman of the Board of the African-American Institute, a front for the CIA. [HOCHSCHILD, 1986, p. 130]  Adam Hochschild, noted the San Francisco Examiner in 1998, is "historically [Mother Jones'] largest funder and the wielder of very substantial clout within the foundation [that runs Mother Jones] ... Hochschild has placed an unspecified sum in a 13-year account which ... provides money year by year in diminishing amounts." [ARMSTRONG, D., 9-13-98, p. D1] As editor-in-chief Jeffrey Klein resigned in 1998, "creative director" Rhonda Rubenstein designed a new format for the magazine. Today's editor-in-chief at Mother Jones is Roger Cohn.

 

     Matthew Rothschild edits the left-wing Progressive (for years published by Erwin Knoll). James Weinstein is the founding editor and publisher of another influential leftist journal, In These Times. (Today's editor: Joel Bleifuss). Naomi Klein is a former editor of a Canadian leftist journal, This. As mentioned earlier, Jews have dominated Nation for decades. Louis Weisberg edits Chicago's gay newspaper, The Chicago Free Press. And as Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note about the world of American journalistic communism:

     "From the 1930s through the 1950s, Jews were quite active in the [Communist]
      party leadership. Almost half the Communist leaders tried for violations of the
      Smith Act in 1947 were Jewish. In the 1940s, the editor of the Daily Worker,
      the managing editor, and the labor editor were all of Jewish background.
      The publicly visible top leadership, however, was non-Jewish." [ROTHMAN
      LICHTER, 1982, p. 100]

     To the American political right, by 1997 Adam Meyerson edits the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review and Bill Kristol, also Jewish, former Chief of Staff for former Vice President Dan Quayle, publishes, and edits, the Weekly Standard, a journal he founded with fellow Jew John Podhoretz. Even William F. Buckley's well-known politically conservative (and supposedly Catholic) magazine, the National Review, founded in 1953, had a strong Jewish foundation. As George Nash notes:

 

     "The fact remains that a striking number of National Review's original

     luminaries were Jews. [Nash cites seven] Indeed, without them the

     magazine might have never gotten off the ground, for if Buckley was

     the founding father of the journal, its unlikely godfather was an Austrian

     Jewish émigré journalist named William S. Schlamm ... [And] it was

     Morrie Ryskind (1895-1985], a prize-winning playwright and Hollywood

     screenwriter, who organized a series of crucial fund-raising receptions

     for the project at his home in Beverly Hills. As a result, Buckley achieved

     more financial success with Ryskind's California friends than with anyone

     else except his own father." [NASH, G., 2000, p. 124]

 

    Other influential Jews associated with the National Review were Eugene Lyons, Frank Meyer, Frank Chodorov, and Ralph Toledano (an editor at Newsweek who was offered the Managing Editor job. He turned it down but later became the National Review's music editor). Marvin Liebman also "emerged as the outstanding fund-raiser, organizer and coordinator of 'agitation-propaganda' for a vast apparatus of conservative causes associated with National Review."  Will Herberg, also Jewish, became the journal's first religion columnist. [NASH, G., 2000, p. 124-126, 156]

 

    Other prominent politically conservative Jewish journalists these days include Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, David Frum, John Podhoretz, and Dan Feder. [FRIEDMAN, M., 1999, p. 110] Even the Christian evangelical World newsweekly (which has over 100,000 subscribers, reasonably comparable in size to the "premier magazine for evangelical Christians," Billy Graham's Christianity Today, which has a circulation of 150,000) is edited by Marvin Olasky. Olasky is a "Jew turned Marxist turned born-again Christian ... [He] oversees the magazine from his custom-built home in the posh hills of Austin, Texas ... He declared himself an atheist at 14, and became a committed Marxist at Yale -- even joining the Communist Party and touring the Soviet Union." [PERINA, K., JUNE 2000]

 

     And how about "radical" (i.e., anti-establishment, anti-Hollywood] documentary filmmakers? For two years (Jewish) film critic and historian Alan Rosenthal was "supported" by an Israeli university to do a book about international documentary filmmaking. (In 1980, the book was published by the University of California Press).  Although it was not a publicly stated interest of Rosenthal's, this side too of movie-making has also been largely Jewish. Rosenthal's list of the most important "radical" filmmakers of the 1960s includes the Maysles brothers, Ricky Leacock, Don Pennebaker, Bill Jersey, Fred Wiseman, and Alan King. For the 1970s, he singles out Barbara Kopple, Jill Godmilow, Julia Reichert and James Klein. [ROSENTHAL, p. 9]  Of 14 people cited, at least 8 are Jewish.

 

     Moving back towards mainstream documentary media, Rosenthal elsewhere observes that "one appreciates Barbara Kopple, Julia Reichert, James Klein, and Richard Cohen but it was directors like Al Wasserman and Douglas Leiterman who have helped enlarge the boundaries of broadcast documentary." [ROSENTHAL, p. 23]  Jewish documentary filmmakers or producers afforded chapter-length interviews in his book included Robert Vas, Abe Osheroff, Amalie Rothschild, Richard Cohen, Jerry Blumenthal (with a group), Julia Reichert and James Klein, Morton Silverstein, David Elstein, and Albert Wasserman.

 

     Wasserman, notes Rosenthal, had a career that covers the best years of 'CBS Reports,' the CBS ‘Twentieth Century’ series, and NBC's 'White Paper' series, which he helped originate. At present [1980] he works as producer on CBS's Sixty Minutes.' [ROSENTHAL, p. 91] "I was at CBS until 1960," says Wasserman, "Then I went to NBC with Irving Gitlin, who was a very important figure in the evolution of the television documentary." [ROSENTHAL, p. 93] Another Jewish writer, director, and producer, Fred Freed, merited an entire volume about his contributions to documentary television. [YELLIN 1973]

 

    For all the international muckraking of all these Jewish documentarians, none of them is noted in Rosenthal's volume to have turned their critical eyes to Israel, from which the volume's university support stems. And the only one who mentions Jews in any way is Robert Vas, who frames himself in the context of the Holocaust. By 1995, with the mass media increasingly celebrating Jewish themes, the world could look to more overt mass media Judeo-centrism when Stephen Spielberg funded the New York-based "Fund for Jewish Documentaries," an off-shoot of his National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

 

 

                               

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

 

     Like the film, television, and publishing industries, the musical recording business and general musical world is, and has been, in virtually all its important facets, dominated by Jews.

 

 

     Classical music? In 1968 Roger Kahn noted that "the four pre-eminent American orchestras are conducted by Jews: Erich Leinsdorf at Boston, George Szell at Cleveland, Eugene Ormandy at Philadelphia and Leonard Bernstein, who is about to retire from the New York Philharmonic. A look at the rosters of these orchestras reveals string sections all but solidly Jewish clear back to the rear desk in the furthest corner of the second violins ... [KAHN, p. 6].... A Jewish armada has conquered musical performance. Jewish names comprise the aristocracy of performers: Heifetz and Horowitz; Elman and Rubinstein; Piatigorsky and Koussevitsky; Bernstein and Stern; Fleisher, Glazer, Gomberg, Graffman, Roisman, Rosen, Schneider ... Jews dominate serious musical performance in America." [KAHN, p. 63-64]  Arnold Schoenberg is arguably "this century's most influential composer." [HEILBUT, p. 493] "In the 1920s he wrote (a still unpublished) Zionist drama and began with the preparations for his opera Moses and Aron." [GRUNFELD, F., p. xix] Philip Glass and Steve Reich are well-know composers in the "pushing the boundaries" avant-garde genre. "In the 1920s [Aaron] Copland was a primary influence in American music through the League of Composers." [PEYSER, J., 1987, p. 33]

 

     Joan Peyser, a biographer of Leonard Bernstein, notes the following about her subject:

 

     "The more one knows about Bernstein, the more complicated the

     portrait is of him as a Jew. Capable of working productively with    

     anti-Semites, he still holds a soft spot in his heart for fellow Jews,

     whom he says he finds superior to all others. 'He is so adamant

     about music being Jewish,' [conductor and composer Gunther]

     Schuller says, 'It is important to him that a composer is a Jew,

     that a performer is a Jew. He told me that Triplum, my composition,

     has a Jewish soul. That is meant as a compliment. I am not a Jew.

     When Lenny says, 'You can almost be Jewish,' that is considered

     by him to be one of the most supreme of compliments.'" [PEYSER,

     J., 1987, p. 409]

 

     Throughout the American geographical terrain, by 1998, Jews were prominent in directing/conducting America's orchestras: Yoel Levi of the Atlanta Symphony, David Zinman of the Baltimore Symphony, Daniel Barenboim of the Chicago Symphony, Yaccov Bergman of the Colorado Springs Symphony, Neal Gittelman of the Dayton Symphony, Stephen Gunzenhauser of the Delaware Symphony, Leonard Slatkin of the National Symphony (Washington DC), Gerhardt Zimmerman of the North Carolina Symphony, Joel Levine of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Victor Yampolsky of the Omaha Symphony, Eugene Kohn of the Puerto Rico Symphony, Robert Bernhardt of the Rochester Philharmonic, Philip Greenberg of the Savannah (Georgia) Symphony, Gerard Schwartz of the Seattle Symphony, Bernard Rubenstein of the Tulsa Philharmonic, and Joseph Silverstein of the Utah Symphony, among others. [BRUNNER, 1998, p. 736] James Levine became head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2001. The same year, a 25 year-old Israeli, Ilan Volkov, became the youngest conductor to ever be appointed to head the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

 

     In southern California, there exists the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, which "is an established and growing ensemble that aims to fill a cultural niche by exploring new or seldom heard music by or about Jews." Founder Noreen Green "is most proud of an original oration and concert, 'Women of Valor,' sponsored by Hadassah Southern California [the international Jewish women's Zionist group] which premiered at UCLA." [SMITH, L., 6-11-2000, p. E1]

     Harlan Robinson notes who dominated the musician (especially violinist) realm of the American classical music realm in the 1940s:

     "Further down the 1942-43 [Jewish impresario Sol] Hurok list was a recent addition
     to the stable: violinist Isaac Stern. Though at the time a newcomer, he, too, would
     eventually turn into a steady source of income. Stern would also become one of
     his manager's [Hurok] most trusted advisers and the patriarch of a group of
     Jewish musicians (especially violinists) whose imposing artistic and booking
     influence would come to earn them the ironic nickname the 'Kosher Nostra ...
     [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 287] ... [Itzhak] Perlman turned into a very popular
     and profitable addition to his list. So did another Stern recommendation, Pinchas
     Zuckerman. Together, they became the backbone of the Manhattan-based
     Jewish musical clique jokingly labeled the 'Kosher Nosta.'" [ROBINSON, H.
     1994, p. 427]
     
     Famed pianist Arthur Rubinstein was an ardent devotee of Israel:

     "Another matter that frequently enraged Rubinstein was the world's attitude
     -- or his interpretation of it -- toward Israel. In his last years, he was not
     merely benevolent toward Israel: he was a right-winger, certain that Israel
     could do no wrong. The territories that Israel had occupied in 1967
     were Israel's by right, he believed, and he said that the Palestinians were
     nomads in whom Lawrence of Arabia had unfortunately implanted the
     notion of being a people -- after which they had done nothing but
     procreate ... Since the Soviet Union had become the major supporter of
     Israel's opponents, Rubinstein even suggested that the United States bomb
     the Kremlin." [SACHS, H., 1995, p. 393]

     Rubinstein once donated $100,000 to Israel's Weizman Institute, he gave $50,000 to the Israel-American Cultural Foundation "in honor of Isaac Stern, on the violinist's sixtieth birthday," and he left $500,000 in his will to the city of Jerusalem. [SACHS, D., 1995, p. 394]
 

 

      In 2000, famous Jewish opera singer Beverly Sills (also chairwoman of New York City's Lincoln Center performing arts center) was in Seattle to speak to the northwestern chapter of Hadassah, the Zionist women's group. This was special news, noted the local newspaper, because Sills "limits appearances to a dozen a year, often speaking to members of Hadassah, a Jewish women's organization. She says, 'They're people trying to make the world a better place.'" [GODDEN, J., 5-2000, p. B1]

 

    In 1933, a researcher discovered consistent Jewish overrepresentation in the classical music world, including "51% of the first violins of twelve orchestras," 23.8% of the works "performed by symphony orchestras," and so forth. Why was this so? Comparing Jewish and non-Jewish children, Kenneth Sward found no intelligence differences, but speculated that "the Jewish child may be a superior all-around organism by 'nature.'" [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 188]

     Singer Jan Peerce (born Jacob Pincus Perelmuth) from the late 1930s to early 1950s "was a regular on the most popular classical music [radio] broadcast in American history ... In a story worthy of Hollywood, he was finally noticed [i.e., 'discovered'] by showman Samuel L. 'Roxy' Rothafel while performing as a singing violinist." [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 253-254] (Peerce "was so deeply religious that he had even disowned his son Larry, a film director, for marrying a gentile woman with two children). [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 459]

 Jewish influence in more popular music has been profound. During the rise of rock and roll, notes Jory Farr, "in many ways, the pop business was run as the film business in its heyday. It was a club, mostly Jewish, filled with wily impresarios, maverick street fighters, and out-and-out operators." [FARR, p. 126] In earlier years, the musical agent -- and later executive -- John Hammond, notes Frederic Dannen, "was the ultimate WASP in a preponderantly Jewish profession." [DANNEN, p. 62]  A network of Jewish executives, agents, managers, and other entrepreneurs have reigned supreme in the musical network for decades.  ("One writer in 1927," note Claire Pagackowska and Barry Curtis, "referred to jazz as reaching 'from the black South to the black North, but in between it had been touched by the commercial wand of the Jew.'") [PAGACKOWSKA, p. 242]

 

     Kenneth Kanter notes that:

 

     "Both as a business and as an expression of talent and creative artistry,

      American popular music was in large part shaped and formed by Jews,

      many of them immigrant newcomers to the American scene ... Virtually

      all the great names that come to mind when one considers popular

      music -- Rogers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Jerome

      Kern, George and Ida Gershwin, Irving Caesar, and Charles Harris,

      for instance, are Jewish names. Jews wrote the songs, Jews sang the

      songs, and Jews made sure that the songs were circulated to every

      corner of the country, for they founded and built America's publishing

      industry. Among the vanguard publishers were M. Witmark, Charles K.

      Harris, Joseph Stern, Shapiro and Bernstein, Harry von Tilzer, Leo Feist,

      T. B. Harms, and Irving Berlin [born Israel Baline]. Collectively their

      publishing firms came to be known as 'Tin Pan Alley' ... It was the Tin

      Pan Alley ethos, combining the commercial with the aesthetic, that gave

      our popular music its distinctive character." [KANTER, p. ix]

     The Jewish Tin Pan Alley monopoly of the music business was solid for decades. As H. F. Mooney notes:

     "By 1941, the virtual monopoly of the ASCAP (American Society of Composers
     Authors, and Publishers, organized in 1914), which had practically protected New
     York's ascendancy in the music market, was broken by legal judgment. The
     consequent opening of broadcasting and recording channels to non-ASCAP
     composers and publishers, many of them unknowns outside the conventional
     musical establishment of Tin Pan Alley ... marked the end of an era of increasingly
     urbane New York composers. These had been heavily Jewish ... Such New York
     Jews as Harold Arlen, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Vernon Duke
     (ne Dukelsky), Herman Hupfeld and Vincent Youmans had produced a pensive
     music of finesse and polish, often using minor strains in the cantorial tradition.
     Their melodic concepts influenced 'white' jazz instrumentalists -- themselves
     frequently Jewish -- flowing with increasing facility through plaintive but
     delicately restrained saxophones from Benny Kreuger in the early 1920s
     through Frank Trumbaujer to Stan Getz; and through the arabesque
     clarinets of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw." [MOONEY, H. F., 1972, p
     p. 258-259]

     (Per current Jazz, in 1998 the Cleveland Jewish News announced that "the world's No. 1 jazz group [is] Spyro Gyra. Meet the man who started it all -- Jay Beckenstein. The world-renowned musician and music producer and his jazz crew (Beckenstein and two other members are Jewish) have been legends since 1970.") [ALPEN, J., 5-1-1998, p. 46]

     Jewish domination of the music world did not, of course, end with the demise of Tin Pan Alley. As we shall soon see, Jewish influence merely broadened.

 

      Tin Pan Alley (a term invented by song writer/journalist Monroe Rosenfeld) [SHAW, A., 1982, p. 386] Jews were also instrumental in maintaining popular negative views about themselves. "The image of the Jews in the songs of the day," says Kanter, "was not terribly flattering. Jews were presented as money-grubbing, hand-rubbing old men who wore crepe hair and ran pawn shops. The Jews of Tin Pan Alley helped perpetuate this stereotype." [KANTER, p. 57]

 

    The Jews who dominated Tin Pan Alley and the turn-of-the century vaudeville world were also central in the popularization and propagation of profoundly demeaning African-American stereotypes. Pamela Brown Lavitt notes Tin Pan Alley and the many onstage Jewish "coon callers":

 

     "Jewish women vaudevillians at the turn of the century popularized

     what is now a little-discussed and misunderstood performance

     venue, known as "coon shouting" ... Trying to break into the

     entertainment business, [Tin Pan Alley entrepreneurs'] aesthetics

     were circumscribed in a vehemently anti-black and xenophobic

     milieu. By the mid-1880-s they had formed a tight-knit Tin Pan

     Alley industry that came to dominate vaudeville and early black

     musicals ... Intended as comedy, coon song ranged from jocular

     and dismissive to cruel and sadistic ... Coon song sheet music

     and illustrated covers proliferated defamatory images of blacks

     in barely coded slanderous lyrics. For example, the 'N' word and

     associated inferences were dispatched in words like 'mammy,'

     'honey boy,' 'pickinniny,' 'chocolate,' 'watermelon,' 'possum,'

     and the most prevalent 'coon.'" [LAVITT, P., 2000, p. 253-258]

 

     Especially well known Jewish "coon callers" included Sophie Tucker, Stella Mayhew, Fanny Brice, Anna Held, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson.

 

 

     Jews have long gravitated to an entrepreneurial exploitation of the Black cultural scene and jazz music. As Burton Peretti notes:

 

       "Aside from the hazards of the mob [organized crime] environment,

       the exploitation faced by jazz players was rather typical for this era

       [1930s and 1940s]. Jazz, like minstrels and ragtime before it, came

       under the control of professional promoters who sought to make music

       profitable. [They adapted] the technique of advertising, song plugging,

       and vaudeville ... Some promoters, like Joe Glaser (who managed Louis

       Armstrong in the thirties) were associates of organized crime who left

       the underworld when prohibition was repealed. Glaser apparently had

       overseen Al Capone's profits from the Sunset Cafe and a prostitution

       ring before he became Armstrong's manager in 1935. Many more

       promoters, however, were veterans of Tin Pan Alley, Manhattan's

       song-publishing industry, including Irving Mills, a former singer and

       songwriter who managed Duke Ellington's and other black bands in

       the thirties." [PERETTI, p. 147]

 

     Glaser ran the Associated Booking Corporation, often "the exclusive agent for many of the top Black performers. He became a close associate of many of the top underworld figures in Chicago and New York, whom he met through his band-booking agency." [MOLDEA, p. 14]  Glaser had been an early partner in the company with eventual MCA chief Jules Stein.  In 1962, mob-linked attorney Sidney Korshak, also Jewish, gained control of the ABC company. [MCDOUGAL, p. 141]

 

     Mills and Paddy Harmon, owner of Chicago's Dreamland Cafe, "sought and gained spurious renown, as Mills took partial credit for many Ellington compositions and Harmon patented and gave his name to a trumpet mute that had long been popular among Joe Oliver and other black players." [PERETTI, p. 148]   The rip-off of Black artists was a norm for the era. As Al Silverman notes in the case of Fats Waller:

 

       "In his time Fats wrote the melodies to over 360 songs. Not that many

        bear his name today, unfortunately, because when money was needed

        he'd write the music and sell all rights to unscrupulous Tin Pan Alley

        characters." [SILVERMAN, p. 129-130]

 

     "That practice of show business share-cropping ... in the 1920s and 1930s," notes the director of Harlem's Apollo Amateur Night, Ralph Cooper, "existed right on through the fifties and sixties. Its bitterness still exists among many performers to this day -- a bitterness from the theft of their songs, their sound, their talent." [COOPER, p. 199] Jewish singers "Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson," notes Donald Fischer,

       "performed in blackface at the beginning of their careers, singing black songs.
        They later built on their successes in this medium to develop national statures
        and professional successes with other music. However, their early songs were
        for the most part borrowed or plagiarized from African-American sources,
        with little or no public recognition -- or monetary reward -- for the creative
        talents that produced them." [FISCHER, D., 6-30-2000, p. 21A]
 

 

      Jews were also prominent in the overseeing of the Black community's jazz life, including the control of musical clubs in Black neighborhoods in a variety of American cities. "The invasion of the Black community by organized crime lords with connections to downtown money," notes Ted Vincent, "was certainly the most sensational contribution to the loss of Black oversight of neighborhood dance halls and theatres." [VINCENT, p. 176] "Slumming resorts" served a largely non-Black audience and "were noted for their riverboat decor, fake magnolia plants, and nearly nude dancers ... Perhaps the nationwide pioneer in the resorts was Isadore Shor's Entertainment Cafe."  [VINCENT, p. 78]  In Harlem, such clubs included Connie's Inn (owned by Connie Innerman) and the famed Apollo Theatre. "From the opening of the [Apollo] building in 1912 until 1934," notes Vincent, "the theatre was a showcase for white [i.e., largely Jewish] vaudeville burlesque shows, with white strippers coming to be the main attraction." [VINCENT, p. 189] The Apollo was eventually sold by "Burlesque Kings Hurtig and Seaman" to Sid Cohen and Morris Sussman, and then to Frank Schiffman and Leo Brecher. Brecher also owned the Douglas, the Roosevelt, the Lafayette Theatre ("the prime showcase for black talent in America") [COOPER, p. 44], and the Harlem Opera House located a block from the Apollo. [VINCENT, p. 189-192]  Jay Fagan, and Moses and Charles Gale (Galewski), founded the popular Savoy Ballroom in 1926.
    
     Mel Watkins notes the reputation in the Black community of dominant mogul Frank Schiffman:

     "Schiffman was a controversial figure in black entertainment. Admired and respected
     by some, scorned and excoriated by others, he was rarely viewed neutrally.
     His Machiavellian approach to business is a matter of record, and most would admit
     that he was an unrepentant shark in business matters. He quickly eliminated
     his competitors and for decades eradicated all serious competition, which
     earned him the grudging esteem of other showmen. Among performers, however,
     the estimate was not glowing. Of his knowledge of black acts, John Bubbles
     [an African-American performer of the era] said, 'Only thing he knew was how
     to get people cheap as he could, and work them as long as he could.' And
     John Hammond, a record producer and friend, flatly declared 'Frank had no
     artistic taste at all.'" [WATKINS, M., 1994, p. 386]
 

 

      Samuel Charters and Leonard Kunstad note the situation of another famous nightclub:

 

     "The Cotton Club had opened at 142nd St. and Lexington Ave. in 1922

      with a strict policy of white only. The owner, Bernard Levy, had pressed

      his policy, despite loud protests from the Harlem community. He used

      Negro orchestras and a Negro revue and ran it as a tourist attraction for

      society people who wanted to see a little of 'Harlem life' ... The club was

      forced to admit colored patrons during the next winter, but the prices he

      kept high and it remained predominantly a tourist attraction until the

      Depression." [CHARTERS, p. 217]

 

     New York's Latin Quarter club (with eventual branches in other cities) was also owned by a Jew, Lou Walters, father of famous newscaster Barbara Walters; Monte Kay was the founder of the famous Birdland jazz club. He too was Jewish. Mobster Morris Levy later controlled the place. The Panama was one of the top two cabarets in Chicago. It was owned by Isadore Levine. [BRICKTOP, 1983, p. 53] Bricktop, a famous international African-American nightclub manager from the 1920s-1950s, wrote about her time spent in Mexico:

     "The most prominent of the wheeler-dealers in Mexico City's American colony
     was a strange, tiny little man called Blumey. He was A. C. Blumenthal, a
     financier who had his fingers in many pies. He was once married to Peggy
     Fears, a Ziegfeld showgirl. Blumey went to Mexico City to dodge Uncle
     Sam's tax collectors, and he was just one of many rich Americans who had
     gone to Mexico City for that reason. The others lived quietly and  inconspicuously,
     but Blumey loved the limelight ... He had a stable of tall, beautiful girls
     who towered over him, and he could be found holding court every day in the
     Reforma Hotel, where he was the manager." [BRICKTOP, 1983, p. 223]

 

     As Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes about a common undercurrent in such night life:

 

     "Jewish Gangsters frequented nightclubs ... In fact, Jewish underworld

     figures owned many nightspots and speakeasies. In New York, Dutch

     Schultz owned the Embassy Club. Charley 'King' Solomon owned

     Boston's Coconut Grove. In Newark, Longy Zwillman owned the Blue

     Mirror and the Casablanca Club. Boo Boo Hoff owned the Piccadilly

     Cafe in Philadelphia. Detroit's [Jewish] Purple Gang owned Luigi's

     Cafe, one of the city's more opulent clubs. Jewish singers and

     comedians, such as Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Sophie

     Tucker played in the mob clubs." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 205]

 

      Upset with outsider exploitation and degradation of the Black community (where many night clubs were located), there was an effort by the Marcus Garvey African-American movement as early as the 1920s to institute Black-owned Liberty Halls "where the musical offerings would be part of an overall effort at community uplift and not just a profit-oriented business." [VINCENT, p. 114]

 

    (From France, even the international jet-set luxury playground/resort of "Club Med" was founded by Gerard Blitz, and built to power by Gilbert Trigano. Both are also Jewish. By 1999 the firm had 116 sites in 36 countries, now headed by Gilbert's son Serge. [REGULY, E., 4-25-88, pl. 24; MCDONELL, E., 5-1-99, p. D10] Hollywood's Roxy nightclub was founded by the Jewish managerial trio of David Geffen, Lou Adler, and Bill Graham. [KING, T., 2000, p. 187] La Boehme in Hollywood, Florida, was owned by Jack Lansky, brother of famous mobster Meyer Lansky. [THOMAS, D., 1991, p. 162] )

 

     Jews have of course been prominent over the years as musical performers. These included three of the most influential band leaders of the 1930s -- Benny Goodman ("the King of Swing"), Harry James, and Artie Shaw (Arthur Arshansky). More recent popular names include Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn, Arthur Fiedler, Stephen Sondheim, and many others.  As noted earlier too, by the 1930s MCA (Music Corporation of America) was a powerful talent agency, founded by Jules Stein and built later to power by Sidney Sheinbein and Lew Wasserman, who ultimately became one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Ronald Brownstein observes that:

 

      "By the mid-1930s, MCA controlled many of the country's most popular

       bands, from Tommy Dorsey to Artie Shaw." [BROWNSTEIN, p. 181]

 

      For years, MCA's Jules Stein, adds Michale Pye, "ran the music business so toughly that no dance hall would stand against him." [PYE, p. 18-19] In a 1946 antitrust trial that MCA lost, a Los Angeles federal judge "declared that MCA held a virtual monopoly over the entertainment business." The presiding judge also stated that MCA was "the Octopus ... with tentacles reaching out into all phases and grasping everything in show business." [MOLDEA, p. 2, 3] "The one man," notes non-Jewish band leader Guy Lombardo, "who probably more than any other solidified the business and hastened the era of the Big Bands was Jules Stein. He had started his Music Corporation of America in Chicago and to that city gravitated bands from all over the country, seeking the buildup and engagements they would get if MCA took them in the fold." Lombardo was also under contract to Stein. [LOMBARDO, G., 1975, p. 153] Stein even wrote an introduction to Lombardo's autobiography.

 

     For years MCA increasingly interfaced with Chicago's Mafia and other underworld personalities. Seemingly omnipresent in Hollywood was lawyer Sidney Korshak. "A close friend of Stein's and Wasserman's," says Dan Moldea, "Korshak quickly became one of the most powerful influences in the entertainment industry and in California politics ... [MOLDEA, p. 5] ... Korshak  ... has been described by federal investigators as the principle link between the [Hollywood] legitimate business world and organized crime." [MOLDEA, p. 2]

 

      And rock and roll? The Jewish foundation continued. "The most famous and important [rhythm and blues disc jockey]," note Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, "was ... Alan Freed, the father of Rock 'n' Roll ... Freed was credited with co-writing fifteen rock and rock hits including Chuck Berry's 'Maybelline,' but he did little more than promote any of them." [CHAPPLE, p. 56-57]  A biography of Freed notes that "by 1956, there was no bigger name in rock and roll than Freed, except Elvis Presley." [JACKSON, p. ix]  (Another of America's best known early disc jockeys was also Jewish, Murray the K, aka Murray Kaufman). In 1960, Freed was indicted for accepting $30,000 in bribes to play songs at his radio station.  "[Freed] grabbed the kids and led them to the great rock candy mountain," says Albert Goldman, "He named their music, coined its us-against-them rhetoric, created rock show biz, including the package tour ... Alan Freed is really one of the principal exhibits in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Ill Fame ... [He] was not only a crook but a self-righteous hypocrite. Even [Freed's manager] Morris Levy [with deep ties to the criminal underworld, particular the Mafioso Gigante family] had to concede that the 'Father of Rock 'n' Roll' was not a nice man. Speaking as one Jew to another Jew about a third Jew, Levy said simply: 'He could have been another Hitler.'" [GOLDMAN, p. 519-520]

 

      In a book about the Atlantic Records empire (later swallowed by Warners), Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie noted Morris Levy and the kinds of people that populated the rock and roll industry: "The truth is, with or without mob connections, Morris Levy was much more typical of the new music moguls than either [non-Jewish] Ahmet Ertegun or [Jewish] Jerry Wexler ... The world in which Atlantic had to survive was populated largely by hoodlums and hustlers." [WADE, p. 57] As Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records, once said, "You want to be in the record business? The first thing you learn is that everyone is a liar." [WADE, p. 60] "The early rhythm and blues companies were run by a fraternity of Jews ... They were tough and they were shrewd -- some say unscrupulous -- and they were alternately loved, despised, respected, and feared. The deep bond of these cultural outsiders prompted one gentile, mild rebuke in his voice, to comment that 'Yiddish was the second language of the record business." [COHODAS, N., p. 3-4, 2000]

 

     "To the general public," notes Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, "the music business seems to have a tremendous amount of corruption." [CHAPPLE, p. 226] "I think in Hollywood," media psychologist Stuart Fischel of California State University at Los Angeles told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, "people get into a kind of mind meld. You can come in as a relatively moral and ethical person, but eventually [Hollywood] produces a re-socializing of a subculture with different norms and ethics based on hedonism and materialism. It's hard to know what's going to breach the bounds of acceptable criminality in Hollywood." [ELLER, p. B8, B11] Aside from drugs, prostitution, and all the other extracurricular norms of the interrelated music, film, and television worlds of Hollywood, just at the most basic business level, "payola [bribery] has been a key factor in the establishment of major artists," says Roger Karshner, "the evolution of publishing dynasties and the creation of recording empires. Payola, layola, and taking care of business are the ABC's of the music industry past and present. It has taken many forms, and many publishers, artists, managers, and record people at all levels have participated in payola practices." [KARSHNER, p. 39]

 

     Probably the most important early rhythm and blues recording company was Chess Records, founded by Leonard and Phillip Chess, Jewish immigrants from Poland. They started out with a scrap metal business in the ghetto, then moved into the liquor business, eventually owning several bars in the Black neighborhoods of South Chicago, including the large Macamba Club, which was "reputedly a prime center for prostitution and heavy drug dealing." [DIXON, p. 78] The Chess brothers soon recognized a profitable opportunity open to them with the many Black musical acts that played at their nightclubs; the entrepreneurs soon embarked upon a recording business, eventually producing blues, gospel, and rock and rock music. Seminal Black artists who signed on to the Chess label included Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Chuck Berry, and many others. Berry's songs were among the most influential in rock and roll history. "Some people have called Leonard and Phillip Chess visionaries who recognized the potential in the visceral blues of post-World War II Chicago, "says Don Snowden, who co-wrote the auto-biography of bluesman Willie Dixon, "A far greater number have branded the Chess brothers as exploiters who systematically took advantage of the artists who created that music." [DIXON, p. 78]  The Rolling Stones even found seminal bluesman Muddy Waters still painting the Chess's home when they came to record in Chicago. [WADE, p. 71]

 

      Frank Schiffman, owner of a number of musical venues in New York's Harlem area, "was a ruthless competitor who would do anything, including take advantage of his black employees and exploit the great black artists who worked for him, in order to increase his profits and beat down the opposition." [COOPER, p. 44]  "Remember [Black singer] Little Eva Boyd?" asks Ralph Cooper, "She worked as a babysitter for two Tin Pan Alley [Jewish] rock and roll writers, Carole King and Gerry Goffen. They wrote a song called 'Loco-Motion' and they asked her to sing it ... Now [1990] she lives in North Carolina, where her people are from. She's a working mother on welfare. She works in a barbeque kitchen as a cook." [COOPER, p. 196]

 

     In 1997, Black singer Darlene Love won a lawsuit for back royalties against famous Jewish musical producer Phil Spector. (Originally awarded $263,000, it was later dropped down to $130,000.) Love was the anonymous lead singer on a number of 1960s-era Spector productions, including He's a Rebel, Da Do Ron Ron, He's Sure the Boy I Love, and other hits. In the early 1980s Ms. Love found herself cleaning toilets for a living, but her singing career later flourished anew. [WILLMAN, C., 10-15-88, CALENDAR, p. 10; WARRICK, P., 11-2-98]

 

     "I didn't know anything about the record business," said early rock and roll sensation Little Richard (of "Tutti Frutti" fame) about his rock and roll career. " I was very dumb ... I was just like a sheep among a bunch of wolves that would devour me at any moment. I think I was taken advantage of because I was uneducated. I think I was treated inhumane ... I think I was treated wrong and many people got rich out of the style of music I created. They are all millionaires, writ many times, and nobody offered me nothing." [WADE, p. 74]   Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie note Little Richard's lamentation, then add: "To which many, if not most, of his black musical contemporaries would add: Amen." [WADE, p. 74]  Among others, Richard had in mind the Jewish owner of Specialty Records, Art Rupe, who many years ago bought the rights to his songs for a paltry $10,000.

 

    Chuck Berry remembers being cheated by the Chess brothers:

 

     "[Phil Chess finally acknowledged] in writing that no songwriter

     royalties had been paid for three years on my Chess Records

     product ... [And in a review of Chess documents] I was

     surprised to learn that I had been paid the same songwriter

     royalties for an LP as I was receiving for a single record.

     Chess claimed to be unaware of this 'mistake,' as if they had

     never noticed that LPs had between eight and ten songs on

     them." [BERRY, C., p. 246-247]

    "In 1974 Howlin' Wolf filed a lawsuit against Arc Music [the publishing wing of Chess Records, it was co-owned by the Chess brothers and two brothers of Jewish band leader Benny Goodman] [COHODAS, N., 2000, p. 37] asking for $2.5 million for unpaid royalties from his songs ... In 1976 Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon filed identical lawsuits against the publishing company, alleging fraud and conspiracy and asking to paid money damages and to have their publishing contracts voided." [COHODAS, N., 2000, p. 308]
 

 

      In 1972, Martin Otelsberg became the manager of African-American musician Bo Diddley. Suspecting in later years that he had been swindled, Diddley filed suit against Otelsberg's estate in 1994 and recovered $400,000. As Diddley's lawyer (also Jewish) John Rosenberg noted, "This is a typical story that's happened time and again to musicians like Bo." [MORSE, S., 6-18-94, p. 28] Diddley complained of being cheated by the Chess brothers as well. "To me every nationality has a reason for bein' here," said Diddley, "an' mostly all the Jewish people own everything. They got all the money. Give him a thousand dollars, he'll turn it into ten million. How the heck they do it, I don't know." [COHODAS, N., 2000, p. 110]

     The Jewish community, of course, isn't comfortable with this history. As Jewish author Neal Karlen describes one African-American depiction of the Jewish music hustler: "In the 1990 film Mo' Better Blues, Spike Lee crafted an artful if blazingly anti-Semitic portrait of the fictional Moe Flatbush, an avaricious Jewish club owner intent on swindling black jazzmen. The ferretlike, Yiddish-spouting Moe, played by John Turturro, was seemingly lifted straight from the pages of the anti-Semitic screed The Protocols of Zions." [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 145]
 

 

     The Jewish agent-producer exploitation of Black recording artists in the early rhythm and blues era of the 1940s and 1950s (and later) was predominant and widespread, entrenching a Black hostility among many to their Jewish financial controllers to the present day. The following Jewish entrepreneurs were among those who founded record labels featuring mainly Black talent: Herman Lubinsky (Savoy Records); the Braun family (DeLuxe Records); Hy Siegal, Sam Schneider and Ike Berman (Apollo Records); Saul, Joe, and Jules Bihari (Modern Records); Art Rupe (Specialty Records-- its biggest hits were those of Little Richard); Lev, Edward, and Ida Messner (Philo/Aladdin Records); Al Silver and Fred Mendelsohn (Herald/Ember Records); Paul and Lilian Rainer (Black and White Records); Sam and Hy Weiss (Old Towne Records; Sol Rabinowitz (Baton Records -- Rabinowitz eventually became vice president of CBS International); and Danny Kessler (head of OKeh Records, a "cheap" branch of Columbia Records). Sydney Nathan controlled both the King and Federal record labels and Florence Greenberg owned the Mafia-influenced Scepter Records (featuring the Shirelles and Dionne Warwick. "During the 1960s, Warwick gained fame singing [Jewish] Burt Bacharach-Hal David compositions such as 'Walk on By' and 'I Say A Little Prayer.' In 1985, she had a brief comeback with another Bacharach song, 'That's What Friends Are For,' sung with Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight.") [CNN, 5-13-02]

 

     "Those illiterates," Hy Weiss of Olde Towne once said about his recording artists, "they would have ended up eating from pails in Delancey Street if it weren't for us." [WADE, p. 70] "Artists are pains in the asses,' [music mogul Morris] Levy said. 'A lot of them are just imbeciles. They're ignorant." [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 146] "The record producers were white," says Nadine Cohodas in her book about the Chess brothers, "their talent for the most part black, many from impoverished backgrounds and few with much formal education, living in a society that regarded them as second-class citizens. The deals between the two parties were not the negotiations of peers. The relationship could be paternalistic, even condescending. At Chess it sometimes looked as though Leonard and Phil gave their musicians an allowance rather than a salary." [COHODAS, N., 2000, p. 4] The history of rock and roll is, of course," notes Rich Cohen, "riddled with pioneering white record men who built careers recording, and sometimes, exploiting black artists: Morris Levy, that burly, cigar-smoking product of the Brill Building, allegedly stealing writing credits from Frankie Lyman; Herman Lubinsky, the founder of Savoy Records in Newark, New Jersey, throwing around nickels as if they were manhole covers." [COHEN, R., 6-21-01]

 

     In Philadelphia, in 1984 lawsuits were swirling around WMOT, a company that "developed a reputation as an aggressive independent record producer specializing in the 'Philly sound.'" Formerly owned by Steve Bernstein, Alan Rubens, and David Chacker, it was acquired by Michael Goldberg, Allen Cohen, and Jeff and Mark Salvarian. Lawsuits even named Israel's Bank Leumi among defendants in a scheme to use the record company to launder drug money. The central player in this accusation was Larry Lavin, who was indicted as the "kingpin of a 13-member [drug] ring that allegedly sold $5 million of cocaine a month." [DAUGHEN, 1984]

 

     By 1978 president Oscar Cohen of the Associate Booking Corporation presided over "the country's biggest black talent booking agency." [SHAW, A, p. 419, p. 133]  Recurrent, "mobbed-up" Morris Levy even eventually owned Birdland in its heyday, the famous jazz club. [WEXLER, p. 130]  Levy also controlled the Roulette Record label. Nat "the Rat" Tarnopol headed the Brunswick label (Jackie Wilson was one of its most prominent African-American stars). Tarnopol was indicted twice in the 1970s "for using payola, drugola, and strong-arm goons to get radio airplay for Brunswick recording artists." [MCDOUGAL, p. 366]

 

     An early and important supporter of disc jockey Alan Freed and his own empire was Leo Mintz, who owned a large record store near Cleveland's Black ghetto. Even earlier, Eli Oberstein founded Varsity records in the 1930s, Joe Davis launched Beach records in 1942, and "Jake Friedman had Southland, one of the biggest distributing outfits in the South." [SHAW, A., Honkers, p. 236]

 

    "The whole history of rock 'n' roll," noted the London Guardian in a review of Jewish author Michael Billig's book about the subject, "has been portrayed as white artists 'ripping off' black music. Only now [with Billig's volume] has the major Jewish contribution been acknowledged." [ARNOT, C., 10-4-2000, p. 6]   Atlanta-based Mark Shimmel, for instance, is the CEO of LaFace Records, which headlines TLC, Usher, Tonik Braxton, GoodiMob, "and a raft of hot hip-hop artists ... He built his own company, managing talents as varied as John Denver and Broadway composer Frank Wildhorn ... He doesn't worry much about what he calls 'the white guy in the black music business.'" He has also worked with Huey Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, and former Eagle Don Henley. [POLLAK, S., 1-7-00]
 

 

      Looking to the Hispanic record market, George Goldner founded the Tico, Rama, and Vee record companies; he also owned a number of Latino-oriented dance halls. Goldner later founded the Mafia-influenced Red Bird label. (Goldner once hired a team of whores to service a deejay convention. He "had the girls arrive a day early, to sit down and go over his new releases with them. The idea was for the girls to whisper the names of those records in the jock's ear while they were making love." [ELIOT, M., p. 49]  By the 1970s, Joseph, Stanley, and Kenneth Cayre (of New York's Jewish Sephardic community) owned the Salsoul record label. It was worth $49 million in sales and held a 70% share of the Latino record market. [UPBIN, 11-10-99]
 

 

     In the folk music genre, Albert Grossman managed the career of Peter Paul and Mary ("known affectionately in the trade as 'two rabbis and a hooker.'" [PHILLIPS, M., 1986, p. 16] "This established his reputation as a star maker," notes Anthony Scaduto, "as some kind of genius manager, even as he was being criticized for commercializing folk and for being an excessively sharp operator." [SCADUTO, p. 106] Israel Young ran the Folklore Center in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Fred Weintraub owned the well-known Bitter End nightclub. Manny Roth ran Cafe Wha? Among the prominent Jewish folksingers of the era were Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Jack Elliott, Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary), David Blue (Cohen), and two (Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert) of the four Weavers.  Ballad singer Leonard Cohen had a grandfather who was the first president of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

 

     Moe Asch (whose father, Sholem, was "the most widely read Yiddish writer of the twentieth century") [GOLDSMITH, P., p. 1] headed Folkway Records, the label that released recordings by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger (manager: Harold Levanthal), Doc Watson, Black blues artist Leadbelly, Josh White, Black poet Langston Hughes, and ethnic performers from around the world. (Woody Guthrie's wife, Marjorie Gleenblatt Mazia, was Jewish, and their child, Cathy Ann, was "raised as a Jew." [POLLAK, O, p. 12]) Guthrie even lived with Marjorie in a Jewish neighborhood in Coney Island.

 

     Asch got into the recording business with a connection to David Sarnoff, the eventual head of NBC-RCA. [GOLDSMITH, P., p. 60]  A later version of Folkways was Verve/Folkways, which featured Tim Hardin, Richard Havens, and Jewish artists Laura Nyro and Janis Ian. (Nyro's original name was Nigro, and her name was changed for fear that people might call her "Negro.") [KING, T., 2000, p. 73] Another Jewish entrepreneur, Maynard Solomon, headed another prominent folk-oriented record label, Vanguard, which featured Joan Baez, Buffy St. Marie, Eric Anderson, among others. Another folk label in Chicago, Flying Fish, was founded by Bruce Kaplan.

 

      Jewish popular musical performers are many and varied, including the Beastie Boys ("widely castigated for glorifying sex and violence") [ANDERSON, 1991, p. 173], Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Barry Manilow, Randy Newman, Carly Simon (one of the heirs to the Simon-Schuster publishing house fortune), Helen Reddy, Lesley Gore, David Lee Roth of Van Halen, Lou ("Take a Walk on the Wild Side") Reed, [BELL, I., 6-1-93, p. 12] and Mountain's Leslie [Weinstein] West. Donald Fagen co-founded Steely Dan. Marty Friedman of Megadeth is Jewish, as is Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane, Marc Knopfle of Dire Straits, Paul Stanley (Stanley Eisen) and Gene Simmons (born Chaim Whitz in Haifa, Israel) of Kiss, Perry Farrell (Perry Bernstein; son of a diamond dealer) of Jane's Addiction, Kevin Dubrow (lead singer of Quiet Riot), Slash of Guns 'n Roses, Geddy Lee ( of Rush -- born Gar Lee Weinrib), Eric Bloom (lead singer of Blue Oyster Cult), Robbie Robertson, Warren Zevon, Jeff Beck, Mick Jones (of the Clash), Gavin Rossdale (head of Bush), Jay (Blatt) and the Americans, Marc Bolan of T-Rex, Manfred Mann (Lubowitz), Norman Greenbaum, Phranc (a Jewish lesbian folksinger), and Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman of the Turtles. And on and on. Jewish interest in the subject notes that ukelele-rooted Tiny Tim's mother was Jewish, Donovan's mother was Jewish, Cyndi Lauper's father is Jewish, Country Joe MacDonald's mother is Jewish, Twisted Sister's Dee Snider's father was Jewish and on and on. [JEWHOO, 2000; BOUCHER, G., 4-17-01, p. 62; TAYLOR, L., 12-27-00, p. F5]] Even the 1998 "Eurovision Song Contest winner" -- featuring an event watched by 100 million people in 33 countries -- was Israeli transsexual Dana International, born Yaran Cohen).

     Not Jewish? Want to make it in the music business? Enhance your chances by learning Yiddish:

  "Even gentiles learned to salt their language with pinches of Yiddish, the industry's       
vernacular. Courtney Love, not long before her own major label debut at Geffen       
Records, began boning up with the help of Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish. 'I'm       
going to blow the minds of all those shemedricks at the record company,' Courtney       
said. She would even sometimes refer to her dispute with Kat [of the all-female band       
Babes in Toyland] over who was the first to wear a baby-doll dress onstage as 'that       
shmatte' controversy.'" [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 146]

       From France, singer Sergio Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg]

     "is still most famous in Britain for his number one 'Je t'aime moi non plus': the
     scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago. He and
     [actress Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that the
     single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican
     ...Yet Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever produced ...
     Echoes of his favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against
     a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary
     records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen ... Towards the end of his
     life, the singer's media appearances became ritual provocations: in one
     television broadcast, he subjected a veteran paratrooper -- horrified
     by Gainsbourg's dub version of the Marseillaise -- to a torrent of
     obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate condoms. On another notorious
     live show, sharing a platform with a young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg,
     then 58, turned to the presenter Michel Drucker and declared, in English,
     'I want to fuck her.'" [CHALMERS, R., 1-4-00]
 

 

     The magazine "Bible" of rock and roll music, Rolling Stone, was also founded by Jewish entrepreneur Jann Wenner [see elsewhere, Mass Media chapters]. Wenner also is "the single most important person behind" Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. [HINCKLEY, D., p. 9] Joel Siegel, later prominent as a film critic, was also "TV's first rock and roll reporter." [SLEWINSKI, C., 3-23-99, p. 102]

 

      Jerry Wexler, the Jewish co-director of Atlantic Records -- remembers with fondness the early rhythm and blues and rock and roll industry years with a curious perspective:

 

     "How well I remember those labels and the grizzled infighters who owned

      them. Exclusive (Leon and Otis Rene), Modern (the Biharis), Imperial

      (Lew Chudd), Specialty (Are Rupe), Old Towne (Hymie Weiss),

      Herald/Ember (Al Silver), Chess (the brothers Chess), and on and on

      into the night -- memorable logos, all. I am reminded of the tribes of the

      Sinai desert -- the Hittites, the Moabites, the Midianites, the Amorites.

      Gone, perished, vanished from the face of the earth. Only one survived --

      the Hebrews." [WEXLER, p. 183]

 

     Wexler's written memories also include stories about other fellow Jews in the later music world, including the music editor of Billboard, Paul Ackerman; his early Jewish bosses at MGM Records -- Abe Olman and Mitch Miller, and A&R men Harry Myerson at RCA and Morty Palitz at Decca; and Nat Shapiro, the promotion man at Atlantic.  "What [Wexler] achieved at Atlantic makes him a key figure in the history of post-war black masterworks." [HOSKYNS, p. 10] Among Wexler's most famous Black talents was Aretha Franklin. Also, "throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jerry Wexler worked with several of the most influential R&B singers ever to hit the charts: Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Clyde McPhatter, the Drifters, Joe Tex, Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, the Clovers, Joe Turner, and La Vern Baker, to name a few. Rolling Stone has gone so far as to christen him 'the Godfather of Rhythm and Blues.'" [BEGO, M., 1989, p. 90] In the building of Atlantic Records to power, non-Jewish co-founder Ahmet Ertegun feared collusion between Wexler and two Jewish songwriters, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, to oust him. [HOSYKYNS, p. 10] (Jerry Greenberg was also "one of Ertegun's top lieutenants at Atlantic." [KING, T., p. 166] Jewish mogul David Geffen once tried to create a rumor that Ertegun was anti-Semitic which "could hurt Ertegun's business." [KING, T., 2000, p. 292]

 

     In 1992, Bill McKibben noted an interesting piece of music trivia that he had heard about on television:

 

     "Neil Sedaka went to the same high school as Neil Diamond and Barbara

      Streisand, and while he was there he wrote a song about a girl called

      Carole Klein who went on to become Carole King and of course had

      several number one records." [MCKIBBEN, p. 20]

 

     The author doesn't mention it, but, rather curiously, aside from the fact that they all became famous pop singers, they were also all Jewish. In fact, in the early 1960s, Don Kirschner and partner Al Nevins had a company called Aldon Music as a kind of last outpost of the seminal Tin Pan Alley complex at the so-called "Brill Building" in New York City. Their hirees (mainly song writers at that time) were virtually all Jewish, including Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weill, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, and Howard Greenflens. Later came Phil Spector, Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman, Burt Bacharach, Hal David, Jerry Leiber, and Mike Stoller. [SCHEURER, T., p. 90]  Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, notes Rich Wiseman, were "one of the hottest songwriter teams in pop." [WISEMAN, p. 31]

 

     "To my surprise," writes Jewish author Michael Billig,

 

      "song after well-known pop song, revealed itself to 'Jewish music,' from

       [Elvis] Presley to the soft sounds of the drifters to [producer] Phil

       Spector. So much of the rebellion-music which I had loved in my

       youth and which seemed to be a window to a foreign, dangerous

       world, turned out to be a product of familiar surroundings. Surprise

       was mixed with delight." [ARNOT, C., 10-4-2000, p. 6]

 

       In the 1960s era, the Beatles' agent/manager, Brian Epstein, was Jewish, as was the promoter, Sid Bernstein ("New York's leading promoter in the mid-sixties,"  [GLATT, p. 87] of their early Carnegie Hall and Shea Stadium concerts. The head of Bernstein's employer -- the General Artist Corporation -- was Norman Weiss, also Jewish.  A Jewish entrepreneur in America, Irwin Pincus, "secured foreign rights on six original Beatles recordings." [ELIOT, M, p. 127] These seminal tunes appeared on the Vee Jay label (which also recorded the popular Four Seasons) in the early months of "Beatlemania' in America. (Meanwhile, the state of Israel banned the Beatles from performing there in 1965 "for fear of the decadent affect it would have on Israel's youth)." [FRANKEL, G., p. 273] Sandy Gallin (also Jewish and, like Epstein, gay) "shot to stardom after booking the Beatles for their legendary 1964 American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show." [KING, T., 2000, p. 93]

      "The daughter of prosperous furniture manufacturers in Sheffield," says Albert Goldman, "[Brian Epstein's mother] had been educated in a school dominated by Roman Catholics, an experience that led to her to attribute all her subsequent misfortunes in life to anti-Semitism, another trait Brian adopted." [GOLDMAN]  "At age ten," adds Chet Flippo, "[Brian] was expelled from Liverpool College for scrawling dirty pictures. He and his mother attributed the expulsion to anti-Semitism." [FLIPPO, C., 1988, p. 143] Both Epstein's parents "were from prominent Jewish families in Liverpool" and he was an heir to his family's NEMS company: the North End Music Store chain, which was purchased in the 1930s. [FLIPPO, C., 1988, p. 143] "Brian didn't care that much about the Beatles' music," writes Flippo, "They knew that early on and he always acknowledged it. He had absolutely no experience in managing a group and the Beatles knew that. His contacts, such as they were, were with the business side of record companies." [FLI_PPO, C., 1988, p. 142]

     Epstein, notes the Jewish Forward, was a

      "gay, Jewish record-department manager -- of the Liverpool store owned by his
      parents -- who met the Beatles and in little more than a year turned them into the
      most successful musical act in the world. The life of the Beatles' first manager
      has been familiar to Beatles fans for decades, though always as one of the sideshows
      to the record-shattering main attraction. With the focus reversed, some arresting
      tidbits emerge, such as when Paul McCartney explains his father's immediate
      approval of Epstein. 'He thought Jewish people were very good with money,'
      Mr. McCartney says. 'That was the common wisdom. He thought Brian would
      be very good for us ... And he was right ... If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was
      Brian.' MANDELL, B., 2001]
 

 

     A biography of Epstein is entitled "The Man Who Made the Beatles."  "While none of his performing artists were Jews," notes author Roy Coleman, "Brian veered towards the company of Jews in the music business, and some of his senior colleagues were Jews: Nat Weiss, Dick James [originally Richard Leon Vapnick], Dan Black, Vic Lewis, Bernard Lee." [COLEMAN, p. 345]  Weiss became partners with Epstein in a company called Nemperor Artists. Another Beatle-based company (called Stramsact in London and Seltaeb in America) was formed, in conjunction with Epstein's lawyer, David Jacobs, to merchandize everything from Beatles chewing gum to wallpaper. Jacobs funneled considerable Beatles business in America to famous Los Angeles Jewish lawyer Marvin Mitchelson. [JENKINS, p. 85]

 

     David Jacobs, note Peter Brown and Steven Gaines,

 

      "adored the young Brian Epstein and took him under his wing. The

      two men were similar in many coincidental ways. Their families were

      both in the furniture business, both were born and bred of money,

      and both had doting Jewish mothers. Both were homosexual. David

      Jacobs became Brian's chief solicitor. From then on, all legal decisions

      and contracts would be made with David Jacobs' advice."

      [BROWN/GAINES, 1983, p. 122]

 

     Victor Lewis, also Jewish, was the Managing Director of yet another Epstein company, NEMS Enterprises. The Beatles had a 10% interest in this company that was based on their profitability; Epstein and his brother held the other 90%. [COLEMAN, p. 305] As Decca writer Tony Barrow once noted, "As for hiring of staff, what John Lennon said to me upon our introduction -- 'if you're not queer and you're not Jewish, why are you joining NEMS?' -- proved to be pretty accurate. They weren't all Jewish, but that was the ideal combination of the two things that were most close to [Epstein] or his family's heart." [COLEMAN, p. 178] Nemperor Holdings (formerly NEMS) was eventually sold to Jewish businessman Leonard Richenberg of Triumph Trust. "Trust became a 90 percent holder of Nemperor ... The Beatles were stunned that they had lost Nemperor." After various legal threats, they managed to reacquire it). [BROWN/GAINES, 1983, p. 322]

 

     The aforementioned Jewish businessman, Dick James, controlled the Beatles' publishing licenses and was their publisher at Northern Songs. James, note Peter Brown and Steven Gaines,

 

     "became the for the Beatles a symbol of the music business. He was

     a balding Jewish 'uncle' to the boys, a man with a big cigar and a sly

     smile, who taught John and Paul one of the biggest lessons of their

     lives ... John and Paul would form a songwriting partnership called

     Northern Songs ... Dick James, in return for his responsibilities as

     a music publisher, would get 50 percent of the earnings. In literal

     terms Brian [Epstein] signed over to Dick James 50 percent of

     Lennon and McCartney's publishing fees for nothing. It made him

     wealthy beyond imagination in eighteen months." [BROWN/GAINES,

     1983, p. 186]

     Chet Flippo notes the context of Epstein's death (an overdose of sleeping pills):

     "There were immediate rumors then, just as there are rumors now, that
     Brian Epstein was murdered as the end result of one or another of the
     many business deals that he had cut regarding the Beatles. There were so
     many murky deals, involving so many people and so much money, that
     it could even have been a deal that he failed to do that might have resulted
     in such rumors of vendetta and revenge. Subsequent court hearings
     over the years have showed that the Beatles were probably -- there is no
     information for this kind of data -- the most underpaid superstar
     performers ever. Given their worldwide acclaim and the millions of records
     they sold, one would have imagined that they were millionaires many times
     over. That was hardly the case ... As Paul [McCartney] especially had started to
     try to dig into the Beatle business books, which they had never even thought
     to do during the Fab Beatlemania years, suspicions of Brian had started
     bubbling to the surface." [FLIPPO, C., 1988, pl. 244]

 

     Also after Epstein's death, in 1969 James sold the rights to the Beatles songs from under them. "It was the single most contentious deal arising from the Epstein-James era," says Coleman. "The Beatles were angry at what they regarded as betrayal." [COLEMAN, p. 306]  Marc Elliot notes that James sold "his interest in Northern Songs to the notorious [British Jewish media mogul] Lew Grade, known in the film industry as Low Grade." [ELLIOT, p. 158]  Epstein also had "good communication" with Grade's brother, Bernard Delfont, "one of the czars of London show business." [COLEMAN, p. 245-246] 

 

       Epstein also managed the career of singer Cilia Black. "After Cilia's performance [in New York City]," notes Brown and Gaines,

 

     "Brian threw a party for her in a hotel suite upstairs. The party was

     crowded with press and New York show business personalities when

     some woman within Brian's earshot remarked that the lobby of the

     Plaza Hotel looked 'Jewish.' Brian flew into a wild rage. The party

     came to a halt around him as he screamed, 'Madame, I happen to

     be Jewish!’.... It was a small miracle the incident didn't find its

     way into the press." [BROWN/GAINES, 1983, p. 183]

 

     Moving in the circles of rich and powerful, notes Coleman, "Brian had struck up a particularly warm rapport in London with Bernice Kinn, wife of the owner of the New Musical Express. An ebullient, intuitive Jew, she and her husband Maurice formed part of the core of London's 1960s show business hosts and party goers." [COLEMAN, p. 245-246] Another of Epstein's "close friends" was Lionel Bart (Beglieter), the Jewish song writer for many of pop star Cliff Richard's songs, and originator of the musical score for the musical play, Oliver! [PRESS ASSOCIATION NEWSFILE, 4-3-99]

 

     The Beatles' "official photographer" during their peak years (1962-67) was Jewish -- Dezo Hoffman. Paul McCartney's wife Linda (Eastman -- originally Epstein) was also Jewish. [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 77, 172] Eastman's father also became active in legal squabbles between the Beatles, especially between McCartney and Lennon. McCartney's lawyer in this contentious era, Charles Corman, was an Orthodox Jew. [BROWN/GAINES, 1983, p. 333] The producers of the Beatles first movie, A Hard Day's Night, were Walter Shenson and Bud Orenstein. Richard Lester directed the movie, and is also Jewish. [JEWHOO; online] Famous Jewish singer Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) introduced the Beatles to marijuana the first time he met them, a gathering arranged by music writer Al Aronowitz. [BROWN/GAINES, 1983, p. 150]

 

     After John Lennon's death, another Jewish agent, Elliot Mintz, has been for years Yoko Ono's publicist (he has also worked as a public relations man for Bob Dylan, and other capacities with pop singers throughout the years).  Immediately after Lennon's assassination, an employee, Fred Seaman, and his "old college roommate," "psychiatrist and New York diamond dealer" Bob Rosen, set up a network (termed "Project Walrus") to market Lennon's stolen journals and other memorabilia. [MINTZ, 1991]

 

     One of the most famous popular music producers of the 1960s -- Phil Spector -- was also Jewish. Specter was renowned for his strange temperament and a music style described as a "wall of sound." "Philip was a very strange person," remarked pop singer Sonny Bono, "He always had a tough time staying rational, a real tough time." [WADE, p. 100]  Specter also founded Phillips Records with partner Lester Sil. "The most famous pop producer [Spector] of them all," noted the Los Angeles Times in 1988,

 

     "was a bigger superstar than any singers among his bullpen he kept on

     hand to belt out wonderfully disposable ditty after ditty -- and he kept

     it that way by issuing most of the singles under the name of some generic

     group, not the actual lead singer." [WILLMAN, C., 10-11-88,

     CALENDAR, p. 10]

 

    Another top Jewish manager, Allen Klein -- starting out with clients like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme (both Jewish), Bobby Darin, and Sam Cooke -- eventually owned the Cameo Parkway company, managing many of the biggest British musical acts of the 1960s, including the Rolling Stones (whose early agent was Sandy Lieberson), the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Animals, and Donovan. Eventually, upon Brian Epstein's death, Klein even managed the Beatles' Apple company. "Klein was a New York accountant," notes Mark Hertsgaard, "whose foulmouthed personality and street-fighter instincts masked a razor-sharp financial mind but helped explain his propensity for attracting lawsuits and tax fraud accusations." [HERTSGAARD, p. 287] "At the peak of his career," says Phillip Norman, "his company was involved in fifty lawsuits," [NORMAN, p. 184] including one with the Beatles. The Rolling Stones once sued Klein for $29 million. [SANDFORD, p. 164]

 

     Christopher Sandford notes that

 

     "By midsummer [Rolling Stones singer Mick] Jagger was unable to

     mention his manager's name [Klein] calmly. Later he gave an

     interview in which he stated, 'Half the money I've made has been

     stolen. Most artists in show business suffer the same kind of thing...

     It's all the hangers-on and parasites. There are very few honest

     people in the profession." [SANDFORD, p. 139]

 

      Klein had this interchange with a Playboy interviewer in 1971:

 

      "Q: Would you lie?

       A: Oh, sure.

       Q: Would you steal?

       A: Probably. Look. You have to survive. Whatever it takes ... It's a

            game for Chrissakes and winning is everything."  [GARFIELD, p.

            257]

 

      Another legendary Jewish manager, Albert Grossman, was "probably the best-known, most successful, and aggressive artist's manager in the music business." [SCADUTO, p. 105] He ran the careers of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and many other top musical artists. (When Grossman's business manager, Dick Asher, signed Joplin to a contract, he never forgot what she said to him: "I hope you didn't fuck us too much." [DANNEN, p. 76] The early booking agent for Joplin's Big Brother and the Holding Company band was Todd Schiffman; its manager was Julius Karpen.

 

     Bob Dylan was also signed to a song-licensing deal by Lou Levy, and later by Artie Mogull ("a hustler") [KING, T., 2000, p. 72] at M. Witmark and Sons. Early in songwriter's career, "when a girlfriend's mother challenged his lies and said she thought Zimmerman was his real name, he called her an anti-Semite, as if a mere description of the truth was bigotry." [RUBIN, p. 94] Dylan, who early in his career hid his Jewish past and made up various lies (he was from Oklahoma, etc.) about his background, nonetheless joined the Jewish fraternity house at the University of Minnesota in 1959, Sigma Alpha Mu. [SCADUTO, p. 26] After becoming rich and famous singing about social justice, in the 1980s, "Dylantologist" A. J. Weberman declared that the famous singer "is an ultra-Zionist. He is doing the tour to raise money for Israel. He has given large sums of money to Israel in the name of Abraham Zimmerman." [SPITZ, p. 430]  Newsweek and Time each reported that Dylan had indeed donated sums to the Jewish state, and even the far right-wing Jewish Defense League. [SPITZ, p. 407] A biographer, Anthony Scaduto, noted earlier, in 1971,

 

     "At this writing, Dylan's search for personal salvation seems to be

     coming around full circle, back to the religion of his fathers. Bob

     has started to study Judaism, and Hebrew. Dylan, who gets so

     Gemini-enthused about everything, has made several trips to

     Israel in the last year to 'sniff the breeze' as his friends put it. He

     has reportedly donated some of his funds to help support at least

     one kibbutz there. Folksinger Theo Bikel [also Jewish, and a

     Zionist activist] adds: 'Dylan has told me that Israel appears to be

     one of the few places left in the world where life has any meaning.'

     He has even attended several meetings of the militant Jewish

     Defense League. The JDL's head, Meir Kahane, [charged by many,

     including Jews, as a racist and fascist] will say only that Dylan has

     'come around a couple times to see what we're all about' and has

     promised to donate money to the organization. Dylan refuses to discuss

     it." [SCADTO, p. 274]

 

      By 1977, the biggest rock concert promoters were San Francisco-based Bill Graham (a Jewish Holocaust survivor originally named Wolfgang Wolodia Granjanka, the owner of the famous hippie Filmore Ballroom who had named his own northern California estate after the mythic Israelite fortress, Masada), Concerts West, Concert Associates, Chicago's Frank Fried, and in New York, Ron Delsener and Howard Stein. [CHAPPLE, p. 152]  In 1976, Howard Stein (whose "father, Jack 'Ruby' Stein, had been a loan shark, ... ended up floating down the Hudson, sans head") [HADEN-GUEST, ., 1997, p. 66] noted that the field of his endeavors in musical concert production had a "territorial overtone":

 

      "It's hard for a major concert producer to get started in New York City

       and do battle with Delsener and myself. It's equally difficult for a major

       concert producer to establish himself against Frank Fried and myself in

       Chicago. In Miami, I virtually don't consider myself as having any real

       competition. In Atlanta, minor competition. In Texas, some competition.

       In New York there are three: Delsener, myself, and Jerry Weintraub. Bill

       Graham on the West coast ... The power of an impresario or a concert

       producer is through associations. It's very political. It's very personal.

       It's building reciprocal relationships." [LEVINE, F. p. 262] 

 

      Jon Fischel at Billboard magazine named Jerry Weintraub and Bill Graham (sometimes described as the "Godfather of Rock and Roll") as the "most powerful men in the [rock concert] business" in their era. [LEVINE, p. 275] "As Bill Graham became increasingly successful and achieved celebrity status in San Francisco," says John Glatt, "he faced a growing hostility from many people who saw him as a capitalist pig growing rich on the backs of the Love Generation." [GLATT, p. 61]

 

     By the 1970s, lawyer Allan Grubman (whose partner was Arthur Indursky) became "the biggest music attorney in the history of rock and roll." [DANNEN, p. 144] Grubman, Indursky, Schindler, & Goldstein have been "the country's leading rock-and-roll law firm." [Karlen, N.,, 1994, p. 59] Irving Azoff, "one of the most loathed men in the movie business," eventually headed the Front Line management firm, "the top management firm in rock and roll." [DANNEN, p. 134]  Top man at Front Line after Azoff? Howard Kaufman. [KING, T., 2000, p. 436] Azoff, short in stature, is known by enemies in the Hollywood world as the "Poison Dwarf." Azoff's acts included the Eagles, Boz Scaggs, Dan Fogelberg, Steely Dan, REO Speedwagon, Joe Walsh, and many others. Azoff eventually headed MCA, and later Giant Records. When he was president of MCA, three of four vice-presidents were also Jewish: Myron Roth, Zach Horowitz, and Larry Solters. [KNOEDELSEDER, p. 26]  The Leber-Krebs agency became "one of the biggest management companies in rock"; their acts included Aerosmith and Ted Nugent.  Dan Weiner founded the rock talent agency, Monterey Peninsula Associates. John and David Handleman (the Handleman Company) eventually became the largest rock and roll "jobbers" (distributors) in the United States; in 1991 they bought out their largest rival, also Jewish-founded  -- Lieberman Enterprises. [HULL, p. 181] "Almost every time you buy an LP, cassette, compact disc or book at K mart," says Tim Kiska, "you're putting a few dimes in the Handleman family fortune." [KISKA, p. 91]

 

     Lou Adler (formerly teamed with fellow-Jewish mogul Herb Alpert) was the backbone producer of the influential Monterey Pop Festival and head of the Ode record label. (Alpert and another Jewish partner, Jerry Moss, also founded A&M Records. Adler, Jay Lasker, and Bobby Roberts also headed Dunhill Records -- which highlighted the Mamas and Papas, etc.) [PHILLIPS, M., 1986, p. 72] The Monterey festival was originally conceived by Benny Shapiro and Alan Pariser who sold the project to Adler and Michelle Phillips. [HOSKYNS, 1996, p. 142] Ray Manarek remembers when he and the rest of the Doors rock group went (before they became famous) to Adler's office, hoping he would sign them to a recording contract:

     "He rejected the whole demo. Ten seconds on each song ... and we were dismissed
     out of hand. Just like that. He took the demo off the turntable and handed it back
     to me with an obsequious smile and said, 'Nothing here I can use.' We were shocked.
     We stood up, the three of us, and [lead singer] Jim [Morrison], with a wry and
     knowing smile on his lips, cuttingly and cooly shot back at him, 'That's okay, man.
     We don't want to be used, anyway.'" [MANZAREK, R., 1998, p. 153]

 

     The landmark 1969 Woodstock Musical Festival was the entrepreneurial investment of four young Jews: Joel Rosenman, John Roberts (heir to a pharmaceutical fortune), Artie Kornfeld, and Michael Lang.  The person hired to pull the whole project together was Stanley Goldstein. Mel Laurence (born Melvin Bernard Lachs) was also the Director of Operations for the festival creators, Woodstock Ventures. Bert Cohen, of Concert Hall Publications, soon joined the production team for various tasks. [SPITZ, 1979] The first employee of Woodstock ventures was Rene Levine, a bookkeeper and another Jew, Alex Jaffee, was the company's accountant. In a book chapter called "Buying Off the Underground," Joel Rosenman recalls when he and others of the Woodstock Ventures investment team went to Greenwich Village's East Village Other "counterculture" newspaper to buy them off, guaranteeing that prominent members of that anti-capitalist community wouldn't cause problems with the economic exploitation of the supposedly anti-materialist Love Generation. Famed radical (and Jewish) agitator Abbie Hoffman demanded $10,000 from Woodstock Ventures, "or else that fucking festival you guys are planning is gonna end up around your ass." [ROSENMAN/ROBERTS/PILPEL, p. 102]

 

     Others involved in the Woodstock project included Judi Bernstein (business manager for the sound company that handled the festival; she later became executive director of Boston's Zionist Hadassah Organization) and her husband Harold Cohen; Lee Blumer (Assistant to the Director of Security); Steve Cohen (who was "largely responsible for designing and building the Woodstock stage"); Len Kaufman (who "headed the 'elite black shirt' security force"); and Rona Elliot (who worked in Woodstock Ventures public relations and later became the music correspondent for NBC's Today show). Many of the Woodstock musical artists were even boarded at the famous Jewish resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains, Grossinger's. Even Max Yasgur, the dairy farmer whose land was used for the festival, was Jewish. [JEWHOO]

 

     One of the four Woodstock festival entrepreneurs, Artie Kornfeld, was vice president of Capitol Records (1967-68). He "wrote and produced all the Cowsills' stuff." In later Kornfeld recalled how Woodstock was started:

 

     "My secretary said, 'There's a Michael Lang here to see you.' And I said,

      'Who's Michael Lang?' And she said, 'He says he's from your old

      neighborhood.' And I said, 'Well, if he's from the neighborhood, tell him

      to come in.' Bensonhurst. It's a section of Brooklyn that's all Jewish and

      Italian. That's how he got to see me; by saying he was from the

      neighborhood.'" [MAKOWER, p. 25]

 

     The two men shared some marijuana in Kornfeld's office. Later, discussing the grand idea of a gigantic music festival, Kornfeld notes that much "was basically talked out that night, that first night, probably behind some Colombian blond, which had something to do with it. Overachieving, pseudo-intellectual Jewish kids with an idea that came from outside of us, I believe. It was the culture." [MAKOWER, p. 27] The two men later paid a visit to join forces with Rosenman and Roberts (later partners in a venture capitalist firm called J.R. Capital) and Woodstock was born.   

