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Hollywood, Nazism, and the Motion Picture Division of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, 1938 - 46

This paper is a revision of a paper given to the 45th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies and Propaganda and Prejudice: Hollywood's Alliance with the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, a presentation given to the Fort Wayne International Affairs Forum on 18 Nov. 2013.

This past summer, a controversy erupted after the publication of two books on Hollywood and Nazis.  Both books asked whether Hollywood did enough to combat Nazism, with one even asking whether it had willingly collaborated with the Nazis.  The first to appear, Hollywood and Hitler by Thomas Doherty, had argued that while the behind-the-scenes machinations involving Hollywood and Nazism was “more apt to tarnish than polish the luster of the Golden Age mythos,” it concluded that the “industry was no worse than the rest of American culture in its failure of nerve and imagination, and often a good deal better in the exercise of both.”  A second book, The Collaboration by Ben Urwand, went way beyond this measured assessment, accusing the industry of actively and willingly obeying Nazi demands to censor film content unfriendly to Germany.  While no one questioned the industry's wholehearted support of the war effort after Pearl Harbor, sharp disagreements emerged over how film history had treated Hollywood's Nazi connections before 1940.  It is not every day that arcane topics of thirties and forties film history catapult their way to shows like CBS This Morning, but suddenly Hollywood, right alongside IBM and Swiss banks, appeared caught in its very own shameful gotcha moment.  Mainstream media outlets love a scandal, especially one involving media.  This scandal additionally had World War II, Nazis, and skeletons in the Hollywood closet.  Something was rotten with the state of ill-gotten Deutschmarks.

More later on that last point, but the collaboration hypothesis of Urwand's book shows just how badly this scholarship needs to consider the local rootedness of Hollywood and its personnel.  Not at odds with the American Jewish community, industry personnel often remained active in local civic and religious organizations behind the scenes, carefully maintaining boundaries setting off what they saw as their private interests from professional obligations.  As Doherty observed, there is plenty of evidence showing Hollywood fell short of taking an unequivocal stance against Nazi anti-Semitism.  Evidence also shows the larger North American Jewish community failing to mobilize American public opinion against Nazi anti-Semitism.  While prior actions or inaction may today fall short of the high moral bar set in hindsight, Jewish industry personnel no more collaborated with the Nazis than they infiltrated and sabotaged the inner sanctums of the Los Angeles Jewish community so that they could short-circuit a broader Jewish response to the crisis of Nazi anti-Semitism. 

Critics long have indicted Hollywood for its failure to make titles forthrightly condemning Nazi anti-Semitism, frequently accusing the industry of putting profits above principles.  Few ever question the faulty premise of this argument.  Hollywood did make anti-Nazi films, both before and after 1940.  To believe that a few more heavy-handed anti-Nazi exposes would have averted the Holocaust assumes a lot about the influence of film, and not very much about audiences.  The challenges of making anti-Nazi films shared the same challenges facing larger globalized efforts to combat Nazi anti-Semitism.  As New Yorker writer David Denby noted in the second of two pieces devoted to The Collaboration, "the studio bosses made the same mistakes that the State Department made; the same mistakes that American newspapers and major corporations investing in Germany made.  Urwand's moral certainty sends him tumbling through the wrong end of the telescope."  How studio personnel, diplomats, journalists, employees, and audiences all gradually understood and then confronted this anti-Semitism did not occur along a neatly pruned trajectory.  Instead, protracted efforts to bring Nazi anti-Semitism to worldwide attention encountered plenty of apathy, short-sightedness, disagreements, and set-backs.  Screen depictions of Nazism were just one other dimension of this ongoing and contested globalized struggle. 

To be fair, many film histories flatten and oversimplify both the era and the diversity of institutions, individuals, religious affiliations, and ethnic backgrounds, all engaged in a corporate enterprise of making movies.  One or two archival smoking guns, or a few high profile titles never produced, like the film adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here, cannot do the full complexity of this enterprise justice.  Focus on the global has not occasioned this reductionism.  It is a global that overlooks the rootedness of the local.  We would do well to recall Hamlet once again. If the specters of globalization have heavens to direct them, to paraphrase Horatio, the local terra firma is still their haunting place.