 

    The disastrous 1999 Woodstock Festival was also headed by Michael Lang, and John Scher. It ended in rioting, vandalism, injuries, arrests, and sexual crimes. [MORSE, S., 7-27-99] Also in the rock-and-roll entrepreneurial world, "the first Lollapalooza," notes Neal Karlen, "was held in 1991 as the brainchild of Perry Farrell [born Perry Bernstein], former leader of the defunct Jane's Addiction. That summer's eight band line-up drew 430,000 fans, grossed $10 million, and was the surprise smash of the entire [music] industry."
[KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 160]

 

     Another Jewish entrepreneur, Harold Leventhal, promoted folk acts like the Weavers and Woody Guthrie. "Jefferson Airplane was the creation of [their manager] Matthew Katz." [GLATT, p. 57] Danny Rifkind managed the Grateful Dead. Paul Rothchild produced the Doors (and many other groups); Jac Holzman, head of Elektra, signed them to his record label. [DENSMORE, J., 1990, p. 79] (Todd Schiffman signed them to a talent agency). [KING, T., 2000, pl. 97] Rothchild was so integral to the Doors that band member Ray Manzarek calls him "the fifth Door." [Manzarek, R., 1998, p. 203] Manzarek recalls Elektra owner Jac Holzman's attitude towards his best-selling group:

     "We were all excited at the prospects of breaking the cherry of a brand-new, state-
     of-the-art [Elektra] recording studio. And we thought it was going to be for free.
     Hell, Jac Holzman built the damned place with profits from the Doors' record
     sales. Everybody called the new Elektra facility on La Cienga 'the house the
     Doors built,' so why shouldn't we record for free? Besides, it was an in-house
     studio. It would be for all Elektra artists. Outsiders could hire the studio at the
     going rates, but Elketra's own people could record there anytime they wanted
     and for free. Right? We were excited. Wouldn't you be? Bullshit! No free
     time. No freebee recording sessions. Everybody paid. Strangers or family ...
     everybody paid. However, Jac did say ... 'Boys, I'll tell you what I'm going
     to do. For you ...' And you could see the calculator in his head whirling.
     You could see that he wanted to be generous to us, he was on the West
     Coast now, he wore love beads, he had grown his hair long, he was not a
     crass materialist, he was new man who believed in peace and love for all
     races, religions, creeds, nationalities. But he was also from New York.
         'For you ... a ten percent discount!'
         I almost snorted in his face. [Lead singer] Jim [Morrison] just spun
     around on his heels, unable to face Jac." [MANZAREK, R., 1998, p. 302]

      Early in their career the Doors practiced at home of Stu and Marilyn Kreiger in wealthy Pacific Palisades. [MANZAREK, R., 1998, p. 149] This was the home of the parents of Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger, also Jewish. Heiress Naomi Hirschorn literally bought the Byrds their first musical instruments. [CROSBY/GOTTLEIB, p. 86]  Terry Melcher (whose father was Jewish) managed both the Byrds and Paul Revere and the Raiders. [WYNN, N., 1990, p. 197] Herb Gart "handled" the Youngbloods. [KING, T., 2000, p. 66] David Kapralik managed Sly and the Family Stone and Barbara Streisand. [SCADUTO, p. 105] Nik Cohn, a music critic for the Manchester Guardian, and later the New York Times, provided Peter Townsend of The Who important criticism in the development of his rock opera "Tommy." Townsend, notes Larry Smith, had a "willingness to compromise his work for a favorable review from [this] respected journalist/friend." [SMITH, L., 1999, p. 3]  In 2002, just before a new Who tour, bassist John Entwistel died. And this is who announced the bad news:

"John Entwistle, the bassist for the innovative 1960s rock band The Who, was found dead Thursday in his hotel room of an apparent heart attack ... The Vegas show was canceled but the rest of the tour was undecided, said Beckye Levin of promoter Clear Channel Entertainment. 'I was told he passed away in his sleep last night,' Levin said, breaking into sobs during a telephone interview. Who manager Robert Rosenberg said he was 'saddened and shocked.'"

      The Beach Boys story eventually centered around key member Brian Wilson's destructive drug habit and his controlling psychotherapist, Eugene Landy [see elsewhere for the story of Landy's exploitation of his famous patient]. The band's road manager was also Jewish, Arnie Geller. At the peak of his success, Wilson also married a 16-year old Jewish girl, Marilyn Rovell. His autobiography was also written by Todd Gold, who was hired by Wilson and his psychotherapist Landy, to create the book (portraying the controversial Landy in an extremely favorable light) from tape-recorded interviews.

 

     Top rock act Creedance Clearwater Revival was effectively destroyed largely by its Jewish overseers. The group signed with Fantasy Records in 1964. In 1967 the company was bought by Jewish entrepreneur Saul Zaentz (he also produced the films One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus). When CCR soon began a string of hit records, the group demanded a royalty increase, per a clause in their contract. Zaentz refused, but led the group to an acquaintance, an unscrupulous (and mob-linked) Jewish lawyer named Bruce Kanter, who developed a complicated scheme to secure the rock group's earnings in a much lower tax bracket. Kanter shifted much of Creedance's money into tax dodge companies created in the Bahamas; one such Kanter company was called King David Distributors, and later Sholom (Hebrew for peace) LTD. [BLOCK, A., p. 268-269]

 

     As Alan Block notes:

 

     "Over the years the Creedance Clearwater Revival repatriated much

     of their Castle [another Kanter-related firm] money by borrowing

     it from companies they actually owned, or thought they controlled,

     under Kanter's plan. Nevertheless, when Castle went bust it took

     $4 million of the group's and [leader singer/writer] John Fogerty's

     money. Before that happened John Fogerty desperately tried to

     extricate himself from Castle and the Kanter grasp ... Fogerty was

     particularly angry with Saul Zaentz because he held him responsible

     for bringing the group into the Kanter scheme." [BLOCK, p. 271]

 

     In the mess, Fogerty also lost the rights to every song he wrote with the band. [BLOCK, A., p. 271]  In 1983, the group won a lawsuit of $1.5 million against Kanter for his part in the Creedance problems. The next year, recording again, Fogerty lyrics in his Centerfield album included obvious references to Zaentz that could certainly infer anti-Semitic overtones. He was described as a "little pig" who is "silent and quick / just like Oliver Twist." [BLOCK, A., p. 272-273]

 

     African-American singing superstar Diana Ross, originally of the Supremes, married a Jewish Hollywood public relations agent, Robert Silberstein, in 1971. J. Randy Taraborrelli, in his biography of Ross, suggests careerist dimensions to the marriage:

 

    "Why Diana Ross decided to marry Bob Silberstein remains a mystery

    today. If the two of them were in love, it was the best kept secret

    in Hollywood ... Bob Silberstein was both white and Jewish. Diana's

    appearance and singing style were meant to appeal to Caucasians, so

    a white husband would certainly not hurt her image -- in fact, it would

    enhance it -- and Jewish men were perceived to be shrewd and

    intelligent." [TARABORRELLI, p. 249]

 

     (African-American singer-actress star Diahann Carroll's first two husbands were also Jewish: Monte Kay (owner of the Birdland jazz nightclub), and Freddie Glusman, head of a Las Vegas dress shop. The second marriage collapsed after Glusman beat her).

 

     Harvey Goldsmith is the manager of rock star Elton John, among others. He is recognized as "the best known rock promoter in England." [GRAHAM/GREENFIELD, p. 551] Doug Goldstein manages Guns 'n Roses. (Jerry Heller and Samuel Frankel manage Guns 'n Roses guitarist Slash. [SNYDER, N., 2-19-01] Steven Levine produced Culture Club. Jerry Meyer "became one of the top independent record promoters in the country. He was part of an informal group of about 10 promoters known at the Network, which dominated airplay on Top 40 radio during the '70s and '80s. The Network had the power to make or break records ... [Meyer] loves music, which next to his Jewish faith, has been the constant of his life." [VIOLANTI, p. 8M]

 

      Rock superstar Bruce Springsteen fell under the control of two agents of Jewish heritage, first

 

       "the tutelage of sharpie Mark Appel, who simultaneously managed

        him, ran the production company through which his contracts were

        signed, and owned his publishing.... [Springsteen] managed to escape

        ... Appel through a series of lawsuits prompted by rock critic/social

        climber Jon Landau. Landau ran Rolling Stone's record review section

        even as he worked as a producer for major record labels ... Landau

        came out the other end Springsteen's manager, producer, and best

        friend and confidant." [DOHERTY, p. 54]

 

     Reviewer Brian Doherty noted Landau's portrayal in a rock and roll history book as "an unethical, anti-art, money-grubbing climber." [DOHERTY, p. 54]

 

      Elsewhere, Dick Friedberg was a partner at the Premier rock and roll management service. Gil Freisen became the president of A&M Records (Janet Jackson, Sting, et al). Herb Abrahamson was a cofounder of Atlantic Records. Norman Granz owned Verve. Jac Holzman founded Elektra Records with "$600 of bar mitzvah money." (President of Elektra? Mel Posner. [KING, T., 2000, p. 245] Simon Waronker and cousin Herb Newman founded Liberty Records in 1955 (Ricky Nelson, Jan and Dean, Bobby Vee, Fats Domino, Johnny Rivers, the Ventures, etc.). Newman also founded another label, Era. Ted Wallerstein headed RCA records in its formative years. Art Kass, Phil Steinberg, Hy Mizrahi, and Artie Ripp founded the Kama Sutra recording label (financed in part by a known mobster, [WADE, p. 118] and later Buddah. Buddah producers Jerry Kasentz and Jeff Katz helped develop the trivial genre of "bubblegum music," including the 1910 Fruitgum Company and Ohio Express. Both groups had the same lead singer, Joey Levine. [DANNEN, p. 164] Don Kirshner is credited with the supervision of the quintessential media-illusory artificial band, the Monkees; three of the four band members didn't even know how to play an instrument. Jewish film moguls Burt Schneider and Bob Rafelson were their creators. Bob Ezrin's Migration Records features acts like Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith, Lou Reed, Robert Flack, Kiss, et al. Trauma Records (owned by Rob Kahane and Paul Palmer) has featured acts like No Doubt, Bush, and basketball star Shaquille O'Neal. Israeli arms dealer and Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan sought to purchase Trauma in the late 1990s and merge it into his own Restless Records company.

 

    Eventually most of the small record labels were bought out or rendered extinct by large mega-media corporations. "The term 'oligopoly' is an apt one to describe today's record business," wrote Frederic Dannen in 1990, "Most Americans get nearly all their wares from six suppliers -- CBS, Warners [including the labels: Warners, Atlantic, Atco, Elektra, Asylum, Reprise], BMG [the initials of the Bertelsmann Music Group, which includes RCA], Capitol-EMI, Poly-Gram [including Mercury, Polydor, London, Vertigo, Verve, Wing, A&M, Island, Motown], and MCA  [including Decca, ABC-Dunhill, MCA, Geffen, DGC, GRP] ... Far out in front there are the big two ... A whopping one-third [of the record business] belongs to CBS and Warners ... Today CBS and Warners can be viewed as the record industry's equivalent of the world's two superpowers." [DANNEN, p. 112]

 

     For years CBS Records was headed by Walter Yetnikoff. "The heart of Yetnikoff's persona," notes Dannen, "was his Brooklyn Jewishness ... An outsized number of [record] label bosses were Jews from Brooklyn, but Walter wore his ethnicity like a gabardine ... [He] fit well with the record business which was culturally Jewish ...   The goyim. With Walter it was always Us versus Them. When CBS Records had its annual convention in London, Walter forbade his people to stay at the Dorchester Hotel because it was Arab-owned ... One of Walter's inconsistencies was that he dated only gentile women, preferring well-endowed blondes. Before his twenty-five marriage broke up in the early eighties, he had already begun to amass a stable of such girlfriends -- his 'shiksa farm.'" [DANNEN, p. 23]  Yentnikoff was a "close friend" of record industry mobster Morris Levy, as was Sheldon Levy, another president of CBS Records. "Walter grew fond of Morris," says Frederic Dannen, "and spent time at [Morris] Levy's farm." [DANNEN, p. 34]

     (To rock star Sting's credit, in 2001 he resisted unspecified "media" pressures to censor an Arab out of one of his songs. As the Associated Press noted, "Sting told the [Arab American Institute Foundation] that some people in the media had advised him not to put out his duet with Algerian vocalist Cheb Mami as a singer, 'because of the Arab guy singing at the front. 'They said, 'If you take him out, we'll play it on the radio.' I said, 'No can do. It's an integral part of the song.' His remarks drew cheers from Arab Americans across the ballroom.") [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 5-2-01]

 

      Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) is a giant German-based entertainment conglomerate. The president and CEO of BMG Entertainment North America, since 1994, has been the Jewish executive Strauss Zelnick, formerly the president of Twentieth Century Fox. From this position he oversees "the operations of all North American divisions of Bertelsmann Music Group as well as Music Publishing and Interactive Entertainment operations worldwide." [BUSINESS WIRE, 9-13-94]  The division Zelnick heads accounts for over $4 billion in yearly sales. In 2001 another Jewish executive, Joel Klein, was named chairman and CEO of the U.S. operations of Bertelsmann AG. For years, another Jewish head, Clive Davis, has overseen the important Arista record division in BMG's stable. In 1998, another executive at BMG (both a German convert to Judaism, and a rabbi) quit to become the director of Germany's chapter of the environmental Greenpeace organization.

 

     In 1997, Frank Woessner, the non-Jewish CEO of Bertelsmann's giant book division, was awarded the (Jewish fraternal organization) B'nai B'rith of Continental Europe's "Gold Medal for Humanitarian Work."  "Woessner," noted the Jewish Week, "was lauded for supporting liberal Jewish causes in speeches by prominent members of the local Jewish community." [AXELROD, p. 41] Among the most important of his "humanitarian work" was the publication of Jewish American author Daniel Goldhagen's controversial work that affixed blame upon all Germans for the Holocaust (not just Nazis).

 

      In 1998, the Jewish Bronfman family's Seagrams firm (which already owned MCA) bought PolyGram NV -- "the world's largest music company" -- for $10.5 billion. The International Herald Tribune noted that:

 

      "The transaction would be the biggest in the history of the entertainment

       industry, eclipsed only by Walt Disney's $18.9 billion purchase of

       Capital Cities/ABC Inc. and the $11 billion merger of Time and

       Warner Communications that created Time Warner Inc."

       [INTERNATIONAL HERALD, p. 15]

 

     The Polygram-MCA amalgamation now under the combined rule of Edgar Bronfman made him, at age 43, "the most powerful mogul in music land," with a quarter of all world record sales on earth," including the largest output of classics and jazz. [LEBRECHT, p. 25] Polygram alone, in the Bronfman empire, also owns over 320,000 song copyrights. Among its labels are A&M, Mercury, Decca/London, Phillips Classics, and Island. [HOOVER, p. 138] Worldwide, Polygram-MCA holdings include the Finnish Sonet Media AB company, Japan's Nippon Phonogram, Polydor KK, and Rodven Records, "the leading independent record company in Latin America." [HOOVER, p. 138] Prominent musical acts in the Polygram stable have included U2, Sting, Lionel Richie, Soundgarden, Kiss, the Village People, Janet Jackson and numerous others. MTV-like TV station projects include Atomic TV in Warsaw, Poland and (in association with MTV) 2 MTV in Asia.

 

       Charles Koppelman was founder of the SBK record label, which recorded "white rapper" Vanilla Ice, and Wilson Phillips among others. Through the mid-1990s he was chairman of EMI Group North America, later founding a company called CAK Univeral Credits, geared to music stars looking for loans. In 2000, Monte Lipman, co-founder of Republic Records, was named president of Universal Records (part of the Bronfman empire), which had bought out the former company. And, in the same year, as the Cleveland Jewish News noted,

 

     "Instead of forming on their own, megapop bands like Backstreet Boys

     and 'N Sync are the manufactured creations of Transcontinental

     Records mogul Lou Pearlman, where inspired grooming and marketing

     has shepherded a number of record boy-groups to stardom."

     [HOROWITZ, G., 3-24-2000, p. 37]

 

     (In 2000, 'N Sync played at young Rachel Colburn's private Bat Mitzvah party. She is the daughter of American Online's President of Business Affairs, David Colburn. "AOL spokeswoman Wendy Goldberg said the band has a relationship with Colburn, and they did the gig as a favor." Such a performance by the singing group normally costs between $250,000 and a million dollars.) [DESERET NEWS, 6-8-2000, p. A2]

 

     In the music executive scene, at Warners, for example, for years Mo Ostin headed the music company. "Warners," notes Neal Karlen, in his book about the all-female band Babes in Toyland, "was run by Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker; the company's entire A&R department was headed by Mo's son Michael. If [A&R man Tim] Carr could get his way, the Babes' campaign would be largely orchestrated from Warner Records' Burbank headquarters by a half-dozen Jewish music men ... Traveling the spectrum of popular music, one could still occasionally hear the word Jew used as an epithet. If one listened, one could catch bands talking of being 'Jewed down' by a record company executive or having to hire a 'Jew lawyer' to fix a thorny legal hassle. The attitude was no different in the shrunken universe of alternative music. True, three of punk rock's spiritual godfathers were Jewish: Bob Dylan, ne Robert Zimmerman, Lou Reed, ne Louis Firbank; and Joey Ramone, ne Jeffrey Hyman. Yet signing with a major label, one drunk English guitarist could be heard saying late one night in 1992 at the historic New York punk club CBGB, meant turning oneself into 'Jew-bait.'" [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 145]

      At Sire Records, an affiliate of Warners, Seymour Stein's artist stable has included Madonna, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and many other premiere talents. "Before long," says Christopher Anderson, "[producer Mark] Kamins and Madonna became lovers ... After a few days together, Madonna felt comfortable enough to spring her tape on Kamins ... He had become friendly with an up-and-coming artist and repertorie man at Warner's Sire label named Michael Rosenblatt ... Rosenblatt took the tape to the mercurial [Seymour] Stein." Madonna also got her start in movies in Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan. [ANDERSON, 1991, p. 96-98, 121] Guy Oseary, born in Jerusalem, is "a partner in Madonna's Maverick Records" and he wrote a book called Jews Who Rock, about Jewish performers in the rock and roll world. "I keep getting calls," he says, "And they say, 'Why wasn't I in your book? I rock. And I'm Jewish.'" [BOUCHER, G., 4-17-01, p. 62; TAYLOR, L., 12-27-00, p. F5] Oseary "as Maverick's chief talent finder has become one of Madonna's most trusted confidants." [FURMAN, P., 6-17-98, p. 12]

 

     When Bob Krasnow became the head of Elektra, "it was, he says, his ethnic credentials more than anything else, that got him the job." [WADE, p. 58]  "I could work for a big company like Warner Brothers [which swallowed Elektra]," said Krasnow, "because I had all the ethnic qualities -- I was white, I was Jewish, they could invite me over to their home for dinner, and I could talk to Black people." [WADE, p. 58]

 

     Jerry Wexler was the co-founder of Atlantic.  When the head of CBS Records, Clive Davis, was fired for embezzling $94,000 (including $18,000 for his son's bar mitzvah [DANNEN, p. 86], he was replaced by Irwin Segelstein. Dick Asher, also Jewish "was the number two man at Columbia Records under Clive Davis." [KING, T., 2000, p. 143] ("Since the days of Abraham," notes the Jewish Forward, "machers in the entertainment business have used their sons' and daughters' special day to power-schmooze fellow moguls. In 1973, Clive Davis, then president of CBS Records, threw one of the most famous bar mitzvahs in show business history (that he was fired for it only adds to its mystique.") [DORFMAN, J., 6-16-2000, p. 2] Davis later ended up as the head of Bell Records under Columbia Pictures president Alan Hirschfield. (Davis later had a successful career heading Arista Records, whose artists included Whitney Houston and the Grateful Dead. Davis' business manager at CBS was Michael Levy; Goddard Lieberman was CBS Records' second in command; Lieberman's assistant was Norman Adler. Al Shulman was head of the CBS Special Products Division and Dick Asher was CBS Records' Executive Vice President. Ron Alexenburg was a vice president for promotion at Columbia. Elliott Goldman was the number two man at Arista Records; Mitch Miller was a prominent producer and musical celebrity at CBS.

 

     By 1998 Jay Boborg -- co-founder of IRS Records in 1979 which began the careers of the Go-Gos, R.E.M., and others -- was the president of MCA Records.  Jerry Greenberg, former head of Atlantic Records, "is now [in 1998, superstar] Michael Jackson's right hand man and president of MJJ Records."  [VIOLANTI, p. 8M] (Jackson was the best man for Israeli psychic Uri Geller's wedding. Geller's drawing -- minus a Star of David -- graces a recent Jackson album). [REUTERS, 11-1-01] Alain Levy is chairman (1998) of PolyGram. In 1997 Danny Goldberg, chairman of Mercury Records, was described by the Jewish Week as being "among the most powerful executives in the entertainment industry." [GREENBERG, E., MUST, p. 49]  Among the divisions he directs is Motown Records and PolyGram Classics and Jazz in the United States. Goldberg was also formerly the president of Atlantic Records where he controlled, among other groups, Nirvana. By 1995 he was the chairman and CEO of Warner Records, but lost the position during the controversy over Warners' support of particularly abrasive "gangsta rap" recordings.  Goldberg is also a former chairman of the executive committee of the American Jewish Congres

     In 1987 Goldberg (then manager of Bonnie Raitt, Belinda Carlyle of the Go-Gos, Don Johnson, and others) organized a record industry-wide propaganda effort for the state of Israel. As the Los Angeles Times described it:

     "Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in an unprecedented appearance before
     a group of recording industry executives, personal managers, agents and lawyers,
     told them that rock music was 'like praying' to some Israeli youth and exhorted
     them to 'come "pray" with our young people so they will celebrate our [Israeli]
     40th anniversary' in 1988. The reception/brunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel
     on Sunday was organized by rock entrepreneur Danny Goldberg, the president
     [then] of Gold Mountain Records ... The 100-plus guests represented a
     cross-section of the music industry, with strong ties to musical talents. Among
     them: Irving Azoff, president of MCA's Entertainment Group; A&M Records
     vice-president Jeff Gold; and personal managers Fred DeMann (Madonna,
     Lionel Richie), Mike Gormley (The Bangles, Oingo Boingo), and Michael
     Lippman (George Michael)." [CAULFIELD, D., 9-29-87, p. 6]

     Goldberg told the Times that

     "We talked about the fact that Israel needs to establish an identity with
     younger people. They're currently only aware of the country as an item on
     the nightly news. In the 1950s, an alliance was formed between Israel
     and what used to be the heart of show business. I mean, Frank Sinatra
     and Elizabeth Taylor were associated with Israel, but that leaves out
     the people who grew up after them." [CAULFIELD, D., 9-29-87, p. 6]

    The brunch was sponsored by the CRB Foundation, founded by Jewish mogul Charles Bronfman "to create a mutual exchange between Israel and the rest of the world." The Israeli Foreign Minister, Peres, noted the Times, received "a standing ovation when he arrived." [CAULFIELD, D., 9-29-87, p. 6]
 

 

       In England, Michael Levy headed Magnet Records, built to power with help in 1972 from the then head of (British) Columbia Records, Maurice Oberstein. Levy, known for "chasing people around the office and throwing ashtrays," is also chairman of Britain's Jewish Care organization. [BRIGHT, p. T2]  Levy "made his personal fortune propelling pop acts -- Alvin Stardust, Chris Rea, Darts and Bad Manners -- to stardom." [DAVIS, D., 2-10-2000, p. 5] "At one point [he] was selling 8% of all records in the UK." [RED STAR RESEARCH] In 1991 British producer Ian Levine began recording old Black Motown record label acts for his new Motorcity label. Levine gathered over 100 former stars to Detroit. "I was in control of the entire Motown family," he chortled, "[I brought] it back together again, and the press and the fans were standing there in awe."  [BULL, p. 14]

 

     Perhaps the most famous agent/manager/record executive is David Geffen (also Jewish), former manager of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and many others, who founded Asylum, and later, Geffen Records (the artist stable included Jackson Browne, the Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and many others). (Alan Cohen "structured the Asylum Records joint venture buyout [with Warner and] left Warner to become head of Madison Square Garden"). [KING, T., 2000, p. 287] Dennis McDougal notes that Geffen "spotted Aerosmith, XTC, Nirvana, and dozens of other pop acts in their infancy and nurtured them to monied maturity and more than fifty gold record albums ... In 1989 alone, Geffen worldwide record sales came to over $225 million." [MCDOUGAL, p. 474]  A key Geffen partner was Elliot Roberts (Rabinowitz) -- he was the "pre-eminent manager of L.A.-based folk rock in the seventies," including, even later, Neil Young and Tracy Chapman. [GRAHAM/GREENFIELD, p. 553] The president of Geffen Records was Eddie Rosenblatt. Geffen's business manager was Jerry Rubenstein. Gil Segel helped to get him into real estate. [KING, T., 2000, p. 160, 184] "The funny thing," says Geffen, " is that I had to forge a letter that I graduated from UCLA [to get an early job], and today I'm on the Board of Regents of UCLA." [SMITH, p. 303] ("He used his friendship with [his client] Linda Ronstadt, who was then dating California governor Jerry Brown, to obtain a seat on the University board of regents.") [KING, T., 2000, p. 316]

     Non-Jewish musical stars, caught in the Judeocentric web of the musical world, often support Jewish/Israeli ethnocentric interests on behalf of their Jewish friends and managers. Among the old Geffen stable, for example, in 2002 a news item noted that Don Henley of the Eagles was "donating the $7,900 from the sale [of his guitar at auction] to the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas for use in supporting Israel and Jewish organizations." [TOP FORTY CHARTS, 6-12-02] That same year, the Jewish Week wondered: "What’s one of the world’s greatest rock stars doing at a Jewish benefit dinner? The answer came Monday night when Bono, the voice and wordsmith driving the fabulously popular band U2, became the first rock and roll personality to receive the Humanitarian Laureate Award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center." [Jewish Week, 11-22-02] (That same year, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that the new Wiesenthal "tolerance" Center in Jerusalem was built on a Muslim cemetery).

      In the rock and roll world which is so heavily Jewish, there are apparently different levels of what is considered to be morally offensive, including the usual admonition: Thou Shalt Not Offend Jews (Others, especially Christianity? -- No problem). As Leah Garchik wrote in 2002, "Marilyn Manson reveals in Rolling Stone's new book 'Tattoo Nation: Portraits of Celebrity Body Art" that Madonna's manager, who was thinking of signing Manson, called Manson's manager to inquire about whether the rocker had a swastika among his many tattoos. 'Of course not,' said Manson's manager. 'One of the guys in the band is Jewish.' 'Oh, OK,' said Madonna's manager. 'We don't have a problem with the Satanism, but we can't deal with any kind of Nazism.'" [GARCHIK, L., 11-7-02, p. D14]

 

     Jews even came to prominence behind the scenes in the world of country music. The first important Jewish figure in Nashville was Paul Cohen, the A&R man for Decca in 1945-58 (the Decca company in the United States was founded in Chicago by Jack Kapp in 1934). Cohen, who lived in New York and visited Nashville for a few weeks at a time, was "called by some 'the King of Nashville.'" [JONES, M., p. 73]  Margaret Jones notes that

 

     "As head of A&R for Decca's country division, Cohen was responsible

     for a blue chip roster of talent that included the top acts of the time:

     Ernest Tubb, Red Foley and Webb Pierce ... In 1952, Cohen signed

     the one and only female star of country to Decca, Kitty Wells, and by

     1954 he had two other solo girl performers under contract: Goldie Hill

     and Wanda Jackson ... After Cohen signed Webb Pierce, Pierce

     became the hottest artist in country ... [JONES, M., p. 74] ... Nashville

     was Cohen's 'fishing hole,' and he galvanized the town, convincing

     Ernest Tubb to record there; soon all the other acts fell into line."

     [JONES, M., p. 73]

 

     "Paul was one of the first Jewish guys who actually came in to Nashville, once they saw country music was getting to doing something," recalled singer Faron Young. "Before that, most of the country people wouldn't accept Jewish people. They were too clannish about that. He more or less broke the ice, then the rest of them came in and more or less took over this business. Hell, they own all the labels and everything else now. Them and the Japs." [JONES, M. p. 73]

 

     Cohen also signed Brenda Lee and eventual country superstar Patsy Cline, among others, to his stable. Earlier though, "Patsy got to know and work with Ben Adelman, another fixture on the [Washington] DC music scene. Adelman, and not Bill Peer, as one story goes, appears to have been the direct link to Patsy' first recording contract. The gregarious, redheaded Adelman was a 'Jewish feller' who hailed from upstate New York and had fallen in love with country music in the late forties. He was willing to spend a lot of his wife's money just for the fun of being in the ball game. Fortunately his wife, Kate Adelman, as an heiress and supported his efforts ... Adelman's real talent and the focus of his energies was songwriting. His early compositions were in the Tin Pan Alley mold, but when his interests shifted to the booming country and western field, he started writing hillbilly music. His wife claimed he wrote or co-wrote literally thousands of tunes that are registered in the Library of Congress." [JONES, M., 1994, p. 50]

      "Cohen was a wheeler-dealer in many respects," notes Margaret Jones, "He started a dozen or more publishing companies of his own -- all named after brands of whisky. Then he had the chutzpah to open his office two blocks away from Decca, so he would be operating right under their noses." [JONES, M., p. 71]  When Cohen's career was finished in Nashville, another Jewish Decca agent, Milton Gabler, "took over for him." [JONES, M., p. 73]  Among his finds, Gabler signed Bill Haley and His Comets in 1954. (Irvin Feld is also credited with "discovering" Bill Haley, as well as Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, and Fats Domino, among others). [BLACKWELL, E., 1973, p. 164] In this same genre, years later, country star Waylon Jennings recalled that his big break in Hollywood came through Jewish producer and musician Herb Alpert.

      The Atlanta Jewish Times notes the story of the birth of another country star, Willie Nelson:
    
     "[Jewish agent Joel Katz] received a phone call from a man with a distinct Texas
     drawl. The man said he had read about the contract Katz had negotiated for
     [Black pop star] James Brown. He didn't have money, but he wanted Katz
     to make him a star. Katz hopped on a plane for Austin, Texas, walked into
     a room at the Ramada Inn, and stared into the eyes of Willie Nelson."
     [POLLAK, S., 1-7-00]

     Katz has represented a wide range of singers: from country stars Tammy Wynette, Waylon Jennings, and George Straight to African-American artists The Temptations, B. B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimmy Buffet, and the rappers Rone Thugs and Harmony.

 

     Finding a niche wherever it is available, by the late 1990s Madeline Stone was even a "leading writer of Christian music," working with top Christian acts CeCe Wilnan, and the group Anointed. "I see myself," she explained, "as being a Jewish girl who writes inspirational songs, not a Christian writer." [DREYFUSS, I., p. Y4] A Reform Jew, Steve Kaufman, is also "the only three-time winner of the National Flatpicking Championship held in Winfield, Kansas." As the Jerusalem Post notes,

 

     "His 50 books and videos include A Smokey Mountain Christmas for

     Guitar and Flatpickin' the Gospels. 'My mother said 'Oy,'' he recounted.

     'I said, "mom, it's going to sell." In this business you fill the void. There

     weren't many bluegrass gospel videos.'" [ROBINSON, R., 7-24, 2000]

 

     In the "heavy metal" musical world, Jewish entrepreneur Jon Zazula of Crazed Management-Megaforce Records has a stable of acts that includes Method of Destruction (M.O.D.), Anthrax, Ministry, Metallica, and others. Cliff Burstein and Peter Mensch have managed AC/DC, Metallica, Def Leppard, Bruce Hornsby, Queensryche, Tesla, and others. Their Q Prime company also owns three radio stations in California.

 

    The "godfather of punk," manager and "mastermind" of the seminal "punk" band -- the Sex Pistols, was Great Britain's Malcolm McLaren. He was also the manager of the New York Dolls, Adam Ant, and Boy George. According to Sex Pistol lead singer Johnny Rotten, his manager was "the most evil man alive." [HARRIS, M., 8-19-94, p. 11; SHAW, D., 12-16-99, p. 5] McLaren "was brought up by his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Corre, a formidable woman from a very rich Sephardic Jewish family." [BARBER, L., 12-22-91, p. 8] The anarchistic Sex Pistols, notes the London Independent, were "brought into being quite cynically by Malcolm McLaren as an advertising gimmick to promote sales of the fetishistic clothes and other devices designed and sold by himself and Vivienne Westwood." [GRAHAM-DIXON, 8-19-95, p. 2] (The Ramones are also a candidate for the most influential punk band. The head of the Ramones, Joey Ramone -- born Jeffrey Hyman -- is also Jewish. ) [TAYLOR, L., 12-27-00, p. F5] Elsewhere, Geoffrey Weiss "first made a name for himself as a Harvard undergraduate when he and some friends took over WHRB, the college's 50,000-watt radio station, and turned it into an oasis of punk rock known across the country for its idiosyncratic programming. After graduation, Weiss had gone to work for A&M records, where he'd helped to launch Soundgarden." [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 160] Howie Klein founded the "punk" rock label 415.

 

      Joseph Heller, formerly of Heller-Fischel, booked acts like Styx, the Electric Light Orchestra, Boz Scaggs, and a variety of others. "He represented top-drawer rock talent like Van Morrison, the Guess Who, Marvin Gaye, War, Elton John and Pink Floyd." [SNYDER, N., 2-19-01] Stretching out as dangerously as possible to make a buck, Heller eventually gravitated towards a relative goldmine in the Black ghetto-based "gangsta rap." He cofounded Ruthless Records and managed the pioneer rap group NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) from early in their careers. The musical genre of gangsta rap, notes Jory Farr, "thrives on misogyny, as well as homophobic and race-baiting rage ... [It] was the perfect music for [a] lifestyle loaded down ... with warnings of betrayal, murder, revenge, and a short life." [FARR, p. 70] "I believed that rap would become the most important music of the nineties," said Heller, "... [But] you can't sell two million rap records to kids in the inner city. That's a way to sell 200,000. You have to market it to the white kids." [FARR, p. 68, 71]

 

      Heller hired Ira Selsky as his corporate attorney and an Israeli-born security chief named Michael Klein to ward off angry, exploited Blacks who quite literally walked into his office threatening to kill him. Rap star Ice Cube even threatened Heller in one of his recorded songs, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to flag it as anti-Semitic. Ruthless Records released a Jewish rap duo called Blood of Abraham.  As Chuck D, the lead vocalist for the Black rap group Public Enemy, noted, "There's no way to get trained on the seamier elements of the music business being on the street -- that element is reserved for boardrooms." [D, CHUCK, p. 85]  Those in Chuck D's reminiscences about "boardroom" behavior include Lyor Cohen (manager of Rush Productions, and an Israeli); Al Teller, an executive at MCA whose parents died in the Holocaust; Steve Ralbovsky of CBS; Bill Adler (a publicist); and Rick Rubin of Def Jam Records. (Jewish diamond dealer Jacob Arabo has made the news as a favored jewelry merchant to the Black rap crowd that seeks to symbolize wealth and power, or, as the New York Times put it, "the jeweler who gives most of today's leading rappers their shine." [CENTURY, p. 1]

     In 2001, Heller was named the "Godfather of Latin Rap" by the Los Angeles Business Journal; he was joining in attempting to build a rap movement in the Latino market via Hit a Lick records. As the Journal noted:

     "If Heller is convinced that Latin rap will emerge as the next big thing, it
     probably will be, said other music industry veterans ... Indeed, Heller is
     widely acknowledged as one of the key forces behind gangsta rap's
     crossover into the music mainstream ... While Heller has the second-tier
     title of chief operating officer, he acknowledges that the other partners
     'generally run everything by me because of my experience and expertise.'"
     [SNYDER, N., 2-19-01]

     By 2001 too, the aforementioned Lyor Cohen had catapulted to power in the Rap world. Rolling Stone even magazine featured an article about him, sub-titled How Lyor Cohen -- the White, Jewish Israeli-Raised President of Island Def Jam Records -- Became One of the Most Important Men in Hip-Hop, and Why He May Now Become One of the Most Important Men in Rock & Roll." Cohen started out promoting punk rock acts like the Circle Jerks, Social Distortion, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He then became president of the rap music label Def Jam in 1988 and soon had become "perhaps the most powerful white executive in an African-American business." (Def Jam was bought out by the Jewish-owned Polygram company in 1999). Irv Gott, a Black record producer, notes that Cohen is "a white Jewish guy, but I think everybody respects him like he's black. He knows how to carry it too. He knows how to get gangster, how to fall back, when to shut the fuck up, when to say something. That's why other white executives are scared of him. He knows how to deal with the hoods, the criminal element." Cohen, continued Rolling Stone, has broadened his musical base and "oversees an empire that includes hundreds of artists performing in dozens of genres, a roster that features PJ Harvey, American Hi-Fi, Shelby Lynne, Lionel Richie, Bon Jovi, Melissa Etheridge, Saliva, Ludacris, Kelly Price and Sisquo." Cohen's nickname is "Little Lansky" (after famed Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky). He was born in New York City "where his father, an Israeli, worked in the consulate." He was later raised on an avocado farm near Tel Aviv. [COHEN, R., 6-21-01]

     Cohen has also been active in trying to readjust Black consciousness of Jewish exploitation of the African-American community. "In the late Eighties," notes reporter Rich Cohen,   

     when [Public Enemy's] album It Takes a Nation of Milions to Hold Us Back was
     topping the charts, the group's minister of information, Professor Griff, made
     several anti-Semitic statements. As a Jewish exec working with the band, Cohen 
     found himself in the middle of a rough, formative experience. 'When Professor Griff
     from Public Enemy said what he said, and it caused this whirlwind, the whole
     industry asked me, 'What the fuck are you doing?' says Cohen. 'Every president
     of every record company called and said, 'Drop them: But I believe part of
     being Jewish is education. And I believe I was instrumental in changing Public
     Enemy's views. I said, "Your voice is being muted because you say Jews are
     this or that. You can't make blanket statements. If you want your message
     out there" -- and it was profound, I think -- "stop generalizing." And I was
     the only Jew in their lives. What if I resigned? They would only be more
     alienated. I hadn't quite being a Jew. I can't quit being a Jew. Instead, I
     tried to have an impact. I felt like I was doing the right thing. Not just
     as a Jew, as a person. They had a big voice da nation of millions, to
     quote their album. I had the Holocaust Museum [the Simon Wiesenthal
     Cednter] shut down, and we had a private tour. The first thing you see
     is a Jewish skull plus a black person's skull equals a baboon. The last    
     thing is a monkey with enormous lips dressed with a Star of David holding
     a trumpet and a sign saying, 'It's these Jews that are bringing in this music call
     jazz.'" [COHEN, R., 6-21-01] 

  

    Then there is former tax attorney Joe Weinberger who drives a Jaguar S-200, wears a diamond-studded Rolex watch and "fat gold rings," and carries a "9mm automatic pistol tucked in his pocket." As the Miami New Times notes about his rise to power in the African-American rap music world,

 

     "In the early Nineties, Miami's reigning booty-rapper, Luther Campbell,

     hired Weinberger away from the carpeted hallways of a swash Brickell

     Key law firm to help manage a growing musical empire and its attendant

     lawsuits. Within five years Campbell was bankrupt and Weinberger

     had purchased the rights to his music. Rather than return to the

     comfortable confines of his former life, the 42-year old lawyer, who

     is single and childless, opted to launch his own label, Lil' Joe ... In a

     post bankruptcy fire sale overseen by Richard Wolfe [Weinberger's

     lawyer/partner, also Jewish], Weinberger bought the rights to 2

     Live Crew music for about $800,000, plus the outstanding money he

     claims Campbell owed him." [KORTEN, T., 8-10-2000]

 

    Weinberger has even been accused of ordering a car bombing and directing death threats against an employee.

 

    Then there is Canada-born Bryan Turner, who founded Priority Records in 1985; he is also Jewish. [JEWHOO, 2000] By 1998, Priority had yearly sales of $250 million. As the Los Angeles Times notes:

 

     "When the pioneering gangster rap group N.W.A. was looking for its

     first record deal, it found a distributor in Priority Records, which

     released an album so obscene it prompted a letter of complaint from

     the F.B.I. When Ice-T left Warner Brothers Records after police groups

     and the company's shareholders objected to his song 'Cop Killer,' he

     found a new home at Priority. When Suge Knight, the imprisoned head

     of Death Row Records, who is known for his pugnacious business

     tactics, was looking for his first deal, Priority gave it to him. Through

     all the violence and controversy of hardcore rap music -- from its roots

     in N.W.A to its current resurrection with Master P -- the Los Angeles

     label Priority Records has been a major player." [STRAUSS, N., 9-3-

    98, sec. E, p. 1]

 

     And as the Times noted on another occasion:

 

     "When Time Warner first parted ways with rapper Ice-T after the 'Cop

     Killer' flap and then with rapper Paris over a song that portrayed an

     assassination fantasy of President Bush, Turner wasted little time

     signing deals with both artists." [HOCHMAN, S., 7-30-95, CALENDAR,

     p. 82]

     Jewish entrepreneur Steve Rifkind has also become very successful in the rap music field. In 1993, Rifkind founded and still heads Loud Records (its president is Rich Isaacson). Earlier, Rifkind began the Steven Rifkind Company, "a consulting firm specializing in Rap and R&B." Loud acts include Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep, Yvette Michelle, Funkmaster Flex, Alkaholics, Raekwon, and Xzibit. The company's value is estimated at about $100 million. [collegemusic.com/1-11-00] "Rifkind," notes the online magazine Entrepreneur,

    "who trademarked the term 'Street Teams,' takes marketing to the street --
     literally -- by hiring youths to tell their communities about his artists'
     music. 'My philosophy has always been 'You can't stop word-of-mouth,
     explains Rifkind, who has street teams across cities, distributing free singles
     to teenagers at housing projects and schools, and scrawling the names of
     his albums in the dust on parked trucks, which then serve as mobile billboards."
     [entrepreneur.com]
 

    

     Yet another major Jewish rap entrepreneur is the aforementioned Rick Rubin, who, says Jory Farr, found his "biggest stars were former gangsters who used beats and rhymes to glamorize wealth, dope, and violence. Deciding who to sign could be a moral quagmire ... but Rubin wasn't one to be bothered by the trivia of social responsibility." [FARR, p. 126] "I could do anything I wanted," Rubin once said about his own family life in New York, "We were always upper middle class. We were wealthy for the community we lived in. In a sense I was spoiled." [FARR, p. 119]

 

     Rubin's record company Def American is now called American Recording; at one time Geffen Records distributed Rubin's material. Earlier in his career he had signed bands like Slayer (whose lyrics exhorted "everything from virgin sacrifice and satanism to sadistic mutilations and the atrocities of Auschwitz" [FARR, p. 109]) and the Geto Boys, who "pushed misogyny and sadism to new depths." [FARR, p. 108]

 

      Rubin's own star rose so high that he eventually produced albums for Mick Jagger and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Troubles, however, came from a lawsuit against him by Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys and threats from the Meir Kahane-founded Jewish Defense League. Outraged by Rubin's promotion of violently anti-Jewish lyrics by Black ghetto groups, the Jewish group reportedly came looking to beat him up. Rubin couldn't understand their anger. He told an interviewer that

 

      "They should've talked to me and found out what I felt before coming to

       attack me, because I was a JDO [Jewish Defense Organization]

       supporter. When I was at NYU I saw [right wing rabbi] Meir Kahane

       speak and he blew me away -- he was amazing ... After hearing him

       speak, I wanted to pack my bags and go to Israel ... I called the JDO

       several times, wanted to join, but they never returned my calls." [FARR,

       p. 123]

 

     Among the most controversial "gangsta rap" labels was Death Row Records (including Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre, and Snoopy Doggy Dog). A noted earlier, Death Row products were distributed by the Jewish-dominated Time-Warner company until "pressure from stockholders after an outcry over the flagrantly violent and misogynist lyrics" of its stars. Time-Warner dropped the label, but eighteen months later it was picked up (for $200 million) by the Universal Music Group, a subsidiary of the Jewish Bronfman family's Seagram company. Universal too eventually abandoned the controversial label, only after "pressure from stockholders and regulators." [HELMORE, E., 8-29-97, p. 10]

     Still another Jewish push -- more recently -- into the rap world is Koch Entertainment's In The Paint record label. Koch, one of the largest "independent music distribution companies," is headed by founder and CEO Michael Koch and President Bob Frank. [kochentertainment.com]

      Jewish author Nearl Karlen doesn't like latent Black perceptions of Jewish exploitation surfacing in the rap world, writing: "'I want everybody to try and find this book!' rapper Ice Cube said at a 1991 press conference where he held up a copy of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a bogus piece of Nation of Islam scholarship." [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 146] Karlen later applauds one rappers stand against "antisemitism, " saying: "Easy-E, former leader of the gangsta rap group N.W.A., made a courageous stand, going so far as to appear on a Jewish rap group's single entitled 'Niggaz and Jews (Some Say Kikes).' Easy-E was not long after lectured by Omar Bradley, the mayor of his hometown of Compton, California, with 'I won't name the specific racial group that's using you, brother, but they are destroying us and having lunch and a bar mitzvah at the same time." [KARLEN, N., 1994, p. 146]
 

 

     And lastly for the music scene, the president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America --- a lobbying group (with a staff of 72) for the big record companies -- is also Jewish, Hilary Rosen, who was described in 1997 by the Washington Post as "a powerful woman in an industry dominated by men. One of the most influential yet least known players in the U.S. entertainment behemoth." [WEEKS, p. C1]  Rosen became the CEO when another Jewish executive, Jason Berman, stepped down from the position.

 

     C. Delores Tucker, the founder of the National Political Congress of Black Women, has singled out Rosen's organization for special condemnation:

 

     "In terms of children, the RIAA is the most destructive lobbying force in

      America. It is incomprehensible that anyone with an ounce of concern

      for children would be demanding the promotion, distribution, and sale of

      gangsta/porno rap to children." [WEEKS, p. C1]

 

      Another organization often under public fire for negatively influencing children and adolescents is the Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents nearly fifty video game companies. Doug Lowenstein, also Jewish,  [who was once the Legislative Director for Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum], became the first president of the organization in 1994, and he remains in power. Lowenstein is often called upon to defend the excessive violence and decadence found in many of the games. "Video games," he insisted in 1998, "are not the source of violence in society." "The producer of Flesh Feast, Eric Wahlberg," noted one media report, "agreed." [MEDIA AWARENESS NETWORK, 5-29-98; BLOOM, D., 9-23-99, p. L8]

 

     The most controversial video game for the early 1990s was Mortal Kombat, produced by Acclaim Entertainment.  In an appeal to video firms, asking for restraint from excessive violence, California Attorney General Dan Lundgren noted that "Mortal Kombat depicts bloody decapitations as well as scenes where a still-beating heart is pulled from a body." [SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 9-9-94, p. C7] Acclaim Entertainment is headed by Gregory Fischbach, once hired by Elliot Goldman (the president and CEO of RCA/ARIOLA) to head RCA/ARIOLA Record International. (Fischbach represented musical acts Crosby Stills and Nash, Emmylou Harris, Boz Scaggs, among others.)  In 1998, Lawrence Kassanoff, CEO of Threshold Entertainment, was making a weekly TV series based on Mortal Kombat.) [KNOEDELSEDER, W., 6-18-86, pt. 4, p. 3; O'HARE, K., 12-27-98, p. 45]

    

 

 

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

 

     For all the Jewish complaints that they are "marginalized" in American society and subject to Gentile-inspired self-hate, Jews have for decades been afforded mass media dominance in literally telling everyone else how to run their lives. "Dear Abby" (Pauline Esther Friedman Philips) and "Ann Landers" (Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer) -- the twin Friedman sisters from Sioux City, Iowa -- have been mentioned before. One or both of them have been listed in polls as among "the most admired women in the United States," "the most important women," and "the most influential women in America." By the late 1980s both women were in demand in the national lecture circuit, commanding $10,000 for a half hour talk. [POTTKER/SPEZIALE, p. viii, 4]

 

     The sisters' father, Abraham, began a successful theatre business as co-owner of a burlesque house in a seedy part of Sioux City. [POTTKER/SPEZIALE, p. 15, 312] Ann (Esther) once admitted that she "learned the facts of life from the girls in the chorus line." [P/S, p. 16] Both women are remembered by locals in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they later lived, for their ostentation: "their flare for making an entrance." [P/S, p. 65] Both women took separate routes to advice column stardom, although "neither twin has had formal training in social service work or journalism." [P/S, p. 4-5]  A non-speaking, competitive feud between them lasted eight years.

 

     Sister "Abigail Von Buren" eventually married Morton Phillips, Jewish heir to a Midwestern liquor fortune. In Eau Claire, the Phillips family also owned a factory, Presto Industry, (which gained national fame as a maker of pressure cookers) which alienated some in the town. "Many of the town's blue-collar workers, resentful of their dependence on the Jewish-owned Presto Industry, openly made anti-Semitic remarks ... [P/S, p. 65]   ... Despite the profits Presto reported in 1953, including an astounding 48 percent return on net worth the year before, Presto managers shocked union employees with a proposal for wage cuts." [P/S, p.89]

 

     "Dear Abby" sits on her husband's $70 million philanthropic foundation. A millionaire many, many times over, she has also done advertising commercials for English muffins and a milk lobbying organization. Telling the world with assurance how to solve its problems, her own daughter spent five years in therapy with (the aforementioned) Judd Marmor. [P/S, p. 178-179]

 

     Sister "Ann Landers" was married to Jules Lederer, founder of the Budget-Rent-a-Car company. In her columns she was "ever mindful of maintaining the facade of a happy marriage, ... presenting her readers with the image of a devoted wife and loving husband." [P/S, p. 216] In 1975, her husband of 36 years dumped her for a younger woman. "Gossip about the affair," note her biographers, "had an extra zing to it. Jules was cheating on the woman who had set herself up as America's moral conscience ... [P/S, p. 222] ... Perhaps her public statements, years before her divorce, reflected her fears and insecurities over an empty marriage." [P/S, p. 216]  A friend of the Lederer family, therapist Abe Franzblau, who knew Ann Landers well, noted that "All it took was a short time in the Lederer company to realize that [Ann] exhibited the classic, textbook traits of a cold, rejecting woman." [P/S, p. 217]

 

     Landers also lives a life of extreme ostentation:

 

     "The ornate showplace at 209 East Lake Shore Drive is still [Ann's]

     home. Wall panels and sconces imported from a British castle

     complemented the mullioned windows and intricately sculpted ceilings.

     Recasts of fifteenth-century statuary in the living room, including

     a covey of kneeling angels..., provide a stunning counterpoint

     to Louis XV sofas and mother-of-pearl inlaid chairs. Works by

     Picasso, Renoir, and Dali cover the walls ... [Her husband] was

     offended by the extraordinary amount of money [she] was lavishing

     on their apartment." [P/S, p. 219]

 

     In 1995, Landers got into hot water with some comments she made in New Yorker magazine about the Pope and the Polish people. "He has a sweet sense of humor," she said, "Of course, he's a Polack. They're very anti-women." Polish-Americans responded with outrage to the slur, wondering how and why she had singled them out as being "anti-women." Landers issued a formal apology but refused to comment further. [O'CROWLEY, P., 12-1-95, p. A1]

 

    The woman who tells the little people of the world how to handle their lives, also had a chauffeur and housekeeper. [P/S, p. 229] The values she champions also reflect her behind-the-scenes "facelift" and "extensive body surgery." Her sister, Abby, has also had cosmetic surgery. [P/S, p. 255]  Both women, but especially Ann Landers, survived scandal in the 1980s when it was discovered that the two millionaires were sometimes doing nothing for their pay -- merely recycling advice columns (not identified as reprints) from two decades earlier. [P/S, p. 277-283]

 

     Concerning Jewish identity, notes Landers' daughter Margo, "[My mother] made the rule when I went to college that I could only date Jewish boys ... Mother was simply ethnocentric. She made it a point to tell everyone she was Jewish and often mentioned it in her column." [HOWARD, p. 142-143]

 

    (In 1987 there was a much publicized search to create a new "Ann Landers" when Esther Lederer left the Chicago Sun-Times to work at the Chicago Tribune. 12,000 people applied to become the new syndicated advice columnist. Jeffrey Zaslow, male, and also Jewish, was selected as one of two people to replace Landers. Zaslow's column was called "All That Zazz"; his wife is also in the media business, a "TV news anchor.")  [ZASLOW, J., 1990; MOMENT, 12-31-96]

 

     Another syndicated troubles columnist, Judith Miller ("Miss Manners") is Jewish as is the popular media sex therapist "Dr. Ruth" (Westheimer) whose shows include her "Sexually Speaking" radio show, "Good Sex!" cable TV program, and "Ask Dr. Ruth" TV program. She has also lent her name to a "Good Sex" board game, a "Terrific Sex" videotape, and ads for condoms, bras, and typewriters. She has been afforded acting spots in movies and was a panelist on the TV game show "Hollywood Squares."  "I raised my children with an emphasis on Zionism and idealism," writes Westheimer, "... They both went to Zionist summer camps ... [When my daughter graduated from college] she announced that she was going to Israel to live. I knew it was coming -- I had encouraged it." [italics in original: WESTHEIMER, p. 180-181]  (In 1996, the Cleveland Plain Dealer noted another Jewish sex therapist, Sherry Levine, who was making appearances throughout the national media. Levine, headlined the paper, "is the Dr. Ruth of Northwest Ohio.") [YERAK, p. 8] Dr. Joy Kuriansky is another prominent Jewish media sex-therapist. 

 

     Elsewhere, the second-most listened-to radio talk show host in America is "Dr. Laura" (Schlessinger), who has been known to have her rabbi as a guest in her studio during her show. (Schlessinger's favorite therapist? Rhoda Markovich "is the best therapist I know of.") [SCHLESSINGER, L., 9-1-2000] "Geoff Rich [the president of Radio Today, was] one of the key people in marketing Laura." [BANE, V., 1999, p. 165] Schlessinger, whose father was Jewish and who asserts an activist Jewish identity, has even incorporated herself as Dr. Laura Inc. She also has a syndicated newspaper column and two books that have together sold over two million copies -- How Could You Say That? and Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives. By 1997, 60,000 people were calling her program per day, seeking her advice on how to solve their problems; that same year she sold the rights to her radio show for $71.5 million. [MYERS, p. B6] 

 

     In 1999, an unauthorized expose of Schlessinger's life was published by Vickie Bane, which portrayed the talk show host as an extremely unpleasant personality behind the scenes and a steady hypocrite in both her past and present, rarely following in her personal life the moral dictates she demanded for others on her talk radio show. In 1998, the news world also noted that "her conservative message had been sullied by the publication of 12 color photographs of her, either topless or nude, on the Club Love web site." [BONES, p. A21] The photos were taken over 20 years earlier by her former boss, Bill Ballance, who gave Schlessinger her start in radio; the photos were taken when she was separated from her first husband. Schlessinger unsuccessfully sued both her former lover and an Internet company.

 

     "Schlessinger," notes Yvonne Crittenden, "hasn't spoken to her mother for fourteen years, and is equally estranged from her younger sister and family -- more fodder for critics who claim she's a hypocrite for espousing strong family values ... She fell in love with a married Zoology professor -- Lew Bishop (who was married with children at the time they met) ... Schlessinger converted to Judaism after watching a show on the Holocaust with her son ... [An article written by Leslie Bennetts of] Vanity Fair found her to be "cold and condescending, defensive, evasive and spiteful about those she'd worked with and hated by many formers friends and colleagues, all long before she became successful.'" [CRITTENDEN, 10-10-99]

 

     Schlessinger, notes Evelyn Theiss, is "particularly tough on callers who have been divorced, but she herself is a divorcee ... By the sheer numbers of documented episodes of such outrageous behaviors, [author Vickie] Bane persuades us that this is a woman with some serious problems ... There is plenty more of such behavior -- an almost stultifying amount."  In 1998, "Schlessinger received Israel's 50th Anniversary Tribute Award for her contributions to humanity." [THEISS, 10-10-99] The Jewish Forward notes the brand of Judaism she practices:

     "Ms. Schlessinger was born to a Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother, but
     was raised without religion, she has said in interviews. Prompted by questions
     from her son, Derek, while they watched a Holocaust documentary, Ms.
     Schlessinger began to research her Jewish roots and ended up converting
     under the auspices of Conservative Judaism. She later joined Chabad-Lubavitch
     of Conejo in the Los Angeles area and underwent an Orthodox conversion
     two years ago. The Chabad congregation's rabbi, Moshe Bryski, said Ms.
     Schlessinger regularly attends." [EDEN, A., 2001]

 

      The author, David Reuben, of the popular volume, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, was also Jewish. And for decades, the prim know-it-all Jewish psychologist, Dr. Joyce Brothers, (real surname: Bauer) was omnipresent in the mass media (her ride to fame began on a TV game show when she won "top prize on the first leg of the $64,000 Question, telling twenty million TV viewers that 'cestus' was the name of the leather glove worn by ancient Roman boxers.")  Brothers was "the only member of the American Psychology Association who was 'repped' by General Artists Corporation, which said [in its handout to journalists] for background: she looks like Loretta Lynn, walks like Marilyn Monroe, and talks like Dr. Freud.") [KRIM, p. 139-140] "She's obviously a fraud," wrote journalist Seymour Krim, "but I can't undress her in public. It's too goddamn cruel." [KRIM, p. 140]  Brothers has a syndicated column in 350 newspapers, a daily program on NBC Radio/Westwood One and "is a long-standing member of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies." [HYMAN, p. 191]

 

     Another Jewish psychiatrist in the talk show business was David Viscott. "At his peak in the early '90s," noted the Los Angeles Times, "he advised millions on both radio and television programs." [ZAMICHOW, p. 10]  Viscott had his own greeting card line, therapy audio tapes, and he had written two autobiographies. His personal therapy sessions cost $1,500 for two hours, which helped finance his ostentatious lifestyle including a Jaguar automobile and a Hancock Park mansion. Consummate hypocrite, police were often called to his home to break up family fights. "Abrasively confident on the air," says the Times, "megalomaniacal off it, Viscott was never in doubt about what other people should do with their lives. But when his own life began to crumble, he turned out to be clueless." [ZAMICHOW, p. 10]

 

     Other prominent Jewish American radio "shrink" talk-show hosts in the last decade have included Elyse Goldstein, Harvey Ruben, Harry Sobel, and Sonya Friedman (her show was entitled, "Telling Secrets with Sonya Friedman"). The pioneer (in the early 1980s) of this radio genre, however, was Toni Grant, "the first in the growing ranks of 'media therapists' who give free advice on the airwaves." [BOSWORTH, p. 112] "While Grant is a nationally recognized advisor on love," noted the Los Angeles Times, "she almost gave up finding it for herself."  "I've been single eight years," she admitted. "And I confess openly that I was starting to wonder if all I knew how to do was talk about it." [FINKE, p. VIEW, 5]  It is difficult to locate any ethnic information about Grant, born and raised on Long Island. She may or may not be Jewish, but, judging by Al Goldstein, publisher of the free love, semi-porno magazine, Screw, she has travelled in some intimate Jewish circles. Goldstein told People magazine that, "she was the hottest sexual partner I ever had. But basically it was a dishonest relationship. I loved her fame. She loved my excitement." [CHAMBERS, p. 70]

 

     In 1987, Los Angeles Times journalist Al Martinez -- intrigued by the avalanche of local telephone call-in therapy programs -- decided to randomly select one of the therapists advertising in the Hollywood Reporter. The psychologist-entrepreneur turned out to be a Jewish woman named Audrey Levy. Her ad was for call-in psychological help, offering "telephone counseling out of Beverly Hills by calling 2-RELATE, credit cards accepted." [MARTINEZ, pt. 9, p. 2]

 

     In 1991, Larry King introduced his (Jewish) guest and "inspirational speaker" Marianne Williamson, like this:

 

     "Who is that petit brunette standing behind the pulpit and why are some

     of Hollywood's hottest stars listening? ... Her detractors say she is a New

     Age guru more interested in self-promotion than teaching others about

     self help." [KING, L., 9-26-91[

 

      Jewish mass media psychology profiteers also dominate the scene in England. "Few people," noted the London Sunday Telegraph in 1997, "have been so influential in British life in recent years as the four famous agony aunts [i.e., mass media personal problem advisers] -- Marjorie Proops, Irma Kurtz, Anna Raeburn, and Claire Rayner. They have been empresses of pelvic epics and laureates of female personal pleasure." They are also all Jewish. [MYERS, p. 26]  "The role of the agony aunt is up for examination," noted the Telegraph in another piece, "What makes a good one? There is a joke among top practitioners that the key qualification is to be a Jewish mamma." "Maybe Jews have been so good at it because we have such an intense curiosity," suggested Claire Rayner. [GRICE, p. 17] "Have you noticed," Irma Kurtz once asked an interviewer, "that three-quarters of the agony aunts in the world are Jewish? We have carried common sense with us. Why are Jews violinists? You can pick it up and run." [SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY, 2-13-94]

 

     And what of the personal background of such people who have given advice to the emotionally needy for decades? What are their qualifications -- other than mass media connections and great drive -- towards counseling millions about etiquette, ethics, and healthy emotional lives? Late in their careers, there were startling revelations about each of the famous four in Great Britain, underscoring a profound audacity and hypocrisy at base in their professional careers.

 

     In 1995 Claire Rayner, agony aunt for the London Sun, publicly confessed that "I've been a depressive all my life ... I'm ashamed to admit that I'm still ashamed ... In America you show off if you need psychiatric help, and in this country you'd rather die than get it." [(SCOTTISH) DAILY RECORD & SUNDAY MAIL, 8-14-95, p.16] In turn, her husband "has been suffering from severe depression for ten years which at time have left him feeling suicidal. Despite his wife's career as an agony aunt, he says she hasn't been able to help." [MIDDLEHOUSE, 7-26-99, p. 41] "I was beaten to hell and back as a child," she says, "... I hardly knew my mother so I couldn't love or respect her. I did not have any self-esteem to speak of..." At the age of 15, she spent 14 months in a psychiatric hospital because of a "misdiagnosed thyroid problem." The kind of woman qualified to give advice to the psychologically and ethically troubled?

 

     Irma Kurtz? In 1999 the London Daily Mail noted that Kurtz, for over 20 years Cosmopolitan's

 

     "personal problem solver ... has given advice on everything from

     promiscuity and its consequences to abortion and the advisability

     of getting married too young. There would be those who argue that

     her own flawed emotional life is hardly conducive to dispensing

     considered, unbiased advice to women ... Irma admits she was a

     recklessly promiscuous young woman who stopped counting the

     number of her lovers when they exceeded 38. At the age of 30, she

     had an abortion when her married lover got her pregnant. And she

     chose a man to father her child, with no intention of ever marrying

     him." Kurtz notes that "when [my son] was eight or nine, I can

     remember getting very low and sometimes I would drink too much.

     There were a lot of nights in a row when I didn't go to bed sober."

     [MIDDLEHOUSE, 2-27-97, p. 46-47]

 

     Marjorie Proops? In 1992 the London Daily Mirror noted that "In her Mirror column ... she has often referred lovingly to her husband, giving the impression that she was writing from the experience and security of a happy marriage." [BROOKE, 12-24-92, p. 2-3] In her biography of that same year, however, she admitted that it was a disastrous marriage. "Britain's best known agony aunt had a largely sexless marriage accompanied by a secret 30-year affair" with the Daily Mirror's chief lawyer, Philip Levy. (For his part, it was later revealed that he always met Proops at a hotel and never told her that he lived with another woman, Meli Meitner). Proops also had three abortions, a divorce, an alcoholic mother, and "chronic depression." "Every agony aunt has a murky past," she once said. "Most use the problems that they've had in the past to share with their readers." [GRANT, p.23]

 

     Anna Raeburn? She built her reputation on Capital Radio with a call-in advice show, the first of its kind in England. In 1998 the London Evening Standard noted that "she's the agony aunt who has suffered more than her fair share of anguish: rape, two abortions, three suicide attempts, four periods of therapy. What next?" She once told an interviewer: "I'm not a nice woman. I have never been a nice woman. I did try it once and it didn't suit awfully well." Pregnant by her husband, she told him that he couldn't "cope" with a child and secured an abortion. [BILLEN, 7-22-98, p. 23]

 

     In 1994, Ann De Courcy, a critic in the London Daily Mail, lambasted the profound hypocrisy of this genre of "agony aunt":

 

      "What makes these women believe that they are specially gifted to

       offer moral guidance? ... They have no hesitation in telling their

       readers how to be happy, nor in laying down moral guidelines

       that often smack of pure hypocrisy ... Most people seeking

       made a success of their emotional life, rather than one traumatized

       by it." [De Courcy, 2-1-94]

 

     Other prominent Jewish agony aunts in Great Britain include:

 

      *Vanessa Feltz.  In 1999, she signed a $4 million deal with the BBC.

       Her qualifications for this career included the fact that "she was

       known as 'Vanessa the Undresser' and her interest in sex was

       such that her mother would ring up hostesses at teenage parties

       and tell them: 'Don't let her go upstairs [with any boys].'" Feltz

       wrote a book called What Are These Strawberries Doing on My

       Nipples? I Need Them for Fruit Salad and was a columnist 

       for the Jewish Chronicle; she also presented "Jewish London"

       on Greater London Radio. Her comedy routines she described

       as "nice smut ... [like] 'Is sperm kosher?" Her TV program's

       formula, noted one critic, "is not only moronic, but can be

       deeply wounding [to those participants on the program]." The

       London Sunday Times also noted that "Vanessa lives in some

       grandeur with her husband and two daughters in a Hampstead

       mansion with a marble hall, a ballroom, and a swimming pool.

       She plays the much-loved part of the Jewish princess to

       perfection, clothes with jewelry like a medieval knight togged

       out for a tournament ... She says she cannot understand the

       'non-Jewish way of dressing.'" [SUNDAY TIMES, 8-23-98]

 

     * Miriam Stoppard. Her 25th book was The Magic of Sex and

       she was by 1991 an anchor woman at BBC's morning program

       People Today. "Hailed ... as the vixen of permissive parenting,"

       one critic said that "some are born to controversy, some achieve

       it, and some have controversy thrust upon them. She luxuriates

       in all three, and her latest book, Sex-Ed -- Growing Up, Relationships

       and Sex, has nothing to diminish that status." [GLOVER, 9-219-97,

        p. 7] Stoppard, noted another media observer, "married playwright

       Tom Stoppard when he divorced his first wife because Miriam was

       expecting his child." [DE COURCY, 2-1-94]

 

      * Suzie Hayman, mass media "sex counselor" and author of The

       Good Sex Guide. "The only thing my mother ever said about my

       father was that he was not Jewish," she says. "And yet when Dad was

       with my mother, he threw himself into the Israeli War of Independence

       ... Why had he been prepared to put himself at such risks, if he

       wasn't Jewish?" Hayman's husband's father was "violently anti-

       Semitic"; later she discovered that he was Jewish too. "And so,"

       she resolved, "as I have found time and time again with counseling

       others, the subconscious drives towards 'martial fit,' keys to common

       ground that we are not even told is there." [HAYMAN, 12-24-97, p. 11]

 

     In America, decadent radio commentator Howard Stern (with the third-ranked talk show radio in America), sensationally obnoxious "shock" radio agitator Michael Savage (Weiner), sports commentator Howard Cosell (William Howard Cohen), talk show host Larry King, radio personality Dennis Prager, popular Los Angeles talk show host Michael Jackson (from South Africa), talk-show physician Dean Edell, woman-beating sportscaster Merv Albert, Jerry Seinfeld, Ed Asner, and Roseanne Barr were/are Jewish. ("I remember  [my mother] taking us down to the basement [at their home in Salt Lake City] if someone just came and knocked on the door," says Barr, "I really truly believed that if anyone found out we were Jewish they would kill us." [LAHR, p. 126]

 

     Gossip queen Rona Barrett (Burstein) was Jewish, as was/is gossip columnist Sheila Graham (Lily Shiel), gossip columnist Louella Parsons (whose father was Jewish), "Let's Make a Deal" game show host Monty Hall, 50s-era television puppeteer Shari Lewis, popular media astronomer Carl Sagan, Henry Winkler (the Fonz), Gilda Radner, Goldie Hawn, and Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Prominent Jewish film critics include Pauline Kael, John Simon, Stanley Kaufmann, Judith Crist (born Klein), Gene Shalit, Leonard Maltin, Gene Siskel (of Siskel and Ebert), and Joel Siegel of "Good Morning America" (among numerous other Jewish movie commentators). Assassinated Denver talk show host Allen Berg was Jewish, as is financial columnist Sylvia Porter, and many, many others are familiar Jewish mass media "personalities" to the public. Mel Blanc was even the voice for Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and other cartoon characters.

 

     In earlier years, prominent Jewish sports voice personalities included Marty Glickman, Bill Stern (Sterngold) -- "one of the best known voices on the airwaves," [LEVINE, P., p. 232] and Mel Allen (formerly Mel Israel). Even the ex-wife, Claudia Cohen, of billionaire financier and corporate raider, Ronald Perelman, was a gossip columnist for the New York Post and later a TV reporter. [BRUCK, p. 218] Not surprisingly, her father is Robert Cohen, "the wealthy book and magazine distributor." [SPORKIN, p. 150]

 

      Profoundly influential in shaping American popular culture, it is estimated that seminal gossip columnist Walter Winchell (original family name: Weinschel) had an audience (for his weekly radio program or his daily newspaper column) of two-thirds of all American adults. [GABLER, Winchell, p. xi]  His focus was brash and sleazy. Like most who are driven towards power, he was, notes Neal Gabler, "vindictive, cruel, egocentric, paranoid, selfish, cheap and thoroughly reprehensible [GABLER, p. p. xiv]  ... What made him a national phenomenon was gossip ... Winchell introduced a revolutionary column that reported who was romancing whom, who was cavorting with gangsters, who was ill or dying, who was suffering financial difficulties, which spouses were having affairs, which couples were about to divorce, and dozens of other secrets, peccadilloes and imbroglios that had previously been concealed from public view ... He suddenly and single-handedly expanded the purview of American journalism [GABLER, p. xii] ... Few lives are more instructive of the forces that shaped mass culture in America than Walter Winchell's." [GABLER, p. xv]

 

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

 

      In 2001, Jews gathered for a "special program for student journalists sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities." "Do Jewish journalists have more obligations than others?" asked the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, "Are they responsible first to their communities, and do they need to represent Israel in their newspapers?" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01] "On campus there is already so much anti-Israel sentiment that we have to be careful about any additional criticism against Israel," Marita Gringaus told a reporter,

     "This is our responsibility as Jews, which obviously contradicts our responsibilities
     as journalists." [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]

     "I'm a Jew before I'm a journalist," added Uzi Safanov, a reporter for Long Island University's school newspaper,

      "before someone pays me to write. If I find a negative thing about Israel, I
      will not print it and I will sink into why did it happen and what can I do to
      change it." ("If he eventually wrote about negative incidents that happen to
      Israel," added the Jewish Bulletin, "he would try to find the way 'to shift the
      blame.'" [RAGOLSKY, H., 11-23-01]

     What of the case of the New York Times' Tom Friedman, "a Jew who was raised on all the stories, all the folk songs, and all the myths of Israel." [DIAMOND, E., 1993, p. 44] Edwin Diamond notes the personal "crisis" Friedman faced when he was confronted with reporting honestly (which he eventually did) about Israel's involvement in the notorious Shatila-Sabra massacre of civilian Palestinians in Lebanon:

     "Shatila-Sabra became a 'personal crisis' for Friedman, convinced as he was
     of Israeli knowledge -- and probably, approval -- of what happened inside the
     camp. Sitting at his typewriter, trying to reconstruct the massacre, he felt
     driven by 'two conflicting impulses,' the truth-telling role of a Times journalist
     and his private Jewish sympathies. 'One part of me wanted to nail [Israeli
     Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and [Defense Minister Ariel] Sharon ... Yet
     another part of me was looking for alibis -- something that would prove Begin
     and Sharon innocent, something that would prove that the Israelis couldn't
     have known what was happening." [DIAMOND, E., 1993, p. 45]

     In a much more practical expression of this censorial world view, in 2001, the Canadian CanWest media conglomerate (headed by ardent Zionist Israel Asper) announced that "We do not run in our newspaper Op Ed pieces that express criticism of Israel." CanWorld, with media holdings in Ireland, New Zealand, and other countries, had earlier announced that it had acquired "all of the major Canadian newspaper and Internet assets of Hollinger Inc., including the metropolitan daily newspapers in nearly every large city across Canada and a 50% partnership interest in the National Post." [ELECTRONIC INTIFADA, DECEMBER 11, 2001] CanWest also has major television interests in Canada and other countries.

     In 1993, a former reporter for the Washington Post, Jeffrey Goldberg, addressed the issue of the "disproportionate" Jewish presence in the mass media and its implications:

 

     "[There is a] particular perception about the Jews and the press,

     namely, that Jews own the presses, and not only the ones off

     Times Square ... There certainly is a disproportionate Jewish

     presence in the newsrooms of major media organizations; anyone

     who knows what the suffixes 'berg' and 'stein' generally indicate

     would agree. But there is, of course, no Jewish conspiracy to control

     the press, and when I am asked how I know there isn't (as I was long

     ago by an official of the [Lyndon] La Rouche organization), I offered

     two forms of proof: 1) No one has ever asked me to join such a

     conspiracy, even though my credentials for membership are impeccable;

     2) If 'the Jews' really did control the media, coverage of the Jewish

     community and the issues that interest it would be far superior to what

     we see today." [GOLDBERG, JEFFREY, 1993]

 

     Are Goldberg's "proofs" convincing? Are there any legitimate signs of a "conspiracy" (whatever the semantic nuances of that word) in the American mass media about expressly Jewish and Israeli themes? By what reasoning should we ignore, in the mass media context, incessant in-house ethnocentric Jewish discourse about their collective superiority, international solidarity with other Jews, the sacredness of the Holocaust, and special attention to Jewish welfare? Need pan-Jewish activism express itself today in "conspiratorial" form, in the sense of a secret spy ring? How can the everywhere celebrated and distinct Jewish world view -- religious or secular -- be completely discarded in any reasoned analysis of Jewish dominance in the mass media?  (Many Jews declare this in their in-house writings. As Eric Kahler observes, for example, about highly assimilated Jews of Europe, "Such distinguished personalities as [Heinrich] Heine, who was a skeptic, an intellectual adventurer, as [Baruch] Spinoza, as [Franz] Kafka, whose devotion was entirely unorthodox, unfixed, exploratory, a Bernard-Lazare who was a freethinker, and as Werfel, who was almost a Catholic -- all of them show attitudes and proclivities, clearly deriving from the Jewish religion.") [KAHLER, E., 1967, p. 7] And is not transnational Jewish solidarity (so much highlighted and heralded by modern Jewish observers) manifest in a purely "naturalized" manner the virtual norm in today's media workplace?

 

    And what of Goldberg's own case? Here's an American-born reporter who, as we learn in his own writings about the lack of a "conspiracy" among Jews in the media, volunteered for service in the Israeli army. Is this of no consequence in speculating upon this man's objective journalism as a former Washington Post reporter?  Perhaps Goldberg will run across fellow journalist Bruno Schlumberger in Israel. Schlumberger is a staff photographer for the Ottawa Citizen who was sent on assignment to the Jewish state in 1998 to cover its fiftieth anniversary celebration. "I couldn't sleep, so thrilled was I to be in Israel," wrote Schlumberger in the paper, "... When I was in high school I joined Habonim, the Labour-Zionist youth movement." [SCHLUMBERGER] (Although soured on religous Orthodoxy in Israel, former Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Stephen Esrati was once even a member of the Zionist terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi organization. [GUTH, D., 12-8-00] Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, as noted earlier, even broke American laws in delivering weapons to Israel.)

 

      And what of the following observations by Israeli Ze'ev Chafets? 

 

      "In a study undertaken in the winter of 1979-80, Professor S. Robert

      Lichter found that fully ninety-one percent of the Jewish journalists

      he surveyed agreed with the statement "The United States has a moral

      obligation to prevent the destruction of Israel ... [CHAFETS, 1985,

      p. 279] 

 

     Can we expect that these Jewish journalists have the same noble "moral" obligations about El Salvador, Argentina, Afghanistan, Poland, Russia, Kenya, France, Iran, the Philippines, or anywhere else? How about the "destruction" of the Palestinians by Israel?

      Here's Max Frankel (for years the Executive Editor of the New York Times) and his thoughts about Israel in his work:

      "I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert. I had yearned
      for a Jewish homeland ever since learning as child in Germany that in Palestine
      even the policemen were Jews! Like most American Jews, however, I settled
      on a remote brand of Zionism, which rejected all importuning to move to Israel to       
      share its hardships and dangers ... I did indeed have many close Israeli friends, not       
      only relatives and journalists but high officials, ranging from Yitzhak Rabin to
      Lova Eliav. That is why I well understood the full range of Israeli opinion on all
      of the country's vital security concerns ... Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and
      my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As
      more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel       
      perspective. And I wrote in confidence that The Times no longer suffered from|
      any secret desire to deny or overcome its ethnic roots." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p.       
      401, 402, 403]

      When push comes to shove in the world of patriotic allegiance, or merely objective journalism, where do such men (particularly a Jeffrey Goldberg or Bruno Schlumberger) stand? And what about an American-born Israeli soldier who scoffs at the "conspiratorial" view of Jewry, asserting that no fellow Jews came around in the newsrooms of America, asking him to join a special underground organization?  As Goldberg well knows, no one needs to ask him to join anything: by religious or secular perspective, the "organization" is a birthright. The modern state of Israel codifies this fact: any Jew can emigrate to Israel by virtue of his genetic identity. And pan-Jewish solidarity and its collectivist perspective is so widely ensconced in the American mass media (and American culture as a whole) that there is in fact nothing at all "conspiratorial" about it whatsoever, since it is, after all, the prevalent, naturalized norm of operation for all. And yet few recognize -- and no one dares risk a challenge to -- it.

 

      And the charge of Jewish "conspiracy?" What does that mean? What are the word's nuances?  Do the "behind the scenes" unified wheelings and dealings of hundreds of Jewish organizations that seek to maintain the unpopular "separation of Church and state" fit the bill?  Is a lack of public honesty and candor about Jewish belief, purpose, and identity part of the same paradigm? As Jewish sociologist Arnold Eisen notes about a veritable Jewish American cultural trait:

 

      "Many [Jewish] informants [in one academic study] demanded

      assurance of the interviewer's Jewish background before volunteering

      certain responses (especially those reflecting their less public attitudes

      about dominant [Gentile] groups) ...  [EISEN, p. 144] ... [The Jew in

      public] represents his people before another, and knows that if his

      behavior is found wanting, his people as a whole will suffer. He must

      manipulate the opinion which others have of him and, as the sociologists

      observe, such manipulation is acceptable in secondary relations but not

      in friendships requiring candor and trust." [EISEN, p. 144]

 

      In this regard of Jewish protective self-censorship, Lesley Hazeleton notes the case of an Israeli journalist:

 

     "One of Israel's top journalists had been asked by an American

     magazine to write an article called 'Has Israel Lost Its Soul?' He  

     turned down the assignment. 'Why?' someone asked. 'You've been

     saying it often enough in the Hebrew press.' He gave a despairing

     shrug: 'I can't. It's read differently in the States. Knowing that, I'd

     only end up writing an apologia.'" [HAZELETON, L., 1984, p. 26]

 

     In other words, the man felt that he couldn't write the truth about Israel in English (perhaps in part because American Jews/media powers were biased towards apologia), but, more importantly, his critical thoughts would be revealed in a language that could also be read by a non-Jewish audience. As Peter Novick notes about journalists in the ethnic Jewish press: "They are 'less Jewish' in that their public role, the fact that they know what they say is being listened to by a gentile audience, may make their utterances less frank, less expressive of spontaneous feelings, more 'correct,' than conversation around the kitchen table." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 38]

 

    And the formal, institutionalized Jewish apologia for the subject of Jewish dominance in the mass media? After conceding the obvious in the year 2000 (that even a Jewish scholar, Steven G. Kellman, noted that "most" of the "100 most powerful people" in Hollywood were Jewish, and that "boosters and anti-Semites agree: Jews have been prominent and predominant in all phases of the [motion picture] business: production, distribution and exhibition"), the Anti-Defamation League was still taking the only apologetic spin on these facts available to it:

 

     "Though individual Jews control Hollywood, Jewishness does not ... The

     ADL believes that the recitation of numbers and percentages is not

     the answer to the false charges of Jewish 'control' of the motion

     picture industry, or, indeed, of similar accusations involving the

     media, banking, finance and other businesses. Reliance on statistics

     alone plays into the hands of anti-Semites." [ADL ONLINE, SEPT 1999]

 

      Indeed it does. This is a profound concession in formally admitting the obvious. What else can the ADL say, lest it be caught as a public liar in refuting the notion of Jewish "predominance" in the mass media? Yet the key, however untenable, to the ADL's Jews dominate the media, so what? argument, is that Jews don't "in any field act in concert with other Jews similarly situated simply because they happen to be Jewish." [ADL ONLINE, SEPT 1999]

 

     Maybe not in whether they root for the Los Angeles Dodgers or New York Yankees, but what reasoned analysis of Jewish identity and politics can possibly assert that they have no collective agenda in the mass media? [See also, for example, later discussed Jewish collective efforts in American government towards molding American foreign policy in support of Israel]. A recurrent subject on entertainment television, for example, as noted by Jewish researchers Jonathan and Judith Pearl, is anti-Semitism, a subject that -- as we have earlier seen -- is virtually non-existent in modern America. But it is a crucial antithetical foundation (against non-Jews) of Jewish identity and socio-economic advantage/advancement. As the Pearls note about their fifteen years of television research:

 

     "The various manifestations of anti-Semitism that popular television

     has portrayed have been almost unlimited ... The continued existence

     of modern anti-Semitism is reflected in the numerous programs that

     dramatize its many manifestations ... [TV] invariably depicts anti-

     Semitism as an ugly, abhorrent trait that must be fought at every

     turn ... Non-Jews often have a strong and prominent role in the

     battle against anti-Semitism ... For the vast majority of Americans

     who are not Jewish, watching their favorite TV character do battle

     with religious bigots can be an important influence. And often, non-

     Jewish characters can make inroads against anti-Semitism on their

     own turf in ways that Jews cannot ... [PEARL/PEARL p. 103-104]

     ... Anti-Semitism is clearly presented in the television dramatic

     programs as an injustice that should be constantly fought. In virtually

     no program is the derogation of Jews or Judaism left unchallenged

     either by inference, word, or action ... This kind of portrayal projects

     the important message that fighting anti-Semitism is not solely a Jewish

     concern but the responsibility of all people." [PEARL/PEARL p. 130]

 

     In 1980, Patricia Erens, noted Jewish dominance throughout the mass media and its self-protection:

 

     "Although anti-Semitic literature [in America] has appeared in every

     decade, anti-Semitism has not been a dominant or even prevalent

     aspect of the mass media (newspapers, radio, film, television) or the

     fine arts (painting, literature, drama). Therefore, it is not surprising

     to discover that although negative portrayals of Jews exist in film,

     little overt anti-Semitism occurs. The large number of Jews who hold

     the reins of Hollywood's power prevented this." [ERENS, P., 1980,

     p. 117]

 

    And what about the ceaseless avalanche of Holocaust-related material throughout the mass media, (as noted in detail elsewhere) including, for example, the front page 1999 article in a Los Angeles Times by Jewish author Josh Geitlin? Again and again, special sympathy is demanded by the public for "Jewish survivors" (and Jews in general), now in their old age. In this case, readers are informed that "as they get older, a lot of these people feel like they're facing extinction for a second time." [GEITLIN, p. 1] This "extinction," as the article notes, is death itself, something -- apparently lost to the author of the piece -- no Jewish suffering, of "survivor" quality or not, has a corner on.

     As Jewish scholar Peter Novick notes why Jewish victimology themes -- especially the Holocaust -- of the Jewish power elite is so omnipresent in popular culture:

     "There are many reasons why concern with the Holocaust among the 2 or 3
     percent of the American population that is Jewish came to pervade American
     society. I will mention one important reason here, if only because it is often
     nervously avoided. We are not just 'the people of the book,' but the people
     of the Hollywood film and television mini-series, of the magazine article and
     the newspaper column, of the comic book and academic symposium. When a
     a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American
     Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and
     opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would
     spread throughout the culture at large." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 12]
 

 

      Let us also turn to other specific Jewish/Israeli issues in the mass media and widespread Jewish-enforced censorship against addressing, let alone scrutinizing, the dominant Jewish presence at the upper echelons of the mass media and its influence in shaping American popular culture. The taboo against this subject is itself institutionalized, usually by dismissing any queries about the subject as both groundless and nakedly anti-Semitic. At a New York Times-sponsored question-and-answer session for the foreign press in 1987, for example, Mato Sato, a press officer at the Japanese mission to the United Nations, made waves for daring to ask Jewish New York Times Foreign Editor (later Executive Editor) Joseph Lelyveld why the Times covers "so many Jewish stories" and "how many Jewish editors are employed at the New York Times?" Sato apparently did not realize that asking such questions are forbidden and considered "bizarre" (to use Lelyveld's description of them) in American society. Lelyveld responded, said the Jewish Week, by saying "that he was unaware of employees' religious backgrounds." (This is a curious response for someone whose own father is a rabbi). [ATLAS, J., 6-7-2000] (Lelyveld was appointed to be Executive Editor by the Times 'Jewish owner Arthur Ochs Sulzberger in 1994, following in that position fellow Jews Max Frankel -- 1986-1994 -- and A. M. Rosenthal -- 1970-1986). Mina Joffe, the wife of an Israeli press officer, followed up Sato's query with her own sarcastic remark in an attempt to trivialize Sato's question: "How many blue-eyed people are employed at the New York Times?" The Jewish Week reported that the New York Times had not yet gotten "an apology" from the Japanese United Nations mission for Sato's unseemly curiosity. [LIPMAN, S, 5-22-87]

 

     Jewish scholar David Grossman (who coauthored a book with a Japanese scholar about Japanese "cultural stereotypes" about Jews) noted the Sato incident, saying that the inquirer's "questions were tactless and displayed astonishing naiveté, but they were probably not malicious and the intense reaction he received bewildered Japanese observers, who failed to understand what he had done wrong." [GOODMAN, p. 10]  (Meanwhile, while Jews and Israel are institutionally protected from examination of their collective power in the mass media, economic, social, and political worlds, it is apparently no problem for anyone that Marvin Wolf wrote a book in recent years entitled The Japanese Conspiracy, that Daniel Burstein wrote Yen! Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America, or that Pat Choate called his own work Agents of Influence: How Japan Manipulates the American Political and Economic System. At least two of these three authors are Jewish: all three surnames can be found in Jewish surname databases. In Burstein's case, he links Japanese self-identity to Hitler's Master Race concept and even mentions the Japanese reporter's inquiry [about how many Jews work at the New York Times and why there were so many articles about Jews] to be an example of Japanese anti-Semitism). [BURSTEIN, D., 1988, p. 72-73]

 

      Sato might well have asked the same questions about the Jewish stories in the Washington Post. A Jewish scholar, Barry Rubin, notes that

 

         "Three of four main articles in the July 22, 1990 Washington Post

         features section were about assimilating Jews who had made widely

         different choices -- Andrew Dice Clay [Silverman], Sandra Bernhard,

         and Allen Ginsberg. That newspaper's October 18, 1992 reviews

         section is full of books by or about Jews: on sports and the American

         Jewish experience; a biography of Bill Graham, a Holocaust survivor  

         and leading rock and roll impresario; the story of a upper-class New

         York family infected by anti-Semitism; a South African woman's group

         portrait of her set of Jewish friends; a Jewish couple's volume on

         foreign investments in America, analyzing problems of multiple

         loyalties and foreign influence paralleling issues in assimilation; and a

         Jewish author's book on politics in higher education, discussing

         multiculturalism in terms drawn from the integration of Jews into

         American society." [RUBIN, p. xiii]

 

      Earlier, Rubin (whose specific interest is declared to be Jewish assimilation into American society), notes that

 

          "An author knows a subject is compelling when it seems omnipresent.

           For example, the April 1991 Vanity Fair contains four relevant articles

           concerning Alfred Stieglitz, scion of a rich German Jewish family who

           founded art photography in America and wed Georgia O'Keeffe;

           Lady Mary Fairfax, whose family migrated from Poland in the 1920s

           and who became a powerful press lord and doyenne of Australian

           society; Charles Feldman, head of Famous Artists Agency and the

           great love of Jean Harlow; and the actress Ali McGraw, whose

           Hungarian mother would never admit to being Jewish." [RUBIN, p.

           xii]

 

    Of course the American mass media is regularly flooded with stories about Israel. As Doug Bloomfield, "former chief lobbyist for AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill", remarked:

 

     "If E.T. had stayed in the U.S. and read the New York Times, the

      Washington Post, or the Christian Science Monitor, or had watched

      the network news instead of riding around in bicycle baskets, when

      he finally returned home and they asked him, 'What is it like on

      earth?' -- the first thing he would have said is, "There are three

      superpowers. There is Israel and two others." [STARR, J., 1990, p. 33]

 

      The Judeo-centric world view of film director Mel Brooks suggests, increasingly, a useful paradigm in analyzing the Jewish entertainment world. As Andrea Most observes,

 

     "The humor in Brooks' movies originate in the idea that everything and

     everyone is Jewish -- and it is his job to reveal it as such. So the oldest

     man in the world is Jewish (The Two Thousand Year Old Man), the

     Indians are Jewish (Blazing Saddles), Sherwood Forest's Merry Band

     is Jewish (Robin Hood: Men in Tights), the past is Jewish (History of

     the World), and the future is Jewish (Spaceballs)." [MOST, A., 1999,

     p. 337]

 

     In the Arab-Jewish political field, in 1985 American media reports were swamped with stories about the horrible death of wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew murdered by Palestinian ship hijackers of the Achillo Lauro. Yet, notes Israeli Amnon Rubenstein, "In the aftermath of the hijacking, the United States media covered his death in great detail ... The same week, Alex Odeh, a United States citizen of Palestinian descent who was the West Coast Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was murdered by a bomb explosion [later attributed by the FBI to an act of terrorism by the Jewish Defense League]... Odeh's death was virtually ignored by the national media." [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 157]

 

        "The truth of the matter," said novelist Truman Capote on the Johnny Carson Show in 1973, "... is the entire cultural press, publishing ... television ... theatre ... film industry ... is almost 90% Jewish-oriented. I mean, I can't even count on one hand five people of any importance -- of real importance -- in the media who aren't Jewish. Here's this God-damned Jewish mafia working tooth and tong on the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, whether they're doing it consciously or not. And mostly they're doing it consciously." [FORSTER, p. 108-109]   Needless to say, Capote's public comments are mainstays in Jewish-written books about Anti-Semitism.

 

     In 1988 John Hohrn, a Black official at the Mississippi film commission, was assailed by the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups for the following comment:

 

      "You hear people say, 'Well, that's civil rights -- that story's been told

      already.' But no one has questioned the right of the Jewish community,

      which controls the media, to retell the story of the Holocaust." [JEWISH

      WEEK, 1-15-88]

 

     ADL attorney Betsy Ross denounced Hohrn's clause about Jews to be "obnoxious ... This person needs an education. His comments about Jews controlling the media is completely inaccurate. It's an age-old anti-Semitic canard." [JEWISH WEEK, 1-15-88, p. 33]

 

     This "anti-Semitic canard" of Jewish media dominance has held credence, albeit discretely, in some pretty high places. According to the memoirs of H. R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, during one closed door session with his boss, "there was a considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media and agreement that this is something that would have to be dealt with." [NEW YORK TIMES, 5-18-94, p. A19]  Nixon's vice-president, Spiro Agnew, even spoke publicly about Jews and the mass media, complaining that the American media "was unduly influenced by Zionist opinion ... All you have to do is look around and see who owns the networks, who owns the Washington Post ... the New York Times ... As you look around in ... the big news business you see a heavy concentration of Jewish people." [VOLKMAN, p. 104]  Even when Richard Nixon signed with Warners to write his memoirs, the people (including his press secretary) who arranged the deal were almost all Jewish:

 

      "The price, according to the agent, Irving 'Swifty' Lazar, would be

      $2 million. Lazar met with William Sarnoff and Howard Kaminsky

      of Warners Communications and Nixon's former press secretary,

      Ron Ziegler, and sealed the deal with handshakes." [BAGDIKIAN, p. 34]

 

     In the entertainment world, country singer Dolly Parton was forced to apologize to the Jewish community for telling Vogue magazine that "everybody's afraid to touch anything that's religious because most of the people out here [in Hollywood] are Jewish and it's a frightening thing for them to promote Christianity." TV personality Kathy Lee Gifford (whose own father -- Epstein -- was Jewish) also publicly apologized for complaining that "they're changing who crucified Jesus," during a TV show that discussed recent New Testament changes. [ROSENFELD, p. 61]   "When the NRA [National Rifle Association] exercises political power," noted Jewish journalist Philip Weiss, "it's a hot-button issue. When Jewish money plays a part [in politics], discussing it is anti-Semitic. If you say anything about [Jewish power in] Hollywood, you are shouted down." [WEISS, p. 32]

 

      In 1990, Giancarlo Parretti, an Italian financier (with alleged links to the criminal underworld) complained to an Italian newspaper that "the Jews have ganged up on me ... The fact is that the Jews don't like the idea that I represent the first Catholic communications network ... There isn't a single [media] holding company in the world that isn't in the hands of the Jews." [TUGEND, T, p. 37]

 

     Parretti was widely attacked for anti-Semitism for this statement. The Los Angeles Times quoted a "veteran Hollywood leader" as saying that "it's one thing to note that many prominent figures in all aspects of Hollywood are Jewish and always have been. It's quite another, however, to make hostile statements on that fact." "As an anti-Semite," said another movie executive, "I don't see how he could ever function in this town." Rushing to Parretti's defense was Yoram Globus, a Jewish co-President of Paretti's Pathe Communications Corporation (which had earlier taken over the Canon Group, owned by the Israeli-born Globus and his cousin Menahem Golan). "There is not even an inch," proclaimed Globus, "of anti-Semitism in him." [TUGEND, T, Hollywood, p. 37]

 

     In 1994, William Cash's aforementioned comments in Great Britain's the Spectator about Jews controlling Hollywood drew widespread attack and publicity. Both the New York Times and Chicago Tribune featured prominent articles about Cash's speaking the unspeakable in a distant overseas publication. The Toronto Star even joined in with a headline proclaiming, "Anti-Semitic Article Shakes Hollywood."  [TORONTO, p. C4] A group of Hollywood actors wrote a letter to the Spectator accusing Cash's piece of "racist cant" and "anti-Semitic stereotypes." Jewish author Neal Gabler, in condemning Cash's ideas of excessive Jewish power in Hollywood, told a Jewish newspaper that Cash was "only contrite to the extent that he feels he has damaged his career -- which of course he has. [Cash was a Hollywood-based reporter for London's Daily Telegraph.] I can't imagine anyone [in Hollywood] wanting to meet with him after that article." [CENTURY, p. 1]   This danger of Cash losing his entire journalistic career, of course, is the paradigm for the reason that those who know well Jewish dominance in the mass media cannot give public voice to the fact.

 

     Among those formally complaining directly to Cash's regular employer -- the aforementioned Conrad Black, owner of the Daily Telegraph  -- was Britain's powerful Jewish Board of Deputies lobbying body. Not only does Black own the Telegraph, he also owns the Spectator, the journal in which Cash's offending article appeared. Jewish omnipresence in the mass media is so great that even the editor of the Spectator itself, Dominic Lawson, was Jewish -- the son of former British chancellor Nigel Lawson. [WOOLF, p. 1]  For Cash's simple telling of the truth, Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center charged the sensationally absurd libel that the British author "has actually plagiarized a page from the playbook of [Nazi theorists] Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels ... fanning the flames of bigotry and genocide." [RICHLER, p. 32]

 

     Referring to the Vanity Fair article addressing 16 Hollywood media moguls that Cash used as reference in his own piece, apologist Gabler -- author of a book on (in his own words) the "Jewish invention of Hollywood" -- complained that those 16 "are not predominantly Jewish at all. Only nine of the 16 are Jewish." When the (Jewish) Forward pointed out that Gabler's own books focused predominantly on Jews, he responded, "What I'm interested in are the figures who shaped popular culture in the 20th century, and because such a disproportionate number are Jewish, the subject inevitably arises." [CENTURY, p. 1]

 

     Richard Neuhaus in the National Review pointed out the craziness, and even sinister intent, of the Jewish Cash crucifixion:

 

       "Some Jews have ratcheted up to an almost painful degree their antennae

        for the detection of anti-Semitism. A few months ago, the New York

        Times went ballistic when the London Spectator ran a little article on the

        self-described dominance of Jews in Hollywood. The somewhat naive

        Spectator author thought he was doing nothing more than reporting

        on interesting circumstances; as it turned out, he was in large part

        relying on what Jewish writers had said about Jews in Hollywood. The

        young man did not understand that non-Jews are not supposed to

        notice when Jews publicly celebrate Jewish influence and success. As

        anyone familiar with the large role of Jews in American history knows,

        the large role of Jews in American popular entertainment goes back to

        the nineteenth century and, far from being a secret, has been frequently

        extolled in film and song. With weeks of letters and commentary in the

        Spectator, our British cousins had great fun with this little squall,

        chalking it up as yet another instance of American hypocrisy about our

        professed devotion to free speech." [NEUHAUS, p. 52]

 

     British journalist Charles Cummings noted that

 

       "It's a delicate subject. Mention the relationship between Hollywood and

       Jews and you can land in some very hot water. Journalist William Cash

       discovered this in 1991 when he wrote an article for the Spectator about

       the increasing influence of Jews in the American entertainment industry.

       More than a dozen movie luminaries -- including Charlton Heston,

       Barbara Streisand, and Steven Spielberg -- sent an impassioned letter of

       complaint to the magazine, chastising Cash as a latter-day Nazi and

       complaining about the trite and vulgar stereotypes in which he had

       couched his argument. Yet the thrust of the piece was accurate."

       [CUMMINGS, p., 15]

 

     As James Atlas noted in 2000:

 

     "The Jewish dominance in the media, in newspapers and magazines and

     Hollywood and the publishing industry, is an old story (not that its

     implications have been very arduously explored); I continue to find

     myself baffled  -- and not a little amazed -- by the popularity of an

     insipid narcissist like Jerry Seinfeld, but he has certainly achieved

     market penetration as a representative Jew." [ATLAS, J., 6-2000]

 

     In 1997, British author John Le Carre (David Cornwell) also found himself in hot water with the Jewish Thought Police. In the best interests of his writing career, he had to grovel before England's Anglo-Israel Association "to lecture them on his reasons for detesting anti-Semitism, and to defend himself against charges which had been made against him on another continent." Years earlier, his third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, had stirred "Jewish American organizations," noted the London Sunday Telegraph, "to know whether he equated Jew with communist." Le Carre recounted worse charges against his last novel, The Tailor of Panama:

 

    "We sat head in hand in my American editor's office, the New York

     Times review of The Tailor of Panama before us, telling us that

     consciously or not I had been listening to the internal voices of

     my English anti-Semitism as I wrote my novel. What could I

     possibly say in reply? ... I wanted to tell the New York Times

     that to publish a smear of anti-Semitism on such arbitrary grounds

     was a serious act of editorial irresponsibility. But a tumult of alarm

     broke out among my well wishers. 'If you write that, your career

     in the United States will be ruined.'" [WAUGH, A., p. 39] 

 

     In a rare case of justice against Jewish-directed persecution, in 2000 William Quigley was awarded $10.5 million in a suit against the Denver, Colorado, regional Anti-Defamation League. A jury trial found the ADL to be itself guilty of defamation for publicly accusing Quigley and his wife of anti-Semitism. As the Cleveland Jewish News observed:

 

     "William Quigley, an executive in the film industry, claimed that as a

     result of the public anti-Semitism charged against him, his career was

     severely damaged. After the charges he was shunned by colleagues,

     most of whom were Jewish, he said." [KARFELD, M., 5-19-2000, p. 24]

 

     This man, surrounded by Jews in the film industry, lives in Denver, not Los Angeles or New York.

 

     Jewish censorship of free speech about them in the mass media has taken an even more sinister form in Canada. In 1994, Doug Collins, a veteran journalist for Vancouver's North Shore News, (with a circulation of only 60,000) wrote a review of Stephen Spielberg's Holocaust movie, Schindler's List, thereby launching into a critique of the Jewish Holocaust mythology as a political and economic weapon, and a lambaste of Jewish power in Hollywood. His article was entitled, "Hollywood Propaganda."

 

     "I think [Collins] made some valid points," said his editor, Tim Renshaw. "I wouldn't have approved the column if it was over the top." [BROOK p. 58] "I've published Doug Collins for fifteen years," added Peter Speck, the publisher of the North Shore News. "He has written 1,500 columns for me, and he's a fine man, a fine journalist, he's a pro, he's the recipient of a military medal, he served with distinction in the Second World War, and he was captured by the Germans and he escaped ten times. Ten times!" [BROOK, p. 58]

 

     In response to Collins' article, the Canadian Jewish Congress solicited a handful of other organizations to join it in pressing criminal charges against Collins under a 1993 British Columbia "anti-hate" law which the B.C. Press Council and B.C. Civil Liberties Union decried as a suppression of free speech in a democratic society. The law, for the first time tested, prohibited the publication of material "that is likely to expose a person or group or class of persons to hatred or contempt because of race, color, ancestry, place of origin, religion, martial status...” etc., etc. etc.  [BROOK, p. 58]

 

     In 1997 Collins went to trial.

 

     The lawyer for the Canadian Jewish Congress, Gregory Walsh, "argued [that] the column exposed Jewish people to hatred." [TODD, JEWS, p. A4]  Collins' crime, declared Walsh, was saying that "Jews are responsible for false Holocaust propaganda, which is itself hateful; they are master manipulators who use their extensive ownership of the media to widely disseminate Holocaust 'nonsense' for profit, to the great harm of innocent people and society generally." [TODD, JEWS, p. A4]

 

     A University of Toronto professor, Bart Testa, noted the Ottawa Citizen, testified that Collins' article "portrayed Jewish people as powerful, manipulative and dedicated to keeping alternative views of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews, the subject of Schindler's List, out of public view." [TODD, p. F11]  Another Jewish professor, Leonidas Hill, "a specialist in the history of anti-Semitism," testified that Collins' column infers that "Jews are deceitful and conspire to swindle the non-Jewish world for their own gains ... Mr. Collins poses as a dauntless civil libertarian and a champion of free speech. This pose made it possible for him to continue publishing his anti-Semitic diatribes." [TODD, p. F11]

 

     In reply, the British Columbia Press Council lawyer, Roger McConchie, denounced the B.C. Human Rights Code under which Collins was tried, calling it "the most significant legislative infringement of press freedom in the history of British Columbia." [TODD, JEWS, p. A4]

 

     In 1997, the B.C. Human Rights Commission decreed that Collins' Schindler's List column was "likely to make it more acceptable for others to express hatred or contempt against Jewish people," but that it did not have enough "calumny, detestation or vilification" to punish him. [BOLAN, p. A1]  Nonetheless, a Jewish Victorian businessman, Harry Abrams, filed another complaint against Collins. (Abrams' tact was to file as an individual, although he is the British Columbia's representative for B'nai B'rith Canada. The earlier complaint was filed by another Jewish organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress). This complaint focused on the cumulative impact of four Collins columns that had critical commentary about Jews. This time, Collins lost.

 

     "The columns," decided the Commission's next tribunal report, "repeatedly reinforced some of the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism, and perpetuate the most damaging stereotypes of Jews: that they are selfish, greedy, and manipulative." [MOORE, D., p. A8] ... "Mr. Collins perpetuates the stereotype against Jews, especially those which allege widespread power and influence ... The ideas and statements in these four articles reflect and, in fact, reinforce common anti-Semitic stereotypes. Mr. Collins not only expresses discriminating attitudes, but also exposes Jewish people to hatred and contempt." [VANCOUVER SUN, p. A19]

 

     The Commission's final report was even ordered to be published in the North Shore News. Managing editor Tim Renshaw responded with amazement that his paper would be forced to publish "government-dictated content." "Basically," said Renshaw, "we have been tried on the same thing [and] they got the desired result the second time around. I guess if it wasn't the second time, then there would have been a third time." The B.C. Press Council declared that the tribunal dictate was "an unjustified violation of the principle of the freedom of the press." [MOORE, D., p. A8]

 

     Author Doug Collins (whose trial costs were $200,000) was ordered by the Commission to apologize and pay Abrams $2000 "as compensation for the injury [Collins' words] have caused to his dignity and ... self-respect." [VANCOUVER SUN, p. A19] The North Shore News was also ordered not to publish anything more "contemptuous" of Jews. The Commission "ordered Collins and the paper to stop publishing statements that expose or are likely to expose Jewish persons to hatred or contempt in violation of section 7 (1) (b) of the human rights code." [BOLAN, K., 12-3-99, p. 5]

 

     "What is particularly odious in its ruling," noted journalist Claire Hoy, "is that although the tribunal found Collins had not explicitly violated hate laws (and one could argue hate laws themselves are an outrageous violation of free speech, incidentally), the collective wisdom of his columns is enough to give the impression of hate-mongering." [HOY, p. 5]

 

     After the decision in his favor, Mr. Abrams said that the Collins columns "soften the ground" for another Holocaust. "They want to complete the job Hitler didn't finish," he said. In response to this wild charge, the 78-year old Collins -- a prisoner of war at the May 31, 1940 battle of Dunkirk -- asserted that "I was fighting Hitler when that louse bag was in diapers." [DE CLOET, p. 27; Sinoski, p. B3]

 

     Collins sought to appeal the Commission's ruling. But the North Shore News could not join in the appeal. By 1999 the paper was itself owned by Hollinger International, the ardently pro-Israel media giant discussed earlier. Its Jewish CEO, David Radler, noted the reason why Hollinger's North Shore News was abandoning its fight for free speech: "We support Collins' right to write whatever he wants. Where we break with Collins is I don't want Collins' view in our newspaper. Basically, I find them inaccurate and offensive." [TORRANCE, K., p. 24-25]

 

     In the midst of the Doug Collins episodes, in 1998 Jewish journalist Paula Brook of the Vancouver Sun wrote an editorial about yet another successful Jewish censorial effort in the Vancouver area. After complaints by the Canadian Jewish Congress, journalist Greg Felton at the Vancouver Courier was forbidden by the paper's owner, Sam Grippo, to write about Israel again. "I have received a directive not to publish any anti-Israel commentary in the newspaper," Felton said in an interview. Noting this case, editor Tim Renshaw of the North Shore News (of Doug Collins notoriety), wrote that "the forces of censorship headed by the Canadian Jewish Congress continue to steamroll over any criticism of Israel or other things Jewish." [BROOK, p. A17]

 

     The title of Paul Brook's article in reply to accusations of repeated Jewish censorship was "Business Rights Versus Free Speech." She concluded her editorial, saying: "If those offended people [to articles like Felton's] have the numbers behind them, and are represented by an advocacy group, more power to them. And if the owner [of the paper] responds by saying, you're right -- reprehensible speech is no longer free around here -- then decisions are taken and life carries on, and as long as the government stays out of it we do not call this censorship. We call it business." [BROOK, p. A17]

 

     In response, Rafeh Hulays, Director of External Affairs for the Arab Community of British Colombia, wrote that "the bottom line of Ms. Brook's argument is that instead of entering a debate, a special interest group with powerful friends has the right to silence the views of journalists with whom it disagrees, no matter how legitimate these views are." [HULAYS, p. A15]

     By 2001, the aforementioned Doug Collins, in his own independent Internet column, noted the state of Canadian "freedom of the press." Jewish media mogul Izzy Asper had bought out "Hollinger/Southam's 13 daily newspapers, 126 community newspapers, Canadian Internet operations, and fifty per cent of National Post." The North Shore News was now an Asper paper, and both its publisher, Peter Speck, and Executive Editor, Tim Renshaw -- supporters of Collins right to free speech about Jews and Israel -- were fired. Likewise, the aforementioned Greg Felton, critic of Israel, was dumped from the Vancouver Courier (even before that paper became part of the Asper chain). [COLLINS, D., 2001] [Click here to read Collins' explanation of the matter]
 

 

     Jewish censorial efforts to squelch free speech, as noted in an earlier chapter, are manifest in many ways across the world. Even in western democracies, citizens can face criminal conviction merely for expressing negative opinions about Jews. Take the case of Robert Holzach, the honorary chairman of Switzerland's largest bank, who the made the mistake of speaking too freely to a reporter from New Yorker magazine. In 1997 Holzach faced prosecution by Swiss courts for remarks he made to Jane Kramer that there was "a Jewish conspiracy" to take over the world's most important banks. Formal, legal charges against Holzach for this comment was made by Marcel Hess, a Jewish politician in Basel. Holzach denied he ever made the remarks.

 

     Conservative syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran, (charged often to be an anti-Semite), formerly of the National Review, notes in overview the problem at stake in all these cases:

 

     "Not only persecution of Jews but any critical mention of Jewish power

     in the media and politics is roundly condemned as 'anti-Semitism’...

     It's permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the

     Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of

     the Jewish Establishment is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief

     measure of its power: its ability to impose its own taboos while tearing

     down the taboos of others ... Power openly acquired, openly exercised,

     is one thing. You may think organized labor or the Social Security lobby

     abuses power, but you don't jeopardize your career by saying so. But

     a kind of power that forbids its own public mention, like the Holy Name

     in the Old Testament, is another matter entirely ... Journalists are as

     afraid of Jewish power as politicians are. This means that public

     discussion is cramped and warped by unspoken fear -- a fear journalists

     won't acknowledge, because it embarrasses their premises of being

     fearless critics of power." [SOBRAN]

 

     Another conservative critical commentator, Wilmot Robertson, noted the same thing in 1973:

 

     "Any critical discussion of Jewish wealth -- or for that matter any

     critical discussion of any aspect of Jewish power -- immediately

     exposes the author or speaker to charges of anti-Semitism ...

     [ROBERTSON, p. 179] ... Instead of submitting anti-Semitism

     to the free play of ideas, instead of making it a topic for debate

     in which all can join, Jews and their liberal supporters have

     managed to organize an inquisition in which all acts, writings,

     and even thoughts critical of Jewry are treated as threats to the

     moral order of mankind." [ROBERTSON, W., p. 180]

 

       One has to look long and far to find any observer willing to stick his (or her) neck out in the mass media to raise the Jewish issue. A rare example occurred way back in the 1970s, when the directors of the Anti-Defamation League noted (as a severe example of irrational anti-Semitism) an article that appeared in a little Gentile-owned newspaper in Vermont:

 

      "In May 1972, the Bennington Banner of Vermont, a

      liberal newspaper, carried a column headlined 'Decline and Fall'

      by Samuel Ogden who wrote about 'WASP' decline resulting

      from the fact that 'the news media, the recent books, the books

      reviewed, all speak the viewpoints of the Jews,' that the

      doctorates and professorships are principally held by Jews, that

      as a result 'the American culture is rapidly becoming Jewish in

      character,' which may be its 'manifest destiny' but which has

      contributed to a society that is 'taking on the aspects of a

      dreadful nightmare.'" [FORSTER/EPSTEIN, p. 111]

 

      All in all, the mass media itself and Jewish lobbying efforts have been astoundingly successful in cloaking Jewish mass media dominance, and framing Jews in America as relatively meek, oppressed, disenfranchised, and invisible. And victims. No mainstream media venue dares to address the dominating Jewish mass media presence. But generic "whites," however unjustly, and incorrectly, are fair game. In 2001, for example, the Los Angeles Times, in an article about the lack of minorities in Hollywood, blamed "whites" for this discrepancy, condemning the Hollywood power structure, specifically that "90% of each major [Hollywood] guild (Screen Actors, Directors, Writers and Producers) is white, the majority of them male." [MUNOZ, L, 3-24-01]

      In 1945 a national poll found that 67% of the American population felt that Jews "had too much power" in America. As Jewish power actually  grew dramatically over the following decades, it was veiled, and the perception of it was socialized away.  By 1962, the perception of "too much Jewish power" was down to 17%. [GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 117]  In 1945, according to one survey, 19% of Americans believed that Jews were a "threat to America." By 1950, this percentage was only 5 percent. "This short term shift," noted Jewish psychoanalysts Bruno Bettelhem and Morris Janowitz, "may well have been influenced by the exposure of Nazi genocidal practices." [BETTELHEIM/JANOWITZ, p. 6-7]  These authors were especially troubled, however, by the results of a 1952 survey question that found that college-educated people were more nearly twice as likely (17 to 10 percent) than grammar school-educated Americans to believe that "Jews were more likely to be Communists than others." [BETTELHEIM/JANOWITZ, p. 19] [See evidence elsewhere in this volume that points to this as an obvious fact]

 

     Always monitoring their fellow citizens, in a 1986 Anti-Defamation League national survey of 1,000 Christian conservatives, "Jews ranked far down the list of those thought to have too much power [in America]. Big business was too powerful for 67% of the group, organized labor for 55%, Arabs for 38%, Catholics for 23%, and 11% for blacks, compared to only 7% who thought Jews were too powerful." [LIPSET, p. 157]

 

    Such beliefs bear repeating, that we might ponder their implications:  In 1945 67% of Americans felt that Jews had "too much power" in the United States and by 1986 only 7% of a religious section of them felt that way. In the more recent survey, five and a half times as many people thought that  Arabs have more power in America than Jews. Over 50% more of these people understand the "power" of the largely impoverished Black community to be more than that of Jews.  What evidence, one must wonder,  has been disseminated to (or been withheld from) such people,  and through what channels,  to create, maintain, and  enforce such preposterously skewed opinions? ("Jewish defense agencies," notes Ronald Bayor, "helped create a climate in which Jew-baiting was no longer respectable. The assault upon anti-Semitism found in movies, the press, and general and politically oriented magazines by 1947 all contributed to its decline as a reputable movement." [BAYOR, 1986, p. 187] )

 

       Such recent perceptions about Jews from the likes of "Christian conservatives" are not unusual to Americans in general. A 1986 Roper Poll of the American public at-large revealed that only 8% thought that Jews had "too much power" in the United States. [PENKOWER, p. 321]  In 1998, the Anti-Defamation League conducted a survey of Americans about the fact that the "presidents of the three national television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, are Jewish" (not mentioning the far deeper cultural hegemony of Jews in the Hollywood world). 80% of respondents didn't think Jewish executives "tend to allow more sex and violence programming than non-Jewish executives" and 80% opined that there was "no connection between the amount of Christian-oriented programming on TV and the fact that the executives of the major networks are Jewish." [ADL, NOV 1998]

      But we are still very far from finished with the story of Jewish influence, and "power,"  in popular culture.     

 

      One last word here, however, about polls and public opinions of "Jewish power" within America. While American awareness of Jewish economic and mass media influence in America is miniscule and considered -- when it is rarely evidenced -- as an "anti-Semitic" view, across the world, in 1983, the Hanoch Smith Research Center conducted a national poll of the Jews of Israel. Colin Shindler notes that

 

         "When Hanoch Smith asked his Israeli respondents whether the Jews

          of America have control of important branches of the American

          economy, 73 per cent replied in the affirmative ... In a non-Jewish

          society, this would have aroused suspicion of anti-Semitism, but

          emanating from a Jewish society, it seemed both a matter of pride

          and bewilderment." [SHINDLER, p. 94-95]

     Likewise, a 2001 survey of Israelis by the World Jewish Congress found that

      "the most admired characteristic of U.S. Jews is 'their cultural and political
      influence' -- 34 percent -- followed by 'Jewish pride' -- 22 percent -- and
      their 'sense of unity and community' -- 21 percent." [AXELROD, T., 10-29-01]

 

 

 

 

"By the early 1960s ... Jews were even more heavily
represented in the knowledge professions than they had
been a decade earlier. They clearly dominated the political
culture of New York, where their style and views had been
adopted by relatively large numbers of non-Jewish intellectuals.
They also became increasingly influential in other cosmopolitan
centers such as Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and
Berkeley. In all these cities, they played an important role
in educating non-Jews to a more cosmopolitan perspective."

Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, 1982, p. 103

"It is ironic that many of the literary figures who shied
from Jewish themes embodied in their writing more alleged
Jewish traits than more consciously Jewish writers. There
remains in their innermost self unsuspected residues of their
inherited culture which no amount of rejection or denial
could wholly eradicate. In both the self-hater and the detached,
the affinity of supposed Jewish characteristics has been observed
by both critics and laymen alike."

-- Lothar Kahn, Jewish author, 1961, p. 31

"If the literary output of 1999 reveals anything, it reveals that
Jewish writers are among the privileged citizens of the global village ...
Given the unprecedented international reach of their imaginations,
their absorption in
Jewish history and theology,
and the staggering diversity of emergent American voices, it
just may be that these young Jewish American writers find that
they share more in common artistically with their Jewish contemporaries writing
 in Israel, Europe, Asia, and the rest of
the Americas than they share in common with their
non-Jewish contemporaries writing in the United States."

 

-- Andrew Furman, one of the judges for the National Jewish

Book award, MAY/JUNE 2000, p. 30]

 

 

 

25
LITERATURE  - "INTELLECTUALS"
-- "THE FAMILY"

 

 

       In a 1974 book, The American Intellectual Elite, Charles Kadushin produced the results of his studies. He had tabulated lists of contributors to leading American "intellectual" publications, narrowed the names down to 200, and in a series of queries or interviews asked his subjects who were the most influential intellectuals around. Of the top 21 most highly rated (by others in this publishing circle), 15 were Jewish, including Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Norman Mailer, Herbert Marcuse, Norman Podhoretz, David Riesman, Robert Silvers, Susan Sontag, and Lionel Trilling. [KADUSHIN, p. 30]  Half of the total 200 were also reputed to be Jewish. As Kadushin notes,

 

      "Jews are indeed much more strongly represented among leading

      intellectuals than the population at large. They compose about half

      of the American intellectual elite. Catholics are vastly underrepresented,

      but Protestants, who are one-third of the group, are also relatively

      underrepresented ... [KADUSHIN, p. 23] ... Even in comparison with

      elite American professors (those who published more than 20 articles

      in academic journals and who teach in high-quality colleges and

      universities) of the same age and in the same fields, there are between

      two and five times as many Jews in the intellectual elite." [KADUSHIN,

      p. 24]

 

     In the world of academia (professorships) at-large, 60% of the "intellectual elite" were found to be Jewish. [KADUSHIN, p. 24] The "intellectual elite" also had a geographical flavor -- half of the academic elite held positions at four East Coast universities -- Columbia, New York University, Harvard, and Yale. [KADUSHIN, p. 23]

 

     Another (Jewish) professor echoes this study in claiming that by the late 1970s 50% of the "top intellectuals" in America were Jewish, the percentage rising to 51% of all "elite" academics in the social sciences and 61% in the humanities. [RUBENSTEIN, p. 64]  Stephen Whitfield cites evidence that as many as 30% of the professors at "major universities" by the 1980s were also Jewish. [WHITFIELD, American, p. 9]  Yet another Jewish professor used such figures to declare that 76% "of the most influential intellectuals had at least one Jewish parent." [DAVIS, D., p. 29]

 

      To begin to understand the implications of all this, (other than the popular Jewish explanations that  Jews are "just smart," or socially positioned as marginalized "others" to recognize greater philosophical insights) one must examine how someone gets on such a list of prominent people. Kadushin's study sample was selected from those published in "twenty or so leading intellectual journals." These included the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, Commentary, Partisan Review, Daedalus, Ramparts, Dissent, the Village Voice and other such periodicals. All of these were founded, controlled, or edited by Jews, as were many of the others on the list. "As might be expected," noted Kadushin, "the persons most often named as having the power to make or break reputations were the editors of the key journals -- Robert Silvers, Jason Epstein [and his wife Barbara], and Norman Podhoretz. [All are Jewish] A few persons [of the intellectuals surveyed in Kadushin's study] commented on the alliance between journals and book publishers represented by Silvers and Jason Epstein." [KADUSHIN, p. 53]

 

     Kadushin's definition of a "leading intellectual" underscores its incestuous current; a "leading intellectual" is "simply any person who writes regularly for leading intellectual journals and/or has his books reviewed in them." [KADUSHIN, p. 8]  Kadushin himself confronts the inbred dimensions of the "intellectual elite": "I have the impression from reading autobiographical accounts of intellectual life that young intellectuals tend to be sponsored by older intellectuals and into intellectual prominence through a combination of journals, circles, and political parties controlled by the older intellectuals." [KADUSHIN, p. 25]

 

     In order to fully understand this scenario, one must begin with the 1930s and a group of mostly Jewish individuals that have sequentially risen en masse in New York City as part of an  interconnected literary, publishing, and "intellectual" network, often self-referred to as "The New York Intellectuals" or "The Family."  The Family, wrote Philip Nobile, is "an elite array of critics, editors, novelists, and poets that manage the country's high culture." [NOBILE, p. 13] "The New York literary world," says Family member Norman Podhoretz, "began to acquire a recognizable identity .... [one could] think of it as a Jewish family." [PODHORETZ, Making, p. 109] To those outside the Family circle in the literary world, they -- and their heirs today -- are the Jewish (literary) Mafia. Homogeneous only in that they are almost all Jews (not uncommonly warring among themselves), they inevitably linked with the many webs of the expanding Jewish-predominated mass media; a few "intellectuals" even became household names. As a group, they are credited with profound influence in the shaping of the twentieth century American cultural, social, and even the political scene.

    

     "During the last few years," wrote Family member Irving Howe in 1969, "the talk about the New York Establishment has taken an unpleasant turn. Whoever does a bit of lecturing about the country is likely to encounter, after a few drinks, literary academics who inquire enviously, sometimes spitefully, about 'what's new in New York.' ... As polite needling questions are asked about the cultural life of New York, a rise of sweat comes to one's brow, for everyone knows what no one says: New York means Jews." [HOWE, p. 267]

"[I]n the frothy turbulent 'mix' of America in the 60's, with its glut, its power drives, its confusion of values," Alfred Kazin decided in 1966, "the Jewish writer found himself so much read, consulted, imitated, that he knew it would not be long before the reaction set in -- and in fact the decorous plaint of the 'Protestant minority' has been succeeded by crudely suggestive phrases about the 'Jewish Establishment,' the 'O.K. writers and the Poor Goy,' 'The Jewish-American Push.' Yet it is plainly a certain success that has been resented, not the Jew." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxiv]
 

 

     Of course the New York Intellectuals  were -- and their descendants are -- not a formal organization, but rather an informal clique, a communally self-promotive camaraderie of writers, critics, editors, and publishers. Alexander Bloom suggests that the following individuals may be considered to be part of the Family's inner ring:

 

     Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Meyer

     Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald,

     Elliot Cohen and Sidney Hooks. A later generation included Irving Howe,

     Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Delmore Schwartz, Leslie Fiedler, Seymour

     Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Alfred Kazin, Robert Warshow, Melvin

     Lasky, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Saul Bellow. Still later came Norman Mailer,

     Philip Roth, Michael Harrington, Theodore Solotanoff, Jason Epstein,

     Midge Decter, Norman Podhortetz, and Susan Sontag.

 

    Other candidates for connective inclusion include Henry Roth, Michael

    Blankfort, Leon Uris, Meyer Levin, Arthur Cohen, Louis Untermeyer,

    Herman Wouk, Arthur Miller, Muriel Rukyeser, Louis Zara, Paul

    Goodman, Barbara Epstein, Steven Marcus, John Simon, and many

    others.

 

      Rings radiating outward include I. F. Stone, Herman Kahn, Hans Morgenthau, Sidney Hertzberg, Ronald Steel, David T. Bazelon, Nat Hentoff, Oscar Handlin, Daniel Boorstin, and others.

 

     In 1980, Daniel Bell, a prominent Family member, broke down his version of the Jewish contingent of the New York Intellectuals and their "fields of interest" into the following categories:

 

      ART: Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg

      PHILOSOPHY: Sidney Hooks, Hannah Arendt (Ernest Nagel)

      LITERARY CRITICISM: Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin,

           Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel, Steven

           Marcus, Robert Warshow, Robert Brustein, Susan Sontag, Diana

           Trilling

      INTELLECTUAL JOURNALISM: Elliot Cohen, William Phillips,

           Irving Kristol, Robert Silvers, Norman Podhoretz, Jason Epstein,

           Theodore Solataroff, Midge Decter

      THEOLOGY: (Will Herberg) (Emil Fackenheim) (Jacob Taubes)

           (Arthur Cohen)

      SOCIOLOGY: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, S. M. Lipset, (Philip

            Selznick)

            (Edward Shils) (Lewis Coser)

      HISTORY: Richard Hofstadter, Gertrude Himmelfarb

      ECONOMICS: (Robert Heilbroner) (Robert Lekachman)

 

     Bell further lists eight Jews as the "Elders of the Family" (1920-1930), with six Gentile afforded "cousins" status. Bell adds ten more Jews as the Family's "Younger Brothers" (1930-40) and seven more Gentiles as "cousins." In the "Second Generation" of the Family (his own group), Bell lists ten new Jews and, rather noteworthy, the Gentile "cousin" group has dropped to two. The 1940-1950 new "Younger Brothers" category lists ten more Jews and, alas, we are down to one non-Jewish cousin. [BELL, Intelligentsia, p. 126-127] "These political intellectuals," says Stephen Isaacs, "include a number of people who have known one another well for many years and who have been tagged the "College of Irvings" after Irving Kristol (a professor at New York University and co-editor of the Public Interest and Irving Howe (a professor at the City College of New York and editor of Dissent). [ISAACS, p. 53]

 

      However one portrays the best known American "intellectuals," New York-oriented or not, a huge proportion invariably came up Jewish. In the 1970s one commentator, Michael Novak, framed his own Most Important American Intellectuals List like this:

 

    IVY LEAGUE PRAGMATISTS AND HUMANISTS: Henry Steele

       Commager, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

   LITERARY MODERNISTS: Lionel Trilling, Louis Kampf, Irving Howe,

       Leslie Fiedler

   PLURALISTS: Nathan Glazer, Daniel Moynihan, David Reisam, Talcott

       Parsons, Will Herberg

   NEW RADICALS: Noam Chomsky, and "the New York Review of

       Book" gang

   CONSERVATIVE LIBERALS: Sidney Hooks, Norman Podhoretz, Irving

       Kristol

   EUROPE-ORIENTED HUMANITIES: Hannah Arendt, Philip Rahv,

       George Lichtheim, Saul Bellow

 

     Jack Porter responded to Novak's Intellectuals List with his own about the subject, specifically focusing on a compilation of Jewish intellectual "insiders" who "despite their political differences, agree on two essential points: the survival and integrity of the Jewish people and the survival and integrity of the state of Israel. If any intellectual opposes either one of these, he or she stands outside the Jewish people." [PORTER, p. 38 -39] Porter's group includes David Brudnoy, Milton Friedman, Meir Kahane, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Milton Himmelfarb, Nathan Glazer, Leonard Fein, I. L. Horowitz, Irving Howe, Arthur Waiskow, Morris U. Schappes, and Paul Jacobs.

 

     The most notable factor in these last two lists is that Noam Chomsky, a Jewish professor of linguistics, is mentioned on the first, and is "left standing outside the Jewish people" on the second. Chomsky has in fact long since been ostracized and marginalized by the Jewish "Family" for his attacks against Jewish chauvinism and Israel. "What sets Chomsky ... apart," notes David Herman, "is his fierce attack on his fellow intellectuals as a class ... Instead of producing truth, he argues, they often betray their vocation and produce amnesia about the past and distortion of the present ... Intellectuals in the universities, think tanks, and media create a consensus of public opinion. All criticism is then marginalized by placing it beyond the pale of informed debate." [HERMAN, p. 39] Not unusually, an American-born professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Barry Rubin, cited Chomsky as someone who was "intellectually unbalanced or psychologically disturbed." [RUBIN, p. 217]

 

       The New York Intellectuals, says Alexander Bloom, "held out for their personal independence but maintained their connections ... They moved across the political landscape together ... occupying the same large area at the same time ... There is no question that these individuals embodied many of the most important political and social forces of recent years, that they helped shape what America thought -- in its universities, its leading journals, and its political debate." [BLOOM, p. 7]   "Once journals have attained positions of eminence," notes Charles Kadushin, "they have independent power to make or break the prestige of individual intellectuals. This power is exercised through the clique and star system, the ability to publish some people and not others, and the ability to select some ideas and not others. And as will be evident, the power to support one idea while ignoring or denigrating another gives one the key to the kingdom of the intellectuals." [KADUSHIN, p. 51]

  
     By the time [Jewish mogul] Punch Sulzberger [inheritor of the New York Times] occupied his father's chair in 1963," says former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel,

      "American society had shed many of its anti-Semitic prejudices and permitted
      the rapid advancement of Jews in professional life and corporate suites. The
      general revulsion against fascism turned into a revulsion against bigotry itself,
      as demonstrated by the election of the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.       
      Exploiting this atmosphere, and Gentile guilt about the Holocaust, American Jews
      of my generation were emboldened to make them themselves culturally conspicuous,
      to flaunt their ethnicity, to find literary inspiration in their roots, and to bask in the       
      resurrection of Israel." [FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 400]

      "Jews play a markedly disproportionate role in political intellectualism in the United States," wrote Stephen Isaacs in 1974, "Jewish intellectuals tend to stand out because many of them have been heavily advertised and, having a touch of the tummler, they themselves are often experts at self-promotion. They thrive not on mass awareness of their concepts but on the quality of their audience. The Jewish intellectuals predominate among the editors of the small but influential intellectual journals..." [ISAACS, p. 53] "Careers like those of [non-Jew] Margaret Mead, David Riesman, and Daniel Bell," notes David Hollinger, "indicate the extent to which social scientists replaced the clergy as the most authoritative public moralists for educated Americans." [HOLLINGER, p. 23]

"In a time of intoxicating prosperity," wrote Alfred Kazin in 1966 about this profoundly influential Jewish secular pulpit, "it has been natural for the Jewish writer to see how superficial society can be, how pretentious, atrocious, unstable -- and comic. Thus, in a secular age when so many people believe in nothing but society's values, is the significance of literature of the Jewish writer's being a Jew." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxv]
 

 

      "These people are the Diores and Shiaperillis of intellectual fashion," the novelist George P. Eliot observed about the Family, "What they think today, you're apt to find yourself, in a Sears-Roebuck-ish sort of way, thinking tomorrow." [BLOOM, p. 313]  "The literary field in which Jews are without qualification in the highest rank is that of the essay," wrote Jewish author Marie Syrkin in 1964,

      "be it column or book-length exposition. As social analyst, political commentator
      or literary critic, the American Jewish writer occupies a major role. In journalism
      every shade of political opinion has Jews among its ablest exponents. The gamut
      runs from the conservative Arthur Krock through the less predictable Walter
      Lippman to the liberal Max Lerner on to extreme radical pundits. In literary criticism
      the same variety and excellence are present." [SYRKIN, M., 1964, p. 231]

 

     The Family took shape around the journal Partisan Review in the 1930s; they initially expressed a radical, confrontational and communist posture towards mainstream non-Jewish American society. The central theme of their communal identity -- not yet overtly expressed as being Jewish -- was that they were all outsiders, "alienated," struggling in the margins of mass culture. Eventually, distinctly as Jews, notes Alexander Bloom, "they claimed ... an expertise in marginality based on hundreds of years of experience." [BLOOM, p. 169]  "[The Family]," notes Norman Podhoretz, "did not feel that they belonged to America or that America belonged to them.' [PODHORETZ, p. 117] "There was something decidedly Jewish about the intellectuals who began to cohere as a group around the Partisan Review in the later 30s," notes Family member Irving Howe, "and one of the things that was 'decidedly Jewish' was that most were of Jewish birth!" [HOWE, p. 240] (What was/is a common situation for a non-Jew who sought/seeks to crack the Jewish-dominated publishing world? Take the case of British novelist George Orwell, of Animal Farm and 1984 fame. "His first publisher, Victor Gollanz," says Milton Goldin, "was a Communist who described himself as a Christian socialist and had been born into an Orthodox Jewish family. Orwell's second publisher, Frederic Warburg [also Jewish, was] a descendant of the Swedish branch of the Warburg banking family ... Jewish editors of the Partisan Review (then located in New York) acquainted a readership across the Atlantic with Orwell's views. And when Jewish editors at the Book-of-the-Month Club chose Animal Farm as a club selection, the breakthrough at last provided him with a decent living.") [GOLDIN, M., 11-29-2000]

 

     "The chic word among the best Jewish writers today is 'alienation,'" wrote Arthur Hertzberg in 1964, "which is a way of recognizing the truth that a Jew is irretrievably different. Writers like Norman Mailer and Leslie Fiedler, and a host of others, have the merit of seeing this fact continues to exist even where Jewish learning or active commitment have evaporated. They may not know why, and they may deny those reasons that they do know, yet these writers proclaim that the Jew in his very existence is alien to the world ... the Jew is not becoming like everyone else they say; it is that everyone worth mentioning is really becoming just like the Jew. There is some superficial truth to this assertion at a moment in American life when so much of its literature is being written by Jews." [HERTZBERG, p. 294] Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz once noted this "alienation which only a Jew can suffer, and use, as a cripple uses his weakness in order to beg." [ATLAS, J., 1977, p. 166]

 

     Among the literature promoted and disseminated by many Family members was the secular Jewish "religion" of Freudianism. One Partisan Review staffer noted that, "We were all more or less saturated with psychoanalytic jargon. Psychoanalysis was at that time very much in the air, and everybody seemed to be in it or contemplating it." [TORREY] Partisan Review editor William Phillips edited two books on psychoanalysis as a basis for socio-cultural perception, Art and Psychoanalysis (1957) and Literature and Psychoanalysis (1983). Lionel Trilling's influential volume, The Liberal Imagination, had chapters on "Art and Neurosis" and "Freud and Literature." Louis Fraiberg wrote in his own Psychoanalysis and American Literary Criticism that "No other critic (than Trilling) has shown a comparable grasp of the significance of psychoanalysis; no other critic has so well incorporated it into his criticism." [TORREY] "Many Jewish intellectuals," suggests E. Fuller Torrey, "sought expiation of their guilt and remorse (about the Holocaust) in psychoanalysis." [TORREY] In 1990 a random survey of New York psychiatrists, 50 to 80% of local book and literary journal editors were believed to be veterans of psychoanalysis. [TORREY]

 

      Norman Podhoretz even described the Family's bitter arguments among themselves in psychoanalytic -- and Jewish -- terms:

 

       "To be adopted into the Family was a mark of great distinction ... But

        once adopted, you could expect to be spoken of by many (not all) of

        your relatives in the most terrifyingly cruel terms ... Transposed into a

        different key, it was the Jewish self-hatred that has always been the

        other side of the coin of Jewish self-love." [PODHORETZ, p. 152]

 

     While most of these Great Thinkers, in the beginning, distanced themselves from issues of their "Jewishness" (although, notes Irving Howe, "this severance from Jewish immigrant sources would later come to be a little suspect" [HOWE, p. 241],  their collective path to money, status, and power is manifest in a most distinctly Jewish way: they were an influential clique, a clan, initially homogeneous only in that they were all part of the same mutually promotive network. Over the following decades their radicalism softened into an assertion of "anti-communist liberalism"; ultimately individuals spread from there across the political map. Increasingly however, after World War II, their most pressing common link was a strong reaffirmation of their Jewish identities, allegiance to Jewish parochialism, and emphatic support for the state of Israel.

 

     Ironically, history has proven the Jewish Mafia's essential self-image of being "alienated" and "marginalized" (later understood by them to be an ancestral reservoir of special Jewish insights) to become ridiculous. The Family has proven to be exactly the opposite of what they proclaimed themselves at first to be. History has revealed them as a group of literary hustlers and self-promoters who were profoundly influential and centrally located in deconstructing the institutions of the surrounding non-Jewish culture they so much despised until they gained entrée to prestigious empowerment, at which time they vigorously struggled to affirm the status quo of which they had become so much a part, save overt adjustments to their new-found "Jewishness," and a reconstruction of the world in that image.

 

      Family member Harold Rosenberg explained  the way modern Jewry seeks to rationalize Jewish particularism as being beneficial to American universalism like this:

 

          "Since modern life is so complex that no man can possess it in its

          entirety, the outsider often finds himself the perfect insider."

          [BLOOM,  p. 153]

 

     "In addition to their notions of group marginality," observes Alexander Bloom, "which differs from individual feelings of aloneness, [the Family] also attempted to carry their alienation with them to the central position they felt they should occupy [in American society]." "What began in the 30s," says Richard Kostelanetz, "as a collection of ambitious young writers became, by the 60s, the most powerful establishment ever seen in literary America, and they dominated the scene as it had never been dominated before." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 39]  "Upwardly mobile Jews," notes Alan Wald, "comprised a disproportionate number of intellectuals in all radical movements in New York in the 1930s. The veterans of the [Jewish-founded left-wing magazines] New Masses and New Leader were not qualitatively different in their Jewish composition from those of the Partisan Review." [WALD, p. 9]

 

     In historical retrospect, it is obvious that noble intellectual endeavors and enlightenment really were not the only -- and probably not the fundamental --  driving forces behind most of the New York Intellectuals. "A strong desire of class was also buried in the whole dynamic," notes Alexander Bloom, "Only subsequently did some of the young men come to see how clearly their own progress was tied to a desire to rise." [BLOOM, p. 27] Norman Podhoretz called the Jewish Mafia's deepest motivation in their struggles "a dirty little secret," and he wrote an entire book, Making It, about his own -- and others -- obsessions with self-promotive hustling and status-seeking within the Family. "The lust for success," he wrote, "... had replaced sexual lust ... especially for writers, artists, and intellectuals, among whom I lived and worked." [BLOOM, p. 360] "After all," noted Irving Howe, "it had never been dignity that we could claim as our strong point." [HOWE, p. 265]

 

     (It was also, as noted earlier, a parallel situation in the largely Jewish left-wing Group Theatre world in New York City -- many actors, directors, and producers abandoned their proclaimed purist principles to migrate to Hollywood for wealth and fame. Even in the folk music world, singer Dave Von Ronk recalls the climate of some of the socially-minded, anti-materialist, left-wing folk singers of the 1960s, naming Jewish singers Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, David Cohen, and Gentile Eric Anderson: "They wanted to get rich. They were hungry, scuffling cats looking to grab the brass ring. I felt it, I saw how hungry they were. They wanted to be honest, but they suddenly realized they could say what they wanted to say and make a million dollars. Dylan was a terrible influence ... Bobby always wanted to be a superstar. When he discovered the reality of being a superstar he freaked out." [SCADUTO, p. 227] 

 

     "Among aggressive young intellectuals, ghetto-bred and seeking big reputations," said Alfred Kazin," [Saul] Bellow was making the world's powers resist him ... he was ambitious and dedicated in a style I had never seen in an urban Jewish intellectual; he expected the world to come to him. He had pledged himself a great destiny." [BLOOM, p. 292][

 

    Concerning Norman Mailer, Kazin once noted that

 

      "I've never known anyone whose career was always in public and who

       constantly put himself forward the way movie people do so much as

       Mailer." [MANSO, p. 274]

 

     "[Jason] Epstein's literary chutzpah is indeed legendary," says Philip Nobile, "He is possibly the only editor in the history of publishing who reviewed a book he himself edited ... and who even edited a book he himself had written." [NOBILE, p. 91]

 

      "Most of my friends and I were Jewish," wrote Seymour Krim of his experiences around the Family, "we were also literary; the combination of the Jewish intellectual tradition and sensibility needing to be a writer created in my circle the most potent and incredible intellectual-literary ambition I have ever seen." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 12] 

 

      In 1963, Richard Hofstadter, another member of the Jewish intellectual Family, decided that "intellectuals" were an elite class in modern society:

 

      "It is rare for an American intellectual to confront candidly the

      irresolvable conflict between the elite character of his own class

      and his democratic aspiration. The extreme manifestation of the general

      reluctance to face this conflict is the writer who constantly assaults class

      barriers and yet constantly hungers for special deference."

      [HOFSTADTER, p. 408]

 

       The underlying paradoxical paradigm here, of course, which Hofstadter does not acknowledge, is the standard Jewish universalist-particularist tension: to dominate the inner machinations of American culture and society, but be alienated from it; to be democratic in abstract philosophy in public life, but a self-anointed elitist in one's personal and confidential worlds; to be a universalistic American on the outside, and a particularist Jew within. Hofstadter never mentions Jews in his entire volume about American "anti-intellectualism"; instead, he sublimates the Jewish dimension to all this, as exemplified by a quote he selects from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: "Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman." [HOFTSTADTER, p. 4]

 

     The great ambitions that encompassed the Family at-large were ultimately accomplished, causing members to reflect from time to time upon their phenomenal success and influence in American society. Citing examples like fellow Family members Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin, "there emerged," wrote Daniel Bell, "a 'cultural elite,' and this was primarily a 'university culture' ... [but] the notion of elites extended beyond campus boundaries. Many of the new cultural arbiters have affected not only serious painters and novelists, but the standards of the larger public as well." [BLOOM, p. 200]  As Irving Horowitz notes, "The Jew at the start of the century was identified as the pure marginal, the outsider, the immigrant incapable of integration. As this century draws to a close the Jew is now identified as the very apotheosis of American dominant values and culture." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 90]

 

     "The growing complexity of our society," Lionel Trilling observed about himself and his Family, "had helped create a new intellectual class, which stood in a new relation with power. In addition, intellectual life itself took on a new character, providing the means of social mobility and social ascent ... [BLOOM, p. 206] ... The needs of society have brought to the top of the social hierarchy a large class of people of considerable force and complexity of mind. Intellect has associated itself with power as perhaps never before in history, and is now conceded to be itself a kind of power." [BLOOM, p. 200]

 

     "The most pervasive event in American letters over the last ten years," joined in Clement Greenberg in the Partisan Review, "is the stabilization of the avant-garde, accompanied by its growing acceptance by official and commercial culture." [BLOOM, p. 297] Among those disturbed with this trend of largely Jewish intellectual status and reward seeking was sociologist C. Wright Mills, a non-Jew, and author of critical attacks of American society called The Power Elite and White Collar. Despite his proximity, as a professor at Columbia University, to the New York Family, he was not part of it. Russell Jacoby notes that

 

          "where Trilling celebrated cultural progress, Mills bemoaned decline,

            the degeneration of political discourse into slogans and toothpaste

            commercials ... [Mills argued in 1955 that] when a stringent

            opposition [to social and governmental norms] had disappeared,

            intellectuals embrace a 'new conservative gentility.' Instead of

            criticizing the mediocrity and mindlessness, they savor their new

            status, instead of acting as 'the moral conscience of society,' they

            confound prosperity with advancing culture. Mills named Trilling

            as one of the intellectuals succumbing to this confusion ... From the

            end of the war until his death, he railed against intellectuals who

            traded ethics and vision for salaries and status." [JACOBY, p. 79]

 

      "[As] radical intellectuals," says Alexander Bloom, "the New Yorkers had once felt that their best hope of access to intellectual prominence and authority lay with a reconstructing of society. In the postwar years, they found the very society which they once scorned, and which had once scorned them, much more hospitable. They discovered a 'place' and a 'role' for themselves in it." [BLOOM]  "We are witnessing a process that might well be described as the embourgeoisment of the American intelligentsia," Philip Rahv observed, "This change, coupled with the new liberal policies, accounts for the fact that the idea of socialism ... has virtually ceased to figure in current intellectual discussion." [BLOOM, p. 201] "Instead of standing in opposition to the prevailing cultural flow-- mass, popular, middle-brow," notes Bloom, "highbrow thought and an avant-garde orientation now molded society." [BLOOM, p. 298]

 

     Indeed, in their earlier years, many of the Family were communist activists, their later worldview adjusted to success and the comforts of capitalism. "In light of the neo-conservative self-portrait being created by many of the New York intellectuals," noted Alan Wald in 1987, "one is tempted to conclude that they have a stake in perpetuating an amnesia that avoids a forthright disclosure of their previous political history as revolutionary but anti-Stalinist Marxists." [WALD, p. 8-9]

 

     The much-published ideas and arguments of the New York Intellectuals and their rise to status and power took them into university classrooms everywhere and even the very seat of government power in Washington DC.  "Intellectuals established intimate connections with government as never before," says Bloom, "Some took jobs in Washington ... While most did not take employment, they nonetheless felt the connection." "President Kennedy began to flatter the intellectual," Midge Decter recalled, "which is to say he invited them to his house for supper." [BLOOM, p. 324] "We became a touch of minor royalty," says Norman Mailer. [BLOOM, p. 324] "All of us in the family," says Norman Podhoretz, "were even friendly with members of the White House staff; they read our magazines and the pieces and books we ourselves wrote, and they cared -- it is even said that the President [Kennedy] himself cared -- about what we thought." [PODHORETZ, 1967, p. 312]

 

      Alan Wald notes that:

 

      "The skills and experience [the New York intellectuals] had acquired

      as polemicists and ideologists during their radical years, and

      especially as authorities on communism with an insider's knowledge,

      enabled them to move rapidly into seats of cultural power in the

      1950s. In more recent decades, some even came to have access to

      national power. Irving Kristol, for example, became an intellectual

      consultant to the Nixon administration, Nathan Glazer's work was

      much admired by the Reagan administration, and neoconservative

      articles in Commentary magazine influenced White House policy

      in the 1980s." [WALD, p. 8]

    As Jewish commentator Earl Shorris noted in 1982 about these once-Leftist, now influential "neoconservative," individuals:

     "The neoconservative Jews [Shorris notes, as examples, Norman Podhoretz,
      Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, and Sidney Hook]
      have not codified their views. They are still best identified by the half dozen
      middle-aged former leftists who led the garrulous conversions [to the political
      right] ... [T]hey enjoy money as Norman Podhoretz has so loudly said. They are       
      unashamedly ambitious, almost greedy. They do not know or wish to know the
      risks of daily life in the world of business; they are more comfortable in the
      role of consultant, advising others on which risks to take." [SHORRIS, E., 1982,
      p. 10]
 

 

       Even those intellectuals without university degrees sooner or later gravitated to teaching positions at universities. Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and William Phillips found positions without PhDs; Philip Rahv even became a professor without a Bachelor's degree. At Columbia, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell (who also became an editor at Fortune) were deeded PhDs for "research already published." [BLOOM, p. 311]

 

     "Once intellectuals had come in from the cold and established connections with power," says Alexander Bloom, "it became clear that their intellectual endeavors no longer represented opposition to the prevailing ethos. They were 'chic' because they were 'in' -- they had achieved what they had long ago set out to achieve." [BLOOM, p. 325] "Where young writers once faced the world together," wrote Irving Howe, "they now sink into suburbs, country  homes and college towns ... They not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals." [original author's emphasis: JACOBY, p. 82]

 

      The Family -- most of them former communists of various brands -- became so entrenched in the mainstream corridors of power and influence that a number of them even ended up having the covert backing of the CIA. During the height of the post-World War II anti-communist hysteria in America, many Family members joined an organization called the American Committee of Cultural Freedom. "Anticommunism became its only prerequisite," says Alexander  Bloom, ".... New York Intellectuals ... provided the solid center of the organization and filled many positions." [BLOOM, p. 264]

 

     Diana Trilling remembers that

 

      "Even before I came onto the Executive Board of the American

      Committee, I was aware, and it was clear impression that everybody

      else on the Board was also in some measure aware, that the institutional

      body with which we were associated was probably funded by the

      government ... We strongly suspected that the Fairfield Foundation,

      which we were told supported the Congress, was a filter for the State

      Department or CIA money." [BLOOM, p. 264]

 

     The ACCF's parent organization even funded a British-based "intellectual" journal, Encounter, edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender. A later editor, Melvin Lasky, is generally presumed to have been the CIA agent-editor publicly alluded to by a former CIA-employee. [BLOOM, p. 267]

 

     Throughout the rise to prominence, status, and power, the incestuous, connections-laden, interlocking of the New York Intellectual clique ran deep in mutual self-promotion. "What might seem the result of a 'conspiracy,'" notes Richard Kostelanetz, "[is] actually caused by a confluence of attitudes, historical precedents, and initially independent discriminations, all of which combine to function with a conspiratorial effectiveness ... It is de facto censorship [of non-Family writers]. [KOSTELANETZ, p. xvii]

 

     "Intellectuals and publishers," notes E. Fuller Torrey, "... are often related or familiar with each other through marriage or shared consorts, recommend and review each others work and pass promising manuscripts around for publication ... The New York intellectual community and the publishing industry are essentially two parts of a single whole." [TORREY]

 

     Midge Decter, for example, the secretary of the first editor of Commentary (Elliot Cohen), became the wife of the second editor of that journal, Norman Podhoretz. She also worked for the Saturday Review and eventually rose to become an executive editor at Harper's where Norman Mailer became a featured contributor and Irving Howe a regular contributor. [KOSTELANETZ, p. 101] John Podhoretz, son of Norman, attained jobs at the Washington Times and George Bush's White House before settling in as a television critic for the New York Post.  By 1998 he was the paper's Editorial Page Editor. Podhoretz's daughter, Ruthie Bloom, moved to Israel and became a regular columnist for the Jerusalem Post. Podhoretz's wife -- the aforementioned Midge Decter -- has a daughter by another marriage who married Elliot Abrams, an adviser on Latin America in Ronald Reagan's State Department. [TWERSKY, p. 45] 

 

     "Family" members Lionel and Diana Trilling were married. Alfred Kazin remarked in 1976 that he didn't like fellow Family member Daniel Bell (co-editor of Public Interest), "even though he is my brother-in-law." Irving Kristol, another co-editor of  Public Interest (and the editor-in-chief at Basic Books) was the brother-in-law of Milton Himmelfarb, a Contributing Editor for Commentary and also co-editor of the Jewish Yearbook." [BLOOM, p. 278] Lionel Trilling's former students included Jason Epstein, who at Doubleday published Trilling's The Liberal Imagination. Trilling also selected the book titles for the Reader's Subscription and the Mid-Century Book Society, each organization managed by  former Trilling students, Gilman Kraft and Sol Stein, respectively. [KRUPNICK, p. 102]  Likewise, "the writers from Partisan Review now came to dominate the New Yorker," Daniel Bell once asserted to Midge Decter, Partisan Review was getting to be like a farm team for the New Yorker." [BLOOM, p. 311]

 

     The self-promotion and clannishness are clearly reflected elsewhere in the interconnectedness of those selected in Family journals for publication. Elliot Cohen, the first editor of Commentary, brought on board Clement Greenberg and Nathan Glazer as editorial assistants and Sidney Hooks as a contributing editor. Irving Kristol and Robert Warshow later joined the staff.  By the end of the first year, Harold Rosenberg, Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Robert Warshow, Sidney Hooks, Isaac Rosenfeld, Daniel Bell, Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, and Clement Greenberg had articles or reviews in Commentary. [BLOOM, p. 160]

 

     "Just as Willie Morris [a rare non-Jewish member of the Family]," says Richard Kostelanetz, "assuming the chief editorship of Harper's, prepublished sections of Norman Podhoretz's Making It, so did Podhoretz feature sections of Morris' North Towards Home in (Podhoretz's) Commentary."

 

     The kind of interrelated media circles Norman Mailer  traveled in, for example,  include -- aside from the central New York Intellectual luminaries -- the following people who were solicited for stories for a book of oral histories about his life (Mailer himself was a co-founder of the Village Voice with Jerry Talmer, Ed Fancher, and Dan Wolf):

 

   * Bernard Farber -- fiction editor at the Saturday Evening Post, later senior

          editor at Trident Press, Simon and Schuster, and then CBS

          Legacy Books. He also served as Vice-President of Mailer's film

          company, Supreme Mix.

   * Benjamin DeMott - columnist for Harper's and The Atlantic, a

          contributing editor to the Saturday Review.

   * Judy Feiffer - Senior Editor at William Morrow, Vice-President of East

          Coast Productions, Orion Pictures.

   * Jules Feiffer - cartoonist at the Village Voice.

   * Henry Geldzahler -- former curator of twentieth century art at the

           Metropolitan Museum of Art.

   * Allen Ginsberg -- Beat Poet.

   * Lionel Hellman -- screenwriter, playwright.

   * Lionel Abel -- "longtime contributor to Commentary, Dissent, Partisan

            Review

   * Leo Lerman -- features editor at Mademoiselle, Vogue, editor in chief at

            Vanity Fair.

   * Max Lerner - an editor at the Nation, columnist for the New York Post 

            and Los Angeles Times syndicate.

   * Max Linenthal -- Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State

            University.

   * Adeline Naiman -- Editor at Little, Brown.

   * Sol Stein -- one of ten founding members of the Playwright Group of

             the Actors Studio.

   * Al Wasserman -- producer, director, and writer for NBC News. Married

            to Mailer's sister.

 

     In 1996 a Mailer quote was used on the back cover of friend Lawrence Schiller's book about the O.J. Simpson trial. "I couldn't stop reading American Tragedy," he said. "My old friend and colleague Larry Schiller has come up with a book that is impossible to put down." [SCHILLER, 1996] Mailer had good reason to be so engrossed in the accusation that Simpson murdered his wife with a knife. Mailer had once stabbed his own wife, Adele, in the upper abdomen and back, sending her to the hospital. "One of the wounds was near the heart," notes biographer Carl Rollyson, "and the cardiac sac had been punctured." Within a week of the assault, "Mailer appeared on the Mike Wallace television show. He announced his intention to run for the mayor of New York City." [ROLLYSON, p. 137, 138]  In an obvious reflection upon the violent incident, one of his 1962 published poems, entitled Rainy Afternoon with the Wife (in a volume he called Deaths for the Ladies) stated that

 

    "So long/as/you/use/a/knife/there's/some/love/left." [ROLLYSON, p. 141]

 

     Some of Mailer's other associations were -- in view of his public image as a "liberal" -- peculiar. Roy Cohn -- a driving force behind right-wing McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s -- helped negotiate a lucrative writing deal between Mailer and the continually morally dubious Newhouse (Advance) media empire; Mailer was initially commissioned on projects for  Parade magazine and Random House. Mailer even rented a cottage to Cohn next to Mailer's own summer home. "Newhouse's overtures to Norman Mailer, made through Roy Cohn," says Thomas Maier, "would pay [Mailer] sizeable fees and commissions, throughout the decade of the 1980s and well into the 1990s, with some of the most lucrative deals ever seen by an American novelist .... By the early 1990s, Mailer was listed on [Newhouse's] Vanity Fair masthead as writer-at-large." [MAIER, p. 108-109]

 

      Seizing the opportunity of the New York city newspaper strike in 1963, Jason Epstein, a Vice President at Random House, and editor of Viking Books, was instrumental in setting  up the New York Review of Books (which extended its own mini-empire by purchasing the Kirkus Reviews book reviewing periodical from Maurice Friedman in 1971). Robert Silvers (formerly at Harper's and the Paris Review) and Epstein's wife, Barbara, were installed as editors. [BLOOM, p. 326]  "In the second year of the Review," says Alexander Bloom, "Harold Rosenberrg, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter contributed; Daniel Bell and Norman Podhoretz did so in the third. The degree to which the New York Review swept the field of contemporary writers and critics led Richard Hoftstadter to refer to it jokingly as "the New York Review of Each Others Books." [BLOOM, p. 329]  Philip Noble, who chronicled the Review's early history, characterized the era as prey to 'nepotism, fratricide, and incest, and even a dose of narcissism. Establishment liberals were reviewing one another wholesale." [NOBILE, p. 29]

     As Jewish scholars Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter noted:

     "The New York Review of Books was edited by Robert Silvers and Barbara
     Epstein, and the bulk of its political contributions (especially articles on
     American politics) in the mid-1960s was written by Jews. By and large
     then, as Tom Wolfe has pointed out, 'radical chic' in New York was a
     heavily Jewish phenomenon, and the influence of such people spread
     well beyond their own circle." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 105]

 

      "In the course of the New York Review's rise," notes Bloom, "two of its prime movers joined the upper ranks of the New York Intellectual world. Robert Silvers ... climbed slowly up the intellectual social ladder. Jason Epstein sprang to the top ... Epstein had helped created the paperback revolution at Doubleday ... Epstein wore his ambition  ... openly." "Jason has the mind of a scholar but the instincts of a pushcart peddler," recalled a former colleague at Doubleday. Dwight MacDonald called him "a caricature of a New York intellectual; a nineteenth century entrepreneur, a robber baron, only his market is not copper, but intellectuals." [BLOOM, p. 327]

 

      "There is no such thing as a New York Intellectual establishment," Epstein said to those not part of the Family, "it just looks that way." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 61] "It is fashionable," wrote Victor Navasky, editor of Nation (of whom Diana Trilling once worked as a literary editor), "for the New York Intellectuals to not only deny its existence but, as a corollary, to deny its influence." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 79]

 

       As the New York Jewish Mafia built a foundation of interconnectedness and self-promotive power, "the Upper West Side, Wellfleet, and Martha's Vineyard now replaced City College and the Village as centers of their social whirl," says Alexander Bloom, "They all still attended each others parties, still gossiped to one another ... [BLOOM, p. 277] ... They remained vitally aware of one another, even as they expressed their criticism [of each other] in extremely harsh terms. Like prizefighters in a traveling carnival, they might be combatants but they remained part of the same show." [BLOOM, p. 279]

 

     Allen Ginsberg, the famous Jewish-born Beat poet, remembers Norman Podhoretz coming up to him at a party and offering him entrée into the Jewish Mafia:

 

        "Ginsberg, [said Podhoretz] you really have some talent and I realize

        that you're an intelligent writer and really gifted. You could have a career

        in New York, be part of the larger scene with us if you'd only get rid of

        those friends of yours like [non-Jews William] Burroughs and [Jack]

        Kerouac. You have much better taste than they. Why aren't you

        working with us instead of those people that are so nowhere? .... I

        remember the incident as an ephiphanous moment in my relation with

        Podhoretz and what he was -- part of a large right-wing proto-police

        surveillance movement .... The Beat group was more or less

        based on Vachel Lindsay, Whitman, populism, and individualism."

        [MANSO, p. 314]

     Barry Gilford and Lawrence Lee, in an "oral biography" of Jack Kerouac, note beatnik resistant to conventions of the New York/Jewish Freudian literary world:

     "Kerouac appears never to have considered turning to psychiatry for insights
      or comfort, and Allen's [Allen Ginsberg] rejection of psychiatry with the aid
      of the analyst who recognized the value of Ginsberg's dissatisfaction was a
      turning point in Allen's creative life. But for many Villagers and other New
      Yorkers of the 1950's, analysis was a secular religion which set forth the
      prospect of salvation through personal accommodations to a world which
      established a definition of sanity through normative behavior. Thus, for
      many, a simple refusal to adjust to the psychoanalytic view of the world
      as it was became a charged act of rebellion." [GILFORD/LEE, 1994, p. 174]
 

 

     Upon a visit to New York City, the novelist George P. Eliot observed that

 

      "What strikes me, as a visitor, ever more strangely than the intensity with

       which these Jews attack and praise each other, is the attention they pay

       to each other." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 25]

 

     Whether hugging or warring, says Norman Podhoretz, the Family was "preoccupied with each other to the point of obsession." [PODHORETZ, p. 110]

 

     The novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) believed a Jewish-inspired plot was amuck to suppress his work for his crime of writing critically about the Jewish community. "He suspected," writes A. A. Swanberg, "that Arthur Pell, head of the Liveright firm, and Simon and Schuster, were parties to the plot ... [To a friend] he wrote: Get me the names of a number of fairly recently organized non-Jewish publishers ... Can you tell me whether W. W. Norton or anyone connected with his organization in a financial control sense is Jewish?"  [GOULD]

 

     Alas, Dreiser was securely marginalized by the American literary-cultural establishment by the early 1960s. "The decline of Dreiser's reputation," notes Irving Howe, "has not been an isolated event. It has occurred in the context, and is surely a consequence, of the counterrevolution in American culture during the forties and fifties ... Dreiser became a symbol of everything a superior intelligence was supposed to avoid ... He represented the boorishness of the populist mentality, as it declined into anti-Semitism." [HOWE, p. 168]

 

     Likewise, notes Ann Douglas, prominent Beat author Jack Kerouac eventually became "ever more paranoid," thinking that "the New York Jewish critics were plotting against him; he joked bitterly about titling Big Sur (1962), 'Another idea for the Jews to Steal.'" [DOUGLAS, A., 19-99] In 2001, Jim Irsay (whose father's original name was Robert Israel), owner of a professional football team, bought Kerouac's original manuscript for On the Road, at auction, for $2.2 million dollars. (Jewish author Franz Kafka's The Trial had "held the previous record for an original manuscript sold at auction.") [HERMAN, J., 5-22-01]

 

      "[There is] a Jewish Mafia in American letters ..., "said popular writer Truman Capote, risking censure and the inevitable charge of anti-Semitism in 1973, "There is a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines ... All these publications are Jewish-dominated and this particular coterie employs them to make or break writers by advancing or withholding attention ... Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are all fine writers, but they are not the only writers in the country as the Jewish Mafia would have us believe." [FORSTER, p. 109]

 

     The Partisan Review crowd, for instance, is generally acknowledged to have "made" Saul Bellow. "From the first," says Alexander Bloom, "Bellow established a recognizable and, ultimately, uneasy relationship with the New York Intellectuals, as friends and patrons. Yet he has resisted any notion that they made him famous." But, says Leslie Fiedler, "[Bellow] really owed a big debt to them, because they did help introduce him to the world. Rahv thought of him as one of their boys." [BLOOM, p. 291]

 

     Early in his career, from 1941-1951, Bellow published six short stories and two novels; five of the short stories first appeared in Partisan Review. [BLOOM, p. 291] His second novel, was reviewed in Partisan Review by Family member Delmore Schwartz and favorably compared with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Henry James, and Walt Whitman. "Bellow's success," says Alexander Bloom, "was more than just personal. whether or not he was 'made' by the Partisan writers is less significant than the degree to which  his success and the history of the achievement of the New York Intellectuals in general intertwined ... Lionel Trilling ... made it clear that a Jew could be a great literary critic; Meyer Schapiro, a great art historian; and Saul Bellow a great American novelist." [BLOOM, p. 293]

 

     "Bellow," said Norman Podhoretz, "was the Family's White Hope, as it were, in fiction." [BLOOM, p. 291] "Bellow was their novelist," observes Alexander Bloom, "because he wrote about them, sometimes literally, but more often socially and culturally." [BLOOM,  p. 293]

 

       "What makes Bellow's work so unusual," decided Alfred Kazin in 1959, "is the fact that his characters are all burdened by a speculative quest, a need to understand their particular destiny." [BLOOM, p. 295] In the 1960s, Leslie Fiedler proclaimed Bellow to be "America's most important living novelist." [BLOOM, p. 292]  Earlier he had declared that of all the contemporary novelists, Bellow "was the one we need most to understand, if we are to understand what we are doing at the present moment." [BLOOM, p. 292]

 

     "It is said," wrote Edgar Siskind in 1978, "that more PhD dissertations have been and are being written on Bellow than any other contemporary writer. No aspect of his work has been more fiercely analyzed than the question of its Jewish component." [SISKIN, p. 90]

 

    "Complementing Bellow's individual success," notes Alexander Bloom, "was his preeminence in what has been called the emergence of Jewish-American literature  in postwar years ... What is striking about the writers included in this literary category is the degree to which they all had close connections with the New York Intellectuals." [BLOOM, p. 295] Such authors include a vast field, including most of the Jewish names in this chapter. Many of Bernard Malmud's stories, for example, first appeared in the Partisan Review and Commentary. Norman Mailer often had pieces published in Dissent in the 1950s. [BLOOM, p. 296-297] Paul Goodman's book, Growing Up Absurd, turned down by nineteen publishers, was promoted by Norman Podhoretz, and serialized in his Commentary. Podhoretz also persuaded Jason Epstein at Random House to publish it, even though his firm had already rejected the manuscript.  [BLOOM, p. 322] Commentary also serialized the diary of Ann Frank, as we have seen earlier, one of the first popular books about the later so-called Holocaust, bringing the subject to public eye.

 

     "I cannot prove a connection," wrote Irving Howe, "between the holocaust and the turn to Jewish themes in American fiction, at first urgent and quizzical, later fashionable and manipulative ... but it would be foolish to scant the possibility." [HOWE, p. 265]

 

     "The larger questions of Jewish existence," notes Alexander Bloom, "as well as the narrower ones of Jewish intellectuals -- the themes mined by Saul Bellow -- became the material for a growing literary oeuvre." [BLOOM, p. 297]

 

     By 1975, this "literary oeuvre" had sparked Jewish critic George Steiner to proclaim

 

        "It is commonplace that recent American fiction and criticism have to a

         a drastic extent been the product of Jewish tone and explosion of

         talent." [MADISON, C., p. 271]

 

     Russell Jacoby had another take on this Jewish "explosion of talent":

 

      "By quality alone, it is simply not possible to distinguish the oeuvre of

       New York intellectuals from that of non-New Yorkers. Essay by essay,

       book by book, the collective work of New York intellectuals is neither

       so brilliant nor so scintillating that all else pales. It is almost more

       feasible to reverse the common opinion: the significant books of the

       fifties were authored by non-New Yorkers ... New York intellectuals

       received the lion's share of attention less by reason of genius than by ...

       their New York location and their personal and physical proximity to the

       publishing industry. In addition, their tireless monitoring of themselves

       lays the groundwork for further studies (and myths). For those padded

       cultural histories with reports on what writer X said to editor Y

       at Z's party, the New York scene is a mother lode ... [JACOBY, p. 102]

       ... New York intellectuals specialize in the self; theirs is the home of

       psychoanalysis, the personal essay, the letter to the editor." [JACOBY,

       p. 103]

 

      As one unnamed "intellectual" responded to Charles Kadushin's study of American intellectuals, "Power is in the circles around Commentary, Dissent, the New York Review of Books, and Partisan. Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in these circles is bullshit." [KADUSHIN, p. 52]

 

       Norman Podhoretz noted the crucial importance of hustling and politicking to further one's career in the Literary In-Crowd, and the desperate Status Chase of it all:

 

      "Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy's last night? Up five

      points. Was so-and-so not invited to the Lowell's to meet the latest

      visiting poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so's book get nominated for

      the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review

      neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two."

      [KOSTELANETZ, p. 129]

 

     This "explosion of talent" within the Jewish Mafia's self-promotive web has been profoundly successful. As example, of all the thousands of talented writers in America, "for several years in succession," wrote Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin in 1970, "Jewish authors won the National Book award with works about Jews. Jewish novels headed the bestseller list." [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 13]  "[The New York] mob writers," complained Richard Kostelanetz in 1974, "usually sit on the selection juries of the National Book Award ... and win these awards regularly (Bellow getting an unparalleled three)." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 124] Among the National Book Award winners, twelve years later Family member Irving Howe even took the prize with his nostalgic look at early Jewish America, World of Our Fathers. National Book Award winner for fiction in 2000? Jewish author Susan Sontag.

 

     Likewise, in the Nobel Prize for Literature world, Jewish author Elias Canetti won the award in 1981, notes the (Jewish) Forward, "shortly after Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in a sequence that some anti-Semites in the Hispanic world shamelessly called 'Stockholm's Jewish triumvirate." [STAVANS, 1999, p. 1]  In 1987, Jewish writer Joseph Brodsky also took the Nobel prize.

 

    In 1994, Jewish author Lois Lowry won for the second time the American Library Association's Newberry Medal for books for young adults. She had won the award in 1990 for Number the Stars, "the stirring tale of the Danish people's heroic efforts to protect their Jewish population from the fate that befell their brothers and sisters in the rest of Europe." [HOFFMAN, M., 4-10-94, p. 23]

 

     "We live in a moment where everywhere in the realm of prose Jewish writers have discovered their Jewishness to be eminently a marketable commodity," wrote Jewish author Charles Madison in 1976, "the much vaunted alienation to be their passport into the heart of Gentile American culture." [MADISON, C., p. 272] "Everyone is by now aware," noted Robert Alter in 1965, "of the fact that literary Jewishness has become a distinct commercial asset." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 13]  "The new atmosphere has created a phenomenon which is especially evident in intellectual circles and on college campuses," noted James Jaffe in 1968, "Jewishness is now acceptable, sometimes even fashionable. At the opera and other important cultural battlegrounds in New York, socially prestigious women are constantly seen with Jewish escorts ... Yiddish words pepper the speech of television personalities from Jerry Lewis, who is Jewish, to Johnny Carson, who isn't." [JAFFE, J., 1968, p. 45]

 

     Pop singer Linda Ronstadt read Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar (first published in 1955) as a teenager: "It screwed me up about love and romance and everything. But I loved it then, and it made me wish I was Jewish." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 12]  Marilyn Monroe once expressed an affinity for the Jewish world that surrounded her in Hollywood, saying,, "It's like the Jews are the orphans of the world. Maybe that's why I feel so close to them." [STRASBERG, S., p. 56]  Upon marrying Jewish playwright Arthur Miller, she declared that "if I have kids, I think they should be Jewish. Anyway, I can identify with the Jews. Everybody's always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me." [STRASBERG, p. 112] As Susan Strasberg notes, "Over the next year she'd pepper her conversations with Jewish expressions as if reaffirming her conversion [to Judaism]. 'Hi Bubuleh, oy vay, what tsures.'" [STRASBERG, p. 112]

 

     A Jewish friend of Elvis Presley, Larry Geller, even "introduced Elvis to new ways of thinking about Judaism ... Both he and Marty [Lacker, another Jewish friend] claimed credit for encouraging Elvis' decision that Christmas to have a new headstone placed on [Elvis' mother's] grave -- with a Jewish star on one side, a cross on the other." [GURALNICK, p. 190]  (Elvis' world of Jews included music agents, movie directors, his Beverly Hills dentist Max Shapiro, and the South African doctor (later exposed as a fraud) Laurenz Johannes Griessel Landau who, while treating Elvis for acne, made a homosexual pass at him. [GURALNCK, p. 47, 620]

 

      "The mostly Jewish New York intellectuals and their magazines -- Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, New York Review of Books, Public Interest -- have assumed an almost mythic position among American intellectuals," says Edward Shapiro, "Thus, Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that she had left Kentucky to become a New York Jewish intellectual (her conversion took place in the office of the New York Review of Books). Hardwick was not alone in assuming mistakenly that to be a New York intellectual (or any intellectual) one had to be Jewish. Victor Navasky [also Jewish] editor of the Nation, jested in 1966 that 'rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, you don't have to be Jewish to be an intellectual.'" [SHAPIRO, Sidney, p. 153]

 

     The commercial pluses to being Jewish (and its attendant homage as eternal victims) in a Jewish-controlled environment were obvious. Even Gentile writers like Robert Lowell and Mary McCarthy stretched back to claim distant Jewish blood in their family trees. [KOSTELANETZ, p. 28] "The exotic appeal that ethnicity offered to the participants in mass culture," says Stephen Whitfield, "has sometimes even seemed to put the dominant group on the defensive. Nelson Rockefeller found it advantageous to ventilate hints of his admittedly distant Jewish ancestry. Caroline Kennedy marched down the aisle of a church [with a Jew]; a character in the film Pete 'n Tillie (1972) emphasized his one-fourth Jewish ancestry because, 'I'm a social climber.'" [WHITFIELD, American, p. 11]

    African-American radio personality Howard Lester, once emphatically decried as an anti-Semite by New York Jews (even threatened and physically assailed by Jewish protest rallies), eventually decided that, considering the fact that he had a great-grandfather who was Jewish, he would convert to Judaism. A key influence in his decision was all the information he was hearing about Jews in the Holocaust; it is the key entree to empathy for Jews for many: the Jewish victim paradigm. "The more I read [about the Holocaust]," Lester wrote, "the greater my numbness at the horror, the greater my numbness as I read of Jews affirming God even in the midst of their own negation." [LESTER, H., p. 122] One day Lester wakes ups "and my lips are moving. I listen. I am trying to say 'Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonat Ehad' [Hear O Israel. The Lord our God the Lord is One]. At night those words resound in me and when I awake, they are the first words I hear from my lips" [LESTER, H., p. 123] ... I have lived these past nine months amidst the ashes of the crypt in heaven. Auschwitz and Treblinka are part of my daily pain. The spirits of murdered Jewish children shoot marbles with me in the dirt of a parsonage yard." [LESTER, H., p. 133]

    Alfred Kazin noted the Jewish take-over of American literature, in 1966:

"Definitely, it was now the thing to be Jewish. But in Western universities and small towns many a traditional novelist and professor of English felt out of it, and asked, with varying degrees of self-control, if there was no longer a good novel to be written about the frontier, about Main Street, about the good that was in marriage? Was it possible, these critics wondered aloud, that American life had become so de-regionalized and lacking in local color that the big power units and the big cities had pre-empted the American scene, along with the supple Jewish intellectuals who were at home with them? Was it possible that Norman Mailer had become the representative American novelist? It was entirely possible, and certainly the thought would not have astonished Mailer, just as the power of his example for other novelists did not astonish Saul Bellow." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxiv]

     In 1998, Ross Wetzsteon, a Montana-born WASP (who made the pilgrimage to New York City), wrote an extraordinarily definitive explication of WASP-self hate, and his cravings to be a Jew, in a Village Voice (Jewish-owned and edited) article. The strange product of Freud's Judeocentric psychotherapy, a journalism career dominated by Jews, alienation from the norms of American popular culture, long-term romantic relationships with ONLY Jewish women, and estrangement from his own family lead him to the rescuing lifejacket of Jews. Wetzsteon embraces all Jewish-enforced stereotypes of the Jew: Jewish moral superiority, Jews as eternal victims, Jewish powerlessness, Jewish bluntness and vulgarity as a form of liberation, and Jews as being more intellectually interesting. What one begins to recognize at core here is a kind of ideological indoctrination process, in Wetzsteon's case deeply rooted in his psychotherapy sessions. Wetzsteon below maps his metamorphosis into his configuration as an 'honorary' Jew:

     "Everyone always assumes I'm Jewish ... So why do people think I'm Jewish? My
     name? My profession? But more interesting than why I pass for Jewish is why it
     pleases me so ... I was immediately drawn to the Jews because they seemed so
     attractive and because the WASPs seemed so repellent. It was at this time, in
     one of the most painful choices of my life, that I decided to become a scholar
     rather than play centerfield for the Yankees ... It became clear ... that the Jews
     represented ... an acceptable rebellion, in that they embodied both a rejection
     of unfulfilling values and a repository of honorable new ones ... Jews were
     both homeless and universal, which appeals to a mind enamored of
     'disengaged' sensibilities. And, since most of the Jews I knew were leftists
     ... [there was] radicalism as the Jewish version of juvenile delinquency ...
     What Jews seemed to be saying was, 'In our powerlessness, we have a
     superior moral heritage' -- an appealing conceit for a teenage intellectual
     who faced the dilemma of being at the center of his culture while
     feeling both socially ill at ease and psychologically estranged ... I came to
     to see WASP life as a rigid, deceitful facade that had to be penetrated if
     one cared at all about what was real. Self-control, self-restraint, self-
     effacement were the pious names given to what were really decorous
     lies ... [I had] a yearning affection for what I perceived as 'Jewish
     openness' ... So-called Jewish vulgarity, in short, became a kind of
     intellectual and moral critique of WASP mentality ... I'll never forget how
     much my therapy had to do with my pleasure. For me, therapy was
     primarily a means of liberating inner vulgarity, of releasing a kind of
     pushiness and ostentation in my psychic life -- it was a way of
     discovering that the things I valued most were radically opposed
     to the WASP ideals that I internalized ... The important point is
     that it was quite clear to me that the Jew and the psychotherapist
     joined forces in the abolition of WASP hypocrisy, WASP decorum,
     and WASP censorship. I even came to see a parallel -- while
     obviously aware of the disparities -- between Jewish social
     liberation and my own psychological liberation. My ghetto was
     my head, my assimilation was through therapy ... I've always been
     attracted to Jewish women -- in fact, every long relationship I've
     ever had, including my marriage, was with a Jewish woman ...
     I regard myself as an 'honorary Jew ... [But] I realized .. that
     by seeking my identity in Jews ... I was denying their identity to
     themselves.'"  [WETZSTEON, R., 9/6-12-98]

     Chaim Bermant notes the necessary pro-Jewish metamorphosis that often takes place among non-Jews in Jewish-dominated environments -- in this case Hollywood:

     "One met the occasional gentile [in Hollywood], like the Skouras brothers,
     who were Greek, or Winfield Sheehan, who was Irish, but the whole
     ambience was Jewish and even the gentiles acquired Jewish mannerisms,
     expressions, and habits of speech. As the Scottish director, John Grierson,
     observed after a stay in Hollywood, 'After a few years in the place, your
     foreskin falls away.'" [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 92]
     
 

      Indeed, this kind of anti-WASP deconstructionist world view needed strong ideological encouragement to prosper. After World War II, and militantly after 1967, the Family and its various satellites began to pay more and more attention to their Jewish identities. "New questions arose," says Alexander Bloom, " ... and an essential component of [the Family's] character -- their Jewishness -- reemerged to demand attention." [BLOOM, p. 125] Largely children of immigrants (or immigrants themselves), "we knew," wrote Irving Howe, "that but for an accident of geography we might also be bars of soap." [BLOOM, p. 137]

 

     "Unable to talk about the Holocaust itself," says Bloom, "[the Family] began in postwar years to talk about themselves as Jews, something they had rarely done before ... By the 1950s ... many had become 'enthusiasts of Martin Buber, while the whole of the New York literary world was ringing with praise of the Yiddish storytellers, the Hassidim, Maimonides, medieval Hebrew poetry, and even Rabbis of the Talmud." [BLOOM, p. 142] "To 'write Jewish,'" noted Charles Angoff and Meyer Levin in 1970, "is in fashion, but recently the Jewishness in much of our fiction has been one of bland nostalgia ... or else it is a Jewishness of mystification cum mysticism, in which the ancient wisdom-image of the Jew is invoked through Hasidic themes or the idea of Buber ... or it is a Jewishness treated satirically -- basically an attack on the complacent middle class." [ANGOFF/LEVIN, p. 15]

 

     The move away from Jewish allegiance to the American melting pot, universalism, and left-wing causes to rationales for Jewish parochialism within American universities and public life had begun. Some members of the family -- Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer -- even joined Milton Himmelfarb, an official of the American Jewish Committee, for group study of Maimonides' texts and other Jewish religious literature. "One after another," notes Alexander Bloom, "under the influence of political pressure, social analysis, and personal awareness, the intellectual began to reassess and reconsider their Jewish past." [BLOOM, p. 143]

 

     Susan Sontag found overwhelming connection to photographs of concentration camp victims:

 

       "Nothing I have seen -- in photography or real life -- ever cut me as

       sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed it seemed plausible to divide my

       life into two parts ... Some limit had been reached, and not only that of

       horror; I felt irrecoverably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feeling

       started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying."

       [TORREY]

 

      The classic irreconcilable dialectic of divisive Jewish values in an all-inclusive, universalistic society began to be addressed by the Jewish Mafia and explained away:

 

     "Insistence upon being 'one-hundred-per-cent something," wrote Harold Rosenberg, makes us "uncomfortable when they debate whether one can be an American and a Jew." [BLOOM, p. 145] "I was born in galut and I accept, now gladly, " wrote Daniel Bell, one time editor of the New Leader, and editor at Fortune, and a co-editor of the Public Interest, "though once in pain, the double burden of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret life of a Jew." [BELL, Reflections, p. 322]

 

    Leslie Fiedler found it useful to tie the particulars of "being Jewish" into its traditional messianic subsuming of all humanity under the dominion of ennobled Jewish suffering:

 

      "In this apocalyptic period of atomization and uprooting, of a catholic

      terror and a universal alienation, the image of the Jew tends to become

      the image of everyone; and we are approaching the day when the Jew

      will come to seem the central symbol, the essential myth of the whole

      western world." [BLOOM, p. 150]

 

     "Some, like [Gentile] social critic Dwight MacDonald," says Steven Zipperstein, "felt sickened by much of what he read in Commentary, where, as he saw it, his friends engaged in self-indulgent trivia. Why, he asked, were such bright people devoting so much time to 'uninteresting exercises in Jewish culture?'" [ZIPPERSTEIN, p. 20]

 

     But the first steps of the "Holocaust is Unique" formula, and the "humankind should look to the Jews for guidance" enforcement had begun in earnest, and the maze of Jewish guilt and self-obsession was spread like a tablecloth over the American scene. "The Jews' life and wanderings," decided Daniel Bell, "are, in a sense, the image of the world's destiny. His heightened sense of his own alienation is a prescient tremor of the quake to come." [BLOOM, p. 153] (This "alienation" from the American power structure has been, of course, at key points a complete delusion. Chaim Bermant, for example, notes the Jewish "outsider" status in Hollywood, the most profound influence upon popular culture: "An essential part of Jewishness is the feeling that one is an outsider, not part of the crowd. In Hollywood the entire crowd was so Jewish that non-Jews felt outside. Nor did they have to feel strange whenever they moved east to confer with the New York end of the business, for that too was Jewish.") [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 99]

 

     "Whereas  [the Family] had earlier argued for a role as the modern 'cleric' and arbiter of modern culture because of their intellectual calling," says Alexander Bloom, "they now claimed to offer a uniquely appropriate view of modern society, thanks to their ethnic background." [BLOOM, p. 151] "One cannot ... simply discount the possibility that some essentially Jewish qualities may adhere to the writing of the most thoroughly acculturated Jews," wrote Robert Alter in the 1960s, "Most readers have sensed in at least some of the 'post-traditional' or 'transitional' Jewish writers certain modes of imagination or general orientation towards art and experience that seems characteristically Jewish, even though the writer scrupulously avoids all reference to his ethnic origins." [ALTER, p. 54] "A Jewish book," declared Ludwig Lewisohn years earlier, "is one written by someone who is well aware that he or she is Jewish. Jewish literature, therefore, consists of all the works -- written in every age and language -- whose creators knew they were Jewish." [SHAKED, p. 169]

 

     Clement Greenberg (who was for a while the editor of the Contemporary Jewish Record),  says Bloom, "asserted that [the Jewish author Franz] Kafka held a steady belief in halakhic order, the belief that Jewish history stopped with the extinction of Palestine and will begin again when the Messiah comes. Until then, Jewish life is to be kept 'humdrum, thoroughly prosaic and historically immobile within the fence of the law. Such history as persists in Gentile history.'" [BLOOM, p. 154]

 

     Whereas in earlier years Harold Rosenberg was "bothered by the chauvinism of certain Jewish zealots in Commentary," [BLOOM, p. 160] and William Phillips "complained throughout the 80s that intellectuals were now asking whether or not policies were good for Jews, [TWERSKY, p. 40] the New York Intellectuals had come, says Alexander Bloom, "to accept and, largely, to proclaim their Jewishness. Their ethnic identity overcame their former universalism ... Now self-defined Jewish intellectuals, they laid claim to a special appropriateness for their personal viewpoint and to a high value for their insight." [BLOOM, p. 153]

 

    "The Alfred Kazin who proclaimed his revolt from Jewish sentimental chauvinism," notes Edward Shapiro, "was the same person who wrote in an autobiography titled New York Jew how the Holocaust became the consuming event of his life." [SHAPIRO, p. 156]  Irving Howe had come to believe that "the only subject truly worthy of a serious writer ... [is] the problem of collective destiny, the fate of a people."  [KOSTELANETZ]  At Philip Rahv's death, it was found that he had donated his estate to Israel. [SHAPIRO, p. 287]  "I remember," notes Mary McCarthy, "Philip Rahv saying that all Gentiles, without exception, are anti-Semitic." [MCCARTHY, p. 98]  Midge Decter's views of Israel? "What I do know," she says, "is that Zionism was bred in my bones ... As for me, the unswerving Zionist, there was the miracle of the establishment of the state of Israel." [DECTER, M., 1999, p. 185, 187] Susan Sontag? She was awarded Israel's Jerusalem Prize for 2001. As Alexander Cockburn notes:

     "[Israeli minister Shimon] Peres has been quoted as admiring Sontag's definition
     of herself. 'First she's Jewish, then she's a writer, then she's American. She
     loves Israel with emotion and the world with obligation' ... Sontag has always
     been appreciative of irony. Does she see no irony in the fact that she, relentless
     critic of Slobodan Milosevic (upon whose extradition to face trial in its
     Hague Court as a 'war criminal' the US is now conditioning all aid to
     Yugoslavia) is now planning to travel to get a prize in Israel, currently
     led by a man, Ariel Sharon, whose credentials as a war criminal are robust
     and indeed undisputed by all people of balanced and independent
     judgement ... Does Sontag sense no irony is getting a prize premised
     on the author's sensitivity to issues of human freedom, in a society
     where the freedom of Palestinians is unrelentingly repressed?"
     [COCKBURN, A., 3-20-01]

 

     Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish refugee, accelerated this interest in Jewishness and, especially, the Holocaust, with her controversial 1963 volume, Eichmann in Jerusalem (first serialized in the New Yorker). Her evidence for Jewish complicity in their own demise in Europe (and her critique that the Israelis' focus upon only crimes against Jews by the captured Nazi was a disservice to wider justice) provoked a firestorm of Jewish outrage. "It is this tension between the parochial and the universal," wrote Daniel Bell, "that explains the furious emotions over Miss Arendt's book. For she writes from the standpoint of a universal principle which denies any parochial [Jewish] identity." [BELL, ALPHABET, p. 312]  Irving Howe wrote that, in Jewish reaction to her book, "the long-suppressed grief evoked by the Holocaust burst out. It was as if her views, which roused many of us to fury, enabled us to finally speak the unspeakable." [BLOOM, p. 329]

 

     What,  wondered Howe, would the goyim say to this Jewish dirty laundry?

   

        "Hundreds of thousands of good-middle class Americans will have

        learned from those articles that the Jewish leadership in Europe was

        cowardly, inept, and even collaborationist, and that if Jews had not

        'cooperated' with the Nazis, fewer than 5 to 6 million would have been

        killed. No small matter: and you will forgive some of us if we react

        strongly to this charge." [BLOOM, p. 330]

 

       Dissent, of which Howe was editor, organized a public discussion about Arendt's book. Mary McCarthy, a non-Jewish member of the Family, thought the book "splendid." "Apparently," she noted, "this is so because I am a Gentile ... I don't 'understand' ... It is as if Eichmann in Jerusalem had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles to make its 'true purport' visible." [BLOOM, p. 330]

 

     "The emotions tapped," says Alexander Bloom, "demonstrated the degree to which Jewishness remained a sensitive issue. Having worked out their own personal sense of Jewishness in the first postwar years, after the decade of cosmopolitan universalism, the New York Intellectuals had not fully resolved the more general questions of Jews in society. Did Jews constitute a particular social grouping with unique collective attributes?"
[BLOOM, p. 331]

 

      Disbanding allegiance to universalistic values, says J. J. Goldberg, throughout the Jewish community "a new set of basic values came to replace them: loyalty to the Jewish people, commitment to its survival, and hostility to its enemies." [GOLDBERG, p. 162] Norman Mailer set sights on one of them:

 

     "In their immaculate cleanliness, in the somewhat antiseptic odor of their

      stringent toilet water and perfume, in abnegation of their walks, in the

      heavy sturdy moves so many demonstrated of bodies in life's harness,

      there was the muted tragedy of the WASP." [SCHRAG, p. 187]

 

      Mailer points the way to what Jewish observer James Yaffe outlined in 1968 as the nature of the generic "Jewish intellectual":

 

     "The Jewish intellectual, whatever else he may do, seldom stretches

     under a tree and just thinks. And then, the intellect can't be just a

     tool for him; it has to be a weapon too. He doesn't use it simply to

     discover what the world is like, or to create something beautiful, or

     to communicate his ideas. He must use it to beat down his competitors,

     to prove his superiority. From him controversy is inseparable from

     intellectual activity. Watch him at a party: note the vicious delight

     with which he backs lesser intellects into a corner. He's implacable;

     neither social decorum nor human compassion can soften his

     attack ... Above all he is very concerned about his 'significance.' He

     must always have something profound to say, even if he has

     nothing profound to say. There is nobody like a Jewish intellectual

     for making Important Statements." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 235]

 

      "Intellectuals," wrote Jack Porter, "are far from ineffectual, although they may be snobs. On the contrary, they exert enormous power, more than any of the 17th century Hof-Juden ever dreamed of. At the same time, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the establishment of the Jewish state -- there has been a definite shift in their allegiance to Jewish causes." [PORTER, p. 35]

 

     "These intellectuals," says Alexander Bloom, "posited that Jews had a central place because of their Jewishness. They now felt that Jewishness, once a source of scorn among some writers, offered a special insight, useful in the analysis of the modern condition." [BLOOM, p. 150] "The Jews," proclaimed Jewish author Isiah Berlin,

 

     "like the strangers seeking to lose themselves in the strange tribe,

     find themselves compelled to devote all their energies and talents

     to the task of understanding and adaptation upon which their lives

     depend at every step. Hence the fantastic over-development of

     their faculties for detecting trends, and discriminating the shades

     and hues of changing individual and social situations, often before

     they have been noticed anywhere else. Hence too, their celebrated

     critical acumen, their astonishingly sharp eye for the analysis of

     the past, the present, and sometimes the future also -- in short

     their well-known genius for observation and classification --

     above all for reportage in its sharpest and finest forms." [ISAACS, p. 55]

 

     "Through their Jewish writers," declared Leslie Fiedler, "Americans, after the second World War, were able to establish a new kind of link with Europe in place of the old pale-face connection -- a link not with the Europe of decaying castles and Archbishop of Canterbury, nor with that of the French symbolists, and the deeply polite Action Francaise -- for those are all Christian Europe; but with the post-Christian Europe of Marx and Freud, which is to say, of secularized Judaism, as well as the Europe of surrealism and existentialism, Kafka, neo-Chassidism .... " [KOSTELANETZ, p. 14]

 

      "By the 1960s," notes Robert Christopher, "Jewish writers had undeniably supplanted white southern ones as the nation's leading school of novelists; they had, in fact, come to dominate American fiction to such an extent that, as Norman Podhoretz recalls in Making It, that wayward WASP Gore Vidal was moved to complain that there was no longer room on any list of important contemporary American writers for more than one 'OK goy.'" [CHRISTOPHER, p. 228] (Symbolic to all this, in 2002 the new Jewish president of Brooklyn college, Marty Markowitz, made the news when he called an old portrait of George Washington that hung in his office "an old man" and announced that "he will probably hang a portrait of a black or a woman in his office in place of the country's first president.") [SOCKWELL-MASON/SEIFMAN, 1-16-02]

     Alfred Kazin noted the arrogant Jewish displacement of the WASP intelligentsia, and rising Jewish power to frame the world to Jewish perspective , like this:

"Generally speaking, the Jewish intellectuals who since the 40's have exercised so much influence on American culture started very far back. If the young man from the provinces, as Lionel Trilling named him, typifies the encounter with the great world in 19th-century novels, it was significantly the Jewish intellectual who was now to write the key book on Matthew Arnold, the definitive biographies of Henry Adams, Henry James, James Joyce ... Just as it was Southern writers, with their knowledge of defeat and thier instinctive irony, who in the 40's spoke to the chastened American mind, so it is Jewish writers who now represent to many Americans the unreality of their prosperity and the anxiety of their condition. In situations of inestimable complexity, requiring the most 'sophisticated' and 'expert' 'analysis' of the 'complex factors,' it was often enough Jews, born and pushed to be intellectuals, who became the connoisseurs of the new chaos, the mental elite of the power age. Never was interpretation, explanation, commentary, a vital new midrash, so much needed as in the period, starting with the war, when the world was so much compressed and subtilized by the new technological revolution -- and never were there so many Jewish intellectuals prepared to do the explaining." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxii]

      "Jewishness has become fashionable," wrote Jewish author Peter Schrag in 1971, "In New York, which is where most of the soapboxes are kept, it is the goy and not the Jew (or the Negro) who feels defensive. Half the major book publishers are Jewish and probably more than half of the art dealers, the music managers (booking agents, publishers, Tin Pan Alley flacks) and the senior brass of network television." [SCHRAG, p. 108]

     Gentile writer Chandler Brossard noted (in the American Jewish Committee's Commentary magazine) the trend of Jewish dominance in American "intellectual" life, and the way Jewish culture subsumed all others, as early as 1950. Brossard recognized the strong influence upon him to submit to Jewish intellectual landlords in order to succeed:

     "There is a new alienated man around. He is the Gentile intellectual in New York
     City. Hopelessly outnumbered by his Jewish colleagues on the New York
     intellectual scene, of late he has begun to feel that his back his against the wall ...
     Partly consciously, partly unconsciously, [the Gentile] starts assuming some
     of the wise style of the Jewish intellectual, to overcome what he thinks is his
     own naiveté, in order to become part of the group surrounding him. The
     implications of this are almost infinite. Strange things happen. His vocabulary
     becomes spiced with Jewish inflections and expressions (his friends teach him
     the correct pronunciations: he has an increasingly strong tendency to say [the
     Yiddish term] 'nu?' instead of 'so?' His gestures become sensual, curvilinear,
     and an elaborate and necessary part of his communication. His humor becomes
     less mirthful -- so long, Mark Twain! -- and more ironic, twisted, oblique,
     and gaggy. (If he is a writer this gag quality finally gags him insofar as his
     originality is concerned). He cannot remember the last time he told a joke
     that did not involved a Jew or the Jewish point of view ... He feels, in effect,
     a kind of clown. His confusion is not helped by the fact that for the first time
     in his life he is now a member of a minority. It almost seems that he is a kind of      
     extravagance of his Jewish circle ... He wonders whether he is ever really being
     accepted; he feels that his Jewish friends do certain things for each other that
     they do not do for him. Is he at the center or the periphery? ... He often winds
     up playing straight man to his friends at a nearly all-Jewish party ... He has the
     choice now of recognizing his background and origins, his difference, and living
     accordingly, or of denying them and reshaping himself with the help, or
     proximity, of his Jewish friends. The temptation to submit to reshaping is
     strong; it is hard to be different in these surroundings." [BROSSARD, C.,
     in ROGOW, A., 1961, p. 349-353]

    In a 1966 introduction to an anthology of Commentary articles, Alfred Kazin framed the central current of that journal with the declaration that Jews are the heart of world and "being Jewish" related to everything.

"It has always been natural for Protestant Americans to believe, in the words of John Jay Chapman, that 'the heart of the world is Jewish.' But after 1945 and the unparalleled, inexpressible martyrdom of the Jewish people in Europe, it was natural for non-Jews everywhere to believe, as Jews now had more reason than ever to believe, that Jewish survival and Jewish self-determination related to everything in the world. The particular distinction of Commentary among Jewish magazines has been to articulate and to support this many-sided relatedness ... [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxii] ... [A]s this anthology goes on to show, the Jewish art critic, essayist, economist, political observer, psychoanalyst, sociologist had only to take up aspects of contemporary experience in general to show the relevance to all this experience of his native, obstinate, questing spirit as a Jew." [KAZIN, A., 1966, p. xxii]
 

 

     "It is not just that Jewishness was chic in mainstream circles," says Karen Brodkin, "It also became mainstream. Observing that J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth were the great American -- not great Jewish -- writers of the period, Peter Rose notes that '[f]or perhaps the first time in American literary history, the Jew became everyman and, through a curious transposition, everyman became the Jew ... Most American Jews are part of the big wide -- and white -- Establishment.' Indeed, as Neil Gabler has argued for Hollywood up to World War II, Jews helped create white Americanness." [BRODKIN, p. 142]

 

     In the world of academe, Irving Horowitz centers on Jewish preeminence:

 

     "An intellectual immigration took place that changed the landscape

     of American sociology no less than that of American sociology itself ...

     The coming to American shores of [immigrant Jewish scholars] Theodore

     Abel, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, Marie

     Jahoda, to name just a few, changed the emphasis in sociology from

     civilizational issues to psychological issues ... [HOROWITZ, I., p. 75]

     Can one seriously imagine the study of sexuality without references to

     [Jews like] Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and [non-Jewish adherent to

     psychoanalytic theory] Carl G. Jung? ... Without them, there would be 

     no Helene Deutsch, or Anna Freud, or Marie Bonaparte; that is, particular

     inquiry into the nature of female sexuality ... The same holds true for

     sub-disciplines like political theory. One presumes that a literate person

     has a working knowledge of the works of Hannah Arendt, Harold

     Lasswell, and Leo Strauss, among others ... It is conceivable, perhaps

     imperative, if the focus is international law versus national power, that

     one world substitute Hans Morgenthau, Hans Kohn, and Hans Kahn

     for the aforementioned trio." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 125]

 

    Karen Brodkin cites another commentator about the Jewish molding of American values in broader, popular culture:

 

     "In the century of Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Dinah Shore, need

     we ask who but a Jew is best at packaging un-whining blonde fantasy

     figures? I don't know about you, darlings, but ever since I found out

     that Kathie Lee Gifford was nee Epstein, I don't assume anything.

     Why be surprised then, that Barbie, the ultimate shiksa goddess, was

     invented by a nice Jewish lady, Ruth Handler (with her husband

     Eliot, co-founder of Mattel?) Indeed, the famous snub-nosed plastic

     ideal with the slim hips of a drag queen is in fact named after a real

     Jewish princess from L.A., Handler's daughter, Barbara (who must

     have been hell to know in high school!) Her brother's name was Ken."

     [BRODKIN, p. 143]

 

     A Jewish author, Irving Berlin, penned the famous Christian-based songs "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade." "No Christmas haters should be put off by [Jody] Rosen's title [of her book White Christmas. The Song that Changed the World], " says Jewish author Stanley Price,

"Her book is much more than just 'the story of a song.' She cleverly uses 'White Christmas' as a focus to explore the phenomenon of Jewish assimilation into American life in the first half of the twentieth century .. As Rosen shows, in the world of entertainment and culture, it was more a take-over than an assimilation. In that golden era of musical theatre and film, almost the only truly successful gentile was Cole Porter. The Jews owned most of the theatres and almost all of the movie studios. For the Jews there was truly 'No business like show business,' another Irving Berlin hit. America has always been the most comfortable place to be Jewish, and this fascinating book emphasizes [Irving] Berlin's contribution to this process of subtle Judaisation -- what Rosen calls a 'Yankee Doodle Yiddishkeit.' Rosen quotes, as follows, from Philip Roth's 'Operation Shylock': 'God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave Irving Berlin 'Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas,' the two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ -- and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.'" [PRICE, S., 12-6-02, p. 32]

      Even the 1990s president of the board of directors of the WASP world's hallowed Miss America pageant is David Frisch.

      Ed McClanahan notes the Jewish dimensions to the Gidget surfing icon:

     "No no, not Sandra Dee or Sally Fields, nor Deborah Walley or Cindy
     Carroll or any of the legions of Gidget impersonators of the big screen or
     the small screen or even, yes, the stage. We're talking the Real Deal here,
     the original Gidget, the ur-Gidget you might say, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman
     herself, whose father, a Hollywood screenwriter named Frederick Kohner,
     wrote the hugely popular little novel ... in 1957 ... and made his daughter
     Kathy, who inspired it, a legend in the world of surfing ... The book was
     regarded as mildly scandalous in its day ('Any parents,' fulminated the
     Nebraska Farmer, 'who allow their teen-agers to talk as Gidget does
     should be soundly spanked.") Nowadays, in the era of Sex in the City,
     it seems as innocent as Rebecca at Sunnybrook Farm. Still, the Gidget
     character is a bit of a potty-mouth (it was she who brought the adjective
     'bitchen' into the language.)" [MCLANAHAN, E.]

 

      In the sexual realm, in the formation of popular American values, notes Anthony Heilbut, "The two major therapeutic changes of the sixties and seventies were ushered in by [Jewish] émigrés, Fritz Perls of Esalen and Wilhelm Reich ... Their positions have become the roots of such American phenomena as 'est' or sex therapy ... Of all Freud's disciples, Reich was the most obsessed with sexuality." [HEILBUT, p. 439] (Reich died in an American prison in 1957, held on charges of "criminal contempt" in a case involving his shipments of "orgone accumulators.")

 

    Perls was also "the founder and main figure of Gestalt therapy." [MASSON, p. 209]  At every group Gestalt therapy session, he recited the "Gestalt prayer," famous doggerel that profoundly influenced, and exemplified, 1960s-era ethics:

 

      "I do my thing and you do your thing.

       I am not in this world to live up to

             your expectations.

       And you are not in this world to live

             up to mine.

       You are you and I am I.

       And if by chance we find each other,

             it's beautiful.

        If not, it can't be helped." [MASSON, p. 209]

 

      In the 1960s, the American Jewish Committee even estimated that 40 percent of the youth who emigrated to the Haight-Ashbury Hippie Mecca in San Francisco were Jewish -- a total of about 71,000 of them. The average stay there was 3-4 months. [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 269] Jewish psychiatrist Oscar Janiger (a cousin of famous poet and counter-culture icon Allen Ginsberg -- "administered almost 3,000 doses of LSD to 1,000 volunteers. Among them were [Cary] Grant, fellow actors Jack Nicholson and Rita Moreno, author Aldous Huxley and musician Andre Previn ... Although his work predated that of LSD guru Timothy Leary, he never gained widespread recognition for it." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 8-17-01]

 

     James Davison Hunter notes, in an article entitled When Psychotherapy Replaces Religion, one of the occupational fields that has profoundly influenced the moral climate of modern America:

 

     "When it comes to the moral life of children, the vocabulary of

     the psychologist frames virtually all public discussion. For decades

     now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been

     muted or non-existent ... Rather, it is the psychologists, and in

     particular the developmental and educational psychologists who

     have owned this field -- in theory and in practice. All the major players

     in the last half century have been psychologists. Eric Erickson, B. F.

     Skinner, Benjamin Spock, Havighurst, Carl Rodgers, Jean Piaget,

     Abraham Maslow, Rudolph Dreikurs, William Glasser, Lawrence

     Kohlberg, Louis Rath, Sidney Simon, Jane Loevinger, Daniel

     Levinson, Robert Selman, Maurice Elias -- their assumptions,

     concepts, and paradigms have largely determined how all of us

     think about the moral lives of children, and, indeed, about moral

     life generally." [HUNTER, J.D., 2000, p. 5-22]

 

     Not surprisingly, well over half of these influential figures have been Jewish.

 

     In the field of anthropology, Jewish academic Franz Boas was the most preeminent and influential anthropologist in the early years of the twentieth century. This genre of the field absorbed and incorporated many of the premises of Freudianism. "By 1915," notes Kevin MacDonald, "the Boasians controlled the American Anthropology Association and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board ... By 1926 every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas' students, the majority of whom were Jewish." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 25]  Jewish students and ideological descendants of Boas, who themselves became influential academics, included Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Leslie Spir, Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Ruth Landes, and Ashley Montagu [born Israel Ehrenburg]. 

 

      Sociology? A Jewish historian and social anthropologist even suggested, notes British sociologist W. S. F. Pickering, that "there is something about those characteristic virtues and viewpoints [of the influential Jewish sociologist Emil Durkheim,] which cannot be understood by gentile readers ... that only a Jew can understand him and his sociology." [PICKERING, p. 10]  (Durkheim started out in early life as a rabbinical student). "By the early 1960s," says David Hollinger, "the large numbers of Jews in sociology led to a faculty-club banter to the effect that sociology had become a Jewish discipline. In the literary world the triumph of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and J. D. Salinger led Leslie Fiedler to hail the great takeovers by Jewish-American writers of a task 'inherited from certain Gentile predecessors.'" [HOLLINGER, p. 28]

 

        Even some academics who aren't publicly reckoned to be Jewish are Jewish. As Hershel Shanks notes,

 

     "I think of a teacher of mine long ago, one of the most eminent

     sociologists in the country -- Robert King Merton. Even when I

     was studying with him at Columbia University in the 1950s, there

     were rumors that he was Jewish. Recently -- he is nearly 90 --

     he came out. He was born Meyer Schkolnick." [SHANKS, H., 2000,

     p. 16]

 

      "Jews found sociology attractive," noted Family member Nathan Glazer in 1994, 'It was particularly attractive to those who were socialists ... In time the Jewish newcomers became the dominant figures in sociology. Concurrently, they abandoned their early radicalism." [GLAZER, DECOMPOSITION, p. 4]  After World War II, notes Irving Horowitz, "young scholars came from other walks of life into sociology ... The field soon became populated by Jews to such a degree that jokes abounded: one did not need the synagogue, the minyan [the minimum number of Jewish men necessary to hold religious services] was to be found in sociology departments; or one did not need a sociology of Jewish life, since the two had become synonymous." [HOROWITZ, I., p. 77]

     Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter note Jewish radical political dominance in a range of academic subworlds:

     "Within academia, Jewish faculty sparked revolts against the 'establishment'
     in their professions, struggling to turn them in directions of direct political
     action. In the American Political Science Association, for example, the
     the membership of the Caucus for a New Politics, a radical activist group,
     was initially overwhelmingly Jewish. (Jews were also heavily represented on
     the 'liberal' opposition Ad Hoc Committee, but here they constituted no more
     than about half of a highly fluctuating and informal membership).
          The same pattern emerged in the Modern Language Association, where
     the radical caucus was led by Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter, both of
     Jewish background. The Union of Radical Political Economists also
     initially contained a disproportionate number of individuals of Jewish
     background. While William Appleman Williams, the dean of the group,
     was not Jewish, a majority of the leading cold war revisionists among
     historians were (Alperowitz, Kolko, Horowitz, etc.). The largest number
     of those radical educators and writers on education who argued that
     American education was linked to capitalism's need to keep lower
     classes (including blacks) in their place were also of Jewish background
     (e.g., Herbert Gintis, Donald and Beatrice Gross, Jonathan Kozol,
     Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Herbert Kohl, Charles Weingartner, Gerald
     Weisntein). The same thing was true in sociology ..." [ROTHMAN/
     LICHTER, 1982, p. 104-105]

 

In this growing context of Jewish pre-eminence throughout academia, Richard Hofstadter already felt secure enough in 1963 to write that

 

     "Catholic scholars and writers tend to be recognized belatedly by their

      co-religionists, when they are recognized at all. All this concerns, of

      course, not so much the anti-intellectualism of American Catholicism as

      its cultural impoverishment, its non-intellectualism."

      [HOFSTADTER, p. 140]

 

      Hofstadter, who obviously basked in his many Jewish cultural treasures, also turned for solace to his own identity chauvinism to attack the then-current beatnik movement for its own "anti-intellectualism." Looking past the Beat's moralist, populist, non-materialist, and oft-times Zen worldviews, Hofstadter said that "the beatniks have repudiated the path of intellectualism ... to [live] lives of inverted sainthood, marked by an acceptance of poverty, and their willingness to do without the usual satisfaction of a career and a regular income ... The movement seems unable to rise above its adolescent inspiration." [HOFSTADTER, p. 421]  In 1998, Jewish American professor Jules Chametsky was commissioned to edit a new Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature. "One could argue," says Chametsky, "that without African-Americans and Jews, popular culture would be very thin indeed in America." [CARNEY, p. 22] (With a different set of cultural dominators, one wonders, would it not have been "thin," but something else?) Noting a 1922 novel by Jewish German author Hugo Bettauer (The City Without Jews), Jewish author Michael Brenner exudes the same arrogance and elitism about Jewish cultural dominance of pre-Nazi German culture:

      "As a city without Jews, Bettauer's Vienna soon becomes a dull and boring place
       where rough woolens are declared the latest style of fashion, the state economy is
       overburdened with debts, the currency loses its value, and intellectual discussion
       and cultural activities are defined by the low standard of the surrounding peasant       
       population." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. xvii] [By whose criteria are such standards        
       "low?"]

 

      The shoving aside of non-Jewish writers and thinkers, and non-Jewish traditions and history, by empowered Jewish particularists has been for decades vigorously undertaken. "One thing did matter to somebody like me, classified as a WASP writer," wrote Edward Hoagland in Commentary, "This was being told in print and occasionally in person that I and my heritage lacks vitality, that except perhaps for a residual arrogance the vitality had long since been squeezed dry, if it had ever in fact existed in this thin blood of mine. I was a museum piece, like some state-of-Mainer, because I could field no ancestor who had hawked tin pots in a Polish shtetl [Jewish village]." [HOAGLAND, p. 62]

     One of the Jewish characters in prominent Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz's prose pieces even proclaimed:

     "My ancestors, in whom I take pride, but not personal pride, were scholars,
     poets, prophets and students of God when most of Europe worshipped
     sticks and stones; not that I hold that against any of you, for it is not your
     fault if your forebears were barbarians groveling and groping about for peat
     or something." [ATLAS, J., 1977, p. 166]
 

 

     One of the many results of all this kind of Jewish-enforced revisionism was a 1970 volume, The New Novel in America, subtitled The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction, which featured all Jewish writers except mention of some Gentiles in a final chapter addressed to "Minor American Novelists." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 27]  An intriguing insight on Kafka comes from Clement Greenberg:

 

      "Kafka's own awareness of what he intuited about the Jewish condition

       through his fiction also explains why he became a Zionist ... Kafka ...

       presented the Gentile world and Gentile history as a trap for the likes

       of him and his ... [Kafka's] heroes  ... could, with very few exceptions,

       win out only at the last moments and only by destroying completely

       completely the fabric of the kind of reality in which they are embedded.

       For that reality, and that reality alone, is their enemy." [GREENBERG,

       p. 270]

 

      (This perspective, of course, is not only Zionist but the absolute paradigm for Orthodox Judaism, that is, at the end of time -- in Greenberg's last  "moments" -- Gentile society will be destroyed and Jews, who cannot ever be free in galut, will prevail over their historical nemeses).

 

      Even earlier, in the 1950s, says Richard Kostelanetz, "[Jewish authors] Mordechai Richler was the most lauded Canadian writer, Don Jacobson and A. Alvarez as the most touted Englishmen, and Harold Rosenberg as the chief expert on 'the New.'" [KOSTELANETZ, p. 28] With the publication of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, in 1971 Peter Schrag delighted in noting that "a few months after it was published an editor in New York rejected a manuscript with a note that 'no one is interested in reading novels about WASPS.'" [SCHRAG, p. 110]

 

     In due time, there were Jews -- heralding the chauvinist core of their mythic past -- who were declaring that even the English language wasn't good enough for them. "I am intrigued," wrote poet Joel Rosenberg in 1971, "with the possibility of Judaizing the English language." [ROSENBERG, J., p. 170] "I feel cramped," decided Cynthia Ozick, "I have come to it with notions it is too parochial to recognize. A language, like a people, has a history of ideas, but not all ideas: only those known to its experience. Not surprisingly, English is a Christian language. When I write in English, I live in Christendum." [EISEN, p. 167]  "One need only call to mind Cynthia Ozick," says Jewish critic Mark Schechner, "currently the most prominent writer associated with the revolt against secular rationalism, to understand that her eminence in our literature, in our culture, portends something of a fairly large movement. In her own mind, and in ours, she symbolizes a distinct movement toward revival of forms of Jewish consciousness which, if not identical to halakhah [Jewish religious law] are certainly unthinkable without it." [in SHAPIRO, M., p. 89]

 

      "Having no longer to defend themselves from real or imagined charges of parochialism," wrote Jewish critic Ruth Wisse in 1976, "the new Jewish writers of the 70s are free to explore the 'trivial' and particularist aspects of Judaism, and even, turning the tables, to speculate on the restrictive limits of English as a literary language." [WALDEN, p. xiii]

 

      By the 1960s and 1970s, notes Harold Wechsler and Paul Ritterband, Jewish scholars and intellectuals were "moved by emotions ... particularly deriving from the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, to ... explore the Jewish component in their studies of Persian literature or Gregorian chants or Renaissance art." [WECHSLER, p. 282] By 1986 there was enough interest in Jewish religious roots for a Jewish scholar to author an entire volume about "Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poets." Some of the poets who qualify for this genre, according to Davka, a Jewish ethnic magazine, include:

     David Antin, Edward Ash, David Avidan, John Bennett, Asa Benviniste, Amy Blank,
     Stanley Burnshaw, T. Camri, Neeli Cherkovsky (Neeli Cherry), Andrei Codrescu,
     Leonard Cohen, Richard Culter, Endi Dame, Ben Deutschman, Jacob and Rose
     Drachler, Richard Edelman, Julie Ellis, Mullah Epstein, Marcia Falk, Walter Field,
     Robert Friend, Harold Gershowitz, Allen Ginsberg, Doris Gold, Paul Goodman, Judith      
     Goven, Ted Gottfried, Carolyn Haddad, Jack Hirschman, Frances Horowitz,
     Benn Howard, Edmund Jabes, Rodger Kamentz, Walter Kaufmann, Abba Kovner,
     Tuli Kuperberg, David Kupferman, Irving Layton, Emma Lazarus, Harris Lenowitz,
     Denise Levertov, D. A. Levy, Dalia Meltzer, Samuel Menashe, Susan Mernit,
     Deena Metzger, Robert Mezey, Ruth Mintz, Sholom Gorevwitz, Ed Ochester,
     Aicheal Palmer, Stuart Perkoff, Marge Piercy, William Pillin, Dahlia Ravikovitch,
     Charles Reznioff, Edouard Roditi, Isaac Ronch, David Rosenberg, Janet
     Rosenberg, Jerome Rothenberg, Muriel Rukeyser, Nelly Sacks, John Sanford,
     Stuart Schoenberg, Howard Schwartz, Eva Shaltiel, Harvey Shapiro, John
     Silkin, Maurya Simon, David Slabotsky, Carl Solomon, Elaine Starkman,
     Julia Stein, Nathaniel Tarn, Malka Tussman, David Weissbort, David Weissman,
     J. Rutherford Willems, Jerry Winston, Bob Witz, Alla Wlebbott, Karl Young,
     Harold Norse, and Natan Zach.      
     [ http://www.davka.org/what/text/poetrycollectionbiblio.html  and Twice Blessed
     online gay and Jewish page]

      "In a single characteristic year," wrote Roger Kahn in 1968, "one careful researcher compiled a list of 'books of Jewish interest in America.' Marginalia were discarded; the list totaled 258. Where books lead, critics follow. Jewish critics proliferated so freely that one writer has made a most curious charge. He argues that Jewish novelists prosper because of the praise of Jewish critics." [KAHN, R., p. 6]

 

     James Shapiro is a Jewish professor in the esoteric field of the English Renaissance, "a culture deeply infused with Christianity." "For years," he noted in 1996, "I'd look around and see that many of the leading scholars of the early modern period were Jews." [WINKLER, K., 1996, 2-2-96, p. A15] Shapiro's narcissistic Jewish ethnocentrism, and exploration of his Jewish roots, eventually led him to decide that "at a time when many writers were trying to reinvent what it means to be English, the English increasingly defined themselves by what they were not. I would argue that the English were obsessed with the Jews." Shapiro, noted journalist Karen Winkler, "admits freely a deeply personal stake in this argument. It is a way for him to confront his own relationship to Jewish history." "I realized," said Shapiro, "that I'm both a professor of English and a Jew, and I wanted to know how my people had shaped the culture I was studying." [WINKLER, K., 1996, p. A8]

 

     Likewise, Natalie Zeman Davis, a Princeton professor and "one of the leading scholars of early modern Europe," remarked that

 

     "I'm Jewish, and I see putting the Jews back into the main story of

     Europe as a way to tikkun, a word that means to repair. I've come to

     feel it as a way to repair the Nazi effort to efface the Jews of

     Europe." [WINKLER, K., 2-2-96, p. A15]

     Judith Arcana notes Jewish poet/prose writer Grace Paley's sudden realization that she had to write about things explicitly Jewish: "Then, one evening, someone read a story at [Paley's] house, a story that 'was on Jewish themes,' and she 'all of a sudden felt that somehow I was given permission to write, by that story' ... Her earliest stories included 'The Contest' with its unforgettable 'Jews in the News' puzzle series, and 'The Loudest Voice,' in which a whole neighborhood of first and second generation immigrant Jews debates the required celebrations of Christmas in their children's school pageant." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 85]
 

 

     Increased Jewish fascination with "Jewishness" and Jewish Orthodoxy,  coupled with Jewish dominance in the publishing industry, recently created in the 1990s for novelist Nathan Englander (age 28) a unique opportunity. Englander, raised as an Orthodox Jew, was "discovered" by Lois Rosenthal, the editor of the journal Story. The Knopf publishing firm offered Englander $350,000 for a book of stories about life among Orthodox Jews, "an astonishing sum," notes the Boston Globe, "for an unknown writer's first work -- for the collection [of stories] and a novel not yet written. Suddenly this spring's deal catapulted the Jerusalem bachelor into literary stardom." [ROCHMAN, p. C6]

 

     Along the same theme, in 1994 Publishers Weekly announced the winner of the HarperCollins "get-published" contest, noting that:

 

     "Advertised on the back of Olivia Goldsmith's novel The Bestseller, the

      contest attracted an amazing 7,000 entries." The lucky winner selected

      was Dalia Rabinovich whose book was a Latin magic-realist tale inspired

      by her Jewish grandparents immigration to Colombia." [QUINN, p. 113]

 

     Two years later the same journal noted major publishing interest in -- of all things --  Holocaust cookbooks:

 

       "For a small press title, In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy from the

        Women of Terezin, edited by Cara De  Silva, translated by Bianca

        Steiner Brown and published in September by Judaica publisher

        Jason Aronson, has received some incredible publicity: articles in

        Newsweek and USA Today, a November 17 full-page review in the

        New York Times Book Review and a People review expected to hit

        today. And now this unusual piece of Holocaust literature, a collection

        of recipes written (some on scraps of Nazi material) as legacy and life-

        affirming defiance by women in the Czech death camp Terezin, has

        received major trade house recognition: it will become a Delta trade

        paperback next September." [QUINN, J., p. 243]

     Then there are the likes of recovering heroin addict and famous author Elizabeth Wurtzel. Her first book, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America "immediately became a national best seller when it was published in the United States in 1995 ... Overnight she became a poster child for Generation X ... She was paid a half-million dollars advance for her second book, Bitch. In Praise of Difficult Women ... Her mother frets over her tendency to date shaygetzes (non-Jews), nevertheless insisting her mother has nothing to worry about because 'I feel so Jewish ... I am very proud of being Jewish.'" [WENIG, G., 1999, p. 58-61]
 

 

      By the 1990s, note David Desser and Lester Friedman,

 

       "Critics usually interpret a Jewish author's direct denial of ethnic

       influence as a conscious evasion, a personal blind spot, or a

       psychological problem; more frequently, they ignore denials in

       favor of analyzing the work, not listening to the author. Scholars

       even scrutinize these novels, poems, and short stories lacking

       Jewish characters and having little apparent relationship to Jewish

       culture for Jewish points of view, attitudes toward characters,

       and thematic selection ... the underlying critical assumption is

       that the work of a Jewish writer must either overtly or covertly

       reflect a Jewish sensibility." [DESSER, p. 4-5]

     In 2001, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles noted the increasing predominance of Jewish authors and Jewish themes in mainstream publishing:

     "It's time to make room for a newer generation of American Jewish writers, many
     of whom are young women who have not even hit 30. Their debut novels on
     Jewish themes are earning large advances, garnering stellar reviews and reaching
     best seller lists ... Daisy Maryles, executive publisher of Publishers Weekly, the
     news magazine of publishing and bookselling, agrees: 'Writers are a lot less
     self-conscious of their Judaism,' she says. 'They are using their own experiences
     to illustrate their relationship to the world at large and to their tradition ... The
     interest in Jewish themes may be part of the wave of multiculturalism --from
     African American to Asian American -- that has captured public imagination ...
     Three themes predominate in contemporary Jewish fiction, says [Gail] Hochman
      [an agent with Brandt and Brandt Literary Agents]: the legacy of the Holocaust,
     survival in Israel or living in the secular world as a practicing Jew ... Laura
     Matthews, senior editor at Putnam, calls it 'curious but coincidental' that she
     has just published two books with Jewish sub-themes .. The 200-plus Jewish
     book fairs held during November and December capitalize on the demand
     for Jewish writers ... But, notes [Carolyn Starman] Hessel, [director of the
     Jewish Book Council], the audience for these books reaches beyond the
     Jewish market. What Jewish women have to say is of interest to the American
     public. [Jewish novelist Susan] Isaacs agrees. 'If we're willing to read novels
     about medieval monks a la 'The Name of the Rose' or Agatha Christie's Miss
     Marple series, about a little Anglican lady in a small town in England, then
     why shouldn't we read about American Jews?" [MUSLEAH, R., JUNE 2001]
     [Specifically noted in the article as illustrations of this increase are Jewish novelists
     Nomi Eve, Myla Goldberg, Anita Diamant, Cheryl Sucher, Katie Singer, Simone
     Zelitch, Fran Dorf, Ruth Knafo Setton, and Susan Isaacs].
 

 

      Many, many Jews are afforded prominence in modern literature and are thereby subject to such scrutiny by fellow Jews. In the best-selling -- often sensationalist and sleazy -- realm are the names of Danielle Steel, Jacqueline Susann, and Judith Krantz. Danielle Steel married Claude-Eric Lazard, grandson of a partner of a famous international French Jewish banking firm. Judith Krantz, who has sold eighty million books in fifty languages, "is the third largest-selling female novelist in history ... She writes about fascinating women, beauty, fame, money, and sex ... She does try to make some serious points and has woven such images as anti-Semitism and the German occupation in her novels." [HYMAN]  Ms. Krantz was introduced to her future husband -- Steven Krantz (eventual director of programming for Columbia Pictures Television) --  by Jewish broadcaster Barbara Walters. "Wherever you go," says Krantz,

 

     "you carry your Jewishness with you, if you want to. I wanted to ...

     [I] would have enjoyed it more if [my sons] married Jewish women.

     Just to continue. Jews have been around for so many thousands of years,

     I hate to think of a world without Jews. Jews contribute so much talent to

     the world, so much spice. What will happen to the talent? Who will play

     the violin?" [BRAWARSKY, S., 6-26-2000, p. 39]

     Krantz's brother Jeremeny Tarcher "became the first and best publisher of New Age books in the United States." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 147] Krantz's autobiography (Sex and Shopping. The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl) has a firm foundation of Jewish interconnection to fame, fortune, and power:

     "My parents were deeply involved in Jewish philanthropies, often spending four
     four nights a week at various meetings [p. 11] ... Well-known [Jewish] fashion
     fashion photographer [Milton Greene] and I became good friends ... It was
     a world of interrelationships. Milton's ex-wife, Evelyn, was engaged to [famous
     Jewish portrait photographer] Dick Avedon ... Later, when I became a fashion
     editor, I was always galvanized when we worked together ... [My sister]
     Mimi became engaged to a man named David Karney, an Israeli whose father
     was the real-estate 'Rockefeller' of Israel ... [Later] Mimi and David were living
     in Los Angeles, where he was beginning a magnificent career as a builder [p. 128-129]
     ... [Jewish friend Andre Sussman changed his named to Surmain and 'became
     the owner of Lutece, which instantly became the very best, most famous French
     restaurant in New York [p. 147] ... A friend named Selig Alkon ... called and
     asked if I wanted to go away with a group of other people for the weekend
     of the Fourth ... We were planning to go with Selig's first cousin, Barbara
     Walters [Krantz's husband, Steve, was at one point their boss at
     'NBC's flagship station, WNBT.' [p. 160] .... [In New York] we were part
     of an interesting group of young couples, many of them involved in the
     art world, such as Aaron Shikler and his wife Pete. Aaron .. painted Jackie
     and Jack Kennedy for their White House portraits ... There was David Levine,
     the now-legendary caricaturist ... None of them were as rich as Joanne and
     Alfred Stern, whose money came from Sears Roebuck via Al's mother ...
     Many of the others lived in the most magnificent East Side apartments, like
     Barbara ... and Jerry Goldsmith ... Among other acquaintances were a
     lawyer, Mort Jankow, and his wife, Linda, who was a granddaughter of
     Harry Warner, of Warner Brothers. Mort later became my agent. [p. 208-209]
     ... In New York, through Jack La Vien [a common form of Levine], a friend
     of [husband] Steve's, we became members of an exclusive club that dominated
     the chic New York disco scene [p. 221]" [KRANTZ, J., 2000]

     Krantz's early publisher was Jewish (Nat Wartel at Crown), as was Wartel's executive editor, Larry Freundlich. [p. 252] "Sylvia Wallace, [Jewish novelist] Irving's wife," writes Krantz, "gave me invaluable advice [when arriving to meet her first publisher]: 'Remember, you travel only by limo,' she said, in the voice of experience." [p. 252] Freundlich gave Krantz's novel (Scruples) to Jewish Warners Books mogul Howard Kaminsky, who paid half a million dollars for it. [p. 254] Krantz worked with Crown Public Relations execs Bruce Harry and Nancy Kahane. Crown's local Los Angeles rep was Ernie Greenspan. [p. 261] During her first book promotion tour, "the best moment was on a television show [in Minneapolis] run by a famous local host, Henry Wolf." [p. 272] "The day after Easter Sunday, [friend] Nancy and I had lunch with Leo Lerman, fabled editor of Vogue." [p. 276] "I had a new editor now, a woman I'd only met once, in passing, whose name was Carole Baron." [p. 288] "When the phone rang it was Howard Kaminsky, president of Warner Books, who had published Scruples in paperback. Howard was a very bright and funny fellow, [Jewish film director and comedian] Mel Brook's first cousin." [p. 288] Krantz's novel Mistral "was quickly bought for France by Edition Stock, whose publisher, Jean Rosenthal, as it happened, had translated my other novels into French." [p. 313] "Leo Lerman of Vogue insisted that I call a friend of his named Sybille Gaussen. 'She knows everybody and everything' he told me." [p. 323] "Polly Guggenheim, a sculptor who'd lived in Paris most of her life, became our guide into the art world." [p. 324] "I spent most of my time working on Manhattan on the Salzmann's kitchen table." [p. 334] [KRANTZ, J., 2000]

     "Soon after the success of Daisy [one of her early novels]," Krantz says, in providing a lesson in what she calls "Jewish Geography":

     "Nat Wartels sold Crown to Random House, which was owned by Si Newhouse,
      one of the richest men in America. On my next trip to New York, this unknown
      billionaire gave a dinner party to welcome me, inviting only executives from Crown
      and Random House. He and Bob Bernstein, who was his second-in-command at
      the time, quizzed me, a total stranger, trying to get a grip exactly who this strange       
      Californian was besides being a successful novelist.
      'So where did you go to high school?' Bob began.
      'Birch Warthen.'
      'My God, did you know my cousin, Alice Bernstein?'
      'Well, of course I did, we graduated in the same class,' I answered
      'What did you do after college?' Si wanted to know.
      'I worked for Herb Mayes at Good House [Keeping]."
      'Herb? I've known him all my life. A great man' was Si's response.
      'My father was one of his best friends,' I said modestly, 'and Alex is one of my oldest       
      and dearest friends,' I added, knowing full well that Si had dated their daughter, Alex, at       
      one point her life, and that Mitzi Newhouse, his mother, and Grace Mayes were friends
      Both men's faces beamed with relief. An absolutely perfect game of Jewish Geography       
      had just been beautifully played and I had been squarely identified as a highly       
      credentialed,  super-nice New York Jewish girl, no potentially oddball California exotic."
      [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 303]
 

 

      Bruce J. Friedman's novels, says one Jewish critic,  usually "center on Jews alienated from Christian America and ignorant of their own roots." [WALDEN, p. 70] Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) is Jewish as is Studs Terkel.  A mere sampling of other Jewish novelists and prose writers includes Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum), Nathaniel West (Nathaniel Weinstein), Harold Robbins (Harold Rubin), and science fiction authors Isaac Asimov ("As far as I know, I was the first science fiction writer of note [of Jewish descent] who used his own name.") [ASIMOV, I., 1974, p. 2], William Tenn, Carol Carr, Robert Silverberg, Horace Gold, Pamela Sargent, Robert Sheckley, and Harlan Ellison.

     "Two of the best science fiction writers of the 1930s," says Isaac Asimov, in reflections of his career, "were Stanley G. Weinbaum and Nat Schachmer, both Jewish. (Weinbaum published for only a year and a half, during which he immediately established himself as the most popular science fiction writer in America, before dying tragically of cancer while still in his thirties." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 16] Martin Greenberg owned Gnome Press (an early publisher of Asimov's works) Many authors complained of being exploited by this publisher. (ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 415-416) There was later a second Martin Greenberg (Martin Harry Greenberg). This "Marty," says Asimov, "has become so famous in science fiction that the name Martin Greenberg now applies only to him." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 416] By early 1990s, Martin Harry Greenberg had "published nearly four hundred anthologies, and there is no question that he is far and away the most prolific and, in addition, the best anthologist the world has ever seen." [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 419] Joel Davis also "had two fiction magazines, both mystery -- Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchock's Mystery Magazine." He also started "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" (IASFM). (The main competitors were [Jewish?] Ben Bova's Analog and Edward Ferman's F&SF (Fantasy and Science Fiction). [ASIMOV, I., 1994, p. 422-423]

     The Cleveland Jewish News had this to say about the science fiction investigations of Jewish American English professor Batya Weinbaum:

      "Existing in two worlds is a also a theme of science fiction written by immigrant
      Jews in the early part of the 20th century, says Weinbaum. Jews, she explained,       
      dominated the science-fiction field in those days ... Another [Jewish author]       
      Weinbaum is fascinated with is Leslie F. Stone, nee Leslie Rubenstein. Like
      many Jewish sci-fi writers at the time, Stone used an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym
      to conceal her Jewish ethnicity ... Many other Jewish writers of the '30s, including
      Nat Schachner, Moses Schere and Bernard Sachs, wrote similar futuristic stories       
      about dictators, political parties and assimilation. Stanley Weinbaum's ... "The       
      Adaptive Ultimate' ... is yet another tale drawing from the Jewish immigrant
      experience of cultural assimilation ... Prof. Weinbaum also credits Stanley
      Weinbaum and Stone with the creation of the 'sympathetic alien, a kind,
      intelligent creature who helped people. This was a far cry from the 'bug-eyed beasts'       
      of H.G. Wells, whose only goal was to eradicate humanity. Many of these
      tales were published in anthologies by another Jew, Hugo Gernsback, whom       
      Weinbaum calls 'the father of sci-fi.'" [GUTH, D., 2000, p. 108-]
 

 

     Irving Stone (Irving Tennenbaum) is Jewish, as is Saul Bellow, Abraham Cahan, Arthur Cohen, E. L. Doctorow, J.D. Salinger, Isaac Asimov, Bruce J. Friedman, Dorothy Parker (half-Jewish), Herbert Gold, Paul Goodman, Joseph Heller, Stanley Kunitz, Meyer Levin, Bernard Malamud, Hugh Nissenson, Cynthia Ozick, Howard Fast, Ellery Queen (a fictitious detective created by Daniel Nathan and Manford Nepofsky), Laura Riding Jackson (Laura Reichenthal), Grace Paley, Chaim Potok, Norma Rosen, Hortense Calisher, Gertrude Stein, Henry Roth, Marge Piercy, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Erica Jong, Philip Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Constance Rourke, Leo Rosten, Gerald Stern, Mary Antin, Judith Rossner, Edward Lewis Wallant, Jerome Weidman, Leon Uris, E.M. Broner, Stanley Elkin, Daniel Fuchs, Harry Kellerman, Edward Dahlberg, Jonathan Kozol, Ira Levin, S.J. Perelman, Meyer Levin, Edward Lewis Wallant, Irving Faust, Francis Ann Leibowtiz, Michael Gold, Irving Stone, Irving Wallace, Herman Wouk, Irwin Shaw, Sidney Sheldon, Bernard Schlink, Alan Isler, Steven Bloom, David Margolis, Charles Powers (also a former Eastern European bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times), and Anzia Yezierska.

 

     Further Jewish women writers include Ann Roiphe, Alison Lurie, Gloria Goldreich, Rosellen Brown, Julie Ellis, Faye Kellerman, Susan Isaac, Amanda Cross, Naomi Regan, Gail Parent, Louise Blecher Rose, Susan Lukas, Myrna Blythe, Marie Brenner, Sandra Harmon, Sue Kaufman, Rebecca Goldstein, Roberta Silman, Alix Kates Shulman, Daphne Merkin, Vivian Gornick, Rochelle Krich, Marissa Piesman, Batya Gur, Serita Stevens, Rayanne Moore, Carolyn Haddad, Rhoda Lerman, Rona Jaffe, Bel Kaufman, Nora Ephron, Joyce (Glassman) Johnson, Johanna Kaplan, Ilona Karmel, Shirley Kaufman, Irene Klepfiscz, Edith Konecky, Emma Lazarus (who wrote the poem 'The New Colossos' inscribed on the State of Liberty and became a Zionist covert in 1881), [SYRKIN, M., 1964, p. 228] Karen Malpede, Emily Mann, Leslea Newman, Allegra Goodman, Joanne Greenberg, Bette Howland, Fannie Hurst ("known in her era as the highest paid writer in the world") [ANTLER, J., 1997, p. 145(e)], E. M. Broner, Rosellen Brown, Edna Ferber, Kim Chernin, Susan Yankowitz, Helen Yglesia, Ann Birstein, Francise Prose, Nesa Rappaport, Tora Reich, Norma Rosen, Lore Siegel, Jo Sinclair, Tess Slesinger, Adele Weissman, Alice Munro, Bella Spewack, Elizabeth Swados, Ruth Whitman, Emma Wolf, and Lynn Sharon Schwartz. Judith Viorst, wife of prominent journalist Milton Viorst and for six years a student at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, has authored nearly 50 volumes. [BEAL, E., 1997, p. 36]  In the popular romance genre, Jewish authors include Cynthia Freeman, Belva Plains, Julie Ellis, and Iris Rainer Dart.

     Edna Ferber, "author of Giant, Show Boat, and the Pulitzer prize-winning novel So Big, attributed her success to having been born a Jew. 'Being a Jew makes it tougher to get on,' she commented, 'and I like that.'" [ANTLER, J., 1997, p. 140(e)] "Modernist" author Gertrude Stein "admired Jews' 'clan feeling' and their high 'ethical and spiritual nature.' It is widely believed that she survived World War II with her lover, Alice B. Toklas (another California German Jew), because of her relationship with the [French] Vichy regime." [ANTLER, J., 1997, p. 140(e)]

 

     When Jewish novelist Anne Michaels' friend ran across yet another volume about a familiar subject, he complained about "another book on the Holocaust," not knowing that her own new work focused on the same theme. [Brawarsky, S., 1998, p. 29]  Carl Djerassi, a Jewish Stanford University scientist who is considered the "father" of the birth control pill, also writes novels. His most recent, Menachem's Seed, "ponders how a non-Jewish woman who impregnates herself with an Israeli sperm can ensure her child will be born Jewish." [PEARL, L., 1997, p. 34]

 

     "Do we need another ex-junkie from New York publishing autobiographical novels about sex, violence, and death?" wondered the [London] Guardian in 1999. The reference was to Joel Rose's new novel, "Kill Kill Faster Faster," described even by the author as a "genre novel -- pulp shit." Rose, of Hungarian Jewish heritage, is a former TV writer for Kojak, Miami Vice, and McMillan and Wife. [GIBB, 1999, p. T18]

 

      Judy Blume is a best-selling author of children's books. Ever busy socializing children against Christian tradition, Blume notes that "I had letters from angry parents accusing me of ruining Christmas forever because of a chapter in Superfudge called 'Santa Who?'" [BLUME, p. 65] In 1986 a children's book called An American Tail was published. "A Steven Spielberg Production," it was originally an animated movie. Lavishly illustrated, the newly invented fairy tale focuses upon the Jewish Mousekewitz family, a group of mice in late 19th century Russia. Both book and film socialize young children to the persecution myths of Jewish identity (depicted here as harmless, innocent mice), while broadly stereotyping the entire non-Jewish community in Eastern Europe as a realm of bloodthirsty monsters. Beneath an image of three cats with Russian style handlebar moustaches, saliva dripping from their teeth, all creeping along next to what appears to be a Nazi (the viewer only sees his black boots and brown pants) the fairy tale reads:

 

         "Suddenly, the houses began to jump and shake. The sound of horses'

     hooves clattering through the town and shouts of terrified people made

     all the mice tremble with fear.

         'The Cossacks! The Cossacks!'

         In those days, from time to time, Cossacks would gallop through

     the Jewish villages of Russia, burning homes and temples, destroying

     everything in their path. In the same kind of way, cat-Cossacks, known

     as Catssacks, would race through the tiny Russian mouse villages,

     burning and demolishing the little mouse homes and capturing whole

     mouse families as they ran from their flaming houses out into the

     snow." [KINGSLEY, p. 10]

 

      Other Jewish authors in the children's market include Paula Danziger, Allen Pace Nilson, Robert Lipsyte, and E. L. Konigsburg, among others.

 

      In 1999, recognizing the market and the times, a coffee-table photography book entitled "The Jewish writer" came out by photographer Jill Krementz. [George Gilbert's history of Jewish photographers claims her as Jewish; GILBERT, p. 60] Well connected in the literary world, her editorial dilemma, noted the Jewish Bulletin, was that there was not enough space in her proposed book for all 78 images of Jewish authors she had collected. [FAINGOLD, 1999, p. 41A]

 

      Going to Miami? Jewish journalist Hillel Italie noted in 2000 that Mitch Kaplan is chairman of the Miami Book Festival, "one of the oldest and most influential literature festivals in the United States." [ITALIE, 2000]  Attending a program at the famous Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church on the Bowery in Manhattan? Since 1987 the director of the organization has been Ed Friedman. (Joel Oppenheimer headed it earlier, beginning in 1966.) Wondering who might be the "literary executor" of famed non-Jewish poet W. H. Auden? Edward Mendelson. [MENDELSON, E., 1982, DUST JACKET] Going traveling with a Frommers guide? Arthur Frommer is Jewish. Using a Lasser income tax guide? J. K. Lasser is also Jewish. [ETKES/STADTMAUER, 1995, p. 172-173] Need a Berlitz language guide? It too is Jewish-founded. Editor-in-chief of Webster's New World dictionaries, major gauge of the English language, from 1948 to 1985? Also Jewish: David Guranlnick. [KIRSCHNER, S., 9-14-2000, p. 11]

 

     However restricted, oppressed, marginalized, and unrewarded Jewish women are supposed to be, "in sheer numbers, some 200 titles produced in the twentieth century since the first text was published in 1912 are identifiable as Jewish-American women's biographies -- that is, those in which ethnicity and gender are significant touchstones for the writer's identification and (self) creation." [SHOLLAR, B.] Prominent Jews who have held prominence in the feminist field include Bella Abzug, Phyllis Chesler, Gloria Steinem, Vivian Gornick, Robin Morgan, Susan Brownwiller, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Meredith Tax, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Naomi Weisstein, to headline a long list. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is half-Jewish. Jews have also been extremely prominent in lesbian activism. "[Jews] have been told that they control everything," noted Jewish lesbian Irene Klepfisz in 1982, "and so when they are in the spotlight, they have been afraid to draw attention to their Jewishness. For these women, the number of Jews active in the movement is not a source of pride, but rather a source of embarrassment, something to be played down, something to be minimized." [KLEPFISZ, I., 1982, p. 47]

      Jewish women, noted Ann Roiphe in 1981, "form a ridiculously high percentage of the women's movement." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 148] "Carolyn Stoloff concluded in a study of the backgrounds of those active in the woman's liberation movement among graduate students at the Univeristy of Michigan. She discovered that, of those whose religious background could be ascertained, almost 58 percent were Jewish." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 109] About half of a 1999 issue of Biography magazine's 25 Most Powerful Women in the business and social world "were either Jewish or had Jewish parents." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 24] "Like [Betty Friedan], many of the leaders and theorists of the 1960s feminists had been Jews, albeit largely secular, unidentified ones." [ANTLER, p. 260]  "Friedan," notes Joyce Antler, "used the language of the Holocaust [in her texts about women's liberation] not merely as a metaphor, or as a tactic to shock readers, but because she had already made the connection between the oppression of women and that of Jews." [ANTLER, p. 261]

 

      David Horowitz adds something else about Friedan (Friedman):

 

     "Her infamous description of America's suburban family household

     as a 'comfortable concentration camp,' in The Feminine Mystique,

     probably had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than

     for her own experience as a housewife and mother. Her husband,

     Carl, also a leftist, once complained to a reporter in 1970 that, far

     from being a homebody, his wife 'was in the world during the whole

     marriage, either full time or free lance,' lived in an eleven-room mansion

     on the Hudson with a full-time maid, and 'seldom was a wife and a

     mother.'" [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 226]

 

    In 1995, even a non-Jewish Polish-born scholar, Magdalena Zaborowska,  teaching at the University of North Carolina, knew which way the intellectual and publishing winds blew. Like many, she too falls prey to the strong force of Judeo-centrism in the American academic community. In her volume about women immigrants to America, subtitled "Gender Through East European Immigrant Narratives," she focuses on the lives of five women -- Mary Antin, Elizabeth Stern, Anzia Yezierska, Maria Kuncewicz, and Eva Hoffman -- to illustrate her theses. The title of the book, nor its theses of investigation,  have nothing to do with Jews.  Yet, in attempting to exemplify the collective voice of the female immigrant experience, the only one who isn't Jewish in her five subjects is Kuncewicz. Can this, one wonders, be an accurate overview of the lives, dilemmas, identities, and world views of the millions of Eastern European women who weren't Jewish?

 

      In 1996, Jewish poet Hal Sirowitz was awarded a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his first collection of poetry, My Mother Said. His second volume was about his therapist, entitled My Therapist Said. [COLEMAN, S., 1998, p. 9A]  In the poetry world, other prominent Jewish authors include Philip Levine, Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, Howard Nemerov (brother of photography icon Diane Arbus),  Adrienne Rich, Karl Shapiro, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Strand, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Louise Gluck, Louis Zukofsky, Delmore Schwartz (who wrote "Anti-Semitism ever / Sharpens Jews to be more clever"), [ATLAS, J., 1977, p. 163] Charles Reznikoff, David Ignatov, John Hollander, Irving Feldman, Anthony Hecht, Jerome Rothenberg ("who has been called a 'Jew among the Indians" for his work with early Native American poetic traditions"), [SHAPIRO, G., 4-20-01] David Meltzer, Robert Mezey, Rose Drachler, Susan Mernit, Harvey Shapiro, Grace Schulman ("I contain my family of Zionists within me"), [SHAPIR, S., 3-16-01, p. 12] George Oppen, Gertrude Stein, M. L. Rosenthal, Marilyn Hacker, (winner of the National Book Award), Sandra Hochman, Jascha Kessler, Donald Finkel, Naomi Lazard, Marvin Bell, Gil Orlovitz, Kenneth Fearing, David Galler, Stephen Berg, Daniel Hoffman, Peter Davison (his mother was Jewish), Babette Deutch, "beat" poet Stuart Perkoff, Romanian-born Andrei Codrescu, and Muriel Rukeyser, among others. 

 

      Part of a much referred-to poem by Muriel Rukeyser in Jewish circles goes: "To be a Jew in the twentieth century/Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse/Wishing to be invisible, you choose/Death of the spirit, the stone insanity." [ANTLER, J. p. 174] "Jewish themes," says Daniel Walden, "pervade much of the poetry of Harvey Shapiro who is probably better known as the editor of the New York Times Book Review." [WALDEN, p. 397] Poet Joseph Auslander was editor of the North American Review. Poet Grace Paley has long been poetry editor of the Nation.

     Jewish critic Bonnie Lyon "argues that Jewishness is 'thematically central' to Grace Paley's work [and] says that 'Yiddishkeit [Jewish culture], especially the idealistic socialist version ... is the underlying source of values in her work." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 224] Here's what Jewish biographer Judith Arcana adds about Ms. Paley (born Grace Goodside) and her Jewish identity in America:

     "So what would [Paley's father] think if he knew that his daughter Grace
      has begun to attend services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? Would
      he, who lived a culturally Jewish milieu all his long life, understand her
      desire to locate and maintain Jewishness every autumn in Christian Vermont?
      He could never have experienced such a need, for his family was strongly       
      identified as Jewish, and he lived surrounded by Jews all his years in the
      United States. Unlike, Judaism, Jewishness, [Grace's sister] Jeanne says,
      'was a given' and was never given up. The Goodside family was not       
      unconsciously seduced by the insidious force of American assimilation."       
      [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 14]

     "Insidious force of American assimilation?!" And this term applied to a family of presumably universalistic socialists?

      Here's more on how Arcana, the Jewish reviewer/critic, understands Paley, the Jewish poet/prose writer -- Paley, who in the political world is a Left-wing activist:

     "[Non-Jewish husband] Bob [Nichols, her second husband] was, even with his
      Brooks Brothers shirt tucked in, an exotic for this Bronx Jew. Though Grace
      has never been exploitive or condemnatory of Jews in her stories like her Jewish       
      brothers-in-print who often attach the unfortunate effluvia of twentith-century       
      materialism to Jews (and especially Jewish women), Grace's Jewish women
      nevertheless often couple with non-Jews. From young Shirly Abramowitz's
      tolerance, through Faith's two Catholic husbands and brief dalliance with Nick      
      Hegstraw, to the newest autobiographical figure in the cycle, Ruth Larsen, who
      has taken the last name of her husband Joe, Grace's Jewish women exhibit not
      only an acceptance of, but a romantic interest in, goyim. [Note: the term      
      'goyim' is traditionally a Jewish pejorative for non-Jews]. In her poetry, which
      she has always acknowledged as being closer to the bone than her stories
      are, Grace has explicitly depicted herself as one who suffers because she
      has forgotten Jerusalem and has coupled with a Gentile. 'Even my lover, a       
      Christian with pale eyes and the barbarian's foreskin/has left me,' the speaker       
      realizes in 'A Warning.' The speaker in another poem, untitled, admits that she       
      'cannot keep [her] mind on Jerusalem' and wonders what will happen 'when the       
      Lord/remembers vengeance/(which is his)/and finds me.' Though her sexual
      and romantic interest in the Christian 'other' might be construed as similar to       
      that lust for 'blondies' we find so often in fiction by Jewish men, it is also
      based in her lifelong laissez faire acceptance of whatever her companions
      may be and especially her desire for an ongoing cultural, ethnic, and
      racial mixing and blending of peoples. Grace Paley has been mining that       
      symbolic vein in her stories and has worked into it the related issues of       
      difference, otherness, and, especially, Jewishness."  [Paley divorced her
      first husband, Jess Paley, in 1972. He was Jewish] [ARCANA, J., 1993,
      p. 160-161]

    "Goyim-barbarian's foreskin?"
 

 

     From 1977 to 1998, fifteen people were awarded Yale University's prestigious Bollingen Prize (today worth $25,000) for poetry. At least seven of them were Jewish males -- David Ignatow, Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Stanley Kunitz, Mark Strand, and Kenneth Koch. [BRUNNER, 1998, p. 733] Reflecting changes in the power elite of the literature world, of the 26 earlier award winners going back to 1949, only two were Jewish (still an overrepresentation of Jewry, per their percentage of the American population, by about 250%).

 

      From Philadelphia, the American Poetry Review has been described as the "premiere poetry journal in the country." [LEITER, 1999] Editors are Stephen Berg, Arthur Vogelsang, and David Bonanno -- at least one, likely two, but very possibly all, are Jewish. In 1998, "local Jewish activist and patron" Lynne Honickman and her family's Honickman Foundation instituted a yearly American Poetry Review "first book" contest for poets. The 1998 judge, Gerald Stern (winner of the 1998 National Book Award for poetry), was Jewish, (his choice as APR winner was Joshua Beckman) as was the next year's judge, Louise Gluck, who selected another fellow Jew as the best poet, Dana Levin.

 

      Sanford Pinsker, a Jewish reviewer, notes with satisfaction the "Jewish dimension" to National Book Award winner Gerald Stern's poetry. Citing Stern's poem called "Behaving Like a Jew," Pinsker's insights into the poem read like a Mad magazine parody:

 

     "In this poem, probably the most anthologized and best known of all

     Stern's work, the speaker ruminates about the death of an opossum,

     refusing to treat the event as yet another instance of the 'joy in death'

     and the 'philosophical understanding of the carnage' he associates

     with the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh. Instead, he insists on behaving

     like a Jew, which means touching the animal's face, staring into its

     eyes and pulling it off the road.

        And as Stern describes this (Jewish) moment, the opossum in

     question metamorphoses itself into what looks for all the world

     like a Hasidic Jew:

        'I am not going to stand in a wet ditch ... / and lose myself in the

     immortal life stream / when my hands are still a little shaky / from his

     stiffness and his bulk / and my eyes are still weak and misty / from

     his round belly and his curved fingers / and his black whiskers and

     his little dancing feet.'" [original author's parenthesis: PINSKER, 1998,

     p. 62]

 

      Pinsker isn't joking about this. Not only does the reviewer declare the poem to be Jewish, so is the opossum! So much so that the idea of its "whiskers," "round belly," and "little feet" loom as a kind of dead rabbi to him.

 

     "Writers are all secret Jews," declared Maxime Kumin, two years after winning a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. [HYMAN, p. 766]  "All poets are Jews," echoed Russian Jewish poet Marina Tsvetayeva. [FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998]  "To be Jewish means to be a poet," declared Holocaust hero Elie Wiesel, affirming an apparent in-house Jewish truism. [STORCH, 1998, p. 8]  "A woman poet is a hunted Jew," declares Erica Jong, "eternally the outsider." [JONG, E., 1994, p. 100] (Delmore Schwartz has his own take on the Jew-poet-sufferer closure, noting his period as a student at Harvard University: " I never thought about anti-Semitism, because everyone was against me as a poet.") [ATLAS, J., 1977, 166] Hilene Flanzbaum suggests the psycho-social forces at play from which such a notion -- any poet as a kind of honorary Jew -- may come from:  "The poet's sense of alienation had come to signal his superiority to a debased American culture ... That poets are seldom appreciated in their own time or nation corresponds to the plight of the Jews, long held to be chosen but nationless." [FLANZEBAUM, p. 267]  Hence, being a poet is understood by many in today's poetry world to be a psychological state of antithesis to the established order, consciously conceived as an echo of the traditional Jewish sense of superiority to the surrounding non-Jewish norms, despite the fact that the elitist cliques that control the avenues towards crowning as a celebrated "poet" in the poetry/publishing industry has become, like all the rest of popular culture, merely an arm of the established -- and increasingly Judaized -- order itself. Being Jewish, after all (really or illusorily), is a strong boost towards the gateway of public sympathy, personal accomplishment, and, in all spheres, success.

 

     Flanzbaum notes the case of famous non-Jewish poet John Berryman, and the phenomena of Gentile poets looking for their symbolic selves in the Jewish victimhood paradigm:

 

     "In 1945, John Berryman, a Catholic poet from rural Oklahoma, won the

     Kenyon Review's annual contest for best short-fiction. His eight-page

     story, 'The Imaginary Jew,' featured a southern boy in New York City

     College who is brutally attacked after being taken for 'a Jew.' In that same

     year, Karl Shapiro, a third-generation American Jew won the Pulitzer Prize

     for a collection of poetry called V-Letter ... Berryman is not the only

     imaginary Jew haunting the pages of modern American poetry. In fact,

     many appear at this time." [Flanzbaum, p. 259, 260]

 

     For Shapiro's part, among his poems is at least one in homage to the new Jewish state of Israel, described in the work as the "liberation of Palestine." In it he further rhapsodizes that "When I see the name of Israel high in print ... I sink deep in a Western chair and rest my soul." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 241] (Shapiro was for a few years the editor of the prestigious journal Poetry.). [SYRKIN, M., 1964, p. 229]

 

     Much-heralded Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, killed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, had a "fanciful belief that he possessed the blood of gypsies and Jews." [NADEL, I., 1996, p. 23] In Europe, in 1999, a press report noted a requisite homage: "[Britain's] Poet Laureate Andrew Motion will read his poem about Ann [Frank], entitled Ann Frank Huis," marking the 70th anniversary of her birth. [PRESS ASSOCIATION NEWSFILE, 6-7-99]  Nearly forty years earlier, Soviet Union poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "married to a Jewess, leaped to world fame in 1961 as the author of 'Babi Yar,' a poem he wrote in protest against the world's apathy towards the slaughter of millions of Jews." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 97]  (Yevtushenko was also in New York when a Jewish Defense League bomb -- intended to disrupt a concert by Soviet performers -- killed a Jewish woman, Iris Kones. In a poem, Yevtushenko "compares the smoke-filled room in which Iris Kones died to a Nazi gas chamber." [ROBINSON, H. 1994, p. 446] Another Russian poet and novelist for years elevated to extraordinary attention in the West is Boris Pasternak. He too is Jewish. So is one of Europe's most celebrated post-war poets, Paul Celan. "Though Celan never spelled out his Jewishness," says Jewish scholar John Felstiner, "he aligned himself more stringently with the Jews than with the non-Jews in his pantheon." [GROSS, N., 7-7-95, p. 8]

 

     Prominent French author Nathalie Sarraute (Natacha Tcherniak) was also Jewish. Well-known French writer "Colette" wasn't Jewish but she was married once to Maurice Goudket, who was Jewish, and who who founded her "beauty institute" which failed. [THURMAN, 2000, p. 394-395, 441] Here's some of the Jewish perspectives on Colette's world, as described by her biographer, where being Jewish is equated with all things progressive, and liberating, in the social world:

"Colette came of age as a woman and a writer during the Dreyfus Affair, which dominated the history of the French fin de siecle [the Dreyfus Affair is a lynchpin in Jewish complaints of anti-Semitism: a Jewish army officer was falsely tried for treason]. The anti-semitism, homophobia, and misogyny of the period proved to have much in common. The Jews, the 'New Woman,' and the homosexual were at once fascinating and repulsive figures in the popular imagination. In each case, the danger that they posed to the established order was the same miscegenation. They threatened to corrupt the old fixed categories of national identity in one case, gender in the other two, at a moment when all kinds of boundaries, external and internal, were being transgressed." [THURMAN, J., 2000, p. xv]

     Also in Colette's world was Georges Kessel:

"Georges Kessel was a wit, an idler, a pretty boy and a dandy. He had married very young and well, his wife's income supported his passion for gambling. He dabbled in fiction and worked briefly as the private secretary to [publisher] Gaston Gallimard, who was impressed by his decadent charm. But at twenty-four, unexpectedly, Georges shook off his dilettante's torper and became the editor-in-chief of a weekly magazine devoted to crime stories ... The venture was underwritten by Gallimard, who paid Georges an enormous salary. He earned it, but he also began embezzling large sums from his patron, in the form of advances to fictitious writers to pay for his cocaine habits and his debts at the track." [THURMAN, J., 2000, p. 403]

     An international Jewish writers conference in San Francisco in 1997 featured prominent authors from Guatemala (Victor Perera), Brazil (Moacyr Scilar), Mexico (Elan Stavans), Romania (Norman Manae), Great Britain (Dan Jacobson), Poland (Henryk Broder) and Hungary (George Konrad, "who has been discussed as a potential Nobel Prize candidate.") [SCHIFRIN, D., 1997, p. 1] Famed Russian author Maxim Gorky wasn't Jewish, but his agent, Alexander Lazarevich Helphand/Gelfand (nicknamed Parvus), was. [VOKOGONOV, D., 1994, p. 112]

    As Ilan Stavans notes about the recent upsurge in "Jewish issues" writing in South America:

      "Jewish authors, for example, seem to have more presence [than before] in the
       Southern Hemisphere. From Argentina, there is Ricardo Feierstein, Marcos Aguinis,
      Jorge Goldenberg, and Fingueret herself; from Mexico, Rosa Nissan; from Uruguay,
      Mauricio Rosencof. Many of those authors began their careers decades ago, but
      now the collective impact of their work is beginning to be felt. Some are even achieving       
      popular success. And while few take the genocide in Europe as their central focus,
      many do offer it as backdrop. Editorial Mila and the Acervo Cultural in Argentina
      publish Holocaust survivors' accounts, like that of Charles Papiernik, originally a
      French citizen, who endured four years in Auschwitz. And a recent fiction contest,
      organized by Feierstein, brought a handful of Holocaust-related narratives, including
      El ultimo dia, by Mina Weil, about a Jewish girl growing up in Mussolini's Italy. I've
      also seen some nonfiction articles, like one about relationships among Holocaust
      victims by Diana Wang, a psychologist in Buenos Aires, who found out she was
      Jewish as she was about to take first Communion. Films, too, are part of the trend.
      I'm acquainted with fewer than half a dozen movies made in Latin America that
      address the Holocaust directly, but several others deal with the topic at least
      tangentially." [STAVANS, I., 5-25-01]

      Muriel Spark, an avowed Catholic, born of a Jewish father, has been described as "arguably the most formidable Scottish writer." [WHITAKER, R., 1-21-96] Jorge Isaacs, of partial Jewish heritage, has long been regarded as Colombia's "national poet." [SACHAR, H., p. 267] Australia's "most widely read and celebrated poet" is Dorothy Porter, whose father, proudly notes a Jewish ethnic magazine, is Jewish. [MANDIE, D., 1999, p. 68-69] The great German writer, Johann Goethe, wasn't Jewish, but "[Albert] Bielschowsky, like so many Goethe biographers [was] a Jew ... German Jews played a leading role in Goethe societies ... In the mid-1920s, Jews were almost a majority in the Berlin Goethe society." [MOSSE, G., 1983, p. 45] Isaac Deutcher noted in 1968 that "quite a few Polish writers have been of Jewish origin, for instance Julian Tuwim and Antoni Slonimski, the most eminent poets of the inter-war period." [DEUTCHER, I., 1968, p. 54]

 

     And who was America's official "poet laureate" for the late 1990's, whose job -- for $35,000 a year -- is to serve as a poetry "consultant" to the Library of Congress? Jewish poet and Boston University professor Robert Pinsky. "One of his grand works," notes the Los Angeles Times, "An Explanation of America,  (Princeton University Press, 1979)  is an epic poem written for his oldest daughter, now a manager at Borders Books in Los Angeles." [MEHREN, p. E1]  Pinsky is the former poetry editor for the avidly pro-Israel New Republic. In 1999, Pinsky became the "first poet laureate to be named for a third year by Congress." [KUSHNER, L., 5-28-99, p. 1]

 

     In 2000, Stanley Kunitz was named to replace Pinsky as America's poet laureate. Kunitz is also Jewish. Including Kunitz, at least five of the last eight American poet laureates (i.e., since 1988) have been Jewish: Kunitz, Pinsky, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, and Joseph Brodsky.

 

      Jewish American playwrights in (the Jewish-dominated) theatre include Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Lilian Hellman, Elmer Rice, Paddy (Sidney) Cheyefsky, Abe Burrows (Abraham Solomon Borowitz), George S. Kaufman, Wendy Wasserstein, Moss Hart, Elmer Rice, S.N. Behrman, and Clifford Odets. [PLESUR, M. 1982, p. 173] In France, surrealist Eugene Ionesco's mother was Jewish. In Britain, where Jews are less than one percent of the population, in 1969 "Lord" Goodman, the (Jewish) chairman of the British Arts Council, observed that "in the theatre at this moment the younger school of dramatists is perhaps seventy-five percent Jewish." Such authors included Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, Bernard Kops, Frank Marcus, Peter Shaffer, Lionel Bart, and Wolf Mankowitz, among others. [LITVINOFF, B., p. 168]  "Their contention is that they are English writers," said Barnet Litvinoff, "... [yet] a hidden sentiment was activated among them in 1967, however, and they made a swift if somewhat condescending rediscovery of their Jewishness." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 168]

      "What could be prompting the increased visibility of so many Jewish figures on the modern British literary scene?" wondered Merritt Mosely (author of The Dictionary of Lietrary Biography: British Novelists Since 1960) in 2001. Mosley notes Howard Jacobson (whose "Jewishness consciousness ... continues to animate his novels") as the best of them. "Two other celebrated novels of the year 2000 were about Jewishnessness," he adds, including Will Self's How the Dead Men Live ("Mr. Self has said that [the character] Lily is partly based on his mother, who was also a Jewish anti-Semite") and Linda Grant's When I Lived in Modern Times, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction (it is "a historical novel about a young Jewish woman growing up in London's Soho during World War II.") "Two widely noticed 1999 titles were about Jews, assimilation and anti-Semitism in England," adds Mosely (these are Gillian Freeman's His Mistress's Voice and Bernice Ruben's I, Dreyfus. [MOSELEY, M., 5-25-01]

     Germany? "Nathan the Wise," notes Michael Brenner, "became one of the most popular figures in post-war German theatre. He was soon to be joined on the stage by many other Jewish figures, ranging from the Fiddler on the Roof to Ann Frank. In recent years in Germany there has also been a remarkable revival of German-Jewish authors, such as Else Lasker-Schuler, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Muhsam, and Alfred Dublin. Such towering names as Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin are much better known today than during their own lifetimes." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. xxi]

      Aside from the many Jewish "Family" critics already mentioned, other prominent Jewish literature/culture critics include Walter Benjamin (Detlev Holz), George Steiner, Louis Untermeyer (whose son, Joseph, was active in Zionist efforts to get weapons to Israel) [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 157] and Clifton Fadiman, among many others.

 

       By 1996, Sylvia Barack-Fishman, a professor at Brandeis University, noted that

 

      "A search for the essence of Jewish identity has become a focal point of

       contemporary American Jewish literary and intellectual exploration

       spanning all brow levels, in works from the most complex fiction to

       the soap-operatic life-cycle angst of popular films and television

       programs." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 58]

 

      She also even notes that these days "Israel figures prominently in fiction by such authors as Saul Bellow, Chaim Potok, Elie Wiesel, Jay Neugeboren, Hugh Nissenson, E.M. Broner, Tova Reich, Mark Helprin, and many others." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 279]  "Even Norman Mailer," says Desser and Friedman, "who includes few Jewish characters in his books, and actually fights against his Jewish identity, is usually included in anthologies and critical works about Jewish authors." [DESSER, p. 4-5]

Here's how novelist Jonathan Kellerman's interest in Israel was reported in 2002:

"Best-selling novelist Jonathan Kellerman placed the winning online auction bid for a guitar signed by Don Henley and his fellow Eagles bandmates. Henley is donating the $7,900 from the sale to the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas for use in supporting Israel and Jewish organizations. Kellerman, the author of 23 books who lives in Los Angeles, is a longtime musician and collector of vintage guitars. But he said he bought the new, Takamine G330 acoustic guitar expressly because the proceeds will provide support for Israel. 'I've lived in Israel, set a novel ('The Butcher's Theater') there and am dedicated to supporting organizations that strengthen Israel,' he said in a statement Tuesday."  [TOP FORTY CHARTS, 6-1-02]   
 

 

    "Complementing the focus on [the Holocaust] survivor syndrome," says Lillian Kremer, "is the attention of writers to [a] survivor mission. This is manifest in [Marge] Piercy's and [National Book award winner] Adrienne Rich's advocacy of Zionism." [DAVIDSON, p. 396]  Elsewhere, mystery writer Richard "Kinky" Friedman "is a hawk on the Arab-Israeli conflict." As a Jewish country western singer, he was once awarded the Jewish Defense League's "prize for cultural contribution"; among his compositions (often performed) is "a particularly tasteless song about using a picture of Jesus for toilet paper." [CHAFETS, MEMOIRS, p. 175,  176]  "A number of new books from university presses, Jewish publishers, and mainstream publishers," noted the Jewish Week in 1999, "are searching out women's voices in Jewish history and Jewish texts, reclaiming Jewish tradition."

 

      In the feminist movement, of which Jewish women have been so much a part, publishing and literary heroines began making their inevitable march home to reconnect with Jewish exclusionist/elitist tenets. Abandoning an abstract solidarity with the generalized human community for the narrower, more tangible, glories of Jewish particularism and Holocaust victim/unity, they somehow managed to tiptoe around the massive anti-woman keystones of traditional Jewish teachings.  In an article about alleged anti-Semitism in the women's movement and being a "born-again" Jew, Letty Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms magazine, announced to her readers that

 

       "During the past few years something has changed, something that

        makes me no less a woman but more a Jew ... [POGREBIN, p. 76,

        1987] .. Looking back, I suppose my first visit to Israel had something

        to do with this epiphany ... As instructive as the first visit was, it was

        the MS tour of Israel that grew out of my account of it in this magazine

        that something clicked for me ... [POGREBIN, p. 77, 1987] ... Before I

        had believed in a universalistic ideal, in feminine synthesis, and

        de-emphasizing differences, but now, secularly as well as spiritually, I

        was 'born again' to my people. The change is subtle but seismic."

        [POGREBIN, p. 77]

 

     "I have never considered myself religious," wrote Betty Friedan, former President of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and author of one of the most influential feminist tracts, The Feminine Mystique, "For me as for other Jewish feminists, religion perpetuates the patriarchal tradition that denies women access to Judaism's most sacred ritual and enshrined them within the confines of their biological roles. But when women like me broke through to our authentic personhood as women, we found the strength to dip deep down into ourselves on other levels ... Now with a sense of confidence born of the women's movement, I and many other feminists found we could embrace our authentic Jewishness in a new way ... In some strange and wonderful way my feminism and my Judaism were merging." [SILBERMAN, p. 264]

 

     "After fifty," says best-selling author (best known for the novel Fear of Flying) and feminist Erica Jong:

 

       "I began to question my ambivalent relationship to my Jewish identity

       and the unexamined assimilation I have written about earlier. It seems

       astonishing to me that a woman born at the height of the Holocaust

       should not have been trained to a stronger sense of Judaism. And I

       also began to regret not having raised my [my daughter] more Jewishly,

       and not having more Jewish children to replace those lost among the six

       million [Holocaust victims]. Lately I have begun to yearn for solidarity

       with other Jewish feminists ... to celebrate Jewishness without shame."

       [TEMPLIN, p. 126]

     (How, by the way, did Jong first get published? Her mother sent her to a Jewish family friend, Bessie Golding -- Jong's grandfather's mistress. Jong presented poems to Golding at her office who read them for twenty minutes, then looked up and decided that "You're going to be the most famous woman poet of your generation." Golding passed the poems along to an executive at the Holt publishing company "who passed it on to Aaron Asher [also Jewish]," the Holt publisher. Thus was born Jong's: Fruits and Vegetables.) [JONG, E., 1994, p. 134-137]
 

 

      One wonders how prominent author Cynthia Ozick, active in Jewish religious circles, reconciles the virulent anti-female Jewish tradition:

 

     "In the world at large I call myself and am called a Jew. But when on

     Sabbath I sit among women in my traditional shul and the rabbi

     speaks the word 'Jew,' I can be sure that he is not referring to me.

     For him 'Jew' means male Jew. When my rabbi says 'A Jew is called

     to the Torah,' he never means me or any other living Jewish woman.

     My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I, a middle-

     aged adult, am defined exclusively by my being the female child of

     my parents. My own synagogue is the only place in the world

     where I am not a Jew." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 202]

 

     As Rabbi Frisch's Marriage Manual, a traditional view of Judaism, says:

 

     "Even though the woman is a man's partner, she should not think

     of her husband as a comrade but rather as a master. And the woman

     should love her husband and he shall rule over her as it is said:

     'And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over

     thee.'" [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 332]   

 

      Rosellen Brown, a fiction editor at the Jewish magazine Tikkun, notes that stories submitted to her tend to be about old Jewish characters, the Holocaust, and old New York City Jewish neighborhoods. "What you can probably see emerging here," she wrote in 1993, "... [is] nostalgia ... [BROWN, p. 79] ... The majority of work we see is thematically hard breathing and anxious. And where its spirit is I have no idea, except that it seems bent on discharging some long-forgotten obligation." [BROWN, p. 82] 

 

      Andrew Furman, a judge for the National Jewish Book award, noted in 2000 the flavor of modern Jewish literature:

 

     "Jews, the world over, continue to write fiction at a fierce clip ... The

     'ethnic,' mid-century wave of Jewish American writing, fueled by the

     immigrant consciousness, has clearly given way to a new wave of

     Jewish writing. Concomitantly, the burden of alienation and marginality

     amid a host culture are no longer the twin occupations of Jewish

     writers. Rather, the literary grandchildren of Bellow, Roth, and Malamud

     -- at home now amid their environs -- look increasingly inward these

     days as they engage more explicitly Judaic concerns: the toxic legacy

     of the Holocaust, the retrieval of extinct Jewish worlds (e.g., the

     European shtetl, New York's lower East Side), Jewish feminism,

     the viability of Orthodoxy, and the biblical resonances in the modern

     world." [FURMAN, A., MAY/JUNE 2000, p. 29]

 

     In poetry, for instance, Jewish poet Linda Pasten was afforded space in the 1990s in Tikkun for her poem about an almost obligatory theme, concluding:

 

       "and when my mother saw the swastika

        on an envelope in the kitchen table,

        she picked up fast, and we returned

        to the steamy city." [FIRESTONE, p. 4]

     Erica Jong's first collection of poetry (Near the Black Forest) was "weighed with poems about my discovering my Jewishness in Germany." [JONG, E., 1994, p. 133]     

 

     In a book about Jewish women, Paula Hyman and Deborah Moore note that:

 

    "A significant group of contemporary Jewish writers produced an inward-

      turning genre of fiction that explores the individual Jew's connection to

      other Jewish people, to the Jewish religion, culture, and tradition, and to

      the chain or Jewish history. Contrary to the expectations of

      assimilationists and the example of Jewish literature during the first half

      of the twentieth century, particularist woman's Jewish fiction became

      commonplace ... Among the themes that emerged is the late twentieth

      century American Jewish fiction focusing on women, some of the most

      important include: the role of the Holocaust in the identity of survivors,

      their children, and the broader Jewish community; Israel as a focal point

      of American Jewish identity, and a setting for the exploration of Jewish

      identity." [HYMAN, p. 422]

 

     "It must be emphasized," notes Gershon Shaked, "that American Jewish literature today is prouder of its dual identity than any other 'foreign' Jewish literature has ever been." [SHAKED, p. 176]

 

     Also among the major current genres of Jewish fiction is the Jewish "tough guy" story, what Paul Breines calls the "Rambowitz syndrome." Breines notes that he is familiar with about fifty novels that celebrate an "idealized representation of Jewish warriors, tough guys, gangsters, Mossad agents, and Jews of all ages and sexes who fight back against their tormentors." [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 280]

 

      "A noticeable change has occurred in recent decades," says Stephen Whitfield, "The fresh appreciation of ethnic differences that began in the mid-1960s has included the celebration of Jewish identity in many best-selling novels, in serious analyses of Yiddishkeit [Jewishness] ... in musicals ... and in other cultural artifacts too numerous to mention." [WHITFIELD, Americans, p. 11] "Ours is close to a golden age," wrote Leonard Fein in 2000, "... Here's one piece of current evidence: On the 'new non-fiction ' table in a local (non-chain) general bookstore the other evening, 11 out of 30 titles were on Jewish subjects." [FEIN, L., 9-8-2000, p. 9]

 

     Thanks to such an avalanche, and Jewish power to empower and enforce it, Jewish chauvinism has become an institutionalized norm and is an increasingly integral -- and even dominant --  part of the mainstream American landscape. "According to a theory which seems to be tacitly assumed by many critics," wrote Robert Alter, "the main currents at least of modern culture all derive from subterranean Jewish sources." [KOESTER, p. 21] "The massive entry of Jewish intellectuals into the academy in the late 1940s through the 1960s," says David Hollinger, "was a crucial victory for the cosmopolitans. The attendant de-Christianization of American public culture was sometimes openly proclaimed -- by Leslie Fiedler, for example -- who in 1967 celebrated what he called 'the great take-over by Jewish-American writers' of the task of speaking for Americans." [HOLLINGER, p. 167]

 

      "The acceptance of [Saul] Bellow as the leading novelist of his generation," wrote Fiedler in evaluating the impact of the Jewish literary Mafia upon America, "must be paired off with the appearance of [Herman Wouk's] Marjorie Morningstar on the front cover of Time. On all levels, the Jew is in the process of being mythicized into the representative American." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 1] "Bellows's Humboldt's Gift," noted Chaim Bermant in 1977, "which is in some ways an odyssey of literary America, or at least literary New York (which nowadays has come to mean the same thing), shows how far the process of assimilation has gone, and it is no longer quite certain what has happened to whom: whether the Jew has become Americanized or the Americans Judaized. It is a world in which a writer like Gore Vidal, who can trace his roots back to an older America, must feel like an outsider, or a Court goy." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 158]

 

     Efforts by highly placed Jews to appropriate all that is great as innately "Jewish" extended to one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- popular artists in history: Hollywood's Charlie Chaplin. "Chaplin's own background and experience," wrote Hannah Arendt, "taught him the traditional Jewish fear of the 'cop' -- that seeming incarnation of a hostile world; but on the other hand, it taught him the time-honored Jewish truth that, other things being equal, the human ingenuity of a David can sometimes outreach the animal strength of a Goliath." [DESSER, p. 10]

 

     "Chaplin was an English Jew," wrote Albert Goldman, "who was at pains to deny or minimize his Jewish origins ... his infatuation with blond-haired, fair-skinned, voluptuously innocent maidens, whom he courted with eyes brimming with Jewish soul and sentiment, were the classic notes and signs of the Jewish comic hero." [DESSER, p. 10]

 

     The slight problem here, of course, is that Charlie Chaplin was not Jewish. None of his parents were Jewish, nor his grandparents. He was not raised in a Jewish home and he did not know Hebrew or Yiddish; he was not known to have even been in any kind of association with Jews at all, at least until he ended up in Hollywood [DESSER, p. 10]  (where one of his wives  was a Jewish actress, Paulette Goddard -- i.e., Paulette Levy).  Jewish insistence to claim him as one of their own, of course, reflects the widespread inability of Jews to understand the universal dimensions of Chaplin's loveable tragi-comic character, the Tramp, and the universal depth of his follies, misfortunes, and foibles against a world that is hostile to anybody.

 

       If anything, note Desser and Friedman, "Chaplin is an essentially Christian filmmaker. The overarching themes of his finest films involve a redemptive Christian vision revolving around self-sacrifice and charity as the highest form of love." [DESSER, p. 10] These, as we have amply seen, and as these Jewish film critics aptly note, are not particularly classic elements of the Jewish tradition.

 

     *  The issues in this chapter of course have an international flavor. In Russia, during and after the communist revolution, Zvi Gitelman notes Jewish "intellectual" influence in securing the new regime: "The Jewish intelligentsia had neutralized the boycott of the Bolshevik regime by the Russian intelligentsia. In Lenin's words, they had 'sabotaged the saboteurs.' At the same time Lenin suggested this should not be emphasized in the press because 'in a peasant land one must sometimes also reckon with such hateful phenomena as anti-Semitism.'" [GITELMAN, 1972, p. 115]

 

     Venita Datta has written an entire book entitled the Origins of the Intellectual in France, noting that the 1914 Dreyfus Affair (when a Jewish army officer was unjustly accused of being a traitor) "is often cited as the moment at which the intellectual was born ... French intellectuals have served as role models for intellectuals all over the world ... [The intellectual] supplanted the traditional priest as a source of moral authority in modern French society." [DATTA, p. 1]

 

     In recent years, there have been many Jews of influence in the French (and international) intellectual world, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Michael Foucault, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan.

 

     In the years around 1900 the 80,000 or so Jews of France represented less than one percent of the French population of 39 million. Yet, "as many anti-Semites noted," says Datta,

 

      "with the advent of the [French] Third Republic, more Jews than

      ever were visible in the fields of art, literature, journalism, and

      academe. Furthermore, noted Jewish intellectuals, in particular Emile

      Durkheim of the Sorbonne and Henri Bergson of the College de

      France, were seen as pillars of the republican establishment, as

      official 'intellectuals who had risen to positions of power and fame

      via the republican university system ... [DATTA, p. 85] ... This new

      [Third Republic] regime sought to 'de-Christianize' public spaces

      ... In no other country where anti-Semitism was present did it possess

      such a strong literary character. Anti-Semites in France were more

      interested in responding to political, social, and cultural developments

      than in developing racial theories ... [p. 87] ... Many Jews rose to

      prominent positions in the army, politics, and high civil service, as

      well as the arts and academe ... [p. 95] ... Jews were particularly

      prominent as cultural middlemen, that is, as reviewers, critics, and

      art collectors ... Significant numbers of Jews were at the forefront of

      avant-garde movements, not only in the literary and artistic avante-

      garde ... but also in the academic disciplines ... [p. 96] ... [One

      influential journal] the Revue Blanche, was more than a journal,

      it as also a milieu and a group of friends linked by school ties and

      family relations ... Jewish collaborators represented roughly half
      of the review's staff and a much higher proportion of its editorial
      board." [p. 105]
 

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

     

Aside from Jewish publishing and mass media pre-eminence in pre-Nazi Germany [see other chapters], Frederick Grunfeld notes the situation for Jewish authors in that era:

     "Literally dozens of writers afterwards banned as 'Jewish -- though many
       of them hardly thought of themselves as such -- were producing important
     contributions to Germany literature. Among the leading dramatists were
     Carl Sternheim (The Snob), Arthur Schnitzler (La Ronde), Ernst Toller
     (The Machine-Wreckers), Walter Hasenclever (The Sun), Ferdinand
     Bruckner (Criminals) and the Hungarian expatriate Ferenc
     Molnar (Liliom); among the novelists, besides Broch and Kafka,
     Alfred Doeblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jakob Wasserman (The World's
     Illusion), Lion Feuchtwanger (Jew Suss), Franz Werfel (The Forty Days of
     Musa Dagh), Alfred Neumann (The Deuce), Bruno Frank (Days of
     the King), Arnold Zweig (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), Ernest Weiss
     (Nahar), Joseph Roth (Radetzky March), and Vicki Baum (Grand Hotel);
     among the poets, Ernst Blass, Alfred Mombert, Rudolf Borchardt, Albert
     Ehrenstein, Martin Gumpert, Walter Mehring, Nelly Sachs, Berthold
     Viertel, Karl Wolfskehl and Aflred Wolfenstein; among the essayists and
     criktics, Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, Maximilian Harden, Theodor
     Wolff, Egon Friedell, Theodore Lessing, Kurt Tucholsky, Freidrich
     Torberg, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten (who also
     happend to be the author of Bambi)." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 27]

      The non-Jewish German Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann once wrote about the key factor that elevated him to fame and attention:

     "Jews 'discovered' me, Jews published me and propagated my reputation;
     they performed my impossible play; it was a Jew, the late S. Lublinski,
     who wrote of my Buddenbrooks (after it had been greeted elsewhere with
     sour expressions), 'This book will grow with time, and will still be read
     generations from now.' And when I go out into the world, and visit
     cities, it is almost always Jews, not only in Vienna and Berlin, who
     welcome, shelter, dine, and pamper me ... It is a fact that simply cannot
     be denied that, in Germany, whatever is enjoyed only by 'genuine
     Teutons' and aboriginal Ur-Germans, but scorned or rejected by
     the Jews, will never amount to anything culturally." [GRUNFELD, F.,
     1996, p. 28]

 

 

 

"The man who translated Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses' into Persian -- and was threatened with death for his work -- is seeking asylum in Israel. Dr. Jamshid Hasni, 57, is married to an Israeli woman and is undergoing a conversion to Judaism. He told the Ma'ariv newspaper that he could not "return to my homeland because extremists will harm me. I prefer to live in a Jewish country. I want to be part of the Jewish people."
[Jewish Chronicle (Great Britain), December 6, 2002, p. 13]
 

26
MODERN ART

 

"American Jews have made tremendous contributions in all aspects of
general culture. In the professions, in music, in literature, in painting and
sculpture, in the academic world, and in the area of science, Jews are
often distinguished and in many instances pre-eminent."
-- Milton Plesur, 1982, p. 168-169 


 

     Jews are dominant in virtually all controlling facets of the modern art world. In the world of "high-culture" dance, music, and theatre, for decades S. Hurok Productions was the major force in performance promotion. When Sol Hurok (born Solomon Izrailevich Gurkov) died in 1974, notes Harlan Robinson, "he was the last large-scale independent commercial producer of high culture in the United States ...  [ROBINSON, p. xv]   ... [He] was an important force behind the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts." [ROBINSON, p. xiv] An early Hurok partner was Jacob Berman. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 120] An early competitor in the "concert management business" was Daniel Mayer's and Marks Levine's National Broadcasting and Concert Bureau, with links to the fledgling NBC broadcast network. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 133] In 1972 Hurok's head of publicity, Martin Feinstein, became the Executive Director of Performing Arts for the newly created John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC. (Hurok's son-in-law, Barry Hyams, originally hired Feinstein to the Hurok firm. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 298] In 1975, the president of Hurok Concerts, Sheldon Gold, was replaced by Maynard Goldman. Gold became president later of the major talent agency ICM Artists Ltd., a newly formed classical music and dance division of Marvin Josephson Associates.

     In assessment of Hurok's closest associates, Harlan Robinson notes that "beyond his domestic employees [cook, servant], Hurok had not real close friends, with the possible exception of [Jewish violinist Isaac] Stern. The violinist was also a favorite with Peter Hyams and Peter's sister Nessa. They also remember their grandfather had a group of 'cronies,' including some Russian Jews, whom he had known for years and to whom he remained steadfastly loyal. These included his accountant and his longtime lawyer, Elias Lieberman, an old-time socialist who had helped to found the International Ladies Garment Workers Union" [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 405] At Hurok's death, he "left money to his grandchildren and to a variety of Jewish charitable organizations ... Surprisingly, only one performing arts organization was included in Hurok's will: the Musicians' Emergency Fund, Inc." [ROBINSON, H. 1994, p. 462]

     Hurok was even succesful in getting a Hollywood movie made about his life (screenplay writers: Harry Kurnitz and George Oppenheimer; producer: Georgie Jessel). [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 320] "Highest on the list of Hurok's demands [for the movie] was the removal of any Jewish ethnicity in the character of the impresario hero or his associates ...[ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 321] ... Similarly, Hurok strongly objected to the presence of 'the stock figures of cigar-smoking impresarios' present in the script's original opening sequence. Such images would, he feared, detract from the image of refinement and good taste he wanted his fictionalized self to convey ... [He did not want to appear as] some sort of back-room shyster." [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 322] In the mainstream, the resultant film was not widely acclaimed. The Jewish Ledger declared, however, that "Jews in America will be proud of the film ... Himself a very modest person, Mr. Hurok is very much interested in everything that is Jewish and lends a helping hand in Jewish affairs." [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 332]

 

     In the world of theatre, notes Lester Friedman, "by the early 1890s a good deal of the theatrical booking business in New York City was in Jewish hands, thanks to the Klaw & Erlanger syndicate, the Shubert brothers, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor, the Schenck brothers, and a host of other agents and stage managers." [FRIEDMAN, L., 1982, p. 9] 

 

     Likewise, for decades the most prominent mogul on Broadway was a Jewish producer, David Merrick (born David Margulies). Merrick's abusive personality saddled him with a widely known nickname: "the abominable showman." Another Jewish theatre mogul, Joseph Papp (Papirofsky), founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, created the influential Public Theatre for playwrights, and produced such Broadway hits as Hair and A Chorus Line. Papp's "ego was huge," says Jewish author Helen Epstein,

       "but instead of slickness, he exuded reserve and a sobriety that made me think
        of Old Testament patriarchs ... Papp had influenced a huge number of his
        contemporaries and younger people in the arts. Hundreds of writers, actors,
        directors, composers, designers, producers, arts administrators, stage managers,         
        journalists and critics traced the beginnings of their careers to the [Shakespeare]
        Festival. Thousands more dated their first exposure to Shakespeare to a production
        in Central Park. Millions of others had seen his productions on television and on
        Broadway. The name Joseph Papp embodied the history and very best possibilities
        of New York." [EPSTEIN, H., 1994, p. 10-ll]

    Oscar Hammerstein I, also Jewish, by the early years of the 20th century built thirteen theatres/music hall (often for the opera) in New York, Philadelphia, and London. "The name and personality of Oscar Hammerstein," notes Vincent Sheean, "became as familiar to the nation as if he had been elected its President ... Oscar Hammerstein ... commanded more space in the press than the Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans, than William Jennings Bryan or indeed any other personage of his day except President Theodore Roosevelt." [SHEEAN, V., 1956, p. 3-4] Hammerstein (and son Willie) even owned the Victoria Theatre ("the great nut vaudeville house of New York") which was famed for freak shows, featuring "persons notorious for whatever reason" -- "bridge jumpers and stunt flyers, divorcees, channel swimmers, and record-breakers of any kind; whether they had stage talent was irrelevant." [SHEEAN, 1956, p. 112] Hammerstein's greatest rival in the opera world (who eventually bought him out) was also Jewish, Otto Kahn, "banker and connoisseur of the arts [and] principal financial power of the Metropolitan [Opera Company]." [SHEEAN, V., 1956, p. 296]

     But the most powerful entrepreneurial network in theatre production and control has long been the Shubert company. Jerry Stagg notes that Samuel, Jacob, and Lee (Levi) Shubert "invaded New York City in 1900, armed with tireless energy, boundless confidence, a lust for money, power, and fame, and $15,000, most of it borrowed. A quarter of a center later, their worth was estimated at half a billion dollars. [The Shuberts] took control of theatre in America." [STAGG, p. 3] (Shubert CEO in the year 2000? Gerald Schoenfeld). More at ground level, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler of New York's Group Theatre were legendary and profoundly influential acting teachers. Lawrence Langner was one of the founders of the Washington Square Players.

   As Ellen Schiff notes:

     "A few years ago, Tyrone Guthrie speculated that if Jews withdrew from the
      American theatre, the institution 'would collapse about next Thursday.'
      Guthrie was no doubt assessing Jewish contributions at every level of
      of show business from artistic, to administrators, to 'angels.' [i.e,
      philanthropists]." [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 79]
 

 

     By 1999, Jewish entrepreneur Robert F.X. Sillerman's SFX company was causing shock waves in the live theatre and music promotion worlds. In one and a half years it had spent $1.5 billion in gobbling up other companies. The Financial Post noted that he was still attempting to "strengthen his domination of live theatre promotion in the United States. SFX also is the single largest player in [music] concert promotion. So large, in fact, that regulators expressed concern last year ... SFX is now believed to be close to purchasing its only major rival, Universal Concerts, a division of Montreal firm Seagram Company [controlled by the Jewish Bronfman family]." [LANG, A., 5-28-99, p. C1, C17]

 

     SFX also owns or operates over 80 venues in the United States, mostly concert halls, as well as the rights to many theatrical productions (Phantom of the Opera, et al). It also produces over 13,000 events a year. Its recently purchased Falk Associated Management Enterprises division manages 650 professional athletes and broadcasters -- basketball star Michael Jordan among them. "Talent agencies, ticketing companies, and independent promoters," notes the (New York) Daily News, "have complained that the new live entertainment giant exerts too much control over the industry." [FURMAN, 6-7-99, p. 57]  In August 1999 SFX moved into Great Britain too, purchasing the Apollo Leisure Group (one of the largest theatre and arena operators in that country) for $254 million. The purchase also included Tickets Direct and the Barry Claymore Corporation. [FARMER, N., 8-21-99, p. 13]  

 

     In the dance world, Martha Graham was one of the icons of this art form in the 20th century. She wasn't Jewish. But in her early seventies her "right hand man" became Ron Protas, Jewish and in his twenties, who eventually positioned himself to inherit her entire estate at her death. As Ismene Brown notes

 

     "When dance great Martha Graham died at the age of 96, she left him

      [Protas] everything. It was the greatest legacy to dance this century.

      Five years later Ron Protas stood as the only inheritor of the Graham

      works, the Graham company, and the Graham industry. After reading

      the section on Protas in the huge biography of Graham by her long-term

      colleague and fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille (Rodeo, Oklahoma!);

      it's hard not to expect to meet Svengali, Mephistopheles, and a leech

      rolled into one. No one could have been more damned in print. He

      caused a 'blood-letting,' 'policed' Graham, de Mille says; turned her

      against old friends, made her into an elderly fool performing into

      her seventies, and tainted a monumental career with sleazy celebrity

      games. The object of this scorn (shared by many) is a shock to meet --

      an amiably shambling, hunched-up man of 49, black curly hair,

      chubby Jewish features, constantly wreathed in smiles, very disarming."

      [BROWN, I., 10-16-96, p. 17]

    Famed dancer Isadora Duncan's accompanist was Max Rabinovitch. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 91] Duncan's husband, Russian poet Seregei Yesenin, was once publicized as an "anti-Semite." "Not surprisingly," notes Harlow Robinson, "and probably with [Jewish impresario Sol] Hurok's help, the story of Yesenin's anti-Semitism immediately hit the newspapers, elaborately embroidered." [ROBINSON, M., 1994, p. 92] As Julia Foulkes declares about the Jewish angle to the modern dance world:

     "Although the leaders of modern dance in the 1930s -- Martha Graham, Doris
     Humphrey, Chalres Weidman, and Haya Holm -- were not Jewish, Jewish
     women filled modern dance classes, companies, organizations, picket lines,
     and concert audiences. Teachers, such as Blanche Talmud and Edith Segal,
     taught performers, such as Lily Mehlman and Lillian Shapero; performances
     by choreographers such as Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow, were reviewed
     by critics, such as Edna Ocko; while organizers, such as Helen Tamiris and
     Fanya Geltman, hassled labor unions and the federal government for increased
     attention to dance. These efforts in substantiating a new art form have been
     overlooked because our view of the arts tends to focus on a few stars,
     emphasizing individual genius rather than collective momentum and organizational
     drive. Jewish women shaped the foundation of modern dance, and in the mid-
     1930s their impact was well enough known that the eminent social commentator
     [and Jewish comedian] Fanny Brice could unleash her satire on the subject,
     playing Martha Graham in a sketch entitled 'Modernistic Moe,' in which she
     cried 'Rewolt!' in a Yiddish accent." [FOULKES, J., JUNE 2000, p. 233-252]

      Even the best known mime in history, Marcel Marceau (originally Mangel), is Jewish. To his credit, he once told a Jewish ethnic newspaper: "I find it hard to identify with Jewish issues -- humanity is my overriding battle cry." [JOSEPHS, J., 3-30-01] Performer Meredith Monk is also Jewish. [TWICE BLESSED, online gay/Jewish website]
 

 

      Jewish influence in the visual arts is a huge story. "Modern art" (hereafter defined as painting, sculpture, and other visual arts) in capitalist society is a paradox. Its practitioners generally believe that their personal expressions of the human experience through physical objects are secularly sacred. Yet, to survive and prosper as artists, to garner the support to do further work that transcends mere consumerism, this belief itself must be fundamentally prostituted. "Fine art," notes anthropologist Stuart Plattner, "is similar to religion ... as an institution that counteracts the crassly commercial search for advancement in a capitalist art world. At the same time, these objects of supposedly sublime vision are bought and sold as commodities." [PLATTNER, p. 4]

 

     The elitist "art world" strata -- so-called "High Art"-- is the milieu of painting provenances, artist pedigrees, and the changing "avante-garde" superstar brand-names. There are, strangely, no objective standards in this strata to discern quality or value in either the artist or his creations. Not only are there no clear standards of evaluation, "in the age of conceptual, minimal, and performance art, it is often unclear what museum quality art is supposed to look like." [PLATTNER, p. 5] The confirmation of artistic importance (and, hence, quality and value) is merely the decision of the "informed opinion" of High Art insiders, whose dictates are often self-rewarding. Such insiders include an incestuous cabal of professional art curators, critics, and dealers who swim back and forth among these occupational categories of art trade. (There are other entrees to the art community, of course. One of the most prominent art critics of the 1960s and 1970s was Harold Rosenberg who was trained as a lawyer and who became an influential "art critic" after a career in advertising. [JACOBY, p. 110] As Rosenberg himself once noted, "Since the rise of art history, in the nineteenth century, art historians have been directly linked with the market prices of paintings and sculptures because of their authority in deciding attributions. By the 1970s, art history, having achieved the leading role in the day-to-day life of art, had overgrown all its theoretical boundaries and gone to seed; it was now prepared to put the stamp of value on anything, not excluding publicized fakes." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 186]

 

      While there is no clearly unifying and objective standard of art evaluation, there is a referential High Art history, the entwined tales of artists and wealthy business patrons who brought them to public attention and acclaim. There is also an art jargon, and meta-language "art talk" for those in the know.

     As Duncan Cameron, once-director of the Brooklyn Museum, said in a speech to the United Nations:

     "In summary, then, the traditional museum has been administered by a curatorial
     elite whose members are trained as scholars in disciplines relevant to the museum
     collections ... structured according to specific models of knowledge. These
     models are generally incomprehensible to other than those trained in a
     specific discipline and may be said to be encoded in the private languages
     of scholarship ... This situation has persisted through the reluctance of the
     public to protest it and the willingness of governing bodies to support it.
     Both have been in awe of the mystique of curatorship, both have been
     unprepared to admit that the content of the museum is meaningless and lacks
     a personal relevance ... For a few, the upper-middle class with higher
     education and therefore some key to the secret codes, it becomes a
     domain with class and status connections." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 236-237]

 

       "Art has become a commodity," notes Sophy Burnham, "Collectors bought art as profitable speculation. Museums bought what their trustees (these same collectors) demanded they immortalize. Critics pushed art in which they had financial interest ... The artist had no part in these exchanges. Once his work passed out of his hands ... he received no further royalties. He watched the prices rise and the dealers in art get fat ... Art was whatever would sell." [BURNHAM, p. 9]

 

     "On the assumption that "he who pays the piper calls the tunes," says Judith Huggins-Balfe, "critics have accused both individuals and institutional private patrons of altering some presumably 'natural' development of art, in their own class and commercial interests." [BALFE, p. 314] Si Newhouse, for instance, (whom we have met before as chairman of the huge Advance media chain)," said dealer Leo Castelli, "is one who has put together a perfect choice of artists, starting out with Pollack and de Kooning." [WATSON, p. 104]

 

      While trained "art professionals" are influential, the foundation of the modern art world is those who buy and sell it (sometimes these very art professionals). Such people decide what has value, and even what art is and is not. Most do not truly care about cutting edge perceptual insights or transcendent visions but, rather, money. Most buying and selling of art today, especially in the realm of High Art, is an economic investment. In 1984 major art journals, including ArtNews and Art and Antiques, even began publishing lists of major art collectors. 60% of the list were Americans. The next most populous were Japanese, then Germans. [WATSON, p. 388] (In more recent years, with Japanese economic woes, Japanese influence has correspondingly diminished and a significant percentage of today's "German" art activity we can safely presume to be Jewish).

 

     The heart of the American (and international) High Art market is New York City. "Although Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and other centers have large demands [for art]," says Stuart Plattner, "New York is hegemonic on the national scale, and even the international level, meaning that only elite gallery exposure in New York creates art-historical significance." [PLATTNER, p. 8] New York City is also home for the most important art magazines and other periodicals whose sphere of reportage is usually its immediate vicinity. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80% of the 2500 core "art market' personnel -- art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors -- were Jewish. [BURNHAM, p. 25] These people -- and their progeny -- in New York largely control American artistic tastes and values at the most important tier. (In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravitz, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn). [ESTEROW, M., SUMMER 2001]

 

      When Alice Bellony-Rewald (an artist, critic, and art model) first moved into the New York art world from France, she noted that :

 

       "I was plunged into a world of highly sophisticated Jewish art collectors,

       and it took me a long time to reconcile my mental picture of speakeasies

       and the Wild West with people who spoke five languages fluently and

       lived surrounded by period furniture, Meissen china, and Old

       Masters." [PEPPIATT, p. 16]

 

     Jewish author Howard Jacobson wrote in 1993 about his experiences with prominent New York City art critic Peter Schjeldhal:

 

     "'I came to New York to be Jewish,' [Schjeldhal] once told me.

       'Did you make it?'

       'No.'

       'What were you before?'

       'Porcelain-sink Lutheran.'

       'And now? Since you haven't made it across as one of us?'

       He paused. He wasn't sure he wanted to be that un-Jewish.

       'A certain transformation has occurred; but a certain gulf

       remains.'

       It takes me a little while to put it together -- the fact that just about

       every gallery/space/loft we go into is run by a Jew. This isn't Jewish

       how I like it. This is slow-drawl, camp Jewish, retreating, high-toned,

       not very sense-of-humorish Jewish. The pallid women gallery-owners

      whose walls and wine we absorb are also Jewish." [JACOBSON, H.,

      1995, p. 84-85]

      Famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz notes in her biography her avenue into the upper tiers of the art world: "Polly Guggenheim, a sculptor who'd lived in Paris most of her life, became our guide into the art world." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 324]

 

      In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton admitted that the main reason she went into a career as an art historian was to be in a field dominated by Jews:

 

       "I wanted to be where Jews were -- that is, I wanted a profession that

       would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the

       company I kept." [RUBIN- DURSKY, p. 289]

 

      Elsewhere, she notes that:

 

       "On the face of it, art history seemed a gentile profession. For one thing,

       the study of Christian art was its center. In addition, there was an ancient

       Jewish injunction against making graven images. But the fact is, the

       field was filled with Jews. One might even say it was shaped by them.

       Art history is characterized in this century by studies in connoisseurship,

       formalist analysis, the study of iconography and iconology, and social

       analyses. Jews have been prominent in all categories." [LIPTON, p. 285]

 

       "Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "... Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact, the contemporary art scene has a strong Jewish flavor. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish mafia since they command power, prestige, and most of all, money." A few important members of the Jewish mafia in recent decades included dealers Leo Castelli, Ben Heller, and Larry Rubins (as well as Rubins' brother, William, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art), free lance art critic Clement Greenberg and Hilton Kramer (long time art critic for the New York Times, Henry Geldzahler (curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), among many others. "This group is a formidable power," noted Krafetz, "in forming tastes and promoting some schools of art to the exclusion of others." [KRAFETZ, p. 161]

 

      The study of iconography and iconology [keys in modern art evaluation] says Eunice Lipton, was "developed by Erwin Panofsky and practiced by [other] Jewish scholars like Leo Steinberg, Irving Lavin, and Linda Seidel." [LIPTON, p. 286]  Still other Jewish art scholars of prominence include Meyer Schapiro, Walter Friedlander, Robert Rosenblum, and Rosland Krauss, to begin a list just among those termed "formalist." Joseph Hodin was a prominent Jewish art scholar in Britain, as was the Viennese-born E. H. Gombrich, author of the internationally influential textbook in every art student's locker, The Story of Art.  "The notion of Jewish culture," he curiously claims, "was an invention of Hitler." [SEARLE, p. T9]

 

     Traditional Judaism has prohibited "graven images" and idolatry, and throughout most of history Jews were usually reluctant to engage in many types of activities western culture describes today as "art."  "It is ... forbidden to draw the picture of a man," declares the Orthodox Code of Jewish Law, "even only the face of a man." [GANZFRIED, p. 53] "This is when [Jewish] religious law became all powerful," noted the prominent Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber, "The human body is despicable. Seeing is a sin. Art is a sin ... Everything creative is smothered at its first appearance." [OLIN, p. 45] "To a non-Jewish reader," says Margaret Olin, "such judgments appear damning. Buber's readership, however, was Jewish, since his book appeared under Zionist auspices." [OLIN, p. 45]

 

     In 1887, two French archaeologists, Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, reconstructed models of ancient Jewish temples and decided that Jews were the "least artistic of the greatest people of antiquity." [OLIN, p. 42] A year later a prominent German art historian, Wilhelm Lubke, declared that "Jews, having no artistic sensibility of their own, borrowed architectural forms on an eclectic principle from the nations dwelling around them." [OLIN, p. 42]

 

      "[This] remark sounds innocent from a postmodern standpoint," says Margaret Olin, "but for Lubke to characterize Jews as a people who borrowed from others the art they could not create on their own lent a historical basis to the anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as chameleon-like parasites." [OLIN, p. 42]

 

    Even the well-known Jewish turn-of-the-century art historian Bernard Berenson reiterated what Olin calls a recurrent anti-Semitic theme. "The Jews," said Berenson, "like their Ishamaelite cousins the Arabs, and indeed perhaps like all pure Semites (if such there be), have displayed little talent for the visual, and almost none for the figure arts." [OLIN, p. 49]

 

     But, although there was "absent a Jewish visual tradition prior to this century," [FREUDENHEIM, p. 9] there was nothing to prevent them from engaging in the market place of it.  Even "in the avant-garde circles of the twenties, thirties, and forties," notes Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan, "Jews were very often the critics (and entrepreneurs), non-Jews the creators. This was so in literature, painting, music, and the theatre." [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN, p. 173]

 

     "In the broad spectrum of Judeo-Christianity, one group, often figured as Jewish," says Marc Shell, "is relatively comfortable with money and uncomfortable with representational art, while one group, frequently reckoned as Christianity, is relatively comfortable with art and uncomfortable with money. It is, according to this stereopticon, the essence of Judaism to reject representational art and the essence of Christians to expel changing coins from the temple." [SHELL, p. 7]

 

     There is, as we have repeatedly seen, little sacrosanct in Jewish religious tradition that prohibits money-making; certainly the exploitation of objects of human expression would fall within the marketable sphere. The merger of money and art as a single consumer commodity, the whole art world as a field for exploitation, and the profanation of modern art that is regarded as illusorily -- yet secularly -- "sacred," has in our own day been profoundly effected by Jewish influence. Norman Cantor, for example,  notes that:

 

        "A member of the Warburg banking family single-handedly started up

        the field of art history ... [CANTOR, p. 271] ... All the art history

        departments in the world are direct descendants of Aby Warburg's

        Institute (moved from to London in 1932 to escape the Nazis) and his

        great Jewish disciple, Erwin Panofsky. Is it anomalous that a Jew would  

        have been so creative in the study of art that was so little cultivated in

        Jewish tradition? All the more that a liberated white Jew should pursue

        art history. But one can see a Judaizing tendency in Warburg's method

        of art historical criticism. The picture is studied for its 'iconology,' its

        pattern of ideas illustrating textual passages. Art is thereby approached

        in hermeneutic fashion, again recalling Talmudic exegesis, rather than for

        its aesthetic content. Yet the most significant aspect of Warburg's

        development in art history is the demonstration that market capitalism

        could embrace and fund a purely cultural and academic operation. The

        distinct equality of capital was not its materialism, but its liquidity, the

        fungible capacity of capital to transform into any commodity, including

        art and humanities literature that represents a dynamic power in society.

        Aby Warburg's historical and critical mastery of art was structurally the

        same as his brother's mastery in their international bank of money and

        its investment potential. The transformative interaction between art and

       capital is central to the nature of the market economy." [CANTOR, p.

       271]

 

     (As Jewish scholar George Mosse notes about the Warburg art circle: "Erwin Panofsky, one of the Warburg library's most famous collaborators [was] like almost all of its early collaborators a Jew ... [Ernst Cassierer was] the Warburg library's most prolific author.") [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 53]

 

      "Jews may or may not have become more culture conscious," suggests Gerald Krefetz, "but they certainly were among the first to realize that modern art is not a bad investment ... [Some Jews saw] in modern art one of the most lucrative ways to duplicate money since the invention of compound interest." [KREFETZ, p. 146] "The linkage of art and commercial gain," notes Alfred Lindemann, "became more important in the United States than in any other country in history." [LINDEMANN, p. 207] (Coincidence that Jewish administrator Lee Caplin "created and directed the Federal Program 'The Business of Art and the Artist' while serving as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts?") [CAPLIN, L., 1989, p. ix] "Some dealers are commodity brokers, not selling pork bellies or soybean futures, but work by recognized artists, mostly dead," says Krafetz, "They buy and sell their works as they would any other product ... They are basically brother traders." [KRAFETZ, p. 147]

 

     A good example of such attitudes of quite literally "brother traders" can be found in a 1994 article in ARTnews that profiles three Jewish art investors -- brothers Joseph, David, and Ezra Nahmad, heirs to a Syrian banking fortune. "Secretive and elusive," reporter Andrew Decker also observes that the brothers "are among the richest art traders in the world. They are also among the least known ... They have one of the largest stockpiles of art in the world ... The inventory ... consists of about 1,000 paintings that usually sit untouched in a warehouse ... [DECKER, p. 116] ... According to several sources, Joseph's greatest interests are money, art, and women, roughly in that order." [DECKER, p. 119] Joseph has been convicted in France for currency violations; in Italy he was jailed for having 25,000 stolen British pounds in his possession. He was also investigated in Italy for income tax evasion, owing over $13 million. In 1973 the Nahmad brothers were found to be in the possession of Giacometti bronzes that had been stolen eight years earlier.

 

     In Israel, the hundreds of thousands of Jews flooding into Israel in recent years have brought with them art treasures from Russia, particularly old Russian Orthodox Christian icons. They are sold in Israel to dealers, collectors, or tourists for anywhere from $500 to $30,000. Their values can range from $500 to $2.5 million; the best quality pieces are sent from Israel to Europe or America for higher price resale. "Taking them out of the Soviet Union  -- or its successor independent republics," notes the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "is illegal. But the immigrants take the risk, often bribing custom officials to look the other way." [SALOME, p. A6]

 

      In 1995 Dmitri Yakubovsky, once kicked out of Russian military school for what he decried as anti-Semitism, and later owner of a $5.3 mansion in suburban Toronto, had a new home. It was "a decrepit Russian prison cell in St. Petersburg's Kresty Detention Center. He was arrested in Moscow last December and is charged with complicity in the theft of a historic $130-million collection of rare far Eastern and antique European manuscripts from the Russian National Library." [GOLD, J., p. 37]   The police laid a trap for Yakubovsky, "his arrest followed immediately, and the net expanded to Israel, where a group of Israelis were arrested." [WARD, p. B6]

    A venerable Israeli "Holocaust museum" has even been involved in international art smuggling from the former Soviet Union. In 2001, the Associated Press noted that

     "In a secret operation, Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has
     smuggled out of Ukraine fragements of murals by Polish-Jewish artist Bruno
      Schulz, sparking an international controversy. Yad Vashem maintains it
     was merely exercising its right to preserve the works of a prominent
     Jewish writer, artist and Holocaust victim, but Ukrainian and Polish
     officials say their removal was a crime." [SHARGORODKY, S., 6-20-01]
 

 

      In such an international art sphere, in 1995 ARTnews published a piece about the man who "is spending more freely than any other collector in history," an Iranian-born Jew, now an American citizen living in Great Britain, Nasser Khalili. His personal collection of Islamic art alone is insured for $1.5 billion. Khalili spent $7.5 million just to publish a thirty volume catalogue of the Islamic works he owns. Among other genres of his 27,000 art objects is a Japanese art collection worth as much as $100 million, Russian enamels and Faberge, ancient Mesopotamian pottery figures, 19th-century Spanish metalwork, Swedish bridal tapestries (1750-1850), Indian woven silks (1200-1500), and 16 of 50 pre-16th century silks "all in Tibetan monasteries until the 1980s." [NORMAN, p. 120] An early Jewish-Iranian adviser to Khalili was Mehdi Mahboubian "who was the most important of the group of Jewish Iranian art dealers in Tehran in the 1970s and acted as a personal adviser to the shah and shahbanu [the shah's wife]." [NORMAN, p. 120]

     Rabbi Alan Lew notes the curiously incongruous expressions of Zen master/art dealer "Rudrananda":

     [There was] a guru named Rudrananda, or, as he was known, Rudi. Rudi's
     real name was Albert Rudolph. He was a Jewish guy who grew up in Brooklyn
     ... [LEW, A., 1999, p. 51] [He had] a large store ... where all of Rudi's students
      lived. The store was lined with tonkas, Tibetan tapestries, and priceless Buddhas.
     Some of them were very large, over six feet tall, and all of them were
     exquisite. Rudi had stood at the Indian border when the Tibetans were fleeing
     the Chinese, buying all their priceless Buddhas and art treasures. Now he
     was an art dealer, selling his treasures to museums and extremely wealthy
     people. I had to wait a long time while he obsequiously waited on museum
     representative and millionaires, periodically going to the back of the store
     where one or two of his students were meditating on him. He would put his
     hand on their heads and somehow transmit energy to them, and they would
     go into convulsions. Other students were coming to see him for consultations.
     It was as if Rudi was giving off electricity. The more advanced the students
     were, the more electrified they would become until they were trembling, all
     in the midst of high-powered transactions over statuary. The millionaires who
     came to buy art objects seemed totally oblivious to everything that was going
     on and never got jolted. It was in the midst of all this that Rudi told me I
     should drop everything and come study with him, that he would make me
     rich, and that I would get laid all the time. 'You should have seen the knockers
     on the woman I was just with in Boston,' he said." [LEW, A., 1999, p. 54-55]
  

     In Switzerland, Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher own "one of the world's greatest accumulations of modern art." [GREEN, D., p. 37]  139 works by 77 artists were exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1998. In Los Angeles,  "in the early 1990s," notes Tom King,

     "with his purchased of David Hockney's Double Portrait, [Jewish Hollywood      
     mogul David] Geffen began a buying spree that soon made the art world take
     note. He built a collection of modern masterpieces that, for the artists and periods
     he favored, was unparalleled, including many of the most valuable works by Jackson
     Pollock and Jasper Johns. [KING, T., 2000, p. 477]

 
 

     In England, Jewish advertising mogul Charles Saatchi and his wife "have built a collection of modern art that is regarded today as perhaps the most important of its kind in the world in private hands," largely concentrating on "American minimalists." [FALLON, p. 325]  By the 1980s Saatchi was spending $1 million a year on new art acquisitions.  Among  his interests was a "heavy investment in the art of [Jewish painter] Julian Schnabel." [GLUECK, p. 2, p. 27] Norman Rosenthal of the British Royal Academy suggested that "the Saatchis are probably the most important collectors of modern art in anywhere in the world." [FALLON, p. 335]  Political artist Hans Haacke once held an exhibition  (called "Taking Stock") "which was an attack on the Saatchis, their advertising empire, and on Mrs. Thatcher [the British Prime Minister who was built to power with the help of Saatchi advertising]." [FALLON, p. 334]

 

      Kevin Goldman even suggests that:

 

     "Advertising is an industry in which the amount of money to be made

     rivals the fortunes made by investment bankers and robber barons.

     Indeed, one [advertising] man, Charles Saatchi, made so much money

     in advertising that he was able to control the world's contemporary art

     market." [GOLDMAN, p. 21]

 

      "The Saatchi Collection," says Alison Fendley, "has been a focus of debate in the world of contemporary art since it opened to the public in 1985. Little is known about the inner workings of the Saatchi Gallery; even today, its finances are mysterious." [FENDLEY, p. 6]

 

     Looking for an ikat, "a rare textile from Uzbekistan?" Try Guido Goldman, who in the last twenty years has amassed the largest private ikat collection from Central Asia in the world. (Goldman's father, Nachum, was the "President of the World Jewish Congress and key player in a host of other Jewish organizations.") [CEMBALEST, HOW, p. 11] )

     Suits of armor? Medieval artifacts? Judaica? Barry Trupin "owned one of the largest private collections of Judaica in America, as well as a world-renowned collection of medieval artifacts and suits of armor. His pride and joy was a suit of armor from Hever Castle in England that had belonged to Henry II. Trupin wanted to own the armor so passionately that he paid $3.2 million for it at auction, outbidding both the Tower of London and the Louvre." [GAINES, S., 1998, p. 231]

 

     How about the works of French poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau? In 1995 Jewish business mogul Severin Wunderman shut down his "Severin Wunderman Museum" in southern California and donated "the world's largest collection of works" by Cocteau to the University of Texas. Wunderman planned to move to France to live in his restored 15th century castle. [HOWLETT, p. E1] The works of artist Andrew Wyeth? In the 1980s, Hollywood producer Joseph E. Levine sold the world's largest collection of Wyeth paintings. [ARONSON, S., 1983, p. 187]

     Jewish TV personality Allen Funt (of Candid Camera fame) began buying relatively cheap paintings by artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) to "decorate his apartment." Ruskin had once described Alma-Tadema as "the worse painter of the nineteenth century." "Funt," says Karl Meyer, "proceeded to acquire more and more of the artist's work; soon enough, publicity being what it is, there were newspaper features describing his hobby, and Funt had become the unlikely agent of Alma-Tadema's rehabilitation." After the Metropolitan Museum put on a show of Funt's collection, Funt sold it all ("In all fairness," says Karl Meyer, "he needed the money since he had recently been defrauded of $1,200,000 in Candid Camera profits by his longtime accountant, who later committed suicide.") [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 184-185]
 

 

     Native American art? In 1998 Stanley Marcus, chairman emeritus of the Neiman Marcus luxury store, put his American Indian art collection up for auction at Sotheby's. In charge of the sale was Ellen Taubman, the head of Sotheby's Indian art department for 25 years, and the daughter of Sotheby's board chairman, Jewish real estate mogul Alfred Taubman. Picasso? In 1998, Victor and Sally Ganz put up for auction their art stash, including "the most important privately-held collection of works by Picasso in America." Expected sales figures ranged from $125 million to half a billion dollars. [HANDWERKER, 11-10-97]  (Picasso's first art "contract" was signed with prominent Jewish dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in 1912). [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 168] In 1999, an auction of art (returned after confiscation by the Nazis decades ago) netted the Rothschild family $90 million.

 

     Art from Germany? Going to auction in 2000, Marvin and Janet Fishman's properties were worth an estimated $16 million. It was "a collection of some 160 works, one of the most comprehensive groups of early 20th century German art ever to be formed in private hands." [RONNER, M., 7-30-2000, p. 16]

 

      Anything else? Jewish dealer Ronnie Darvick has, over the years,  even sold the gun that killed Lee Harvey Oswald (for $220,000), Marilyn Monroe's certificate of conversion to Judaism when she married Jewish playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, the writings of mass murderer Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler's autograph. "My mother had her whole family wiped out in Poland," says Darvick, "Her attitude was, he'd be turning over in his grave if he knew a Jew was making money off his autograph." [THOMAS, p.G8]

     In 1981 Charles Hamilton, an art and documents dealer, wrote about his auction world experiences:

      "In November, 1975, I put up at auction several unusual Nazi items, one of
      which instantly captivated the press. It was an ornate, gold-plated license plate
      used on Hitler's parade limousine. He'd presented it to his mistress, Eva Braun,
      because she was intrigued by flashy beauty. The plate was made of heavy brass
      plated in gleaming gold. There was an embossed swastika in the upper left and
      a Nazi eagle in the upper right. The plate bore the legend: 'Reichskanzler -- Deutschland.'
      Not more than two doors away from the Conrad Suite at the Waldorf-Astoria where
      I was holding the sale of Hitler's license plate, there was by chance a meeting of the
      B'nai B'rith, an assemblage of pensive graybeards wearing yarmulkes. A television      
      reporter perceived the anomaly.
         'May I borrow that license plate for a few minutes?' he asked.
        'Of course,' I said.
      I followed him and his television crew into the B'nai B'rith conference. The
      reporter selected an old man who looked as though he might have suffered the
      brutalities of a concentration camp.
        'Sir,' he said, 'Mr. Hamilton, the autograph dealer, is auctioning off, just down
      the hall, this license plate from Hitler's limousine. May I have your opinion of the sale?'
        'Disgusting! I cannot believe that anyone would sell or buy such a revolting object.'
     The reporter asked the same question of three or four other elderly members of the      
     assemblage. The answers were all vehement denunciations of me and my auction.
     After the license plate was sold for $3,500 to a Jewish dealer, the reporter asked me what      
     I thought of the sale." [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. p. 180-181]

     Elsewhere, Hamilton notes another such story:

     "In the fall of 1979 a young man, who introduced himself as Aaron Goldberg, brought
      me for auction a small sheaf of unused stationery imprinted with Hitler's name and       
      address.
         'I take it your father brought these back from Germany after the war,' I said,       
      recognizing the paper as that often used by Hitler in writing to lower army echelons.
         'No,' he explained. 'My father was too old for the army. He owned a printing shop
      in Brooklyn. Two or three years before we got into the war, he was asked by the Nazi       
      embassy in New York to print some official stationery for Hitler. It was tough at that
      time to get any sort of work and although Jewish, my father took the job. I found
      these sheets in the back of the shop.'" [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p.182]

      In England, in 1989 a Jewish entrepreneur, Andrew Benjamin, was evicted by his Jewish landlord when it was discovered that Benjamin's rented space was a store called "Cutdown," which was "selling Nazi clothing and medals, as well as racist records, literature, and videos." [HOROWITZ, D.] (Conversely, in a Jewish censorial action against an Internet provider, France's International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Student Union went to court in Europe to seek to ban an on-line Yahoo Internet auction of Nazi memorabilia. "Is Yahoo expected," complained the company, "to check who is on-line and comply with the laws of every other country?") [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 5-16-2000]

     Jewish activism to stop the sale of Nazi memorabilia is odd considering the vast experience of art and documents dealer Charles Hamilton in the selling of Nazi items:

      "In the past twenty years I've sold at auction thousands of Nazi relics and
      documents. And nearly always such sales have evoked criticism, harrowing
      experiences, or even threats on my life ... Today the big threat to me is not
      from bombs [Hamilton once had a bomb threat for having a Hitler photo for
      sale in his gallery window] but from collectors who are stampeding me and
      other autograph dealers in their frenzy to stock up on letters and documents
      of Hitler and his henchmen before the price goes through the roof. A letter of
      Hitler's is now worth five of Churchill's and ten of Franklin D. Roosevelt's.
      Who's in the Third Reich rat race? The Germans are buying. The British are
      buying. But most of all it's Jewish collectors in America. They bid with aliases
      or anagrams, from behind pillars or half-closed doors, or signal the auctioneer
      furtively. Their names are top secret.

      Is it just the fascination of evil and violence? Maybe. But as one Jewish collector       
      explained to me: 'It's like having the head of the hunter on the wall instead of the
      hunted.'" [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. 172, 174]

     Hamilton continues:

     "One of the outstanding Nazi collections in America was formed by the late
      Philip D. Sang, whose collection of Judaica I recently appraised for presentation
      to Brandeis University. I helped Sang to build his superb assemblage of Jewish
      letters and documents and I helped him to gather his huge and important Nazi
      collection. Among the historic items that came from my sales were the Nazi
      top-secret plan for the invasion of Holland and Belgium and Mussolini's own
      copy of Nietzche's Man and Superman, annotated with Il Duce's own ideas for       
      implementing the philosophers' vision.

      Another Nazi collector, famed for his physical education courses, once told me
      that his entire family was wiped out in an Austrian concentration camp during the       
      Holocaust. Yet I never met any man so enthralled with the Nazis, especially the
      more brutal of them. He liked to ensconce his villains in spectacular frames. I
      once put together for him an 'ensemble' of Hitler and Goering, with examples of
      some of the medals worn by the Fuehrer and his pompous air marshall. As my
      customer stood admiring the finished product, glittering with medals, he commented
      on my 'superb job' and I couldn't refrain from asking: 'What are you going to do with it?'

     'Why,' he said, 'I'm going to hang it in my living room.'

      I couldn't think of any reply except: 'Not the place I'd pick to hang Hitler and
      Goering.'" [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. p. 172, 174]

      In Miami, among other business projects, Jack Sugarman, "prominent auctioneer" and owner of Jack Sugarman Auctioneers, once organized an auction of paperweights owned by Oscar Schindler (of "Schindler's List" fame). In 2000, Sugarman went to prison for embezzlement of funds from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 4-18-2000] Then there is "Chicago collector" Million [Is this the Jewish source magazine's typographical error?] Kohn, who has amassed 700 Holocaust-related artifacts, including "a list of people scheduled for extermination on July 5, 1943," "a stuffed pillow with human hair, a bar of soap made from human body fat, and a patch of skin bearing a tattoo." He has exhibited his collection in 14 countries. [LUM, R., 11-19-99, p. 3A]

 

      The man, Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald was Jewish. So was Abraham Zapruder, the man who filmed President J.F. Kennedy being shot in Dallas. Zapruder sold the original 8mm film to Time magazine for $150,000. "Concerned that a Jewish man's profiting from the assassination could touch off a wave of anti-Semitism," notes Washington Post reporter George Lardner Jr., "his lawyer suggested that he donate the first $25,000 to a fund for a Dallas police officer killed that day, J. D. Tippett. Zapruder readily agreed." [LARDNER, G., 1998, p. A11]  Zapruder died in 1970.

 

     Inexplicably, the film was returned to Zapruder's heirs in 1975 by Time Inc. Over the years, the Zapruder family (one of Abraham's sons is a Washington DC lawyer) has been known to charge outlandish fees for the use of the assassination footage. Two independent filmmakers who were told that permission to reproduce the footage in their own movie would cost $30,000, successfully sued the Zapruders to use the historical material. [MARGOLICK, D., 1988, p. B20] In 1997, the U.S. government appropriated the original movie film (it was already in storage, at the Zapruders' request, at the National Archives.)  The Justice Department went to arbitration with the Zapruder family to decide "just compensation" for the 26 seconds of footage. The government offered $3 million; the family asked for $30 million. Three Justice Department judges eventually decided (2-1) to give the family $16 million. (Kenneth Feinberg and Arlin Adams voted yes, and Walter Dellinger no -- he suggested $3-5 million as a fair market value). Incredibly, the Zapruders' also retained copyright -- any reproduction of the film would be subject to a fee to the family. [REICHMAN, D., 8-3-99]

 

      As the Quincy Patriot Ledger (Quincy, Massachusetts) editorialized:

 

     "You and I [taxpayers] get the bill and the government gets to keep the

     original footage. Besides the $16 million, the Zapruder heirs retain the

     copyright, so they can sell the footage another 16 million times ... The

     family compared its treasure to a Van Gogh painting." [QUINCY, p. 12]

     (Even the man who painted John F. Kennedy and his wife "for their White House portraits" was Aaron Shikler, also Jewish. [Jacqueline Onassis] also notes in her biography "David Levine, the now-legendary caricaturist.") [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 208]
 

 

     Elsewhere, Stanley Slotkin, the Jewish founder of the Abbey Rents company, once bought a pile of rocks dug from a tunnel next to Christianity's traditional Jesus nativity site (in Bethlehem) in the 1960s; in more recent years his descendants set the souvenir stones in jewelry frames and are marketing them in TV commercials (featuring actor Ricardo Montalban) as "nativity stones," selling for as high as $395 apiece. [DART, J., p. B1]

 

       Of course Jews are active in the specifically Jewish art market too. Wilbur Wendell Pierce (originally: Wilbur Persofsky), for instance, even has "an international reputation for his collection of concentration camp currency, which he amassed during the past five years [1991-96]." [BIBERMAN, p. 69]

 

    In the field of archeological swindles, Moses Shapira was the pioneer in the field. "Shapira," notes Israeli art curator Irit Salmon, "was the first to recognize that archeology could be a profitable business." Shapira, a Russian Jewish transplant to Jerusalem, sold a variety of fake archaeological artifacts in the late 1800s, including recently manufactured items he misrepresented to major European museums. "His exposure as a fraud in 1884," notes Shoshana Sappir, "led to his suicide a few months earlier." [SAPPIR, S., 7-31-2000] In Great Britain, famed Jewish swindler Adam Worth was behind the theft in 1876 of Thomas Gainsborough's painting of the Duchess of Devonshire, which only a few weeks earlier "had been sold at auction for 10,000 guineas, at that time the highest price ever paid for a work of art, causing a sensation." [MacIntyre, B., 1997, p. 3]

    Stephen Nohlgren notes the illustrious art fraud history of Elmyr de Hory:

     "While foraging at one garage sale, I paid a few bucks for a book called
     FAKE! [full title: FAKE! The Story of Elymyr de Hory, the Greatest Art
     Forger of Our Times, by Clifford Irving], a biography of Elmyr de Hory,
     perhaps the greatest art forger of all time. De Hory was a Jewish Hungarian
     aristocrat and would-be artist who lived in Paris in the 1920s ... During
     World War II, De Hory's parent's were killed and the family riches
     confiscate. He was stranded in Paris with no allowance -- but an undiminished
     taste for high living ... [He] launched a 20-year forgery career. Never
     successful with his own work. De Hory cranked out a prodigious body
     of fakery. He could mimic almost all of his old acquaintances. To sell his
     fakes, he'd drop hints that his father had amassed a private collection in
     the 1930s that was later smuggled out of Hungary. He sold to art dealers
     and museums. His work started showing up in art books as originals. He
     forged so many Dufys that an expert once rejected two real Dufy's as
     fraudulent because he mistakenly assumed that De Hory's hand and style
     were the correct ones. He was finally caught in 1967 and spent a few months
     in a Spanish jail." [NOHLGREN, S., 7-16-00]

    Auction gallery owner Charles Hamilton notes another Jewish con-man:

     "The ability to bilk one's clients at auction is a fine art, make no mistake
      about it. To succeed for a lifetime without detection or exposure, the auction-
      buying crook must have the cunning of a polecat, the ethics of a
      Gabon viper, and the acquisitive drive of a dung-beetle. All these
      feral qualities were uniquely fused in the late Lew David Feldman,
      a rare book and manuscript dealer who operated under a firm name
      devised from his cutely bastardized initials -- The House of El
      Dieff." [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. 19]
 

 

     More recently, in 1987, the Jewish Week ran an article with a headline declaring "Israeli Art World Stunned By Forgery Allegations." Ten Israelis were eventually arrested in the scam, including gallery owners and art dealers. "80 high quality fakes" of prominent Israeli artists were discovered in the ring, as well as stolen art from important artist Eliahu Gat. [JW, 4-7-87, 4-10-87]

 

     In the United States, in 1982 the state of New York created a law, sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, which sought to undermine the busy market in stolen Torah scrolls ("150 .... in recent years in New York alone"). Much of the Torah market theft was attributed to a "Brooklyn-based Russian Jewish crime ring." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 58] In the new system, documentation of the previous scroll owner would henceforth be necessary for any sales transaction. [GALLOB]  Although a Sefer-Torah "is the holiest object in the Jewish religion," a Manhattan Judaica dealer, Herbie Stavsky, noted that "as long as people like money, there will always be someone who will steal it. Goes to show you that nothing's sacred. Anything for the almighty dollar." [KALMANOFSKY, p. 55]

 

     As evidenced with stolen Torah pages, a growing realm of corruption is the business of buying and selling Jewish antiquities. In 1990 the Jewish Week noted recent criminal cases including the $60,000 forgery of a 15th century haggadah by an Italian Jew, an antique Hungarian book of Psalms that "was stolen only to appear at an Israeli auction," and a Hassidic art dealer, Chaim Schneilbalg, who was murdered in a Jerusalem hotel while meeting an art client. A suspect was an Israeli living in West Germany who was "reportedly involved in counterfeiting, the running of brothels, and a previous insurance claim of dubious validity." Schneilbalg, reported the Jewish Week, "was said to have been jockeying for control of the market in Jewish manuscripts suddenly available in newly capitalist Eastern Europe." [MARK, J, p. 31]

 

     In an overview of the growing art market for Jewish artifacts, Jonathan Mark in Jewish Week noted that

 

    "Ignorance and fraud were creating such havoc that in the last twenty

    years Judaica buyers and sellers increasingly turned to non-Jewish auction

    houses to protect themselves from each other ... With many American

    Jews experiencing a rise in their discretionary incomes in the 1970s and

    80s, more began buying and selling Judaica as an investment or hobby. It

    was often used for Jewish fund raising ... But even in auction houses ...

    certain dealers were known to work in collusion ... The recent fascination

    with the Holocaust has inflated the market even further. Purchasing an item

    that was desecrated by the Nazis was considered to be very chic

    'mitzvah.'" [MARK, J, p. 31]

 

     By 2000, not much had changed. "Synagogues across Europe are being robbed of treasures worth hundreds of thousands of dollars," noted the Jerusalem Report. Highly suspect were "two Israeli con artists" who continued to reappear at synagogues, particularly in the Netherlands. [LEVY, R., 2-14-2000] In 2001, Israeli police arrested Yerahmiel Hershler, Aharon Stefansky and Amnon Edri in the Jewish state with stolen religious artifacts from synagogues from "Britain, Gibraltar and a number of European countries" worth "at least $2 million ... A fourth suspect was arrested in northern Israel. A police spokesperson said additional arrests were expected." HAAS, D., 3-2-01, p. 2]

 

                       

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

 

      Entrepreneurial Jews have been especially active in the European "art scene" since Emancipation in the 1800s. "By the opening of the late 19th century," says Howard Sachar, "Jewish [art] salons in Berlin were well established as the center of German social life ... Writers, artists, intellectuals and viveurs all found good food and even better conversation at the gatherings." [SACHAR, p. 150] (Much earlier, the wealthy Amsterdam Jewish community often paid for their depiction by the great painter Rembrandt. [37 of his 200 male portraits are of Jews. "When Rembrandt fell on hard times in his later years and became bankrupt," says M. H. Goldberg, "he was given both spiritual and material help by a rabbi.") [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 122]

    There were also the likes of Jacques-Louis David:

     "Realizing the propaganda potential of art and eager to assert France's
     primacy in all fields of culture, Napoleon reshaped the academy into a
     superb machine for the production of art. Jacques-Louis David, a former
     member of the Royal Academy and an ardent Bonapartist, was one of
     the governing elite who spurred artists to glorify France in painting classical
     themes or the battles and heroes of the day." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 170]

 

     Jews have been particularly preeminent in the economic exploitation of art and the formation of its commercial value since the rise of "modern art" in the 1880s. In that era the center of the art world was Paris. "[There were] two groups of important art dealers in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century," notes Peter Watson, " ... one was made up of [Daniel-Henri] Kahnweiler, Paul Guillaume, Felix Feneon, and the Rosenbergs [Leonce and Paul], dealers in contemporary works .... The other was an equally tight-knit but smaller group of dealers who formed the elite secondary markets dealing with Old Masters ... and increasingly in the Impressionists. At the center of this group were [Nathan] Wildenstein, [Rene] Gimpel, and [Jacques] Seligmann. Loosely attached to them were three other dealers in London and New York, [Samson] Wertheimer and [Roland] Knoedler [later run by Charles Henschel until after World War II]." [WATSON, p. 219-220]  "[Paul] Rosenberg's strait-forward approach and steep prices shocked Parisian art circles and made him the subject of savage criticism." He even once said, "As for me, a painting is beautiful when it sells." [FELICIANO, p. 54] Among those in Rosenberg's art stable was Picasso, formerly signed to David-Henry Kahnweiler and Rosenberg's brother Leon. All these people were Jewish.

 

      Further, "one of the oldest art dynasties in France" was founded by Alexandre Bernheim [FELICIANO, p. 75]  and David David-Weiss, a prominent art collector, became the President of the Board of Directors of the French National Museum in 1933. Across the border, Max Friedlander, "one of the leading experts on Rembrandt," directed the Berlin Museum in the same era. [EPSTEIN, 1996, p 290]

 

     Disgruntled with such Jewish control of the art market, in 1915 a lecturer, Tony Tollett, delivered an address to the French Academy of Sciences, Literature, and Arts in Lyon entitled: "On the Influence of the Jewish-German Corporation of Paris Art Dealers on French Art." [WATSON, p. 190] By 1930, notes Pierre Assouline, "according to dealer Pierre Loeb, during this period four art dealers out of five were Jewish, as were four out of five art collectors ... Wilhelm Uhde who had made the same observations, added art critics to the list." [ASSOULINE, p. 230]  After the Nazi's takeover of France, notes Hector Feliciano, "deploring the lack of experts available to advise German clients, a number of the Nazi information services in Paris explained that this was because most of the premiere art experts had been Jews. Since the 1920s, they had contributed to the development and maintenance of a worldwide network of wealthy art buyers. This network collapsed as soon as they were denied a role in Europe's largest art market." [FELICIANO, p. 124]

 

     Nachum Gidal notes that in Germany, James Simon "made a gift of his world famous collection of Italian renaissance paintings, sculptures, medallions, and bronze" to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, "on whose governing board he sat." [GIDAL, p. 348] Other prominent German Jewish collections included those of Marcus Koppel, Franz and Rober von Medelssohn, Alfred Beit, Oscar Huldschinsky, Eduard Arnhold, Leopold Sonnemann, H. H. Meyer, and Philip Rothschild, among others. "The greatest collection of German 19th century painters," continued Gidal, "belonged to Max Bohm and Rudolf Mosse; the greatest collection of Old Master drawings was assembled by Paul Davidson." [GIDAL, p. 348] Among the major Jewish German art dealers were Alfred Flechtheim, Herwath Walden, and Paul Cassirer in Berlin, and Bernheim & Heinemann in Munich.

 

     Many Jewish art dealers grew to be extraordinarily successful. In 1909 Jacques Seligman "astounded Paris by acquiring the Palais de Sagan, an even more luxurious house ... Seligman was the main [art] supplier for the French Rothschilds as well as [J. D.] Morgan; he was also known for his contacts in Russia ... " [WATSON, p. 224] "Possibly the most successful, and certainly, the most secretive [art dealer] was [Nathan] Wildenstein," says Peter Watson, " ...  Another reason for Wildenstein's success was his close association with Duveen and Gimpel, which made each others businesses truly international." [WATSON, p. 220-221]

 

     "Georges Wildenstein," notes Hector Feliciano, "was very well known and actively involved in art circles in a number of countries, including those within the Nazi sphere of influence. Even after the French armistice and the German occupation, Wildenstein seems to have taken advantage of this network to organize a number of deals with the Germans." [FELICIANO, H., p. 61] Feliciano was actually sued for such statements about Wildenstein and the Nazis by the art dealer's heirs in the 1990s. Feliciano counter sued, and with relevant historical evidence, won the case.

 

     "Notoriously dishonest," [WATSON, p. 166] Joseph Duveen was another prominent Jewish art dealer in the early decades of the 1900s, "the most successful art broker of the twentieth century, this trade -- thanks to his undoubted charisma and his gift for salesmanship, laced with lavish doses of corruption." [SIMPSON, ARTFUL, p. 1] Upon his move from Europe to New York City, Duveen was charged (in a legal "case that attracted enormous publicity") with evading customs duties of -- at today's values -- $102 million. Connections with several United States Senators and other men of influence helped Duveen evade the law. [WATSON, p. 166]

 

      Duveen had a long -- and secret --  association with the very prominent and influential Jewish art connoisseur, critic, and esthete, Bernard Berenson.  Berenson (whose original name was Bernhard Valvrojenski), an expert on Christian art, converted to Protestantism and then Catholicism, but noted in his diary,” At times I seem to myself to be a typical 'Talmud Jew.'" He also wrote that he longed to drop "the mask of being goyim and return to Yiddish reminiscences ..." [RUBIN, p. 75] In 1944, Berenson wrote a piece called, "Open Letter to American Jewry." In it, notes Barry Rubin, "Berenson warned that envious Christians would persecute them, 'even if you were innocent as the angels ... and you are far from that.'" [RUBIN, p. 76]

 

       For his less than innocent part, Berenson regularly colluded with Duveen over a twenty-five year period in perpetuating continuous fraud and deceit upon unsuspecting art collectors.  "Berenson was a genius," writes Colin Simpson, "who early in life channeled his gifts into the study of that finest flower of Christian art: Italian Renaissance painting. By the age of 35 he had become the world's leading authority ... The curators of many of world's greatest museum's were either his former pupils or his disciples ... They came to hear his opinions, take his advice, and pay homage to his scholarship and his intellectual integrity. A small minority saw him as a disgustingly rich, opinionated, spiteful tyrant ... But only a handful were aware that it was Berenson, not Duveen, who was probably the most successful and unscrupulous art dealer the world has ever seen." [SIMPSON, ARTFUL, p. 1]

 

     "The raw truth about both men," notes Peter Watson, "... is... complex and considerably ... sordid." [WATSON, p. 167] For his part, from 1911 to 1937 Berenson's hidden association with Duveen netted him alone the equivalent -- in our day -- of $150 million. [SIMPSON, ARTFUL, p. 2]  "Berenson,' notes Eunice Lipton, "shaped the very terrain of Renaissance studies, not to mention the market for what became its masterpieces." [LIPTON, p. 285]

 

      Another of Berenson's Jewish contemporaries who had a strong hand in shaping American art history was Paul Sachs. "Though not as widely known as Berenson," notes George Goodman, "Paul Joseph Sachs, too, had a patriarchal influence in the world of art museums -- in America and abroad. Unlike Berenson, however, Sachs was born to privilege." [GOODMAN, #2, p.2, p. 54]  Sachs' father and uncle founded the prominent Goldman, Sachs New York investment firm.  Paul Sachs, an Associate Director of Harvard's Fogg Museum and chairman of that college's Fine Arts Department, aided a number of Jewish art scholar protégés, including James Rorimer (eventual Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)." "Two other Jewish protégés," notes Goodman, "happened to be Sach's relatives" -- Charles Kuhn and James Sachs Plaut (eventual head of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art). [GOODMAN, #2, p. 57] Yet another Sachs relative, Samuel Sachs II, became head of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1973, then later Director of the Detroit Institute for the Arts and New York's Frick Collection. Paul Sachs' grandson, Franklin W. Robinson, also became -- in 1979 -- the Director of the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, and later Director of the Johnson Museum at Cornell University. The patriarch Sachs, says Goodman, "largely invented the notion of curatorial training." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 145]

 

     Jewish pre-World War II influence in the European art world -- and Jewish influence in it now -- may be appreciated by this observation by John Conklin. While some wealthy German-Jews -- like financiers William Weinberg, Georges Lurcy, Siegfried Kramarsky, and Jacob Goldschmidt -- were able to get their art out of Europe as capital,

 

      "In 1973 the Austrian government declared that the art in its possession

       that it had been unable to return to the rightful owners and heirs would

       become state property, saying that there were no longer many claims

       being made. Art magazines and Jewish groups challenged that position

       ... From then until 1985, the Austrian government and Jewish

       organizations worked together to find the owners of the unclaimed

       pieces. In 1985, the Austrian Parliament passed a law to return to their

       rightful owners and heirs more than 8,000 works of art that the Nazis

       had confiscated. Some from museums but most from European Jews ...

       The law established a period until September 1986 for claims to be

       processed; unclaimed works were then to be auctioned off and the

       proceeds divided among Austrian [World War II] resistance groups,

       the Jewish community in Vienna, and Jewish groups in the United States.

       [CONKLIN, p. 222]

                                                 

      With the rise of German fascism, Jewish art historians began emigrating out of Europe. At New York University alone, Jewish refugee art professors included Richard Ettinghaven, Walter Friedlander, Karl Lehman, Alfred Salmony, Guido Schoenberger, and Martin Weinberger. [GOODMAN, #2, p. 61]

 

     Yet another prominent early twentieth century ring of Jewish art dealers was the Stein family: Gertrude, Leo, Michael, and Sarah. "They claimed," says Peter Watson, "often and vociferously, to have discovered modern Art." [WATSON, p. 161] Their famous Parisian salon "was an expression of the Steins' desire to show off and have others take them as seriously as they took themselves ... The Saturday salon made the Steins famous ... Leo took [his] Renoirs and half of the Cézannes to the United States. He was keen to get to New York to try Freudian treatment for three complexes from which he was convinced he suffered: an inferiority complex, a castration complex, and a pariah complex." [WATSON, p. 162]

 

    One of the Stein sisters, Gertrude, became famous as a writer, starting out in America with impressions of Picasso and Matisse which were published in another  influential German-Jewish art dealer's magazine in New York City, Camera Work. This man, Alfred Stieglitz, "editor/dealer/entrepreneur/ impresario/photographer," would "spawn the spectacular exhibition that introduced modern art to the United States. It was a show that would change American taste for all time, that would eventually cause modern art to rival Impressionism in all the salesrooms, and that in the long run would leapfrog New York over Paris as the art capital of the world." [WATSON, p. 163]  For Gertrude Stein's part, "Stein's apparent pride in her Jewish heritage and frequent assertion of Jewish particularity suggests a strong, continuing identity." [ANTLER, J., p. 175]

 

     With the shift in the Art world center from Europe to New York City, the development of the "art market," "art scene," and "art world" -- in all its most important permutations -- continued to be Jewish-dominated. Julien Levy, for example, was a major dealer of surrealist art in the 1930s. Salvadore Dali was "central to Levy's stable ... Julian Levy and his gallery are central to the history of American art between the wars." [ALTSHULER, B., MARCH 1999] Maurice Wertheim (father of Zionist historian Barbara Tuchman, who we have met earlier) was a major art collector. Also, "as president of the American Jewish Committee in the early 1940s, he tried unsuccessfully to foster support for Israeli statehood." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 61] Wealthy Jewish patron Peggy Guggenheim sponsored and helped build the career of famous Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock whose wife, Lee Krasner (formerly Lena Kreisner) was also Jewish. Ms. Guggenheim had a reputation for "bizarre sexual appetites" and claimed to have slept "with practically every man she ever met," including Pollock. [NAIFEH/SMITH, 1989, p. 478] Guggenheim sued Pollock's widow in the 1960s, "charging a failure to hand over at least fifteen works executed by her late husband between 1946 and 1948 when Miss Guggenheim was subsidizing him on the condition that he give her everything he produced." [BURNHAM, p. 89]  For her part, Krasner outlived Pollock by 31 years and amassed a fortune of $26 million, largely from Pollock's estate. "Lee Krasner spent the rest of her life nurturing the Jackon Pollock legend. Through her crafty manipulations, the price of Pollock's paintings skyrocketed into the millions." [GAINES, S., 1998, p. 144]

 

     "After World War II," remarks Gerald Krefetz, "a new element was added to collecting: investment value. Jews were perhaps the first to appreciate the new art and the new ingredient." [KREFETZ, p. 147] Sam Kootz opened a gallery in 1945 (he even experimented, in later years, with selling limited edition art at department stores such as Macy's and Gimbel's.)  He, like some others, came to art with "a training in law" and a background as an advertising executive. Among art dealers, says Marcia Bystryn, "Kootz marks a shift from a concern with establishing a personal bond with the artist to a concern for a marketable product ...  [BYSTRYN, p. 184]  ... [He] was to apply the techniques he learned in the advertising business to that of marketing his artists." [BYSTRYN, p. 185]

 

     Sidney Janis opened his influential gallery in 1948, Leo Castelli ("with his aristocratic manner" [PLATTNER, p. 35] began his own in 1957. "Castelli knows everyone," wrote Sophy Burnham in 1974, "He appears everywhere. An article in Vogue, a spread in Life, a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine." [BURNHAM, p. 36]

    

     Castelli, owner of one of the most influential American art galleries in modern history, is widely credited to have spectacularly maneuvered the art world to his best economic advantage, the consequences which have been profound in art history. In 1964 Robert Rauschenberg, one of the artists in Castelli's "stable," won the prestigious Venice Bienniale Prize. Sophy Burnham notes that:

 

      "It was said that Castelli first handpicked the American Biennale

      commissioner, Alan Solomon, Director of the Jewish Museum; then

      he chose eight American representatives (four of whom were attached to

      his gallery) and the American judges, then trotted off to Europe to

      persuade the other [European] judges ... of the inevitable thunderous

      Rauschenberg landslide ... The first person invited to be the American

      judge had turned the job down on the grounds that he felt he would have

      been unable to exercise his own opinion in the face of American

      pressure. [BURNHAM, p. 45]

 

     "I was somewhat responsible for the Rauschenberg victory," Castelli later admitted to the New York Times Sunday Magazine. "After Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale in 1964," notes Stuart Plattner, "the value of this [genre of] art was 'proven,' and prices for the gallery's artists rose." [PLATTNER, p. 35]  "Anyone can discover an artist," Castelli once said, " but to make him what he is, give him importance, that's really discovery." [ECONOMIST, p. 98]  In this context, Castelli was influential in the "discovery" of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Ellis Kelly, Cy Twombly, and others. [ECONOMIST, p. 99]  "There is no deviousness in [Castelli]," insisted Ivan Karp -- another prominent Jewish art dealer who was formerly employed by Castelli, "He's the victim type." [BURNHAM, p. 47]

    One of the most influential art exhibitions in the early years of the 20th century, featuring 1,300 art works, was the International Exhibition of Modern Art, also known as the Armory Show. As Karl Meyer notes:

     "In 1912 painters Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn toured Europe to gather the
     best examples of the most radical modernist works ... By the end of their
     hegira Davies and Kuhn had assembled the first large assortment of works by
     masters of European modernism to be shown in America ... The Armory Show
     has been accurately described by Lloyd Goodman, former director of the
     Whitney Museum of American Art, as the 'opening gun in the long, bitter
     struggle for modern art in this country.'" [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 100-101]

    (Jewish art mogul Henry Geldzahler, chairman of the Metroplitan Museum museum's twentieth-century art and later commissioner of New York City's Cultural Affairs, also mounted a very influential exhibition in 1969: "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940 to 1970." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 101-102] In the late 1960s, the Metropolitan Museum "assigned five seats on the Metropolitan board to ensure borough-wide representation." Of these five, one was an African-American and three were Jewish: educator Muriel Rosoff Silberstein; Sol Shapiro, a founder of the Bronx Museum of Arts; and Henry Saltzman, former president of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.) [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 114]

 

    Another of the most important New York art sales organizations, still strong today, is the Marlborough Gallery, begun in London in 1948 by two German-Jewish refugees, Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. By the 1980s it had branches in New York City, Zurich, Toronto, Rome, Tokyo, Montreal, and Liechtenstein, an "art world multinational corporation." [KREFETZ, p. 160] The Marlborough Gallery's reputation hit rock bottom in the 1960s -- but survived to prosper -- after an ugly series of lawsuits over the estate of painter Mark Rothko (a suicide). The gallery seriously undervalued his remaining work and tried -- by fraud and conspiracy -- to manipulate and skim them for outrageous profits, ultimately losing the case to Rothko's heirs in court.  Rothko's daughter Kate also successfully sued the executors of her father's estate -- Morton Levine, Theodore Stamos, and Bernard Reiss ("the most celebrated accountant in the art world as far back as the 1940s." [MYERS, J, p. 236] "The only thing that blocks them [the Jewish mafia] from complete control of the art world," Marlborough's Jewish president, Frank Lloyd, proclaimed, "is Marlborough. We're independent. We are the biggest handicap to that clique." [KRAFETZ, p. 161] On another occasion he admitted that "I collect money, not art ... There is only one measure of success in running a gallery: making money." [SMITH, R., 4-8-98]

 

      Lawsuits and counter suits are common between artists and their galleries. "The artist sees the dealer as a leech," observes Sophy Burnham. [BURNHAM, p. 94] Artist William de Kooning sued dealer Sidney Janis, the Marlborough Gallery initiated legal action against Naum Gabo.

 

      Other recent prominent Jewish art dealers include Laurence Rubin, Irving Bloom, Ronald Feldman, Holly Solomon, Ileana Sonnabend (former wife of Leo Castelli), and many others. In 1998 a London newspaper called Jewish dealer Bernard Jacobson "possibly the leading dealer of modern British art." [COOPER, p. 50]   British dealer and art patron Jonathan Silver "established an art gallery for his friend [ultimately art superstar] David Hockney." [DAILY TELEGRAPH, p. 31] Otto Kallir "dealt in expressionist painters ... [He also] became the representative of Grandma Moses and even edited her autobiography." [HEILBUT, p. 218] Andy Warhol's world of Jewish art moguls included Ivan Karp, Irving Blum, and Robert Scull. Henry Geldzahler, a homosexual and curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was "Andy's painting mentor .... Although they were never lovers, the relationship became intimate. Andy spoke to Henry on the phone every night before he went to sleep and every morning as soon as he woke up." [BOCKRIS, V., 1989, p. 158, 101]

     In 1980, Warhol produced a limited series of pictures entitled "Jewish Geniuses," featuring portraits of Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, Sarah Bernhardt, the Marx Brothers, theologian Martin Buber, Louis Brandeis (the "father" of American Zionism), George Gershwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. An accompanying exhibition was featured at New York's Jewish Museum and the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. Bluma Goldstein notes the "eagerness of major Jewish museums to mount and advertize the exhibit and to sell expensive portfolios of the exhibit's serigraphs" and Warhol's shrewdness in targeting Jewish wealth, prominence in the art world, self-infatuation, and vanity:

    "Warhol's preoccupation with money and status is common knowledge and is
     reflected in his many prints of dollar signs and paper money ... New York Times
     art critic Hilton Kramer, in a review of the exhibit at the New York Jewish
     Museum, and David Bourdon, in his book on Warhol, both commented on
     the artist's crass opportunism in targeting a specific sector of the public. [Carrie]
     Rickey calls it 'the synagogue circuit' -- that is middle-class Jews who could be
     counted on to be attracted to things Jewish and contemporary culture and who
     also possessed the means to purchase an expensive portfolio in a 200-count
     limited edition ... Not unlike this sector the public, the Jewish museums were
     drawn to an array of famous Jewish faces artistically displayed by a major artist
     popular for the previous two decades ... Ronald Feldman, owner of a New
     York art gallery involved in many successful commercial ventures of Warhol's
     career, assisted Warhol in selecting Jewish figures, organized the exhibition at
     the New York Jewish museum, and issued the print portfolio for sale."
     [GOLDSTEIN, B., 2000, p. 128]

 

     In 1993 the New York Times Magazine called Arnold Glimcher "the most successful art dealer in New York. With art collector and Hollywood hot-shot Michael Ovitz as one his best friends, Glimcher could personally merge the New York art scene and the Hollywood movie industry." With Ovitz's Hollywood connections, art dealer Glimcher even became a film director. In an overview of his career, the Times noted that he lent "himself a WASP-ish touch in his early days as an art dealer by assigning himself the Nordic-looking name Arne, and now, in Hollywood, [he] adopt[s] the more Jewish Arnie." [SCHWARTZMAN, p. 32]

 

     As art dealer, Glimcher represent "19 of the world's most demanding artists, from Donald Judd and George Baselitze to Joel Shapiro [Ovitz's cousin] and Julian Schnabel." [SCHWARTZMAN, p. 33] Glimcher also represents Jewish artist Jim Dine, with whom he spent two months in Israel. [BOXER, T., 5-26-01] Glimcher's gallery employs dozens of people, including eight full time archivists. Gallery director, Renato Danese, is a former head of the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. "One of the amazing things about my father," said a Glimcher son who headed his dad's art catalogue division, "is that in this high-powered world, with all the various things that he's been successful at, he has this innocence." [SCHWARTZMAN, p. 44]

 

      "So savage was the [art] business (fake forgeries and ruthless competition in an unregulated economy)," wrote Sophy Burnham  in the 1970s, "that the Art Dealers' Association was formed in the early 1960s to help raise the ethics and reputations of dealers." [BURNHAM, p. 90] But some things never change. In September 1997 ARTnews reported an ongoing Justice Department "probe into the business practices of art dealers and auction houses." Subpoenaed galleries included Acquavella, Didier Aaron, William Beadleston, Simon Dickinson, Robert Haboldt, Hirschl and Adler, Kennedy, Knoedler and Company, Otto Naumann, Newhouse, PaceWildenstein, Rosenberg and Stiebel, and the Sotheby's and Christie's art auction houses. [KASTNER, J, p. 43]  "It is believed," said the New York Times, "that about two dozen of New York's more prominent fine art dealers have heard from the Justice Department," [VOGEL, p. A1]  adding  Richard L. Feigen, Colnaghi and Herman Shickman.

 

     In 1991, the Bernard and S. Dean Levy Gallery in Manhattan was found guilty of collusion and fined $100,000.  In 1996, in New Orleans, Federal marshals shut down the Morton M. Goldberg Auction Galleries firm under court order after Morton and David Goldberg were charged with fraud and skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars from a British supplier of art and antiques. [GREG, p. 21]  Also in 1996, major Jewish art dealer and best-selling novelist (The Thief of Light, no less) David Ramus was sentenced to 33 months in prison for fraud, bilking art collecting clients out of millions of dollars. "There are no rules [in the art world]," he waxed as he prepared for jail, "only bloated songs of money and ego. It's a treasure hunt for grown-ups. And it's like dope; nothing -- no profit, no fortune -- is ever enough." [LAURENCE, p. 21]

     In 1999, a Los Angeles Police Department media press release noted

     "A museum art thief was convicted of thefts of fine art from two Los Angeles
     museums. Nureet Granott, 50, used a fake driver's license, a fraudulent credit
     card, and fictitious rental agreement information to garner control of over
      $22,000 of art through the art rental galleries of the UCLA/Armand Hammer
     Musuem of Art and the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1995 ... [Others were fleeced]
     for an estimated $100,000 in goods and services -- from a luxury car to pet bills.
     During the museum thefts, Granott assumed the identity of her sister, Hanit Peretz, who
     is living in Israel. During many of the transactions, Granott was accompanied
     by her husband, David Yehuda Cohen. Both are also suspected of being
     involved in questionable real estate transactions." [LOS ANGELES POLICE,
     8-16-99]

     In 2001, the New York state attorney general filed an injunction against the Antique and Design Center (owned by Jill and Dave Schuster) for selling fraudulent art work over the Internet on e-Bay. It was "the first case of fraud brought by the State against an online art retailer." [ART NEWSPAPER, 5-30-01] The same year, in Boston, art dealers Shirley Sack and Arnold Katzen were "charged with conspiring to launder $4.1 million in drug money." They were arrested "as they attempted to sell paintings, which they claimed were originals by Modigliani and Degas, to a federal agent posing as a drug dealer ... Ms. Sack had been attempting to sell a painting by Raphael and was prepared to accept payment in drug money or from organized crime figures." [MUSEUM SECURITY, 6-3-01]

     Also in 2001, Michel Cohen, originally from France, hit the news with his own spectacular art fraud:

     "Many are calling it the biggest art fraud ever. When all the figures are in,
     art dealer Michel Cohen will have taken the art world for at least $50
     million ... [Art dealing] is a jealous and wary system, where each player
     guards sources and clients, but it is built on an essential trust. This is the
     system that has made the art market the largest unregulated money market
     in the world -- a market that Michel Cohen was in a position to loot."
     [HADEN-GUEST, A., 2-6-01] ... Whether for purpose of convenience,
     privacy or to avoid paying taxes or the authorities, great sums of money
     are loaned all the time to purchase art. An inhabitant of the art world's
     periphery, Cohen knew this ... The art world's secrecy worked to Cohen's
     advantage. Dealers seldom want their peers to know what they are doing."
     [HADEN-GUEST, A., 2-12-01]
     
 

     Always within the art world matrix of incestuous connection and often corruption, the artist has usually championed a rarified "humanities"-based world perspective that is usually antithetical to the daily economic morass in which he or she is mired. Burnham notes that

  

       "[The artist] appears ... at a museum opening or gallery party, for it is

       politic to circulate in the art crowd. He mingles with the black-tie patrons

       of the arts and acts his own iconoclast part ... all the while hating what

       he is doing: the terrible dancing with a prospective patron, the posing,

       while at the back of his mind lurks this terrible doubt about the place of

       art in society." [BURNHAM, p. 8]

 

     "The artist who would be known," wrote the great folklorist Joseph Campbell, "has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places." [CAMPBELL, p. 49] "Much time," wrote Jewish artist Julian Schnabel, "is spent nurturing liaisons with creatures of the art world mechanism. At first, there is no time for friendship. Later, there is no capacity for it." [CAPLIN, L., 1989, p. 168]

 

    For some artists, total cooption and immersion into the most trivial and superficial of values has occurred. "Striking instances of this culture-industry phenomenon," wrote Anne Bowler and Blaine McBurney in 1993, "may be seen in the cases of painter Kenny Sharf [Jewish and gay] and writer Tama Janowitz [not Jewish]. In both instances, national and sometimes international publicity was directed at these artists in a manner that illustrates the distanced values of the culture industry. In the case of Sharf ... a feature-length cover story in the September 1985 issue of ArtNews  [Jewish owned and edited] is representative of the culture industry 'plugging' and labeling process that produce the art world 'star system.' ... The ArtNews piece actually spends a great deal of time discussing everything but Sharf's artwork. Instead, we are treated to a journalistic tableau of downtown parties, clubs, and 'personalities.'" [BOWLER, p. 172-173]

 

     In Paris, from about 1920 to 1940, Jewish painters "were almost a school unto themselves," including Chaim Soutine, Jules Pascin, and Marc Chagall. [KREFETZ, p. 143] Other Jewish painters included Pissaro, Amedo Modligliani, and Szyk. Jewish socio-political artists in America in the 1920s and 1930s included Ben Shahn, Moses Soyer, Chaim Gross, Jack Levine, Morris Kanter, Raphael Soyer, Saul Steinberg, Max Weber, and Abraham Walkowitz.  A partial list of other prominent Jewish American artists includes Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz), Julian Schnabel, Barnett Newman, Joel Shapiro, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Sam Francis, Judy Chicago (Cohen), Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, George Segal, Ad Reinhardt, Morris Louis, Adolph Gottleib, Larry Rivers (Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg), Jim Dine (the Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum's "Artist of the Year" in 2001), [BOXER, T., 5-26-01] Eleanor Antin, Allen Katz, Jacques Lipschitz, Sol Le Witt, Dennis Oppenheim, Max Ernst, Milton Avery, Leonard Baskin, Eugene Berman, Leonid Berman, Hyman Bloom, Louis Eilshemius, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Philip Pearlstein, Rachel Rosenthal, Carolee Schneeman, Susan Weil, Hannah Wilke, Ross Bleckner, among many others.  Peter Max has been among the most popularly commercial. "Some critics," says Gerald Krefetz, "have suggested that the whole field of modern abstract art is especially Jewish." [KREFETZ, p. 145]

 

    Even Morris Katz

 

    "is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as 'the most prolific

    painter in history,' with over eighteen paintings painted and sold

    to date ... 'Paint fast, sell cheap' is his motto." [JACOBSON, H.,

    1995, p. 62, 63]

 

    In 2000, sculptor Robert Gober was chosen "to represent the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale." [VOGEL, C., 5-19-2000, pt 2, p. E30]

 

      Celebrated Jewish architects in recent history include Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Moshe Safdie, Frank Gehry, Richard Gluckman, Malcolm Holzman, James Polshek, Robert Siegel, and Robert Stern. Louis Kahn was the architect for both Yale University's art museums; Moshe Safdie designed Ottawa's National Gallery and Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts. Emery Roth "became one of the most prolific architects of high-rise apartment buildings in Manhattan." [SCHACHTMAN, p. 101] Eisenman "founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, the intellectual center of architectural activity in the United States and the place where architects from all over the world come to sniff the breeze." [ARONSON, S., 1983, p. 303] In 2000, "Daniel Libeskind, whose Jewish Museum Berlin has attracted crowds before its exhibits are even in place, was named architect of the Denver Art Museum's new [$62.5 million] wing." [CHANDLER, M., 7-14-2000] "In Germany," notes Cecil Roth," in the middle of the [nineteenth] century, the most prominent name in [architecture] is that of George Hitzig, president of the Academy of Art, who designed the Bourse (1859-64) and the Reichsbank (1869-77). Many of the local branches of this institution, in the full fortress-like floridity of the close of the last century, were erected by E. Jacobsthal, while in Austria, a new tradition in theatrical architecture was started by Oscar Strnad." [ROTH, C., 1940, p. 159]

 

     Even Sigmund Freud's grandson, Lucien Freud, has had phenomenal success as a British painter, selling "small to medium size" pictures for between $200,000-$1 million apiece; occasional individual sales have topped $2 million. Freud's first wife was Kitty Epstein, daughter of sculptor Jacob Epstein. [FEAVER, p. 138-139]  In 1998 a painting of his daughter Bella sold for $5.83 million, the highest price for a living British artist. A "longtime friend" of Freud is Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, head of the famous banking firm. Rothschild also heads the National Heritage Monument Trust in Great Britain, an arts agency roughly equivalent to America's National Endowment for the Arts. (Taking a trip to Australia? Perhaps you might show your art work to Henry Krongeld, the chairman of the National Art Center in Melbourne, and listed in at least one Israeli publication as a committed Zionist).

 

      Even Sigmund Freud himself was afforded art museum attention in 1999 when documents, antiques, and other artifacts from his personal life,  including a reproduction of his consultation room, toured the United States, beginning at the Smithsonian museum, and later the Jewish Museum in New York City. [BARUCH, E., 1999, p. 11]

 

     In the late 1990s, millionaire British Jewish advertising king Tony Kaye decided he wanted "to have a bigger impact in the world of communications." [HILTY, p. 16] So he moved to Hollywood to become a movie director and a gallery artist. Among Kaye's "art works," noted the (London) Financial Times, was a project to place a real homeless man "on display at the [British] Tate Gallery with a price tag of 4m. pounds .... [The man] will soon be replaced by ... a homeless woman [that] Kaye encountered on Venice Beach [California] and has displayed at the Getty Museum." [HILTY, p. 16]

 

    "Today," says Stephen Brook, "... many of the most distinguished [artist] names in Britain are those of Jews ... [R.B.] Kitaj ... has discovered in middle age an increasing fascination with Judaism ... Like many Jews, his rediscovery of Judaism sprang from this study of the Holocaust; he became a mad expert in the whole 'lugubrious business.' ... His obsession with the Holocaust ... is adumbrated by the inclusion of a chimney-stack motif with some of his recent work." [BROOK, p. 329]

 

     Kitaj, who was born in Ohio, coined the term "School of London" to describe the work of himself, Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, and Francis Bacon. He had a major retrospective exhibition in 1994 that was roundly trashed by critics. Three months later, noted the New York Times, Kitaj's wife, the painter Sandra Fisher ("who is credited with the largest picture ever  made -- 300 ft. by 100 ft., for a Heineken advertisement" [BARKER, p. 10], "died unexpectedly of an aneurysm at age 47. And Mr. Kitaj concluded that his critics motivated by anti-Semitism killed her." [RIDING, p. 13] "I have long since resolved to be a Jew," once declared Kitaj, "... I regard that as more important than my art." [STEYN, J., 1999, p. 153] Juliet Steyn notes traditional Jewish self-conception in one of Kitaj's paintings: "The chimney [in a Kitaj painting] functions as an indictment of Christianity. Hence Jewish identity in Kitaj's painting is achieved in opposition to Christianity ... Innocence and guilt: Jew and Gentile." [STEYN, J., 1999, p. 168]

 

      The theme of suddenly returning to a lost Jewish identity (and sometimes Judaism) via the decades-old Holocaust is a common one, reflected also in the work of Judy (Cohen) Chicago, a daughter of Marxists and co-founder with Miriam Shapiro of the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute for the Arts. (In New York, Jewish artists Barbara Zucker and Pollie Attie founded the feminist collective gallery "AIR" -- Artists in Residence. Zucker "recalls being ambivalent and embarrassed at being Jewish, yet felt guilty for harboring such emotions. In the late 1980s, she began to explore her Jewish identity." [HYMAN, p. 73] In a like manner, following her son's bar mitzvah, a rereading of the book of Genesis, and a trip to Israel [feminist artist] Ann Sperry produced her own version of the biblical story of creation." [HYMAN, p. 73]  Particularly important in Judy Chicago's Jewish retrieval was her viewing of Claude Lansmann's Holocaust movie, Shoah. "The next two years," says the Cleveland Jewish News,

 

     "were spent reading everything she could find about the Holocaust,

     visiting museums and exhibitions, viewing films and listening to survivor's

     tapes ... In 1987, Chicago [and her Jewish husband, Donald Woodman]

     traveled the 'landscape of the Holocaust,' a 6,000-mile journey following

     Hitler's pathway of destruction through Germany, France, Austria,

     Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the former Soviet Union  ... While

     Woodman took pictures, Chicago wrote, writing her impressions and

     feelings in her  'Jewish journal.'" [HELLER, F, p. 14]

 

     Eventually this long escapade became a popular art installation: Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, Chicago's "journey of identity as a Jew." [HELLER, p. 14]

 

      Art world interest in the Holocaust might be measured by ARTnews' features in recent years on various aspects of the subject, including an article entitled "Picasso at Auschwitz." "Picasso embraced me," recalls Pierre Daix, "and said in a low voice: 'To think that painters once thought they could paint The Massacre of the Innocents.'" [DAIX, p. 197]

 

     Art Spigelman's Holocaust comic book, Maus, merited an article, as did Gay Block's photographic portraits of "Rescuers of the Holocaust." [DRUCKER, p. 114-118] This series of portraits of people who saved Jews from Nazis was also an exhibition at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art. MOMA also "mounted a show on the making of Maus ... which ... documented Spigelman's working methods." [BERMAN, A, p. 63-64] Yet another ARTnews article in 1995 featured the paintings of Peter Malkin, "a former Mossad agent who helped capture [former Nazi] Adolf Eichmann in Argentina." [CLEMENTS, F., p. xvii]

 

      Another artist, Anselm Kiefer, "one of the most important artists to emerge in post-war Europe," started out as an art student in 1969 by having  "himself photographed in a paramilitary costume, giving Nazi-style salutes in front of monuments, landscapes, and seascapes around Germany." Thirty years later he was afforded an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. "We see railroad tracks anywhere," he was quoted as saying, "and think about Auschwitz." [MENDELSOHN, J. 1999, p. 37]  54 of the author's works "were acquired" in 1995. As two Jewish art critics note about the importance of catering to Jewish concerns in recent art trends, "there are tons of non-Jews -- Christian Boltonski, Anselm Kiefer, Christopher Williams, to name a few -- who've done astonishing work dealing with Jewish culture, persecution [and] the Holocaust." [AUERBACH/WEISSMAN, 3-21-99, p. 51]

 

      Art world and auction house cynicism for profit knows few limits. "On the very day [in 1979] the Pope preached at Auschwitz," notes Theodore Ziolkowski, "fifty lots of Nazi memorabilia brought record prices at an auction in New York, including $5,000 for a small diary kept by Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's mastermind of the 'Final Solution.'" [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 685] Adolf Hitler himself was a water color painter and his work today has sold for thousands of dollars. Long before Hitler achieved world wide notoriety as a war monger and mass murderer, notes M. H. Goldberg, "most of the paintings Hitler did sell were bought by Jewish dealers." [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 37]

    As art dealer and memorabilia seller Charles Hamilton notes:

     "Contrary to popular belief, Hitler was never a house painter but was, in fact,
      an artist who actually made a meager living from his watercolors of flowers
      and buildings and street scenes. Several years ago I had a visit from my good
      friend, Shea Tennenbaum, a distinguished Hebrew poet, and our conversation
      fell upon art and artists.

      'A great artist paints from his soul, not from his mind,' said Shea. 'It is this flood
      of deep, inner emotion that makes a great artist.'

      'Don't you think an artist can counterfeit emotion?' I asked. And without waiting
      for a reply, I walked to a file in my gallery and took out a small watercolor of
      flowers in a vase. 'What do you think of this?'

      Shea studied it. 'Obviously,' he said, 'the artist was a man of great delicacy and
      profound feelings, a lover of beauty. He has captured the supreme moment in
      the existence of these flowers and recorded it with taste and skill.'

      I said: 'Look at the signature in the lower left.'

      Shea looked and gasped in horror. The signature was that of Adolf Hitler.

      For a moment I feared that Shea might slump to the floor, but he quickly
      recovered himself and I apologized for the prank."

      After Hitler had twice failed the matriculation test for the Vienna Academy of
      Arts and Sciences -- he had hoped to become an architect -- he turned to
      dabbling in watercolors. His favorite subjects were deserted streets, public
      buildings, and churches. A friend of Hitler's, Reihold Hanisch, pretended to
      be blind so he wouldn't need a peddler's license and hawked Hitler's paintings
      for him in the bars of Vienna. They sold for a few kronen reach and the two
      youths split the take, much of which they spent on pastries and whipped cream.
      At this time Hitler was bearded and wore a derby and a long black coat that gave
      him a very Semitic appearance. Oddly, most of his regular customers were
      Jewish, and since Hitler was fond of quoting Jewish proverbs he was often
      taken for a Jew." [HAMILTON, C., 1981, p. 182]
 

     Holocaust survivor material also has a price tag. In December 1997, for example, Edith Hahn's "personal letters documenting her [Holocaust] survival, her love affairs and her escape as a Jew during World War II" went for $169,250 at a Sotheby's auction. [BROWN, p. 1] Also on the Holocaust theme, in 1995 Rabbi Israel Miller gave the Jewish editor of ARTnews, Milton Esterow, an honorary shofar, "a ram's horn blown in synagogues before and during Rosh Hoshanah for the magazine's role in transferring the ownership of thousands of artworks stolen from victims of the Holocaust by the Nazis to the Jewish community of Vienna." [ARTnews, 10-96, p. 53]  In the late 1980s, a commission to do a Holocaust memorial art work for the New York Appellate Courthouse "triggered [in Harriet] Feigenbaum [an] interest in her Jewish roots." [HYMAN, p. 73]

 

     All this of course reflects latent Jewish "particularist" exploitation of America's new "cultural pluralism" paradigm. As Paula Hyman and Deborah Dash note:

 

     "During the last decades, the concept of America as a melting pot was

     gradually replaced by visions of a multicultural society based on ethnic

     diversity, and the concept of 'universal' art reflecting a master-narrative

     was challenged by the belief in the necessity of pluralistic art forms."

     [HYMAN, p. 69]

 

      Perhaps the most obsessive "art work" about the Holocaust, blending aesthetics, mass murder, and a neurotic Jewish identity, is that of a 23-year Jewish California lesbian, Marina Vainshtein, who sports 25 body piercings and a red Mohawk haircut. As one Jewish art critic appreciatively notes, Vainshtein also has

 

     "tattoos of graphic Holocaust images over most of her body. On her

      upper back, the central image represents a train transport carrying Jewish

      prisoners in striped uniforms towards waiting ovens ... It was ... in high

      school [in Los Angeles] that Vainshtein became obsessed with

      Holocaust literature ... Vainshtein's tatoos include a violin player ...

      surrounded by hanging corpses, anguished faces and Zyklon B, the

      killing agent in the gas chambers. The screaming faces of prisoners

      being gassed are tattooed on one breast." [APEL, p. 12, 14]

 

    Then there are the likes of Rachel Schreiber, a video artist, and teacher at the Heron School division of Indiana University in Indianapolis, whose recent works include a video expression entitled: "Please Kill Me: I'm a Faggot Nigger Jew." [SCHRIEBER, R., 2000]

     For "superstar" Jewish novelist Judith Krantz, it's not permissible to even mention some historic art movements. Jewish victimology usurps them. She recounts her outrage when, visiting a German art museum, her companion dared to mention the "Dachau school of landscape painting" [Dachau was also the later site of a Nazi concentration camp where Jews were murdered]:

     "Suddenly [Krantz's German companion] exclaimed, 'Oh, look here at the masterworks
     of the Dachau School of landscape painting.' 'WHAT DID YOU SAY?' 'The
     Dachau School of landscape painting,' she replied in all innocence, showing me
     some charming paintings of rural countryside. 'It was a well-known artistic
     movement.' Only then did I realize that Anna laced the faintest idea of history.
     My mind whirling, I couldn't decided where to start her education." [KRANTZ,
     J., 2000, p. 304]

 

     Invariably, within the "back to Jewish" roots model,  surfaces the ages-old Jewish world view, sanctified in the myths of the Jewish Holocaust, that celebrates "galut/exile." And the model is this: constant self-hatred in a world other than Jewish, obsession with physical and/or intellectual markers of Distinction, the incessant Persecution Complex, and the notion that Jews -- God's (or no God's) eternal outsiders -- cannot, and should not, successfully assimilate into the rest of modern American society.  In 1997, Jewish art critic Donald Kuspit addressed this theme of modern Jewish identity in an article called "Unconsciously, Always an Alien and Self-Alienated: The Problem of Jewish American Artists."  The Jew, says Kuspit

 

      "may symbolize the ultimate alien in Christian society, the common

      enemy against which all Christians can unite ... In the minds of both

      [secular and religious] Jews the memory -- the threat  -- of genocide

      remains ever present. For all their differences, the two [kinds of Jews]

      are inwardly united; they know Christian society regards them as one

      and the same." [KUSPIT, p. 30]

     In 1999 Juliet Steyn noted a film entitled Jewish Artists in the East End (of New York City) about David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, and Alfred Wollmark where "Richard Cork argues that a common identity existed between them as Jews: alienation in the condition they share." [STEYN, J., 1999, p. 17]

 

     Among the international artists most popularized in recent American art history, "rediscovered in the late 60's and early 70's," [TANNER, p. D3]  is the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Kahlo, "often described as Mexico's foremost woman painter," [SOLOMON, p. 28] was half-Jewish. So, decides reviewer Deborah Solomon, Kahlo "combined a Jewish feeling for psychic suffering with a Mexican feeling for bold design." [SOLOMON, p. 28]  Her paintings today, notes the San Francisco Chronicle in a 1992 article entitled Why Frida Is Everywhere, "sell for millions.' [TANNER, p. D3]  "None of us can claim to be immune from Fridamania," says Holly Barnet-Sanchez, chief curator of the Mexican Museum.

     In 2001, an Arizona newspaper noted one dimension of the Frida Kahlo craze at an exhibition of Mexican art at the Phoenix Art Museum. The show featured the collection of wealthy Mexican Jewish collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman, "major players in the glamorous Mexico City film scene of the 1940s":

     "Contemporary acquisitions ... [of Jacques and Natasha  Gelman] have been
     expertly guided by longtime [Jewish] Gelman friend Robert
     Littman, ex-director of Mexico City's now-defunct Centro Cultural/Arte
     Cultural). As president of the Vergel Foundation, which is responsible for
     carrying on the Gelman legacy, Littman seems to possess an infallible eye."
     [Vanesian, K., 6-701]

    The Gelmans became rich in the motion picture business in Mexico. Artist Kahlo, like others, "often paid the rent by doing portraits of wealthy socialites." One of Kahlo's portraits of Natasha Gelman "captures the woman, crowned with sausage curls al modo and draped ina a fur stole." "To anyone familiar with Mexican art history," writes critic Kathleen Vanesian,

     "the Gelman exhibition is not a well-balanced overview of Mexican art mid-century ...
     Rather, it's a classically status-driven, gotta-be-better-than-the-Gomezes
     compilation reflecting one type of art collector's psychic preoccupation
     with memorializing himself and notable public figures with which he has
     socialized. Frankly, it's one more befitting a newly moneyed, 18th-century
     Dutch burgher than a discerning, visionary collector seeking emerging
     and mid-career artists' best and most enduring works." [VANESIAN, K., 6-7-01]
 

 

     Other intriguing Jewish art angles these days include the New York Jewish Museum (which gave Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns their first important exhibitions) where "a high tech highlight of the galleries devoted to the Israelite period [is] the interpretive Talmud -- a video that displays Talmudic passages with inset translations and talking heads." [ROSENBAUM, p. 102] Elsewhere, "last summer," noted ARTnews in 1994, "Jane Alexander [a Gentile] was starring on Broadway, playing a Jewish banker in The Sisters Rosensweig. No one, least of all the actress herself, imagined that she'd soon take on what may be her most challenging role yet -- leader of the embattled National Endowment for the Arts." [CEMBELAST, p. 71-72] In Eastern Europe, with the collapse of communism, Jewish-American billionaire George Soros has "introduced artists to new systems of patronage, exhibitions, and competition" with the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Prague, one of 20 Soros-established organizations throughout former communist countries. [BERNSTEIN, R]

 

      One of the things the Eastern Europeans can learn is that in the relatively narrow art world circle, "there is a constant movement of people around the jobs of the art world, from college professor to museum director to dealer to magazine editor." [BURNHAM, p. 125] All such occupations tend to overlap. Nepotism and interconnectedness run rampant. Prominent dealer Ivan Karp, for instance, started out as an art critic for the Village Voice. He later worked for art dealer Leo Castelli before starting his own gallery, O.K. Harris. Castelli's ex-wife Ileana (Sonnabend) started her own eventually important gallery too. Artist Alexander Lieberman started out as a layout editor at Vogue. His stepdaughter became a contributing editor for Art in America and was married to another artist, Cleve Gray, who showed at the same gallery as Lieberman, and was also a contributing editor to Art in America, as well as a sometimes writer for Vogue. "Those who questioned Liberman's art," notes Thomas Meir, "invariably mentioned his status as editorial director at Conde Nast," the firm owned by billionaire media magnate Si Newhouse, of whom Liberman has been a close friend for thirty years. [MAIER, p. 70] "Poverty is not conducive to good art," Liberman told the New York Times in a feature about his studio, "and I have always believed in living life to the hilt." [MAIER, p. 70]  Prominent art critic Clement Greenberg was both an associate editor of the Jewish magazine Commentary and art critic for the Nation. He also worked earlier with Elliot Cohen (later the head of Commentary) at The Contemporary Jewish Record. [FREEDMAN, M., 1994, p. 583] Prominent fellow Jewish art critic Harold Rosenberg "helped launch Clem in his early career as an art critic." [FREEDMAN, M., 1994, p. 587] Among those many Greenberg himself helped along in their careers was Rosalind Krauss who he once referred to as one of the "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters." [FREEDMAN, M., 1994, p. 587]

 

      Such "cross-pollinating" may be witnessed in the recent case of Tom L. Freudenheim who, at the same time, has been an executive at the National Endowment for the Arts, Assistant Secretary for the Arts and Humanities at the Smithsonian Museum, and Board Vice-Chairman of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Henry Geldzahler was "curator of twentieth century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, program director for the Visual Arts of the NEA, a close friend of many artists, and a friend and follower of [prominent critic Clement] Greenberg." [BURNHAM, p. 127]

 

     Artist Jim Rosenquist really got his career started when someone "told Alan Stone [about Rosenquist's work] who told Ileana Sonnenbend, who told Dick Bellamy and Ivan Karp and Henry Geldzahler and Leo Castelli who came down to the studio in that order to see the picture." [BURNHAM, p. 106] In the case of prominent artist William de Kooning, his wife -- Elaine Fried  (both Gentiles) -- is credited by some for "largely creating and orchestrating the 'de Kooning myth," including having sex with influential art critic Harold Rosenberg and ARTnews editor Thomas Hess [both Jewish]. "When Elaine slept with Hess," claims an "unnamed elder statesman in the art world," Bill got publicity in ARTnews. When Elaine had an affair with Harold Rosenberg, he paid Bill off with attention." [GLUECK, p. 129] She herself eventually wrote art reviews for ARTnews. And the dominant art critic of that era, Clement Greenberg? "Greenberg's compulsive womanizing -- often inseparable from his promotion of female artists -- has long been legendary ... In the early 1950s he carried on an affair with artist Helen Frankenthaler." [LEWIS, MJ, p. 59]

 

      Incestuous collusion, mutual back-scratching, under the table wheeling and dealing, nepotism, and clique allegiance are intrinsic principles of the modern art world. Another case in point was Bill Rubin, chief curator of painting at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s. Rubin's brother was a New York art dealer. In 1970 Rubin set up an exhibition of the work of Frank Stella, a personal friend, and an artist in his brother's gallery. Rubin even exhibited at MOMA two Stella paintings he owned himself. The show could be expected to automatically raise Stella's art prices, personally beneficial to both curator Rubin and his brother.

 

    In 1943 Sam Kootz became an adviser to the Museum of Modern Art; the next year he was also a private art dealer, eventually selling works of art by Picasso. When MOMA held a Picasso exhibition in the 1940s, Kootz was holding a simultaneous Picasso exhibition as a private dealer. [BYSTRYN, p. 186]

 

      Dore Ashton, an art critic for the New York Times, was once reprimanded by her editor for choosing to write about art shows that included her own husband, Adja Yunkers. She wrote that

 

     "Of this trio, Adja Yunkers, showing heroic and sultry pastels at the

     Emmerich Gallery, is the most romantic, stoking the fire of color and

     shape to degree of thrilling intensity. Yunkers, who uses pastels with

     verve and assurance, organizes restless compositions in a truly

     symphonic way, summing up a complex infinite of shapes and color

     for the majestic 'scoring' of these beautiful and impressive pictures."

     [BURNHAM, p. 342]

 

     During the mid-1960s, says John Conklin, "the price of favorable attention by a prominent critic Clement Greenberg was the gift of one or two major works. Critics have built up reputations of artists whose work they have personally invested, and then profited from the sale of the art. Art historian Bernard Berenson sometimes over-praised artworks in which he had a financial stake, even vouching for paintings that he knew had undergone significant restorations so as to be made more appealing to buyers. He earned substantial commissions from the sale of paintings by dealer Joseph Duveen, collecting more than $8 million from Duveen in their twenty year partnership ... Moreover, Duveen financed much of Berensen's art criticism, which he then used to justify the prices he charged to wealthy collectors." [CONKLIN, p. 44]

 

     Critic Clement Greenberg, member of the Jewish mafia "New York Intellectuals," and probably the most powerful art critic of his era, carried with him a reputation for paybacks for friendly reviews. "No other critic has so openly allied himself to the merchandizing of art," wrote Sophy Burnham, "...[It is accused that] he turned his influence to personal profit, accepting free paintings, writing and lecturing about contemporary art, and selling the pictures high." [BURNHAM, p. 149-150]  "For three decades," notes Michael J. Lewis, "art criticism in America was the domain of a rule-giving prophet [Greenberg] ... Where his favor came to rest, as it did for a time on the paintings of Jackson Pollack, there followed national celebrity and success." Other prominent Jewish contemporary art critics "included Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg. Hilton Kramer arrived on the scene a bit later." [LEWIS, MJ, 1998] When British/Jewish art critic David Sylvester died in 2001, London's Daily Telegraph declared him "modern art's most influential critic." [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 7-20-01]

      "Jewish émigrés in flight from the Nazi genocide and Jews of earlier emigrations, such as Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg, for example," notes Catherine Soussloff,
     
      "had a definitive and formative influence on art and art history in America and
      England -- and by today in the English-speaking world as a whole. The impact of
      these Jewish art historians, critics, and artists in the interpretation and exhibition
      of art in America and elsewhere was central for art history." [SOUSSLOFF, C., 2000]

 

     Among his favorites, Greenberg championed "Washington Color School" artists. "By the end of the 1960s," notes Burnham, "Greenberg's Color School artists were being shown in four important galleries in New York, Paris, London, and Toronto. They were collected in museums, including the Metropolitan, MOMA, and the Smithsonian, and considerable muttering could be heard -- not always good-natured -- about the Mafia and the Kosher Nostra." [BURNHAM, p. 107]

 

     "I've decided the kind of people attracted to art are often psychopaths,"  Greenberg once said, "You can quote me on that. In art and literature both -- Do you know the difference between psychopaths and psychotics? Psychopaths are people with defective consciences. They cannot tell right from wrong." [BURNHAM, p. 157] For his part, Greenberg is reputed to have walked into artist Barnett Newman's studio and asked for a painting. "Barney was going to give him something small -- a lithograph perhaps," notes Sophy Burnham, "'I don't want that,' said Greenberg, 'I want that big one over there. It's your best picture.' And Newman, inwardly raging, capitulated to his own ambitions and handed over the painting. Greenberg takes only the best ... If the critic has an undisclosed stake in the artist's reputation, it is not for the artist to question." [BURNHAM, p. 131]

 

     Margaret Olin suggests that widespread Jewish early and mid-twentieth century championing of formalist art (art denuded of social, political, cultural, and religious reference) had -- until recent years when celebratory Jewish "particularism" has been unleashed-- been rooted in their self-interest in downplaying publicly their Jewish identities. Prominent Jewish art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, for example, were especially prominent in the encouragement of "Abstract Art." Occasionally, however, latent counter-attitudes to abstract universalism could indiscreetly surface. Greenberg, for example, once remarked that "it is possible that by 'world-historical' standards the European Jew represents a higher type of human being than any yet achieved." [OLIN, p. 51] This Jewish elitism, lingering just behind a universalistic front, was also manifest in critic Bernard Berenson. Despite his own professed "tendency toward universalism and timelessness" and "the same human quality in every individual," he further proposed to "erect the same qualities into ultimate standards, and to appraise societies as well as individuals by the extent to which they have possessed these qualities." "Thus [for Berenson]," notes Margaret Olin, "like George Orwell's Animal Farm, which found some animals more equal than others, he found some societies more universally human than others." [OLIN, p. 48]

 

    By the 1980s, art critic Peter Halley found some intriguing historical essences in what he calls a Jewish American artist renaissance:

 

     "Art in the 80's has been consistently labeled as ostentatious, garish,

     extravagant, garish, extravagant, vulgar, and over-scaled. These are

     the epithets of the parvenu or nouveau riche. However, they are also

     terms that, in earlier decades, were used to characterize Jewish-American

     taste and style. I want to be very clear that I am not making any claim

     that anti-Semitism has entered the critical debate. I would suggest

     instead that the commentators who have thus defined the 1980s have

     been blind to the meanings that this aesthetic of extravagance may

     have for Jewish artists of the 80s." [HALLEY, p. 28]

 

     Halley might have been thinking, among many other candidates, about the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Jewish curator of contemporary art, as did Lee Seldes, in 1979:

 

    "Trendy Henry Geldzahler [is] the curator of the newly created, hotly

    debated contemporary arts department. His recent exhibition "New

    York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970," had set a record for swish

    ostentation but engaged serious artists and scholars." [SELDES, p. 5]

 

                                        

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

 

      "Historically," notes James Twitchell, "the modern museum has been the site of pitched battles for control, for social territory, for what modern criticism calls privileging." [TWITCHELL, p. 214] Steadily, in recent decades, traditional wealthy White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant control of major art institutions has been replaced by Jewish art philanthropy and their own attendant influence and control in shaping -- or reshaping -- the standards of value and aesthetics in the art world. "Jews significantly support 'high culture' in America," notes Barry Kossim, "Their support of hospitals, museums, symphonies, and universities across the country now appear disproportionate not only to their numbers but also their proportion of the wealthy." [KOSSIM, p. 26]

 

     Jews have long been prominent in the institutionalized art world, as both formal, public directors and powerful behind-the-scenes "philanthropists".  George Blumental, for example, headed (1933-1941) New York's influential Metropolitan Museum, as did Thomas Hoving (son of the chairman of Tiffany and Co.) beginning in 1967. [Hoving was once described by New York Times reporter John Hess as "a compulsive liar and likened [him] to a cover-up artist." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 92] Irene and Alice Lewisohn's Museum of Costume Art merged with the Met in 1946. Michael Friedsam, Jules Bache, and Samuel Lewisohn were other prominent Met philanthropists in that era. "When Henry Geldzahler [the eventual director of the visual arts program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York City Commissioner on Cultural Affairs] ... was brought to the Met as a junior curator of American art, James Rorimer [another Jewish Met director] advised him not to let the trustees know he was Jewish." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 71]  (Future Met head Thomas Hoving also became a Rorimer "protégé" when Rorimer hired him as an assistant curator.) [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 94] "Following the precedents set by Geldzahler," adds Goodman, "two Jews have since held the prized curatorship of modern art at the Metropolitan. The first was Thomas Hess, well known as an art critic and collector. He was the son-in-law of Edith Stern, a major patron of the New Orleans Art Museum, and daughter of Julius Rosenwald. Stern's sister, Adele Levy, was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 72]

 

       In 1969 Robert Lehman, a Vice-President, then the Chairman of the Board,  and a Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for twenty years, willed to it his $100 million collection of Old Master paintings. "Bobby Lehman," noted a friend after his death, "wanted his pyramid; with plate glass before the art works. See, Bobby, knew about Macys [Department Store]: the entrance is small, but the display windows are large ... when you go to Macys, the pots and pans are in the basement and the Lanvin perfume is at the entrance. Art today is a kind of cultural cosmetic." [BURNHAM, p. 173] By the mid-1980s one-fifth of the Museum's Board of Trustees were Jewish, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,  then CBS-chairman Laurence Tisch, and Mrs. Walter Annenberg. [CHRISTOPHER, p. 217] Wealthy Metropolitan Museum philanthropist Saul Steinberg even held his wedding reception at the museum, as did a member of the wealthy Tisch family. [CANTOR, p. 403]

 

        In 1980, Frederic P. Rose, a real estate developer and former President of the New York United Jewish Appeal-Federation, was appointed to the Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ("There's more yikus [prestige] in being on the Met Board than in being on our own," said a UJA-Federation official, "and a lot more clout." [SILBERMAN, p. 215] Soon after, a friend and fellow Jewish real estate mogul, Harold D. Uris, donated $10 million to the Museum. "As a result," says Charles Silberman, "the museum decided on a new focus for its fundraising drives. 'Met Museum Aiming to Tap Real Estate Industry,' a New York Times headline read, using a euphemism for 'wealthy Jews.'" [SILBERMAN, p. 215] With the death of Jack Linsky in 1982, his will stipulated another $50 million for the Metropolitan Museum. [GOLAN, p. 6]

 

      In 1991 communications mogul Walter Annenberg willed his whole art collection -- "one of the most valuable and highly sought-after in history" -- to New York's Metropolitan Museum. He also pledged a $10 million gift over a five year period to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. [MOMENT, p. 196]  (Annenberg's wife, Lenore, had been "chief of protocol" for the Reagan administration's State Department. Renee Crown, wife of the Lester Crown who has controlled the General Dynamics weapons corporation, has served as the chair of the Women's Board of the Lyric Opera of Chicago. [BAER, p. 210] By the early 1990s, other Jewish mass media barons like S. I. Newhouse of Advance, and Hollywood powerbroker Michael Ovitz, were on the board of trustees of the Met. "On one occasion in the 1990s," notes Robert Slater, "[Ovitz] scoured [his 2,000 art] books in search of a suitable background for the advertisement that [his company Creative Artists Agency] produced for Coca-Cola. One advertisement, with Coca-Cola bottles falling out of the sky, was meant to be reminiscent of a Rene Magritte painting." [SLATER, p. 161]

 

     At the Met, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an institution in which Jews, says George Goodman, "have enriched almost area of the Museum's collections, including pre-Colombian ceramics (Nathan Cummings), African art (Klaus Perls), ancient Mediterranean and Middle Easter Art (Norbert Schimmel), Old Masters Paintings (Lore and Rudolph Heinemann), French decoration arts (Belle and Sol Linsky) modern European Art (Florence May Schoenborn), modern American art (Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman; Edith and Milton Lowenthal), Indonesian bronzes (Samuel Eilenberg), and South and Southeast Asian Art (Enid Haupt and Lita Hazen, Walter Annenberg's sisters). " [GOODMAN, #2, p. 73] Throughout the Met too, galleries, rooms, theatres, and gardens are named after Jewish sponsors including Iris and B. Gerald Canter, Helene and Michael David-Weill, Lawrence and Barbara Fleishman, Howard Gilman, Leon Levy, Henry R. Kravis, Janice H. Levin, Carroll and Milton Petrie, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sacker, Laurence Tisch, and Ruth and Harold Uris. (Among the various Jewish curators at the Museum is Barbara Weinberg, head of American Paintings and Sculpture).

 

      By the 1990s, across town, both vice-presidents of New York's equally prestigious Museum of Modern Art were also Jewish --  Ronald S. Lauder and Richard Salomon. (In 2001, another Jewish member of MOMA's board, media mogul Si Newhouse, resigned after breaking MOMA 's ethical policy when he maneuvered to purchase a Picasso painting that was owned by the museum). [D'ARCY, D., 6-5-01] In 1995 Lauder -- cosmetic heir and Eastern European media mogul -- became chairman of the board; in 1997 he spent $50 million on a Cezanne painting for his private collection. (In 1988, after a stint as a Reagan-appointed ambassador to Austria, he was the subject of an Austrian parliamentary investigation for his purchase and export from that country 120 art works worth more than $10 million.  Lauder decried the investigation, saying that the "investigation is a politically motivated attempt to discredit him for expressing his views on anti-Semitism in Austria." [PROTZMAN, p. 42] Aside from being a major donator to the right-wing Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and gobbling up a major share of the mass media system in Eastern Europe, this is the kind of man that today heads one of the most important museums in America:

 

       "[Lauder] was recently named chairman of the Museum of Modern

       Art in New York after making a multi-million dollar pledge ...Some

       critics grumbled about [Lauder's] ascent to the chairmanship of the

       Museum of Modern Art earlier this year after making his pledge." 

       [Wall Street Journal, JERESKI, p. A1]

 

      "[Lauder] did a stint at the Pentagon beginning in 1983 and was an

       ambassador to Austria from 1986 to 1987, a job for which he was

       widely lambasted as being ineffectual. (ABC's Ted Koppel once

       asked him to comment on reports he was considered 'a laughingstock'

       there, to which he tersely replied, 'Thank you.') -- Wall Street Journal,

       [JERESKI, p. A10]

 

     After spending $14 million to buy his way into the position of New York City's mayor (and failing) in 1989, Richard Reeves wrote an Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial, saying:

 

        "To me, Mr. Lauder stands as an advertisement for confiscatory 

        inheritance taxes and another indictment of American campaign

        financing. His major claim to credibility -- other than a declared net

        worth of $227 million -- is a stint as the U.S. ambassador to Austria.

        He got that after raising money for Ronald Reagan." [REEVES, p. A15]

 

     In 1994, Ronald Lauder's brother, Leonard, was named chairman of another New York City cultural monument, the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art. (David Ross director of that museum since 1991, became head of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1998. Adam Weinberg is the Whitney's Curator of Permanent Collections.) In the early 1990s the Museum of Modern Art wanted to buy the building next door, the Dorset Hotel. The key to its successful acquisition was MOCA (another Jewish) board member Jerry Speyer who "had known the owner, Sol Goldman, for years, and he know Goldman's children, who inherited the building on their father's death." [TRAUB, p. 67]

 

    Also in New York, the prominent Jewish Guggenheim family founded the Guggenheim Museum (1998 president: Jewish corporate raider Ronald Perelman), as well as the prestigious humanities foundation that bears their name. By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur Foundation "genius awards" were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. [CHRISTOPHER, p. 121]  The Kaplan Fund has also had an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of J. M. Kaplan's daughters was married to a prominent artist, another was the Chairman of the New York State Arts Council. [KREFETZ, p. 153] Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the $34 million New York State Art Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was "not professionally trained in the arts." Her mother, Alice Kaplan, was once president of the American Federation of the Arts. The founder of the Kaplan Fund, J. M., Kaplan, was also founder of the Welch's Grape Juice company. [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 77]

 

     Jewish dominance in 1990s New York also continues with Ellen Futter (President of the American Museum of Natural History), Betsy Gotbaum (Director of the New York Historical Society), Susan Soros (Director of the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, David Ross (Director of the Whitney Museum of Art), Cornell Capa (until recent retirement, the chief officer at the International Center for Photography), and Mark Rosenthal (Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum).

 

      Up the Hudson Valley, a bit out of Manhattan, in smaller communities, the New York Times noted in 1997 that

 

      "At the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College, bar mitzvahs

      ease the unrelenting financial crunch. In Yonkers, at the Hudson River

      Museum, there are weddings after the public leaves. And in Katonah

      at the Caramoor Center for Music and Find Arts, Jewish High Holy

      Day services pay the way." [BRENNER, SEC. 14, p. 1]

 

      Two Wall Street Journal reporters noted a "private party" held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s:

 

      "Outside the Metropolitan Museum that blustery September evening,

      there was all the anticipation of a Hollywood opening. Through a

      phalanx of photographers and reporters the cream of New York

      society hustled outside, the ladies clutching their hair against the

      wind, the men dapper in tuxedos, flashing invitations by one

      account 'as stiff as sheetrock.' In went the Saul Steinbergs, Carol

      and Punch Sulzberger of the New York Times, Jonathan and

      Laura Tisch, and a hundred others.

        Few even in this social stratum had the connections to throw a

      private party at the museum, but greeting their guests inside the

      wrought-iron gates of its Medieval Court was a couple who had

      muscled their way in with a $10 million donation: Henry Kravis

      and his stunning, fashion-designer wife, Carolyne Roehm."

      [BURROUGH/HELYAR, p. 128]  [All the men mentioned

      are Jewish]

 

      At New York University, the art department is called the "Tisch School of the Arts." The philanthropist it is named after, Laurence Tisch, "does not hide his affection for Israel, even when it costs him money. Thus, for example, when Israeli ministers stay at the Regency Hotel [in New York], owned by the Tisch-controlled Loews Corporation, they receive a significant discount." [HANDWERKER]

 

     Going to Carnegie Hall? You'll probably be sitting in the recital hall named after Sanford I. Weill, the Jewish chairman and co-chief of Citigroup. Weill gave a large sum of money to them music center in 1983. He is also the current Chairman of the Board of Carnegie Hall. [NEW YORK TIMES, Weill, p. 10]

 

     In Los Angeles, the most important mover behind the creation of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was a Jewish industrialist, Norton Simon (among his economic holdings is Hunt Foods). Three separate museum buildings were constructed, two of the three named after a Jewish benefactor: Howard Abrahamson, Armand Hammer, and Leo Bing (funded by his wife Anna in his memory). The first chairman of the LACMA board of trustees was also Jewish, Sidney Brody. Eli Broad, another eventual chairman, was once listed by ArtNews to be (with his wife) the most important art collector in the world. (He is the chairman and CEO of SunAmerica). Erica Feinblatt was the curator of prints and drawings; Maurice Tuchman became the curator of modern art. An assistant to Tuchman was Stephanie Barron. "As a Jew," notes George Goodman, "she was also attracted to avant-garde works considered 'degenerate' by the Nazis." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 135]  In 1984, Barron married a LACMA (Jewish) trustee, Robert Gore Rifkind.

 

       Early Jewish donors of important art or large sums of money  to LACMA included Joan Palevsky (who purchased for the museum the 650 objects in the Heermaneck Collection of Islamic Art), B. Gerald and Iris Canter (owners of the largest collection of Rodin sculptures in the world; New York's Metropolitan Museum has four galleries named after these philanthropists), Philip Berg, Hans Cohn, and Arthur Gilbert, among others. In 1997 Bernard Lewin, a furniture store owner, later art dealer,  and "one of the world's preeminent collectors of modern Mexican artists," [JOHNSON,  R., p. N1] willed his $25 million Mexican art collection to LACMA upon his death.  The Los Angeles Times noted an exhibition of Lewin's collection at a public gallery three years earlier, curated by a Jewish academic in Latin American studies, Shifra Goldman:

 

      "When a museum show consists entirely of works that are for sale at one

       commercial gallery [as this one is] .... disappointment gives way to

       disgust ... When Lewin ... decided to limit the scope of this show

       to the stuff he'd like to sell, the die was cast ... [Nothing] can redeem

       such a colossal commercial-cum-vanity showcase." [CURTIS, p. F1]

 

       In 1974 Richard Sherwood (a member of the local American Jewish Committee) became the LACMA president. Further Jewish donators to the museum included David Lowe, Armand Deutsch, Michael and Dorothy Blankfort, Nathan Smooke, Philip and Beatrice Gersh, Stanley and Ellise Gringstein, Max and Ellen Palevsky, Robert Halff, Betty Asher ("formerly an assistant to Maurice Tuchman," now an art dealer), Felix and Helen Juda,  Frederic and Marcia Weisman (sister of Norton Simon), Lucille Ellis (Norton Simon's first wife), Bernard Levin (a dealer), and Douglas Cramer (a television mogul).

 

     In later years, Micheal Shapiro, a curator at the St. Louis Art Museum was chosen to head LACMA. "It would have been newsworthy for the County Museum to hire a woman, an African-American, an Asian, or a Hispanic, "says Jewish commentator George Goodman, "but few points would be scored [publicly] for hiring a Jewish director [this was, after all, the norm]. Nevertheless, the board members turned to Michael Shapiro. Shapiro's selection must have been intended to impress Jewish donors of the museum." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 135]

 

     When Shapiro left, he was replaced by Andrea Rich in 1995. Rich had formally been the Executive Vice Chancellor of UCLA. As Goodman noted it in his article in Modern Judaism about what he calls the "Jewish Art Elite":

 

      "For its first [combined] president and chief executive officer, LACMA's

       trustees made a startling decision, hiring Andrea Rich ... A specialist in

       communications and planning, she had never worked for an arts

       organization and was not even a dues-paying member of the museum.

       Ms. Rich is Jewish, however." [GOODMAN, p. 136]

 

     In 1999, Rich also raised eyebrows by becoming -- along with her other administrative posts -- the director of the museum.

 

      Elsewhere in southern California, other Jews were active in a virtual lock on important directorships in the art world.  Aby Sher hired architect Frank Gehry (a fellow Jew) to build the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Edith Wylie even established the Craft and Folk Art Museum across from LACMA.  In 1979 a number of prominent Jewish collectors including Marcia Weissman (who also donated $3 million to the now-called "Weissman Art Museum" at the University of Minnesota, as well as other funds to Minneapolis Walker Art Center) Eli Broad, Philip and Beatrice Gersh, Lenore Greenberg, Frederick Nichols, and Max Palevsky broke off from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to form the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Today's president of MOCA [1998] is, of course, Jewish: Audrey Irmas.  "Although [Director Richard] Koshalek deserves much of the credit for MOCA's success," says George Goodman, "he has several talented associates, among whom were the Jews Sherri Geldin, an administrator, and Paul Schimmel, previously a curator at southern California's Newport Harbor Art Museum." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 139]  Noteworthy Jewish philanthropy to MOCA includes that of Barry Lowen, Marcia Weissman, and Taft and Rita Schreiber.

 

       David Levanthol (of the Los Angeles Times) also serves as the current Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). In 1996 MOCA's "Temporary Contemporary" branch was renamed the "Geffen Contemporary" after a $5 million donation from media mogul David Geffen. Earlier, another $5 million gift had changed the Westhood Playhouse theatre near UCLA to the "Geffen Playhouse."  The head of the Geffen Playhouse, Gilbert Cates, is also Jewish. He also "produces the Academy Awards programs and [he] put together the local Israel 50th anniversary celebration." [TUGEND, 10-22-99]
 

 

     "Most people, I'd say 90% of donors want recognition of some sort," remarked Eli Broad, trustee of both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, which has its own "Eli and Edythe Broad Reception Hall." [MUCHNIC, S, p. F1, 5] "For better or for worse," says Jewish critic George Goodman, "the museum world is full of --  and to a large degree  formed by --  prima donnas. Collectors such as [early Jewish philanthropists] Blumenthal and Lehman wanted wings and galleries bearing their names. In recent years, however, a growing number of Jewish collectors have let their egos run wild." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 147]

 

      Rich Jewish businessmen with enormous art hoards have also created major museums and named them after themselves in Los Angeles to house their collections: the Norton Simon Museum (the Simon's board of trustees "was led by Jennifer Jones, his second wife, and other relatives") [GOODMAN, #2, p. 147] and the Armand Hammer Cultural Center, respectively.  "The boondoggle of the Hammer Cultural Center -- within a lifetime of [Armand Hammer's] fraud and deception," notes George Goodman, "is ... documented in Edward Epstein's biography of Hammer." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 141]  [See also Carl Blumay's indicting biography of the ruthlessly corrupt Hammer]. Armand Hammer, notes the London Sunday Times, in a review of Epstein's book,

 

      "was one of the great frauds of the 20th century ...The sordid details

       of his  astonishing life [are those of] myth, fakery, and deceit ....

       [He was] a ruthless charlatan who bullied and betrayed his

       way to an imposing reputation as billionaire patron of the

       arts with a long list of powerful friends ...  [Epstein] also details the

       brazen forgery that helped build Hammer's extensive art collection.

       One benefit of the tycoon's Russian connection was an official

       Faberge stamp, given to him in Moscow, which he used to authenticate

       fake Imperial jeweled eggs." [ALLEN-MILLS]

 

     Hammer set up the L'Hermitage Gallery, selling Russian art, in New York City in 1925. Years later he later purchased 75% interest in M. Knoedler and Company, "America's oldest art gallery." His partner in the business was also Jewish, Maury Leibovitz.  [EPSTEIN, 1996, p. 126, 293] In later years, a freelance writer, Martha Kaufman, became Hammer's mistress. Wearing wigs to hinder recognition by Hammer's wife, she also became the curator of Hammer's art collection and eventually the Director of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center. [EPSTEIN, photo section]

 

     After Hammer's death, various family members filed lawsuits against each other for parts of the patriarch's art collection. Others came to court too: "Occidental Petroleum [Hammer's company] stockholders were outraged at the squandering of company assets [for Hammer's personal art collection] which they claimed totaled $95 million." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 141] Hammer also, notes Elliot Horowitz, "identified himself ... falsely as a Unitarian Protestant throughout most of his life, even after becoming the CEO of Occidental Petroleum ... Later he became a great friend of the state of Israel." [HOROWITZ, E., Too, p. 196] He was once received the Golda Meir "Man of the Year Award" at an Israeli Bonds banquet. [BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 416] (In 1987 he even flew Soviet Jewish dissident/refusenik Ida Nudel on his personal jet to Israel.) [NUDEL, I., 1990, p. 301-302]

 

     Hammer also has a wing named after him and his wife at the Los Angeles County Art Museum. [BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 436] At his own museum, the chiseling of his name in marble alone cost $75,000, the "Armand Hammer Fireplace" cost $25,000, and the marble floors cost $1 million. [BLUMAY, C., 1992, p. 454] In downtown Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum in the Los Angeles Music Center is named for wealthy Jewish patron S. Mark Taper. (Gordon Davidson, the current artistic director of the Taper/Ahmanson Theatre, is also Jewish). A few miles north, the Pepperdine University Art Museum in Malibu was renamed the Frederick R. Weissman Museum of Art in 1992 after his gift of $1.5 million.  (The University of Minnesota also has an art museum named after Weissman; the San Diego Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art also contain "gallery complexes" that bear his name). Another southern California Jewish philanthropist, Mandell Weiss, was the main patron behind San Diego's Mandel Weiss Forum. With city public arts cutbacks, in 1993 Leah Goodwin lost her executive director job at San Diego's Public Arts Advisory Council. [TUREGANO, P., 9-30-93, p.  E12] Also in San Diego, Mathew Strauss and his wife Iris organized Art Pac, a lobbying group for government funding to the arts. [TUREGANO, P. 2-13-95, p. D1] Phyllis Epstein, former chairman of the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture, was appointed to be a member of the California Council for the Arts in 1999. [JONES, W., 12-14-99, p. E14] State senator Adam Schiff, also Jewish, is chairman of California's Joint Committee on the Arts. [CITY NEWS SERVICE, 1-6-98]

 

     In 1999 Glorya Kaufman donated $18 million to renovate UCLA's old Dance Building, now to be called Glorya Kaufman Hall. It was the largest arts-oriented donation in University of California history. Among those proclaiming public thanks was Daniel Neuman, Dean of UCLA's Art and Architecture School. (In earlier years, MCA's mafia-linked Hollywood mogul Jules Stein also founded UCLA's giant ostentatious medical wing, the Jules Stein Eye Institute). In 2000, Jewish businessman Eli Broad topped Kaufman, donating $20 million to UCLA's art department. The Dickson Art Center was to be renamed the Eli Broad Center.

 

     After donating an undisclosed sum to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in metropolitan Los Angeles, Henry Samueli became a member of its Board of Directors. Samueli and his wife also gave $50 million to the UCLA and University of California at Irvine Engineering departments. "In exchange for the gifts," noted the Los Angeles Times in 1999, "the highly ranked UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and UCI's School of Engineering will bear Samueli's name." [CONWAY, A., 4-13-99, p. E1] Earlier, in 1987, another Jewish mogul, Harvey Stearn resigned as the Orange County Performing Arts Center Chairman of the Board; he remained chairman of the California Arts Council. That same year Leonard Shaine, "philanthropist long active in community and Jewish causes," was added to Orange County art center's Board. [JALAN, A., 8-21-87, p. 1] Jewish real estate mogul Walter Shorenstein "founded the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government." [MOTHER JONES, 3-5-01]

 

     From Texas in 1998, prominent Dallas art collector and real estate mogul Raymond Nasher donated $7.5 million to his alma mater, Duke University. The Duke University Art Museum would be moved to a new building, to be known as the Nasher Museum of Art. [DUKE, 11-98] In Austin, Texas, Mort and Angela Topfer "have pledged millions to the Austin Museum of Art, the Dell Jewish Community Center Campus and other charitable projects." [BARNES, M., 6-17-99, p. B1] Likewise, Jewish real estate developer John Price donated $7 million to the Museum of Fine Arts at his alma mater, the University of Utah (Price's JP Realty offices hold "one of the largest collections of Depression era lithographs in the country.")[KNUDSON, M., 3-23-97] In Omaha, Nebraska, Mort Richards was once president of Performing Arts Omaha. He also served as the top official for other local organizations, including the Downtown Rotary Club. "In 1978, he received the State of Israel’s' 30th anniversary award." [1-14-2000, p. 1]

 

      Even the renowned Getty Museum, founded with funds from the non-Jewish oil mogul, J. Paul Getty (and with $4 billion to play with, the richest museum on earth) has consistently had Jews at the economic helm. In 1998, after 17 years, Harold Williams left the presidency of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Williams, notes George Goodman, was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los Angeles." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 142] Williams had earlier retired as Norton Simon Inc.'s chairman of the board at age 42. He later served as the Dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Business and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the President Carter administration.

 

      The new president of the J. Paul Getty Trust is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz, formerly the chancellor of both the California State University system and the University of Houston. Munitz's "current project," says Goodman, "is the renovation and expansion of the [Getty branch] in Malibu, which will open in 2001 ... The collections donated by Lawrence and Barbara Fleishman will be one of the highlights." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 144]  The new Getty Center opened in 1998, designed by Jewish architect Richard Meier and built at a cost of $1 billion. Earlier, George Goldner had "launched the Getty's drawing collection." He later became the Getty curator of paintings and the curator of prints and drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was succeeded at the Getty by David Jaffe, a Jew born in England, and formerly of the National Gallery of Australia. (Even the president and CEO of the Getty Petroleum Corporation is Jewish, Leo Liebowitz; in 1993 he was charged by journalist Robert Friedman with being in cahoots in a tax cheating scam with a chief in the "Russian Mafia." [NATIONAL PETROLEUM,  p. 20] )

 

      "In Baltimore, Miami, Atlanta, and a host of other cities," says Charles Silberman, "cultural institutions are increasingly dependent on Jewish support." [SILBERMAN, p. 214-215] In Miami, for example, Jews were the "creators of the New World Symphony and the Miami City Ballet." [HURIASH, L., 2-15-99, p. B3] Joseph Meyeroff donated $10 million to the Baltimore Symphony hall, half its cost. [CHRISTOPHER, p. 214 ] Also in Baltimore, Robert Bergman became the director of the prominent Walters Art Museum in 1981. In his first decade he oversaw a $6 million museum renovation. Half a dozen wealthy Jews "have been among the Walters' most generous donors." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 123]  "Some eyebrows," says Jewish author George Goodman,

 

       "may have been raised at the awareness of Baltimore's Jewish 'Art

       Mafia.' At the time, Arnold Lehman was director of the Baltimore

       Museum of Art, Sergio Commissiona was music director of the

       Baltimore Symphony (in Meyerhoff Hall), and Frederick Lazarus IV,

       an arts administrator, was president of the Maryland Institute College

       of Art. Also, Herbert Kessler, a medievalist ... , chaired the well-

       regarded art history department at John Hopkins [University]."

       [GOODMAN, #1, p. 123

 

      By 1993, Director Bergman, by now the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, became director of the Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts. Bergman was replaced at the Walters Museum by another Jewish administrator, Gary Vikan.

 

     Across town, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Florence Levy was the museum's first director; Gertrude Rosenthal was for decades the chief curator. Goodman notes that :

 

      "When he was appointed the [Baltimore Museum of Art] director in

      1971, at thirty-five years of age, Tom L. Freudenheim became one

      of the nation's most visible Jewish museum professionals. Though

      secure in his identity as a Reform Jew and a Zionist, he did not seek

      recognition as a trailblazer. Indeed, he was somewhat puzzled as to

      why the Museum's Board sought a Jewish director, especially one

      with such obvious Jewish credentials.  [GOODMAN, #2, p.129]

 

      Perhaps Freudenheim needed only to look at the Museum's treasury for a solution to this puzzle. Prominent Jewish donors to his Baltimore museum included Helen and Abraham Eisenberg, Jacob Epstein, Julius Levy, Alan and Janet Wurtzberg, Robert and Ryda Levi, and Sadie May. The Museum's Etta Claribel Cone collection included over 3,000 pieces of art, including paintings by Renoir, Matisse, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gaughin. Freudenheim's other credentials for his post included internships under prominent Jewish art custodians E. H. Gombrich, Panofsky, Ettinghausen, Alan Solomon of the Jewish Museum in New York, and Peter Selz, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

 

     When Freudenheim eventually left the Baltimore Museum, he was replaced by another Jewish director, Arnold Lehman, a grandson of a founder of the Gimbels department store. Lehman eventually became director of the Miami Metropolitan Museum of Art and later the Brooklyn Museum. Like Bergman, Lehman has also been president of the Association of Art Directors.

 

     When Lehman eventually left the Baltimore Museum, he was predictably replaced by yet another Jewish director, Doreen Bolger, whose credentials include museum directorships in Texas and Rhode Island (the largest gift to the Rhode Island museum she directed was from the Jewish benefactors Leonard and Paul Granoff).

 

     Also in Baltimore is the American Visionary Art Museum, founded and directed by yet another Jewish powerbroker, Rebecca Hoffberger (formerly a development officer for the Associated Jewish Charities). AVAM's largest benefactor, of course, has been Jewish: Zanvyl Krieger. "Hoffberger," notes George Goodman, "remains active as a volunteer in Jewish organizations, and [is] devoted to Torah study." [GOODMAN, #2, p. 132]

 

     In nearby Washington DC, by 1998 Jews in the upper ranks of the art world establishment included I. Michael Hegman (Secretary, "or Chief Administrator") of the Smithsonian Museum, real estate mogul Robert Smith (President of the National Gallery of Art), Allen Shestack (Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art), Neil Benezra (Chief Curator of the Hirschorn Museum, where fellow Jew Stephen Weil recently retired as Deputy Director), David Levy (Director of the Corcoran Gallery -- his wife is a Vice President at PBS broadcasting), and Stephen Ostrow (Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Library of Congress).  Jewish mogul Arthur Sackler's wing at the Smithsonian is the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, featuring Asian and Near Eastern art. Sackler's collection, noted one curator, is 'by far the largest and most important collection of ancient Chinese art in the world." [GLUECK, G., p. B8] Years ago, Jewish collector Joseph Hirshhorn's 6,000 art works were donated towards the creation of the Hirshhorn Museum. (Hirshhorn made most of his fortune in uranium mining).

     Karl Meyer notes the context for the building (in 1974) of the Hirshhorn Museum -- so prominent on the Washington Mall -- as a government institution:

     "The federal government was to pay the expenses of building a museum
     bearing Hirshhorn's name; the design of the museum was to be subject to
     Hirshorn's approval, with the title to the art passing to the government
     only upon completion of the project; a ten-member governing board
     was to be established, half of whose members would be nominated
     by Hirshhorn, who also would nominate the director; and Hirshhorn
     would not be required to supply an endowment to help meet future
     operating expenses ... These terms aroused considerable disquiet
     in the museum world, in good part because they were likely to
     encourage other donors to demand equally one-sided arrangements."
     [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 49-50]

    (Hirshhorn's choice for the museum director position was Abram Lerner). [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 51]

    As Sherman Lee, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, protested in 1966:

     "It is a mistake to accept a collection of contemporary art formed
     by one man and to use a large sum of money to house and administer
     such a collection. If at least ten million dollars is available for a
     building to bear, not the nation's name, but that of a donor, sufficient
     funds aught to be available to set about the formation of a truly
     catholic and articulated national collection housed in a building bearing
     the collective name of all the people. Such a collection is already begun
     in the National Collection of Fine Arts, now bypassed by this proposed
     action." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 50]

     In the midst of the controversy over the Hirshhorn museum, Washington newspaper columnist Jack Anderson "reported that Hirshhorn had been in legal trouble years earlier over alleged currency smuggling and stock manipulation." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 50]
 

 

     A highlight exhibition for 1988 at Washington's Capital Children's Museum  (founder and director: Ann Lewin) was its Holocaust show. "The visiting children," noted the Washington Post," who are held to groups of 30, sit on the floor in an intimate room and are told the story of the Holocaust through a video narrated by a child. A dialogue, led by especially trained docents, some of them Holocaust survivors, follows." [GAMAREKIAN, p. B7]  "[Lewin's] exhibit about the Holocaust, Remember the Children, " noted the Post years later, "has traveled around the country and partly inspired the permanent children's exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum." [KASTOR, p. B1]

 

      By the 1970s Stanley Marcus (of Nieman-Marcus luxury store fame) was the Director of the Dallas Symphony Society, an Advisory Director of the Fort Worth Art Museum, a Trustee for the Public Television Foundation for North Texas, and even a Trustee of Southern Methodist University. Another Marcus, Richard, was on the board of the directors of the Dallas Theatre Center, the Dallas Council of World Affairs, and Assemblage, an organization of the wealthy who are interested in the arts. [COEVER, p. 123]

 

     In 1993, the Director of the Milwaukee Art Center noted in an art catalogue that

 

      "since 1957 ... the Jewish community has been central to the

      development of the [Milwaukee] institution ... The list of members

      of the Jewish community who have been monetary supporters of

      the museum would be too long to elaborate here, as would the many

      members of the Museum's Board of Trustees, presidents and officers

      of that board's committee, and support group members, and

      volunteers." [BOWMAN, p. 1]

 

      In Detroit, prominent Jewish philanthropist/entrepreneurs include financier Max Fisher, Eugen Appelbaum (founder of Arbor Drugs), Sam Franiel (a real estate baron), and international glass magnate William Davidson. Davidson also owns the Pine Knob Music Theatre and the Palace of Auburn Hills, the two most popular music concert venues in the area. His companies also manage the Meadowbrook Music Festival.  In Denver, Colorado, Barry Hirschfeld is "past board chairman of the Denver Art Museum." [PR NEWSWIRE, 3-21-96]

 

     In Canada, Avie Bennett is (1992) vice president of the National Ballet of Canada; Judith Loeb Cohen became president of that organization in 1988. Louis Applebaum headed the Ontario Arts Council from 1971-1980, and was appointed in 1979 to "co-chair a federal review of Canada's cultural policy; he also helped raise funds for the National Arts Center Orchestra and served three years as its chairman. [CSILLAG, R., 5-4-2000, p. 6] In 1999 Peter Herrnsdorf, a baptized Jew, was named as the chairman and CEO of the National Arts Center. Garth Drabinsky (until recent financial scandals) owned the Pantages Theatre and also managed and operated the $50-million North York Performing Arts Center. In 2000, a pair of Jewish brothers "were named to head two of the most important government-owned cultural institutions in the country [Canada]." Victor Rabinovitch became president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corp., "the country's largest and busiest museum." (His brother, Robert, became president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). Victor has also been on the Board of Directors for the Ottawa Jewish Community Center. [GORDON, S., 11-30-01]

      In Australia, Graeme Samuel became Chairman of the Australian Opera in 1996. Peter Redlich retired from the chairmanship of the Victorian Arts Center in 1994, the same year that Nathan Waks became director of music at ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company). [SINGER/SELDIN, 1995, p. 359] Prominent Australian artists include Louis Kahan, Desiderius Orban, Sali Herman, Harold Freedman, Asher Bilup, "renowned portraitist Judy Cossab" and sculptor Karl Duldig. [RUBINSTEIN, H., 1987, p. 216-217]

 

     In England, the current director of the Tate Gallery (one of that country's most important museums with 2.2 million visitors a year) is also Jewish: Nicholas Serota. In a 1995 obituary to another prominent Jewish businessman, (Lord) Aby Goodman, the Times (of London) noted that, "Not content with being the chairman of the trusts for both the Observer and the Jewish Chronicle, he was at the same time Chairman of the Newspaper Publishers Association; hardly as he finished his second year term as Chairman of the Art Council than he popped up again as Chairman of the British Council." [HOWARD, A., 1-19-99] In his lifetime he was also Chairman of the English National Opera, president of the National Book League, Director of the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, and a governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. [BOGGAM, S., 1018-99, p. 4]

 

     "Glance at the names of board members of major contributors [in Great Britain] to such institutions as the National Theatre and Covent Garden," suggests Jewish observer Stephen Brook,

 

       "and the large proportion of Jewish individuals and organizations

       will be apparent. Jonathan Miller ... argues that Jews mostly support

       only the most prestigious institutions ... That I think reflects not so

       much a commitment to the arts as a commitment to getting a place

       in the British establishment. It's a short cut. You can buy your way

       into the centre of the Establishment. I think it's rather pathetic."

       [BROOK, p. 326]

 

    An example of this is England's Arnold Goodman, a Jewish mogul who died in 1999. Goodman, notes the Financial Times of London,

 

     "became successively or concurrently: chairman of British Lion

      Films, the [London] Observer, the Newspaper Proprietors'

      Association, the Committee of Inquiry into Charity Law, the

     Arts Council, the Committee on London Orchestras, the

     Housing Corporation, and the National Building Agency."

     [He was also the Director of the Royal Opera House and

     president of the Theatrical Advisory Committee]. [FINANCIAL

     TIMES, 10-16-99, p. 4]

     Corrupt Jewish early 20th century art dealer "Lord" Joseph Duveen also was a philanthropist to British art causes. Duveen

     "underwrote the construction costs of entire galleries at the British
     Museum, the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery, and the National
     Portrait Gallery in London. (His generosity nonetheless piqued
     Osbert Sitwell to demure: 'It is an ironical reflection that while
     Lord Duveen's magnificent gifts to the nation stand as a memorial
     to his name, much of the money that paid for them was earned by
     the sale to the United States of the flower of eighteenth-century
     and early nineteenth-century English paintings. We have the galleries
     now, but no pictures to hang in them.')" [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 180-181]
 

 

      In Cleveland, Richard Bogomolny's $3 million gift to the Cleveland Orchestra -- the largest ever -- secured his position as president of the Board of the Musical Arts Association, the group that controls the orchestra. In Seattle, a new symphony venue is called Benaroya Hall, named in honor of the Jewish Benaroya family's benevolence to the arts. Also in Seattle, "mega-donor" Samuel Strom (major philanthropist of the Strom Jewish Community Center, on Mercer Island) "headed the capital campaign" for the Henry Art Gallery. (Strom is also Chairman of the Seattle Symphony Board and a regent at the University of Washington). [BARGREEN, M., 4-27-97, p. N9] In Washington DC, Lessing Rosenwald donated a major collection of graphic art to the National Gallery.  In Atlanta, Georgia, Ned Rifkind directed the High Museum until he moved to Houston to head the Menil Collection in 2001. Even in the hinterlands, in San Antonio, Texas, a museum director noted in 1964 that "the vast majority of [art] collectors are Jewish." [BRENNER, p. 323]

 

     Even in a place like San Luis Obispo, California, Chris Cohan [owner of professional basketball's Golden State Warriors and Sonic Communications, a TV station conglomeration] "was a central figure in the building of San Luis Obispo's Performing Arts Center, donating $2.1 million and enduring a rash of bad publicity in a dispute over whether or not it would bear his name." [LYONS, ONLINE] In Anchorage, Alaska, the "Sydney Laurence Theatre" is part of the Alaska Center for Performing Arts.  [ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS, 3-29-99, p. 2D] In the same genre, in Poland, Zygmunt Nissenbaum planned to provide funds to "renovate the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and affix a plaque with his name on it" at the site, a narcissistic idea which was "roundly rejected by most Jewish leaders." [WEINBAUM, L., p. 27]

 

      As James Yaffe noted in 1968:

 

      "Less than 1 percent of all contributors to Jewish charity are anonymous.

       Donors not only like to have their names known, but immortalized. To

       satisfy this desire many organizations have adopted the practice of

       naming things after people. Hospitals give contributors' names to

       everything from new wings to new oxygen tents. Brandeis University

       has a Jewish name attached to nearly every building on campus. The

       Israelis refer to the United States as Plaquistan." [YAFFE, J. 1968, p.

       175]

 

     Howard Jacobson recounts his amazement about the wealthy Jewish donor name game while visiting the University of Judaism in Los Angeles:

 

     "A list of the university's founders is done in gold lettering on marble

     tablets in the hall of what is the SYLVIA AND DAVID WEISZ

     EDUCATION WING, which is itself, as I understand it, part of

     the SHIRLEY AND ARTHUR WHIZIN center, (dedicated to the

     JEWISH FUTURE), which is in turn, as I further understand it, is

     housed within the WILLIAM AND FRIEDA FINGERHUT

     ACADEMIC BUILDING, a sub-branch of NORMAN AND

     SADIE LEE COLLEGE. To get from SYLVIA AND DAVID'S

     WING to the BESS AND ALEXANDER L. BERG DINING

     CENTER (fed, incidentally, by a kitchen dedicated to the memory

     of CELIA AND MORRIS I. PELLOW BY THEIR CHILDREN

     JUDITH AND LOUIS), you have to negotiate the ELIE J.

     AND RACHEL GINDI ENTRY PLAZA AND LOBBY."

     [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 191-192]

 

      In Boston, like anywhere else, censorship of art works and ideas is usually easily disguised via the rejection of artworks for completely subjective and nebulous "aesthetic reasons."  And, of course, there is self-censorship by those who dare not offend those who economically control -- and legislate "philanthropic" power -- in the art world. An overt case of Jewish manipulation, however, occurred in 1991 when Steve Grossman, a Jewish board member of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, resigned in protest of an ICA curatorial decision to show a series of films by Palestinian filmmakers. The Anti-Defamation League soon became embroiled in the matter, as well as high-profile Jewish lawyer Alan Dershowitz, forcing the Museum to present a concurrent screening of Israeli films, as well as an "educational forum" to address the Palestinian film's "political context, not artistic merit." 

 

      The injustice of the ICA decision to fall to Jewish pressure was not lost even to the curator of the Israeli film show, Ela Chohat, who said: "Can you imagine a program on black cinema where someone resigns if they don't have a white perspective?" [HARTIGAN, p. 75-76]   (Balance me apartheid," says filmmaker Tom Hayes, about his own experiences with Jewish demands to weld their pro-Israel political opinions into any public expression of the  Palestinian point of view, "or the Cheyenne, or the Japanese-Americans' experience during World War II, the slave's tales with the slave owners'." [HAYES, p. 6] "At any rate," noted the Boston Globe, "the upcoming Palestinian series prompted Grossman's resignation, which raised questions about the role of a board of directors in programming." [HARTIGAN, p. 75-76]

 

     Likewise in Boston, in 1982, prominent British actress Vanessa Redgrave -- known for her sympathy to Palestinian causes -- was commissioned to narrate an oratorio for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was ultimately fired. As Lenni Brenner notes:

 

      "A key role in the dismissal [of Redgrave] was played by Irving Rabb, a

       leading figure in Boston's Jewish establishment, and a member of the

       Symphony's board of trustees." [BRENNER, p. 331]

 

     (Redgrave sued, with the support of a variety of free speech organizations. She won what she would have been paid for the narration, but a federal judge ruled that she wasn't entitled to damages. And she also had to pay court costs).

 

     Blatant censorship and/or information manipulation takes other forms of course. In New York, for example, in 1971 political artist Hans Haacke had his scheduled exhibition cancelled by the Director of the Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Messer. The curator for Haacke's show was then fired. Haacke's "art" show was a public revelation of the various slumlords on the Museum's Board of Directors. The New York Times noted that

 

        "One of the real estate pieces that upset the Guggenheim [was] a

        deadpan photo documentation of 142 mostly grubby buildings --

        many in Harlem and on the Lower East side -- owned by [Jewish

        mogul] Harry Shapolsky and associates, a major holder of minor

        properties in the city." [GLUECK, #2, p. 27]

 

      The Guggenheim Museum, declared its director, "was not the proper place in which to expose slumlords." [GLUECK, #2, p. 27]

 

     In Montreal, Canada, in 1972 Jewish pressure "forced the Saidye Bronfman Center to cancel a production [of the play] The Man in the Glass Booth by Robert Shaw, a play about Adolf Eichman that had been performed, without outcry, in Israel itself." [PARIS, E., p. 99]  In Canada, Jewish organizations decided the play was anti-Semitic. Two years later "the same kind of pressure obliged the Saidye Bronfman Center to cancel another event [An Evening with Dudley Kravitz]." [PARIS, E., p. 101] At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts there's a performing hall named after Jewish real estate mogul Max Cummings. [EISENTHAL, B., 5-24-01]

 

       Elsewhere in the rolls of Jewish art patrons, in Forth Worth, Texas, prominent philanthropist Rosalyn Rosenthal is on the board of the Forth Worth Opera Association and she is a founder of the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall. More curiously, she endowed the E.M. and Rosalyn Rosenthal Chair in Jewish Studies at Texas Christian University's Brite Divinity School.

 

     Many Jewish art moguls also have some very politically-minded philanthropic interests. In Dallas, Stephen Felder Black was for two terms the president of the Dallas Symphony and a board member of the Dallas Chamber Orchestra. He was also, noted the Dallas Morning News in 1996,

 

       "devoted to disseminating information about Israel ... Earlier this

        year, Mr. Block worked to raise money so the Dallas Symphony

       Chorus could perform in Israel .... At his funeral Monday, 40 members

       of the symphony chorus sang the Israeli national anthem  ... At the

       time of his death, Mr. Black was chairman of the Israel Commission

       of the Jewish Community Relations Council and on the

       organization's national board." [SIMNACHER, p. 18A]

 

      Another mogul/philanthropist, Joseph Meyerhoff,  until he died in 1995, was extremely active in the art circles of Baltimore. But, notes the Baltimore Sun,

 

     "If you think Meyerhoff is a prominent name in Baltimore, you should go

      to Israel ... Meyerhoff ... was an ardent Zionist whose interest in Israel

      started through his involvement with United Jewish Appeal. He was

      also one of the first investors in Israel Bonds ... Contributions from him  

      and the foundation that was formed after his death are responsible [in

      Israel] for the construction of 11 libraries, nine day care centers, several

      community centers, cultural arts centers, the emergency wing at

      Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem and several buildings at universities

      throughout the country .... 45 to 50 buildings in Israel bear the

      Meyeroff name." [RIVERA, p. 2D]

 

     In addition to all this, as sampling, a scanning of merely a few common, and easily recognized, Jewish names in an alphabetical list of American art institution officials (1997-98) revealed the following (selected here are only people at the pinnacle of their organizations or fields):

 

    Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts: Samuel Sachs II. (The

         Treasurer of this museum is also Jewish: Gilbert Silverman).

    Chairman of the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati: Stanley

         Kaplan.

    Public Affairs Director of the National Museum of African-American

         Art in Washington DC: Janice Kaplan.

    President and CEO of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry:

       James Kahn.

    Executive Director of the Connecticut Historical Society: David Kahn.

    Executive Director of the National Assembly of State Art Agencies in

       Washington DC: Jonathan Katz.

    President of the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York

        City: Nathan Leventhal.

    President of the Society of American Graphic Artists: Martin Levine.

    Director of the American Foundation for the Arts in Miami: May

        Levine.

    President of the American Foundation for the Arts in Miami: Richard

        Levine.

    Public Information Director for the International Center of

        Photography in New York City: Phyllis Levine.

    President of National Assembly of State Art Agencies, Washington

        DC: Marvin Cohen.

    President of the American Society for Aesthetics: Ted Cohen.

    Executive Director of the of the Arizona Commission for the Arts:

         Shelly Cohn.

    President of the New York Artists Equity Association: Arnold 

         Gold.

    Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the McMichael Canadian Art

       Collection in Ontario: Joan Goldfarb.

    Chairman of the Art Academy of Cincinnati: Stewart Goldman.

    President of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies:

       Adrienne Goldstone.

    Executive Director of the Farrington Valley Arts Center in Avon,

        Connecticut: Betty Friedman.

    Director and Chief Curator of the Nova Eccles Harrison Museum of

        Art in Logan, Utah: Steve Rosen.

    Executive Director of the American Institute for Conservation of

        Historic and Artistic Works: Sarah Rosenberg.

    President of the Albuquerque (New Mexico) United Artists: Allan

        Rosenfield. 

    Director of the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Museum of Art: Ellen

        Rosenholtz.

    Chairman of the Board of Trustees, the Brooklyn Museum: Robert

        Rubin.

    Commissioner of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs: Lois

        Weinberg.  [BOWKER]

    

     Alan Stein was also Chairman of the Board of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in the 1990s [WINN, S., 9-24-93, p. C1] and in 1995, also in San Francisco, "a traveling Jewish theatre [was] the lucky winner of a $150,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts ... [It was] one of only 44 arts organizations in the country (and the only theatre company in California) to receive that kind of NEA grant [that] year." [JAMISON, L., 3-8-95]

 

                              

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

 

       In the actual formation of art tastes and pedigrees, organized Jewry's influence in art market trends has occasionally been blatant. "[In the 1960s] at first 'relevance' meant exhibiting avant-garde art," says Sophy Burnham, "Some people date 'relevance' from the coming of Alan Solomon to the Jewish Museum in 1963. The Jewish Museum had been devoted for years to preserving the historic traditions in its vessels and chalices. Suddenly it turned about face and marched after contemporary art. It was a shock. Everyone was talking about the Jewish Museum and about Alan Solomon, the director. It was showing Rauschenberg, Johns, Larry Rivers, Richard Diebenkorn, Ken Noland, Jean Tinguely, [James Rosenquist] ... and later, an exhibit, a social documentary, of life on the [Jewish] Lower East Side... Before the decade was out, the other museums had turned to the chase -- the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Pasadena Museum ... [BURNHAM, p. 164]

 

     Another seminal turning point in the modern art market was a 1973 auction of Jewish  taxi-cab company-owner Robert Scull's collection of contemporary art. Scull was, says Stuart Plattner, "an early and avid pop collector whom the art world loves to despise for his boorish manners and transparent attempts to use art to increase his social position." [PLATTNER, p. 35] The auction was a stunning success and launched a flurry of investment interest in collecting this genre of contemporary art. The vast fortune Scull reaped from the sale of exploited artists (who were original paid a small fragment of the paintings' sale prices) caused artist Robert Rauschenberg to punch Scull in an auction room. "I've been working my ass off just for you to make that profit," complained Rauschenberg. (One Rauschenberg painting Scull bought, for $900, sold for $90,000.) [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 183-184]

 

      Art gallery sellings and buyings of important art are usually secret. The most important public gauge for art market prices are the results of art auctions. The most important art auction firm has been Sotheby's. [The other major auction house, Christies, was the subject of movement towards control in December 1997 by a consortium headed by the SBC Warburg company. [CORPORATE MONEY, p. 2-3]  (Christie's chief curator for contemporary art, Neal Meltzer, is also Jewish).  In 1966 the Rothschild Investment Trust bought 20% ownership of the Sothebys firm, [WATSON, p. 351] but by the early 1980s A. Alfred Taubman, by then "one of the world's richest men,"  a Jewish entrepreneur who made his fortune in shopping malls and real estate, purchased controlling interest in Sotheby's. (He was also married to a former Miss Israel). [HOGREFE, J., 1986, p. 127]

 

    As a trustee of both the Whitney Museum and the Smithsonian, and now an art dealer, some critics complained, to no avail,  that Taubman had a serious conflict of interest in his new buy. "Selling art has much in common with selling root beer," Taubman told the Wall Street Journal, "People don't need root beer and they don't need to buy a painting either. We provide them with a sense that it will give them a happier existence." [WATSON, p. 385]

 

       In 1998 both Robert Lacey and Peter Watson authored separate books that exposed the scandalous inner workings of the Sotheby's company. Watson's expose was supported in part by BBC television; what he discovered, said CBS 60 Minutes reporter Morley Safar, "shook the art world to its foundations." [MYRPHY, p. 15]   "A couple of decades on, Sotheby's," noted the Economist, "now controlled by an American property tycoon, Alfred Taubman, has grown beyond recognition. So, too, has its ethical malaise, according to Peter Watson, a British journalist and art-market expert." [ECONOMIST]

 

     In text and on film, Watson documented Sothebys' international art smuggling operations, from Old Master paintings in Europe to religious artifacts in the Third World. Watson, noted Newsday

 

       "focuses his story on James Hodges, a disgruntled antiquities

       administrator in Sotheby's London office, who amassed thousands

       of documents that outline the auction house's various alleged

       malpractices, including smuggling. Hodges was later convicted

       of the theft of two artworks from Sotheby's (which he claims

       he was "holding" for dealers), but his documents constitute the

       basis of Watson's investigations. Most shocking of all of Sotheby's

       indiscretions is its alleged collusion in smuggling artworks out of

       India. With his television crew, Watson visits a tiny Indian village

       to find the home of a goat-headed stone goddess that was put up

       for sale on Sotheby's London auction block. All that's left of the

       local shrine, once the home of 20 such goddesses, is a pile of

       rubble where the villagers still pray." [LEE, p. B13]

 

     Watson told the New York Times that his investigations led him to believe that such practice at Sotheby's was "systematic." [IBRAHIM, p. A9]  "Art crime," notes Richard Myrphy,

 

      "... is far more pervasive than the occasional well-publicized dramas or

      those crooked dealers' ploys would suggest. The statistics themselves

      are sobering. According to a Cambridge University study, 30 to 40

      percent of the world's available antiquities pass through the sale rooms

      in New York City and London. Roughly 90 per cent of these pieces are

      of unknown provenance, meaning they were almost certainly stolen,

      smuggled, or both." [MYRPHY, p. 15]

 

      Meanwhile, there is an image to be maintained. "Taubman's most public gambit," said Watson, in an earlier volume about the art world, "was to flood Sotheby's board [of trustees] with a raft of rich friends and acquaintances -- socialites in many cases -- whose job it was to bring in business and create the impression in the minds of prospective sellers, at least in he United States, that Sotheby's was a sort of club, membership in which conferred social status." [WATSON, p. 381]  Among this group was Henry Ford II, for a while the vice-chairman at Sotheby's, who called himself Taubman's "token Gentile." [BERMAN, p. C1]   (Price-fixing scandals at Sotheby's forced Alfred Taubman to step down as chairman of Sothebys in 2000, although he maintained controlling interest in the company. CEO Donna (Dede) Brooks also resigned with him. That same year, Sotheby's and Christies art auction houses agreed to pay $512 million to satisfy numerous class-action suits brought against them.) [LOS ANGELES TIMES, 9-23-2000, p. C1] In May 2001, Taubman was indicted for price-fixing by a Federal grand jury. [SMITH/HIGGINS, 5-1-01, p. 1]

 

     This elitist, status-laden attitude is not special to Sotheby's; it has long been the foundation of the modern art world.  (In 1993 Sotheby's even successfully sold the ownership to the abandoned mechanical rover on the moon for $68,000, essentially a conceptual possession, an abstract play thing).  High-brow art culture, noted Jewish sociologist Herbert Gans in 1974, serves "a small public that prides itself on exclusiveness." [DIMAGGIO, p. 142] Sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Michael Useem reiterated the same theme in 1989:

 

       "Our findings clearly indicate that in this country the public for the visual

       and performing arts is distinctly elite in levels of education, occupation,

       income, and race. The statistics we were able to summarize from the

       many studies reviewed show little indication of cultural democracy."

       [DIMAGGIO, p. 163]

 

      "Many [art] galleries go out of their way to be rude," wrote Sophy Burnham, "indeed, one rule of the art world might be that the more 'important' the gallery, the more haughty it will be ... The gallery of High Art is so discriminating, so refined, deals in such precious artistic sensibility and at such prices, that it affects an ambiance, commensurate with its wares." [BURNHAM, p. 30]

 

    Among Taubman's Sotheby trustee appointees was the Jewish owner, Max Fisher,  of United Brands, a company that was fined for bribing Honduras government officials in exchange for tax breaks. "Still," notes Watson, "Fisher was chiefly known for his enthusiastic fund-raising for Jewish and Israeli charities ... [He also] wrote Op-Ed pieces for the New York Times." [WATSON, p. 381]   Fisher, longtime chairman of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency,  gives half his multi-million dollar oil and real estate income each year to Israel and other Jewish causes," notes the (Jewish) Forward. [FORWARD]

 

     The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is a reality that is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden -- as always for anyone, anywhere -- to discuss the subject for fear of being branded "anti-Semitic." Typically, as example, an entire 1989 academic volume on the "Sociology of the Arts" fails to mention Jews as sociological entity in the modern art dynamic. There are analyses of art galleries, "artist groups," art patrons, and art audiences, broken down into gender, age, income, occupation, and even "racial and ethnic minorities." We can find that, negligibly, "blacks, Orientals, and persons of Spanish origin constitute about 7% of the art audience," but there is nothing whatsoever about Jews, even their own percentage of that "art audience," let alone how many art galleries they own, museums they direct, and articles they generate about art value. [FOSTER/BLAU, 1989]

 

     This kind of false framing is endemic to modern America. (See, for example, a 1998 scholarly volume entitled Ethnic Identity and Power. Cultural Contexts of Political Action in School and Society. The index cites references to Blacks (large case), "white" (small case), "angry white males," Chicanos, Mexicans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Latino, Native Americans, Eskimos, Haitians, "Hmong people," Moroccans, and so on.  There is nothing about Jews in the context of power and ethnicity -- they are not afforded a heading in the book's index). It is institutionalized: no one (certainly not a non-Jew) is allowed to single out Jewry for an analysis of their power. Those few who know the story are afraid to speak. Most are merely ignorant of the dimensions of the issue. Take, for example, American journalist Thomas Billitteri's crusading article for truth, justice, and fairness, never mentioning Jewry in his critical appraisal of the mass media's systemic reluctance to hire minorities (i.e., Blacks, et al). Instead, Billitteri's mass media culprits are the standard punching bags -- the amorphous "whites," by which the very particularistic Jewish dominance in the mass media (especially at the highest decision-making strata) [See mass media chapter] is conveniently subsumed, and thereby, as always, hidden:  "79% of television new personnel are white, and 88% of radio news workers are white. In management ranks, 92 percent of television and news directors are white. Only 1% of television news directors are black." [BILLITTERI, p. 19] Or what of the Los Angeles Times' dissimulative assertion in 2001 that "90% of each major [Hollywood] guild (Screen Actors, Directors, Writers and Producers) is white, the majority of them male." [Munoz, L., 3-24-01]

 

    Art critic Peter Halley (self-identified as half-Jewish) took another angle on the "Forbidden to Be Spoken About" machinations of the modern art world, as represented by the ethnicity of many of today's most successful artists:

 

      "It is my contention that the art world of the 1980s represented a kind of

      renaissance for Jewish American artists who came of age in that decade.

      The list of young Jewish American artists who took center stage in the

      80's is long -- early in the decade we might think of Barbara Kruger,

      Laurie Simmons, Sherrie Levine, R.M. Fischer, Donald Sultan, Julian

      Schnabel, and David Salle. Later, the work of Ross Bleckner, Terry

      Winters, Haim Steinbach, and Meyer Vaisman come to the fore ...

      What originally motivated me to explore this subject [of growing

      Jewish artist prominence] was the strange fact that there has been an

      inexplicable silence surrounding it. Especially in this era of multicultural

      awareness, it is surprising, to say the least, that no one has mentioned

      this phenomena ...  [HALLEY, p. 26-27] ...

         One possible reason for this silence about a Jewish artist renaissance in

      the 80's is that at the same time a great fluorescence of Jewish influence

      in the areas of philanthropy, business, finance and the bastions of high

      society was taking place ... By the 1980s ... in cities with large Jewish

      populations, like New York, Jews had largely replaced the older WASP

      elite as standard bearers of social  power and prestige in the evolving

      American postwar ethnic meritocracy."

         Thus a new and yet unexamined social paradigm arose. Jews ... [who]

      had championed the marginal culture of Modernism had suddenly

      become the pillar of the American establishment. At the same time, a

      new generation of Jewish artists was emerging whose work was collected

      as often as not by Jews in the cultural elite as part of a continuing

      tradition of Jewish support for contemporary art." [HALLEY, p. 28]

 

         By the 1980s, from such artists, notes well-known art critic Robert Hughes, "never before had star artists been so bathed in adulation ... The doings of collectors, the gyrations of the market, the increasingly passive promotional role of museums. The whole social circus attached to the art world supplied limitless fodder for breathless journalists. Art magazines devolved into sycophantic praise-bulletins. Since the magazines depended on advertising, revenue from dealers who were not averse to applying pressure, 95 per cent of the writing published in them was the merest puffery, garnished with opaque Derridan and Lacanian jargon [Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan were two French -- and Jewish -- psychoanalytic philosophers]." [HUGHES, p. 594]

 

     Hughes may have had Milton Esterow in mind when he spoke of the slide into purely money-grubbing, consumerist-spewing "art" magazines. Esterow, the Jewish owner and editor of ArtNews (America's largest circulation arts publication) and other media interests, was featured in the New York Times in 1995 in his quest "for more consumer, or general, advertising to go along with the substantial art advertising that has traditionally run his magazine." "Art collectors are passionate about beautiful things," Esterow said, "This is translatable to beautiful cars, beautiful clothes, exotic vacations. There is no better setting for beautiful things than our magazine." [SLOANE, p. D9]  Esterow noted new ads from Infiniti cars and Rolex watches in his publication. Promotional plans also included an allowance for automobile advertisers to "place a new car in front of a major museum during a particular exhibit," and an alcohol company "to hold a tasting at an important art fair."

 [SLOANE, p. D9]

 

                                        

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

 

     The Jewish influence in "art photography"  -- as artists as well as dealers, critics, photographers themselves, and curators-- is overwhelmingly dominant. This is certainly in part due to the fact that many photographic artists seep over into the High Art realm from positions of Jewish predominance in hard-to-get advertising, fashion, and photojournalism positions, each deeply part of the business world (Annie Liebowitz at Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, for instance, or Arthur Penn, Richard Avedon, and Helmut Newton at Vogue and other slick magazines).  Even maverick Robert Frank took a vacation to Peru early in his career "because he wanted to escape the commercial success he was beginning to have in New York shooting for fashion magazines." [WESTERBECK, p. 645] Anthony Heilbut notes that "during the 1930s, American notions of physical beauty were altered by the [Jewish] émigrés, a neat reversal of the pattern that once led East European Jews to celebrate icons unequivocally gentile and heterosexual. Fashion photographers like Horst and Erwin Blumenthal specialized in tableaus of exotic, androgynous women." [HEILBUT, p. 492]

     In England, in 2001 Gemma Levine had a career retrospective at London's National Portrait Gallery. She "is one of Britain's leading portrait photographers ... Her career in photography was initiated by a commission from [Jewish publishing mogul] George Weidenfeld to take photographs for two books in Israel in collaboration with [Israeli heroes] Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir." [absolutearts.com, 2001] Rock and roll photographer Gered Mankowitz had a retrospective exhibition the same year:

     "Best-known for his work as the unofficial photographer for the Rolling Stones
     in the late 1960s, Mankowitz didn't just take pictures, he created some of the
     most enduring images of that era. Working with talents such as Jimi Hendrix
     and the Stones, he produced the kind of photographs that led nice teenagers
     astray to worship at the altar of rock ... Now 55, the photographer has been
     creating pop images for so long he has become part of the mythology himself.
     As integral to swinging London's music scene as flowing hair and weed,
     Mankowitz's studio was in the heart of it all." [SCOTSMAN, 11-13-01]

     Jacques Lowe, son a German father and Jewish mother, was John F. Kennedy's personal photographer. Lowe "became an assistant to the renowned [Jewish] photographer Arnold Newman, who became his mentor." Lowe founded the Visual Arts agency (later called Visual Arts Projects). [JFK, 2001]
 

 

     An émigré from Europe in 1938, for decades Miki Denhof was a "noted mentor of fashion photographers" at Esquire, Vogue, House and Garden and Glamour. Her big break was to be hired at Vogue by (fellow Jewish) art director Alexander Lieberman in 1945. She once donated 900 photographs from her father's personal collection to an exhibition entitled "Fighting for the Fatherland: The Patriotism of Jews in World War I." Denhof's influence in the fashion world was so influential that her death in 2000 merited an article in the New York Times. [HELLER, S., 8-6-2000] (The editor-in-chief for 17 years at Vogue was Grace Mirabella, an Italian-American. Her husband, William Cahan, was a wealthy Jewish doctor and socialite; his cousin, Abraham Cahan, founded and edited the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward. [MIRABELLA, 1995, p. 167] At her wedding to Cahan, "the Jewish custom in weddings is to step on a glass and break it. So, after we'd kissed, Nate [Cummings, a Jewish friend] brought out a glass wrapped in a napkin, and Bill had to stomp on it. Nate then picked up the pieces, still wrapped, and had them affixed to a canvas background, which he framed. The collage now hangs in our home, like an abstract painting." [MIRABELLA, G., 1995, p. 175] She notes that "photographers were becoming big stars too" in her era, particularly noting Jewish Vogue photographers Bert Stern who "could only work with ten assistants in his studio," Richard Avedon, and Arthur Penn.] [MIRABELLA, G., 1995, p. 121-122] Jewish novelist Judith Krantz notes the Jewish complexion of her photography connections:

     "Well-known [Jewish] fashion photographer" Milton Greene "and I became
     good friends. It was a world of interrelationships. Milton's ex-wife Evelyn
     was engaged to [famous Jewish portrait photographer] Dick Avedon ...
     He already had an aura of a vast future about him, a photographer version
     of the young [Jewish conductor] Leonard Bernstein ... Later, when I became
     a fashion editor, I was always galvanized when we worked together."
     [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 128-129]

 

      In the field of photojournalism, three of the original six staff photographers for Life magazine were Jewish (Carl Mydans, Margaret Bourke-White, and Alfred Eisenstadt). "Within a few years Jewish photographers Fritz Goro, Eliot Eliosofon, Dmitri Kessel, and others (Curt Gunther, Hebert Gehr, Yale Joel, Hy Peskin, Paul Schutze, Mark Kaufmann, Nina Leon, Ida Wyman, Arthur Shay, Lawrence Schiller, Henry Groskinsky, Jill Krementz, and Neil Leifer) became staff or contract photographers." "From the [19]40s to 70s Philip Stern "was known as Life's photographer in Hollywood." Look magazine was founded in 1937. "For most of its years the Director of Photography," notes George Gilbert, "was Arthur Rothstein." [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 60, 78] The successful "A Day in the Life" series of coffee table photography books (A Day in the Life of -- the United States, Russia, Israel, etc.) have been headed by two Jewish photojournalists, Rick Smolan and David Cohen.

 

     An influential documentary photography organization from the late 1930s to the 1950s was the Photo League. "The overwhelming majority of members of the 200-plus group," notes George Gilbert, "including photographers from Life and from the photo agencies were of Jewish heritage." Jewish photographers Sid Grossman, Sol Libsohn, and Aaron Siskind founded the group in 1932. [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 230-231] Another influential organization, the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP), was created in 1944. "Starting with 30 paid-up members," notes Gilbert, "... the group leaped into prominence in the industry, boasting an estimated three of four of all eligible magazine photographers as members. The initial roster, with an exception of two, were all of Jewish heritage." [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 237]

     Famous turn-of-the-century social documentarian Lewis Hine wasn't Jewish. But the man who controlled his estate at his death, Walter Rosenbaum, was. In 2001, the Times of London reported that

     "The FBI has begun an investigation into the suspected forgery of hundreds of
      works by one of America's most famous photographers. Tests showed that
      numerous 'vintage' prints by Lewis Hine, who is revered for his social realist
      pictures from the Depression, were printed on paper not available until more
      than a decade after his death in 1940. The investigation was prompted by a
      complaint from a dealer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, about Hine's longtime
      collaborator, Walter Rosenbaum, an acclaimed war photographer and the
      former president of the Photo League co-operative where Hine left his
      archives ... This year [Rosenbaum] was reported to have reached a
      confidential settlement out of court with six dealers to create a 690,000
      pound fund to reimburse buyers of between 300 and 500 Hine prints
      who were unhappy with their purchases." [TIMES OF LONDON, 8-17-01]

 

    Prominent Jews in the photographic publishing field have included the founders (William Ziff and Bernard Davis) of Popular Photography magazine, the associate publisher of Modern Photography, the photo page editor of the New York Times, the publisher of Photo Dealer magazine, the publisher of Photo Weekly, and so on. [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 306] Laura Levitt notes the increased interest in the photographic publishing world in Jewish subjects:

 

     "Since 1996 there has been a proliferation of exhibits on Jews and

     photography across the United States ... [There are also] explicit

     photographic collections about Jews [that] are increasingly being

     marked as identifactory texts. As I read it, this larger situation of

     loss [of the Jewish past] helps account for the growing market

     for picture books about American Jews." [LEVITT, L., 2000, p. 90,

     65]

 

     Critic James Twitchell calls the omnipresent merger of modern art and business advertising these days "adcult," and the medium of photography plays a central role. The photographic work of Richard Avedon is a case in point, reflecting the interconnected back scratching of the art and corporate elite. Concerning an Avedon exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art, Twitchell notes that:

 

     "Si Newhouse's Advance Publications owns the New Yorker, which gave

      Avedon more-than-usual space in the week of the show's opening. The

      co-publisher of the exhibition catalog, with an essay by New Yorker art

      critic Adam Gopnik, is Random House, which is owned by Newhouse.

      Among the six speakers at the Whitney symposium connected to the

      show were Random House's CEO Harold Evans and writers Brendan Gil

      [author of a New York Review of Books article accusing the great

      folklorist Joseph Campbell of anti-Semitism] and Ingrid Sischy who

      write for  ... the New Yorker. The curator of the show was Jane

      Livingston who does not work for the Whitney but for Avedon, who

      used a grant from Kodak to pay for the show and the catalog.

      Synergies, anyone?"  [TWITCHELL, p. 227]

 

      Elsewhere in the criss-cross into the art world, for years too Cornel Capa  (born Karol Friedman) has run the important International Center for Photography in New York City. Capa's brother, Robert Capa (Andreas Friedman), was a founder of Magnum, the seminal photojournalism agency.  Tom Freudenheim notes that "many of the works [of a "Jewish art" exhibition under his review] are by the most significant photographers of the century and indeed, it can probably be demonstrated that this is a medium which, unlike painting and sculpture, was moved primarily by men and women who were Jewish." [FREUDENHEIM, p. 28] "Photography has been dominated by Jewish photographers from the 1920s through the 1980s," says Tom Bamberger, himself both a Jewish photographer and adjunct curator of a Milwaukee art museum. [FREUDENHEIM, p. 28] Even the famous photography repository -- the Bettman Archives -- was Jewish-founded,  by Otto Bettman, as was Simon Guttman's London-based international news and photography agency, Report.

 

     Aside from a core of west coast nature photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Wynn Bullock and scattered others across photographic history, there are comparatively few non-Jews who have cracked Jewish dominance of the upper echelon of art-world status in photography. A history of American (and -- as many were immigrants -- even international) photography reads almost like a history of Jewish photography. A partial list of well-known Jewish photographic artists and/or recurring grant and award winners must always start with the gigantic influence of Alfred Stieglitz. "It was Alfred Stieglitz who was to define the parameters of American ideas about photography's emotional and expressive potential" [CRICE, p. 661]; his magazine Camera Work and 291 gallery were seminal in moving the "tangible acceptance of photography to the domain of art patrons and other buyers." [BUNNELL, p. 314] As John Pultz notes: "Steiglitz had been the major force in avant-garde America photography for over forty years. He had exerted his will, and would continue to do so, not only through his own photography but also through the three photography periodicals he had edited between 1893 and 1917 and the three New York galleries he was to run between 1905 and his death in 1946. [PULTZ, p. 484]

 

     "The capitalist concept of the art work [was] a singular rare object," notes Peter Bunnell, "with a measure of its importance provided by the extent of its economic value ... The development of the private gallery, of organized marketing activity replete with regular exhibitions and published criticisms was an American contribution. Largely an urban phenomena, it was orchestrated out of New York by the country's leading practitioner and spokesman for photography, Alfred Stieglitz ...  [BUNNELL, p. 314]  ... [He] appl[ied] capitalist economics to the appreciation and acceptance of art. Steiglitz clearly positioned himself at the center of power and he was the major spokesman for Pictorial photography [an early genre of self-conscious "art" photography]." [BUNNELL, p. 315]  In 1993, a 1920 "art" photograph by Steiglitz of artist Georgia O'Keefe's hands and a thimble sold at auction for $398,500, the highest price ever paid for a photograph. Another Stieglitz print went for $107,500. [NYT, 10-9-93, p. A11]

 

      A partial list of celebrated Jewish photographers includes Paul Strand (Stransky), Richard Avedon, painter-photographer Robert Rauschenberg, Herb Ritts (another "photographer of the stars"), Eric Salomon, Alfred Eisenstadt (the "father of photojournalism"), Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky), Robert Capa (Endre Friedman), Cornell Capa, Laslo Moholgy-Nagy, Andre Keretsz ("among the most influential photographers in Paris in the 1920s" [WESTBECK, p. 35], Margaret Bourke-White (her father, originally Weiss, was Jewish. She was "surely the twentieth century's most famous woman photographer" [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. ix], William Klein, Helen Levitt, Aaron Siskind, famous ambulance chaser Weegee (Arthur Fellig, whose father was a rabbi), Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Diane Arbus (whose major photography influences were Lisette Model [originally Elise Felice Amelie Seybert] and Marvin Israel), Irving Penn, Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, Duane Michaels, Lewis Baltz, Carl Chiarenza, Michael Bishop, Werner Bischof, Roloff Beny, William Wegman (famed for his in-joke photos of his dog named "Man Ray"), Richard Misrach, Arnold Newman (whose Israeli-born wife  was a "one time member of Haganah, the pre-state Israeli underground army" [WALMAN, p. 303], Eve Arnold (originally Cohen: the first woman in the influential Magnum Photo agency), David Seymour (born Szymin, a co-founder of Magnum), Brassai (Gyula Halasz), Susan Meiselas, Cindy Sherman, Walter Rosenblum, Arthur Olman (also the Director of San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts), Ruth Orkin, Larry Sultan, Jerry Uelsmann, Judy Dater [Lichtenfeld], Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Elliot Erwitt, Danny Lyon, Larry Fink, Art Kane (Arthur Kanofsky), Jay Meisel, Nan Goldin, Simpson Kalisher, Joe Rosenthal (who took the staged photograph, which has become a patriotic icon, of soldiers planting an American flag at Iwo Jima), Ralph Gibson, Helmut Gernsheim, Phillipe Halsman, Ernest Haas, Annie Leibowitz, Roman Vishniac, John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfelde), Gisele Freund, Sandi Fellman, Abigail Heyman, Lauren Greenfield, Arthur Rothstein, Doris Ullman, Rebecca Lepkoff, Sandra Weiner, Andreas Feininger, Lotte Jacobi, Inge Morath, Lynne Cohen, Rosalind Soloman, Milton Resnick, Donald Blumberg, Baron Adolf de Meyer, Ellen Land-Weber, Eva Rubinstein, Dennis Stock (Stockl), Mark Cohen, Paul Diamond, Ray Metzker, Arthur Tress, Peter Simon, Marcia Resnick, Helmut Newton (whose sado-masochistic images for glamour magazines have been seminal to the heroin-addict look in fashion photography criticized by President Clinton in the 1990s), and many others. [See for example, George Gilbert's compilation of Jewish photographers].

      "It is impossible to deny the impact [Helmut Newton] has made, on fashion photography in particular," noted England's The Independent in 2001,
   
      "To radical feminists, Newton is the antichrist. This is the man who
      photographed a woman on all fours with a saddle on her back,
      and another sitting on her underwear or an unmade bed, with a gun
      in her mouth ... Newton's vision is fuelled by sex, status, power and, above all,
      voyeurism ... Small wonder, then, that much of the photographer's most successful
      imagery has become far more famous than the garments he has chosen
      to photograph ... Newton's influence is everywhere ... In the Sixties and Seventies,
      Newton's decadent vision may have been labeled 'porno chic,' but today the rest
      of the world has finally caught up with him and it's just plain chic. There is
      barely a stylist, photographer or designer working in fashion today who can
      fail to acknowledge Newton as an influence ... Helmut Newton was born to middle-class
      Jewish parents in Weimar Berlin in 1920, and the decadent spirit of that place at that
      time is imprinted on his work ... Accusations of misogyny are still constantly
      made against Newton's work." [FRNKEL, S., 5-9-01]

 

     Les Krims' "taste for the bizarre -- deer slayers, dwarfs, murdered women, and naked Jewish mothers making chicken soup -- made him one of the most controversial artists of the 1970s." [RICE, p. 677] Krims' work "would also be seminal," notes Shelly Rice, "to the works of Joel Peter Witkin, a young photographer who is continuing, into the 1990s, to explore the domain of the mysterious. Attracted to the bizarre, like Krims and, before him, Diane Arbus, Witkin photographs transvestites, deformed people, dead fetuses, and other strange phenomena." [RICE, p. 678] Also Jewish, a Witkins relative, Lee, founded the Witkin Gallery in 1969 which "experienced great success and became the first commercially viable gallery devoted entirely to photography." [ALEXANDER, p. 697] (Among many influential photography galleries were those run by Stephen White in Los Angeles and Marjorie Neikrug Raskin's Neikrug Galleries in New York (specializing in antique photography. Charles Traub, also Jewish, was the director of the influential Light Gallery). Vicki Goldberg is one of many prominent Jewish critics of photography.

 

     In 1999, another Jewish photographer, Nan Goldin, was provided a one-person show of her work at Prague's Galerie Rudolfinum, a spectacular art facility in that beautiful city. Goldin's show, sponsored by New York's Whitney Museum of Art, framed her as an ambassador of American art and culture to the Czech Republic. And what was the show like? Large scale color Cibachrome prints of the decadent and violent American underworld decorated the elegant museum walls, including huge confrontational images of drug addicts masturbating.

 

     Another Jewish photographer is Peter Basch. His "photographs for male-oriented publications won him the reputation of having photographed 100,000 nude women." [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 60] Daniel Howard Cohen died of AIDS in 1995. He was "an educator who grew up in Baltimore and went from being an outlaw leftist to running the photography program at one of the nation's most prestigious journalism schools ... [He joined] the leftist Weathermen group in the 1960's. He went underground for several years while he was wanted by the law." [BALTIMORE SUN, 4-17-95]

 

      Europe's August Sander is also regarded as a seminal influence in the development of documentary photography. Roman Vishniac is another well-known name. Probably the most famous current Polish photographer is expatriate Ryszard Horowitz, a Holocaust survivor, now living in New York City. The best known photographer from Brazil? Sebastian Selgado, also Jewish.  Jewish cameraman Yevgeny Khaldei was described by one newspaper as "the greatest Soviet war photographer." [PIRANI, S., p. 11] W. W. Waglieff Schapiro was the Tsar of Russia's official "Court Photographer." [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 135]

 

     A Jewish refugee from Germany, Laslo Mohology-Nagy, founded Chicago's Art Institute of Design. Prominent Jewish graduates have included Aaron Siskind, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel, Ray Metzker, Ken Josephson, Barbara Crane, and Eileen Cowan, among others. [WESTBECK, p. 656] More commercially, Morris Germaine founded "Germaine's School of Photography," H. P. Seidel founded the "School of Modern Photography," and "on the west coast today's prestigious Brooks School of Photography also had its start early in the twentieth century by a Jewish family." [GILBERT, G., 1996, p. 79]

 

     "By 1963," notes Stuart Alexander, "the teaching of photography at the university level had become such a significant force in the United States that, under the instigation of Nathan Lyons [formerly of the George Eastman House] the Society of Photographic Education was founded to 'discuss educational issues ... It has its own internal hierarchy and exerts a great influence on American photography." [ALEXANDER, p. 701] In intellectual cliques, German-born Walter Benjamin is among the best known of "photo-mechanical" theorists. "Benjamin," notes George Mosse,

 

    "consciously [sought] to define his own brand of Judaism. Benjamin,

    barely out of school at the age of twenty, rejoiced in his newly

    discovered Jewish identity. Jewish intellectuals, he wrote in 1912,

    provide the principal support and dynamic for true culture, which

    in this case included not only literature and art but also socialism

    and the women's emancipation movement. Among Jewish intellectuals,

    he continued, writers were in the vanguard of change ... [Jews] took

    a central role in creating alternatives to the existing order ... Benjamin's

    preoccupation with Jewish thought, which for a time, under the

    influence of close friend Gershom Scholem, seemed to shift

    Benjamin's early definition of Jewishness toward a sporadic interest

    in cabala [Jewish mysticism] and Zionism." [MOSSE, G., 1985,

    p. 66-67]

 

     In 1997, George Gilbert published a volume that identified over 500 Jews who have been prominent in the field of photography as photographers, critics, scientists, or curators. As Jewish critic A. D. Coleman observed about the volume, "this selection can't exhaust the list of prospects, indeed it barely scratches the surface (as a parlor game of sorts, I sat with a friend for two evenings and compiled a list of at least one hundred figures Gilbert missed)" ... [These "hundreds and hundreds" of Jews are] so integral to photography's history as we habitually think of it that a written version of that history excluding these figures is difficult to imagine." [COLEMAN, A., D., 1998]

 

    Among the most important genres of photography is the so-called "New York School." It is overwhelmingly Jewish (two-thirds of the important artist selections for one book by curator Jane Livingston on this theme are Jews). "In its art historical usage," says Coleman,

 

     "the term 'school' connotes a connectedness among a group of

     artists that goes beyond mere friendship and social interaction to

     deeper levels of bonding and influence: master-apprentice relationships,

     stylistic kinships, parallel and overlapping trains of thought, and

     general agreement on what the important questions are in the

     field -- what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn would call

     a shared paradigm." [author's emphasis, COLEMAN, A., D., 1998]

 

     This "shared paradigm," of course, is intellectual doubletalk for a "collective world view" or, more pointedly, ideological collusion.

 

    Why such Jewish dominance of the field, Coleman wonders? Or, as he literally says, "How are we to make sense of this?" What Coleman, as all, fail to willfully address is the obvious: Jewish networking and hustling, Jewish predominance in the mass media, Jewish economic dominance of the art world, Jewish power, Jewish money, and the connective agreement upon what does, and what does not, fall within the realm of artistic "quality." For the "New York School," Coleman suggests its core is "stylistic rebelliousness and intellectual contention." "All of them," he adds, "Jewish or not, were functioning in the liberal-left bohemian intellectual atmosphere of New York City at the time, which was strongly Jewish-influenced. It was an environment in which an urban-Jewish atmosphere permeated everyone's thinking, including that of many non-Jews." [COLEMAN, A. D., 1998]

 

      In another case, Paris-based Michel Frizet's massive international English-language (1998) volume entitled "The New History of Photography," features an article by critic Colin Westerbeck, "On the Road and in the Street: The Post-War Period in the United States." Of the 23 photographs illustrating the article, at least 16 images (and perhaps as many as 20) are by Jews. [WESTERBECK, p. 641-659] William Klein and Robert Frank are noted as seminally influential to a new aesthetic: both are also Jewish. Klein's world view in photography is quintessentially Jewish in its animosity towards Gentiles. Klein moved to Paris, says Westerbeck, because

 

     "He had needed to escape from New York because, as a poor Jewish

     child in a tough Irish-Italian neighborhood, he had spent his youth being

     terrorized by street gangs. By the time he went back, in the early 1950s,

     photography was, for him, he has confessed, a 'weapon' with which 'to

     get even.' He wanted his photographs to reveal the harshness of life on

     the New York streets, and he realized that the way to do so was to

     cultivate in himself a killer instinct for pictures as ferocious as the primal

     emotions he wanted to betray in his subjects." [WESTERBECK, p. 644]

 

     The huge, scholarly volume from which this quote is taken declares itself to be the "new" history of photography. And even this book about photographic image-making devotes an entire obligatory page to the specialness of the Holocaust, a brief article (entitled "The Final Solution") and four photographs. (No such special attention is provided any world wars or anyone else’s' collective suffering, genocidal or otherwise). The author of this article, Anne Lilensztein, assets that surviving photographs of the "Final Solution" evidentially prove that the Holocaust occurred: "Testimonies of this madness have been brought to us ... above all [by the] photographic ... Thus photography is the tangible proof of one of the greatest tragedies of contemporary history." [LILENSZTEIN, p. 600]

 

     The proof cited for this assertion is four Nazi-era photographs --  a pile of naked corpses captioned "Buchanwald, 1946," and a three-portrait series of a woman entitled "Records of an Inmate at Auschwitz, circa 1943." There is, as usual, no mention in the text that anyone other than Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, or that millions of other people died at fascist hands in other ways too.

 

     The article's stated purpose is to declare that photography played an important role in "proving" the atrocities against the Jews. And, as always, the bias against non-Jewish suffering is intrinsic -- who can say with absolute certainty that the pile of anonymous corpses depicted are only Jewish? And even if they are, far more indicting to the author's (and editor's) ethnocentric premise is that, although non-Jews are never mentioned as victims in the piece, the three portrait photos of an Auschwitz prisoner illustrating "proof" of the Final Solution against Jews depict a female prisoner who is, incredibly, not Jewish.

 

     The woman in these images [page 600] has a Nazi-created card in the photograph with her prisoner number noted: it is "POL:F 31848." In the second photo, a patch with her number and a triangle can be clearly seen sewn to her prison uniform. Tadeusz Iwaszko, in an authoritative volume published by the Auschwitz Museum in Poland, notes that: "Besides being tattooed, another element in the registration process for new arrivals [at Auschwitz] was being photographed in three poses. In the first photograph, a profile, the camp number was visible as well as letter symbols for the category and nationality of the prisoner. Jewish prisoners, who had begun to arrive in mass transports in 1942, were not photographed. (There were certain exceptions to this general rule)." [IWASZKO, p. 61] But even if these photographs in question were such exceptions, Nazi concentration camp prisoners were identified by both tattooed numbers and sewn cloth patches (or painted) symbols on their clothing. A red triangle was a political prisoner, a green triangle meant "professional criminal," a black one were so called "anti-social" prisoners (including prostitutes, gypsies, and others. Violet triangles signified Jehovah's witnesses; the Catholic clergy had red triangles and homosexuals pink ones. "Jews," notes Iwaszko, "were identified with a six-sided star, composed of two triangles of different colors ... [Later] Jews began to be identified by the same method as the other prisoners, except that a yellow square patch would be positioned above the single triangle." [IWASZKO, p. 63-64] [See the photographic section before page 33 in Auschwitz: Nazi Death camp, edited by Piper/Zwieback for photographic examples of the different identification symbols and portraits for Jews and Poles].

 

    The Nazis were of course meticulous in their delineation of ethnic/racial backgrounds. The letters "POL" or "POLE," and then a number series, denoted a Pole. "JUDE," followed by a series of numbers, denoted a Jew. Hence,  three of the four photographs used to "prove" the Final Solution against the Jews in the New History of Photography are those of a non-Jewish Auschwitz inmate. Why belabor this? Because such an error is systemic in western cultures today. In an otherwise meticulous scholarly enterprise of such international scope, this mistake is no mere oversight. The appropriation of the image of an unnoted Gentile concentration camp victim to "prove" the indisputable facts of the Jewish Holocaust is a surrender to the constant historical revision barrage in all realms of life today whereby only Jews count, and even photographic evidence of non-Jews at Auschwitz is appropriated as further, irrefutable evidence for the uniqueness of Jewish martyrology. There is a profound lesson here that subverts the very thesis of the Final Solution article in the History volume. Even as the author heralds the absolute truth of photographic evidence, her illustrations -- as any photographs -- are always susceptible to contextual manipulation. In this case, as elsewhere, the widespread, monolithic presumption about the specialness of a Holocaust only for Jews precedes all and any facts on the matter. Yet, ironically, the images used in this book in question actually subvert what the author seeks to illustrate, i.e., that it was only Jews who died in a Holocaust-Final Solution at Auschwitz.

 

     The overwhelming Jewish dominance in all realms of art and photography leads us to one place where, in very recent years, some non-Jews have managed to get considerable attention for their photographic work. In the late 1980s American art went through a convulsion of controversy when religious leaders and elected politicians  began attacking -- and legislating against -- what many perceived as decadent modern art values. Seminal among the troublemakers was the work of Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe (both photographers), and Karen Finley, each in some form rewarded for their efforts by the National Endowment for the Arts. Andres Serrano's most controversial piece was a photograph of Christ on a crucifix in a container of urine, entitled Piss Christ. Mapplethorpe -- who has died of AIDS -- was celebrated in an NEA-funded retrospective of his works including homosexual sadomasochism, for example, elegant photos of a man peeing into another's mouth and one in which a fist goes up a rectum.

 

     Karen Finley is a performance artist whose central theme was described in one review as "victimization, especially women as victim, women as underclass, tough stuff ... she casually peels off her dress and pours gelatin into her bra ... she lathers chocolate over her body ... strikes blobs of bean sprouts over body and calls it sperm." [EVANS, p. 209]

 

     None of these controversial artists are Jewish. However, as Micheal Medved pointed out about the largely Jewish-run entertainment media, it should also be of serious concern here that in a field so dominated by Jewish curators, collectors, critics, and dealers, such material is not only heavily supported, but encouraged and glorified. And rewarded.

 

    (A similar kind of incident occurred in 1998 in Great Britain when two Jewish women, Amanda Moss and Marissa Carr [a former stripper], self-described as the Dragon Ladies, "female sexual entertainment," were awarded nearly $10,000 from the British Arts Council. Joe Ashton, a member of Parliament, complained that "It's like giving a subsidy to porn. This does enormous damage.") [BROWN, D., 2-22-98, p. 26]

 

     Piss Christ, by any reckoning, is a childish act of sensationalism to engender attention through outrage. It is an assault upon Christian identity, and the response that occurred in reaction to it was predictable. Would the same (largely Jewish) critics, curators, and art financiers who championed this, in the name of free speech and pushing artistic boundaries, feel able to champion a "Piss Star of David" or "Piss Talmud?" If so, where is it? It does not exist because it is, by "politically correct" dictates,  forbidden. Likewise, does the victimization mythology heralded by the gay community (in Jewry's martyrological shadow) entitle Mapplethorpe to be funded and glorified in dehumanizing and degrading human beings in demeaning sadomasochistic acts? And when Karen Finley howls with sensational rage about her victimhood as a woman, narcissistically covered with chocolate on a stage, where might we look for a model for this kind of demand? Victimhood and sensationalism pays off big time in our era; they are presently the pillars of modern art-making. Where, one wonders, did this all come from?

 

     Another art expression of considerable controversy, albeit in the movie world, was Martin Scorscece's film, The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that engendered a storm of protest from angry Christian organizations. Among the protestors was Reverend Don Wildmon who "during his boycott of the Last Temptation of Christ ... informed the readers of USA Today of the Jewish background of the studio president that released the film." [BOLTON, p. 8]

 

     This revelation is considered by Jews as an act of anti-Semitism.  The issue -- in the political sense -- is not whether the Last Temptation of Christ is a good or bad movie. The issue is really the Jewish double standard as dictated by the modern "art" world: Jewish hallowed sanctity (the Holiest of Holies rendered to be the secular Holocaust mythos of  Consummate Uniqueness and Irreproachable Innocence), and all other religions and belief systems subject to critical, and deconstructive, attack.  While Jewish economic and institutional support is offered to deconstruct Christian mythology in the name of free speech and the expanding of artistic boundaries, a parallel deconstruction of Jewish mythology --religious or otherwise, including the Jewish mythologies of incessant victimization -- is unfathomable.

     As "conservative" commentator Robert Knight has noted abut a 1993 rash of anti-Christian art-making:

     "Included in the Whitney show were [Jewish artist/father] Joel-Peter Witkin's 'Maquette for
     Crucifix,' a naked Jesus Christ surrounded by sadomasochistic, obscene
     imagery and many grotesque corpses and body parts. [Jewish artist] Suzie Silver
     contributed a film entitled A Spy, in which Jesus is depicted as a naked woman
     with her breasts exposed. It was reminiscent of the Easter event in 1984 at
     the Episcopal cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, when a statue
     of 'Christa' was unveiled to give the world an image of Jesus Christ as a buxom,
     bare-breasted goddess. The Whitney [which is headed by Jewish mogul Leonard
     Lauder] exhibit also included the famous Andres Serrano work 'Piss Christ,'
     a photo of a crucifix in a beaker of the artist's own urine, and a film by
     [Jewish] porn star Annie Sprinkle titled, 'The Sluts and Goddesses Video
     Workshop, or How to be a Sex Goddess in 10 Easy Steps." [KNIGHT, R., 1998,
     p. 168-169]
 

 

     In May 1996 the Jewish entertainment mogul, David Geffen ("whose personal collection of art is perhaps one of the two finest collections in the western United States") donated $5 million to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) which renamed an exhibition center after him. (Geffen has also been a philanthropist for immigrant Russian and Ethiopian Jews in Israel). A little over a year later, in August 1997 (under the auspices of Jewish curator Paul Schimmel), the "Geffen Contemporary" featured an art installation by homosexual artist Robert Gober, once an altar boy. The installment featured a life-size sculpture, in classical pose, arms open, of the Virgin Mary.  A large metal shaft like a spear protruded from her midsection. "While the spiral drain pipe pokes a hole in the Virgin Mary and her protective dogma," says art critic Suzanne Muchnic, referring to its accompanying catalogue," It also functions as a phallic symbol that penetrates her body bloodlessly." [MUCHNIC, Stop]

 

       The setting up of Gober's art exhibition was a major undertaking, involving the removal of 8,000 cubic feet of earth, essentially creating a basement for the Geffen Contemporary museum. "No one will specify the total cost of installing the piece," noted the New York Times, but the Geffen's own costs approached $200,000. [SMITH, R., p. E1,4]

 

     When Gober first cast the Virgin Mary sculpture in New York, the Italian family that owned the business he hired to do the job initially told him, "You shouldn't be doing this. If you were a Muslim (and made a similar artwork), you'd be dead." [MUCHNIC, Stop, p. 6]  "The piece," noted the New York Times, "also set off a storm of protest letters from some of the city's Roman Catholics, including the director of media relations for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Then it received a positive review, with a photograph in the Los Angeles Times." [SMITH, R, p. E1]  (The president of the Los Angeles Times' parent company, Time-Mirror, has been David Levinthol, who is also the chairman of MOCA's Board of Trustees). A rally against the artwork at the museum drew hundreds of protesters and the Geffen was barraged by "thousands of letters, most of them negative." [LA TIMES, 12-20-97, p. B4]

 

     The show continued unabated. Compare this lack of response to protest to the response of the San Jose Mercury-News -- the second largest newspaper in northern California -- in 1992 when it completely changed its advertising acceptance policy because the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Jose and the County of Santa Clara, and the Human Relations Commission saw anti-Semitism in a carpet ad run in the San Jose newspaper's pages. The ad featured a "Moses-like figure holding tablets above an epithet that said, 'Thou Shalt Not Pay Retail.'" [WOLKOFF, p. 25]  No more religious characters in ads would be accepted for publication.

 

     In stark comparison, in 1994 Recycled Paper Greetings, the fourth-largest greeting card company in America, headed by Jewish co-founders Phil Friedmann and Michael Keiser, came under heated attack by Muslim and Arab groups for a "get well" card in its line. The card depicted a head-to-toe woman in a black veil and was captioned with "Rather than confront her morbid fear of germs, Millicent changed her name to Yazmine and moved to Tehran." Inside, noted the Houston Chronicle, there was "irreverent play on the word 'Mecca' and 'Shiite.' Hundreds of telephone callers protested to the company and there were two death threats. The company continued to refuse to pull the card from it's line. [FRANKLIN, S., 1994, p. 9]

 

     When the Gober exhibit finally closed, the Religion page of the Los Angeles Times ran a small article about the artwork (that defamed one of the symbols of the Catholic faith), entitled "Exhibit That Touched Off Catholic Protest Closes." Next to it, on the same page, in a story many times larger, an article entitled "Reform Rabbis Back Return to Dietary Kosher Laws" respectfully elaborated how some liberal Jews were returning to aspects of Jewish Orthodoxy. [LA TIMES, p. 12-20-97, p. B4]

 

     In 1999, a parallel event occurred on the opposite American coast. The Brooklyn Museum made headlines with its exhibition called "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." New York mayor (of Catholic heritage) Rudolph Giulani and others were outraged by the show which included real mutilated animals and an artwork entitled, "The Holy Virgin Mary." This piece "included cut-outs from pornographic magazines and lumps of elephant dung." Giulani accused the Museum board of "turning the museum into a preserve of Catholic-bashers, people who have no regard for animals, and no regard for the sensitivities of children." [CASIMIR, L., p. 4] Visitors to the exhibit were formally warned that the show "may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria, and anxiety." [BARSTOW, p. B1] Even the United States Senate passed a resolution condemning public funds for such artwork. (One-third of the Museum's budget is provided by New York City coffers, another $500,000 in the last three years came from the National Endowment for the Arts).

 

     As Michael Holden of the Baltimore Sun complained:

 

     "Imagine a painting about eight feet tall and five feet wide. The

     subject? Martin Luther King, Jr., or the prophet Mohammed, or

     Buddha, or the Star of David. Now cover the face in that painting

     with elephant dung. Next, surround the figure in the picture with

     color photographs of female genitalia. Call the finished product

     'art,' more specifically, a 'collage.' Then, try to get a museum or

     art gallery to display your picture for the public. No one would

     touch it. Why? Because covering a picture of King or Buddha or

     the Star of David with feces and pornography would be condemned

     as a hate crime ... But if you take the Virgin Mary, the mother of

     Jesus and a central figure in Roman Catholicism as well as in other

     Christian religions -- and cover her image with elephant dung and

     female genitalia, your picture will be displayed in London and

     New York art galleries." [HOLDEN, M., 10-10-99, p. 46]

    

     Based on alleged abrogation's of the museum's stated policies in securing city funds, the Giulani administration instituted legal actions to pull its funding from the museum. It also accused the Brooklyn Museum of "conspiring with Christie's auction house, a sponsor of the show, to inflate the value of the artwork displays, which are all privately owned by Charles Saatchi, the British advertising executive." [HERSZENHORN, p. A1] In turn, the museum sued Giulani, accusing him of shutting down free speech.

 

     Not surprisingly, most of the central power mongers in this drama  -- the manipulative inflation of (controversial) art prices, the celebration of the defamation of a Christian icon in the name of free speech, and the glorification of religious attack, were Jewish. These included the owner of all the art work --Charles Saatchi; the head of the Brooklyn Museum, Arthur Lehman; the Chairman of the Board of the museum, Robert S. Rubin; the lawyer who led the counter suit by the museum against the city, "First Amendment expert" Floyd Abrams; and American Civil Liberties Union defender of the museum, Norman Siegel. The  New York Times (whose editorial board is largely Jewish; see earlier) printed an anonymous editorial entitled, "The Museum's Courageous Stand." (The actual author of the Virgin Mary depiction elevated to fame was not Jewish. He was African. Lerner insisted that critics of the painting were being culturally intolerant, that the animal feces that decorated it was really a fertility symbol.)

     The Saatchi show was formulated and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London; that venue is also headed by a Jew: Norman Rosenthal. For another Rosenthal exhibition, after Sensation, the Times of London noted that the

      "curators of the Royal Academy insisted yesterday that hardcore porn and images
      of mutilation by contemporary artists were comparable to the Old Masters. They
      likened a sado-masochistic video to Michelangelo and Renaissance drawings, a
      pile of rubbish to the 16th-century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and an assemblage
      of mutilated toy soldiers to another 16th-century master, Pieter Breughel the Elder.
      Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary of the 237-year-old institution, and his
      colleague, Max Wigram, defended the latest objects to fill Burlington House - a
      sequel to the 1997 Sensation show - against suggestions that they could not be
      described as art. Walking round the Apocalypse exhibition yesterday before it
      opens to the public on Saturday, they repeatedly drew comparisons with the
      Old Masters ... Mr Rosenthal was unable fully to explain how it differed from
      pornography screened in any Soho sex shop: 'I don't see porn videos in Soho.
      This is about men and women. It is a very Existentialist work of art, like a very
      beautiful drawing.'" [ALBERGE, D., 9-20-00]

     London's Daily Telegraph complained that at this same Royal Academy show, Apocalypse, "its organizer Norman Rosenthal ... basks amidst a freak show almost wholly devoid of authentic art." [JOHNSON, D., 9-20-00] Or, as London's Guardian noted:

     "The Royal Academy is a perverse British institution, and Norman Rosenthal
      is a perverse institutional figure. You can't imagine him anywhere else. The [London
      art gallery] Tate would never have put on Sensation!, the exhibition of Charles
       Saatchi's collection the Academy mounted in 1997: how could the Tate have
      allowed Saatchi to stamp himself on history in that way? But Rosenthal had no
      qualms about importing all this stuff into the sacred halls of Burlington House,
      and for many Sensation! is the defining exhibition of young British art, not only
      here but in America. In his office is a framed front page of the New York Post
      leading with mayor Giuliani's attempt to ban the show last year. 'I was at the opening
      (at the Brooklyn Museum). All the glamorous people were there. But, he says, no
      protesters at all. 'I was almost disappointed. The whole thing took place not in real
      people's experience but in the clichés of politicians and journalists. That's so boring.
      Art is beyond that.' This denial of a desire to create a stir is frankly unbelievable.
      Rosenthal is the epitome of the art curator as showman ... Rosenthal's shows have
      helped to define British culture now, making the exhibition a phenomenon, a public
      ritual ... Since he became exhibitions secretary more than 20 years ago, Rosenthal
      has turned the Royal Academy into a venue for event art. Buzz, hype, noise, crowds
      are what this purportedly posh and staid organisation thrives on." [JONES, J.,
      1-4-00]

     Reviewing the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation, Camille Paglia complained at the Internet magazine Salon.com:

     "As an arts educator, I think that the behavior of the Brooklyn Museum has been
     self-interested and short-sighted ... The Brooklyn show [Sensations] is a perfect
     example of the improper diversion of public monies -- in this case to aggrandize
     a single British collector [Saatchi], an obnoxious advertising executive of
     dubious taste ... And I'm just as sick of 'Catholic-bashing' as Giuliani himself.
     I may be an atheist, but I was raised in Italian-Catholicism, and it remains
     my native culture. I resent the double standard that protects Jewish and
     African-American symbols and icons but allows Catholicism to be
     routinely trashed by supercilious liberals and ranting gay activists ... That
     a Jewish museum director had no compunction about selecting a parodic
     image of the Madonna from the whole of [artist] Chris Ofili's dung-bedecked     
     oeuvre shows either stupidity or malice." [PAGLIA, C., 1999] [Salon.com even
     had a subtitle for Paglia's article, Why are a Jewish collector and a Jewish
     museum director promoting anti-Catholic art?, but it was later discretely removed.
     POLLITT, K., THE NATION, 1999]
 

 

     "Charles Saatchi is clearly the big winner in this," said Bruce Wolman, editor of Art and Auction magazine, "...  Saatchi is not a great advertising man for nothing." [CONNOR, p. 51]  The head of the Brooklyn Museum, Arthur Lehman, also stirred Catholic ire earlier when he purchased an Andy Warhol version of the Last Supper for a Baltimore museum. (In October 1999, the Jewish ethnic magazine Forward noted that the Council of American Jewish Museums "was circulating a letter in support of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in its battle with Mayor Giuliani." Likewise, "the associates division of the American Friends of the Israel Museum were scheduled to visit the Brooklyn Museum exhibit on October 17. The visit was to be followed by a cocktail reception at the home of the Brooklyn Museum's director, Arnold Lehman.") [FORWARD, 10-8-99, p. 5]

 

     And the judge selected to hear the city's case against the Museum? Nina Gershon, described by the New York Times as having studied "psychiatry and the law at the Hampstead clinic, run by Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud. She is married to Bernard J. Fried, an acting state Supreme Court Justice in Manhattan." [FRIED, J., p. B3] In November 1999 Judge Gershon ruled in the Museum's favor.

     Thus armed, completely insensitive to Catholic complaint, Arnold Lehman and his Brooklyn Museum returned in 2001 with yet another controversial defamation of Catholicism. This time African-American artist Renee Cox was afforded space for her photograph "Yo Mama's Last Supper," in image in which Christ is depicted as a nude woman. The curator of this exhibition was also Jewish, Barbara Milstein. [HERMAN, J., 2-16-01] As Catholic Defense League president William Donohue wrote to Ms. Milstein:

      "I would love to know whether there is any portrayal of any aspect of history
       that you might personally find so offensive as to be excluded from an exhibition
       at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. For starters, would you include a photograph of
       Jewish slave masters sodomizing their obsequious black slaves? And worry not,
       when contemplating your answer, just think of it as a work of high artistic merit."              
       [DONOHUE, W., 2-15-01]

     Meanwhile, across the world, in 2001 "the Jewish director of Warsaw's leading state-funded art space, the Zacheta Gallery" resigned. Anda Rottenberg had been under critical fire and national pressure to be fired for two of her controversial exhibits. [ART NEWSPAPER, 3-13-01] In the first, she presented the work of an Italian artist who had a life-like sculpture of of the Pope (a revered figure in Poland) lying on the floor, crushed by a meteor. Upon viewing the exhibit,

      "two MPs [members of the Polish Parliament] from the Catholic nationalist party, Halina Nowina-Konopka and Witold Tomcyk, seriously damaged the sculpture when it was on display ... They authors of the attack alluded to the Jewish origins of Anda Rottenberg, the museum's director, 'How would [s]he like a sculpture to be sent to the National Museum of Israel showing a rabbi squashed by Stalin or Arafat?' ... The Polish Minister for Culture has been inundated with letters of protest about the sculpture calling for Mr Rottenberg's dismissal." [ART NEWSPAPER, 2-23-01]

    In the Rottenberg exhibition, it was reported that

     "one of Poland's best known actors and film stars is currently under police
     investigation and faces a possible prison sentence for slashing a portrait of
     himself, in an exhibition in Warsaw's leading contemporary art gallery ...
     The show consisted of an uncaptioned series of photographs of actors in
     Nazi uniform, taken from film stills without the actors agreement, by the Polish
     artist Piotr Uklanski ... Accompanied by TV cameramen and reporters and
     as the cameras rolled, the actor Daniel Olbrychski, featured in one of the
     portraits, pulled a sword from under his greatcoat and slashed some of
     the exhibits, then tore the two featuring himself from the wall and left. The
     choice of the sword was significant: it was one used in a film about a
     swashbuckling Polish hero and patriot Kmicic. Mr. Olbrchski later
     declared: ' I defend the right to say that there are some frontiers of
     decency which were clearly overstepped in this exhibition, and I reacted
     violently in the hope that my gesture will highlight my objections. I did it
     in the spotlight of the camera and flashlights because I wanted Poland to
     know my feelings about such 'artistic practices.' Furthermore, I received
     the agreement of other actors whose portraits were in the show, including
     the French film star Jean-Paul Belmondo who agreed that I should protest
     in their name. I can understand that there are opportunistic artists but I
     cannot understand why a director of such a serious institution as Zachenta
     has accepted this. Soon Mrs. Anda Rottenberg will organize an exhibition
     at which she will expose the faces of known actors on lavatory paper because
     she considers that as we are public figures she is entitled to do so."
     [ADAM, G., 2001]

 

            

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

 

 

     * Note a similar museum case in 1968 and a different result (an example of the usual double standard), when the Jewish community felt defamed by a New York City art institution. A Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue for its African-American photography exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, was decried as anti-Semitic largely because of the comments about the Jewish community by African-American author Candice Van Ellison. Van Ellison noted high amounts of anti-Semitism in the Black community, due to, as she saw it, the many Jewish landlords in Harlem, the many Black servants and maids in Jewish homes, and other forms of exploitation. Jewish pressure forced the museum to pull the catalogue from circulation, despite the fact that the curator of the show and head of the catalogue was Jewish, Allon Schoener, and the fact that Van Ellison's offending comments were merely paraphrases of quotes from a sociological study by Jewish author Nathan Glazer and non-Jew Patrick Moynihan. [HOVING, T., 1993, p. 176]

 

     The curator of the Metropolitan, Thomas Hoving, recalls that he received a call from the office of then-NYC mayor John Lindsey, who was also under heat from the Jewish community to act against the catalogue. "Lindsay," said Hoving, "called upon me to withdraw [the catalogue] at once." "My advice to you," (Jewish) mayoral aide Joe Feldstein told Hoving, "is to act now. Do what the Mayor wants or you're in deep shit!" [HOVING, T., 1993, p. 171] "Two members of the City Council," notes Hoving, "were calling for a hearing -- at once! -- to consider halting all funds for the museum until the offensive catalogue was removed from sale ... [HOVING,  p. 172] ... There were increasing outcries from City Council members to 'launch an economic boycott against the Metropolitan' ...[HOVING, p. 173-174] ... On Thursday .. twelve of the more prominent members of the City Council issued a resolution requesting the immediate withdrawal of the catalogue and the withholding of city funding until such time." [HOVING, p. 175]

 

     Museum trustees even called in a former (Jewish) Secretary of Labor, Arthur Goldberg, to provide advise about how to resolve the situation. The trustees hoped Goldberg could "figure a way out of this mess" but "what he did was almost the opposite. Goldberg intoned that in his view there was nothing to be gained by the 'continuance of offering for sale the offending catalogue.'" [HOVING, T., 1993, p. 173] Even the New York Times, defender of "free speech" in the later Brooklyn Museum's defamations against Christianity, "published a bitter editorial condemning the show and its anti-Semitic statements." [HOVING, p. 174]

 

     The offending catalogue was published under Metropolitan auspices by Random House. The president of Random House, Robert Bernstein, and its chairman, Bennet Cerf, were both Jewish. Hoving notes that Cerf and Bernstein,

 

    "who had distinguished career fighting for civil rights all over the world,

    had called [curator and catalogue head Allon] Shoener to task, asking

    him to issue a personal apology for the catalogue. Schoener had refused.

    The publishing executives had informed Schoener that under the

    continuing and increasing pressures from the Jewish community, they

    might not be able to hold out much longer on withdrawing the book.

    Schoener said flatly, 'But that would be book-burning." Cerf, incensed,

    shaking all over, thrust his finger towards Schoener's face and shouted,

    'Do you know what you have done to Random House?'" [HOVING, T.,

    1993, p. 174-175]

 

     The Metropolitan Museum and Random House soon caved in to Jewish pressure and withdrew the catalogue.

 

     Likewise, notes J. J. Goldberg, "In 1994 the San Francisco Jewish community rose up and protested an anti-Semitic mural on the student union building at publicly funded San Francisco State University. Unlike the Brooklyn Museum [and its Saatchi collection], San Francisco State backed down." [GOLDBERG, J. J., 10-8-99, p. 14]

     Also, in 2001, due to immediate pressure from both private individuals and the city of Los Angeles, part of a mural painted by two Hispanic artists in Los Angeles on private property was painted over even before it was finished. The offending section -- part of a "timeline" about the Hispanic experience in California -- depicted "an unflattering caricature of a Jewish landlord." The mural was in Boyle Heights, an area of Los Angles once largely Jewish, and now Hispanic. Although Jewish slumlords are a verifiable part of ghetto history throughout America (See Chapter 20), the landlord image was even construed -- sight unseen -- by the local SPARC artist organization, as the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles tells it, to be "hateful and racist." Even a non-Jewish local artist, Dawn Pentecost, volunteered to destroy the art work in her neighborhood. "I don't think we have to accept expressions of anger and hate in our environment," she told a Jewish reporter, "We have to have standards." [TEITELBAUM, S., 3-12-01]

      Also in 2001, always eager to check anything that depicts Jews or Judaism in anything less than an idealistic light, the American Jewish Congress formally protested "B.C." cartoonist Johnny Hart for his depiction (at Easter) of the candles of the Jewish menorah going out, being replaced at the end of his comic strip by a cross. "Supercessionism," the AJC declared, "the belief that Christianity can and will replace Judaism, has been strongly repudiated by many leading Catholic and Protestant theologians ... Whatever the cartoonist's personal beliefs, the sudden insertion of religiously offensive cartoons into the comics section of Sunday newspapers is highly inappropriate and abuses readers, especially young children, who turn to B. C. every week." There are certainly such people who have bowed to such Jewish lobbying pressure, but not only is Christianity a "supercessionist" faith, but so is Islam, which holds that the prophet Mohammed is the last in the line of prophets descending from Jewish and Christian tradition. And how is Judaism itself not "supercessionist?" How could it not be? Judaism was invented in a social, political, and religious vacuum? The AJC "urged newspapers across the country to either replace [the cartoon] or print a disclaimer on Sunday." [AMERICAN JEWISH CONGRESS, 2001]

 

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