Happily, recent scholarship has begun to tap the vast well of textures and flavors marking the relationship between Hollywood local Jewish Los Angeles.  Laura Rosenzweig's important recent essay in the Jewish Review of Books helps illuminate this new direction, detailing the central role Hollywood studios played in establishing and funding a secret and vast espionage network in Los Angeles that infiltrated Nazi and anti-Semitic groups in the region.  Subsequent research must take into account these "on the ground" histories, bearing in mind that Hollywood did not exist isolation from its surroundings, but occurred in a real time and place, embedded within a local context.

That spy network involves but one dramatic facet of this context.  Studio personnel also maintained more ordinary and day-to-day relationships with the Los Angeles Jewish community through its participation in the Motion Picture Division of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee.  Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the committee operated as an impromptu liaison between the industry and the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles Community Relations Committee Collection.  In addition to considering things like spy networks or the films Hollywood did or did not make during this period, studying the Motion Picture Division offers a fuller history of Hollywood and Nazism, especially in how together the film industry and the local Jewish community worked on the ground in responding to Nazi anti-Semitism and the growing public awareness of the Holocaust.

To say that both the film industry and the Jewish Federation worked together does not mean that they worked together well or even closely.  In response to the rise of anti-Semitism, both worldwide as well as in Southern California, Los Angeles Jewish community leaders created a defense group called the Los Angeles Community Relations Committee, headed by executive director Leon Lewis.  The CRC developed a complicated committee structure that worked both to combat outright anti-Semitic activity, but also worked help educate the region about issues of prejudice and bigotry.  The so-called Hollywood Committee, later the Motion Picture Division, was but just one of dozens of CRC committees.  Created at a March 1934 meeting of studio executives, the Hollywood Committee membership initially featured names like Irving Thalberg, Harry Cohen, Jack Warner, and Pandro Berman.  While the committee raised tens of thousands of dollars, initially to combat anti-Semitic attacks on the industry, it had less success achieving a regular meeting schedule.  Lewis' notes frequently mentioned the Committee's absenteeism and lack of regular communication in reporting its work, even at one point wondering if the committee had become defunct.

Apart from its ability to raise money and fund the CRC's spy network, the Motion Picture Division also played an important role, however lackadaisical or disorganized, in helping to mediate Jewish identity at the Hollywood studios with Jewish Los Angeles.  Even after the Division functioned only sporadically, the organizational framework that existed between the Division and the CRC helped establish an informal and pliable network through which Jewish, professional, national, and civic identities could interlock and coincide.  Consider three different instances of this flexible network mediating different facets of Jewish identity: celebrity Eddie Cantor being accused of Communism for fighting Nazism; a jeweler's reporting of a 1939 meeting with Charlie Chaplin to Lewis; and a discussion of the treatment of European Jews following Liberation.

Throughout the 1930s, the American reaction to Nazism included deep suspicions among some that Jewish opposition to Nazism was homologous with Jewish support for Communism. The relative ease with which one could publicly voice these suspicions often led to a set of tortuous identity politics for American Jews.  A 1938 letter from radio and film star Eddie Cantor to Leon L. Lewis, head of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, demonstrated how the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee frequently helped negotiate these politics.  When red-baiting Texas Representative Martin Dies went to Hollywood that year to investigate Communist influence in the film industry, Cantor received an ominous phone call requesting an appointment with, in his words, "this obvious politician."  In 1938, even stars like Cantor had to profess hatred of Communism in order to protest Nazism, so as not to besmirch their Americanism.  "It would be easy to show," Cantor wrote Lewis, "that on the radio, at public meetings, and in my writings I have fought Communism, as well as Nazism and Fascism and that my Americanism cannot be questioned because Jew and Gentile, in both high and low places, have both agreed on that score."  Cantor was able to use Lewis' name with Dies "as a means of getting rid of him."  More than just a power broker who cut deals for Jewish celebrities, Lewis offered guidance to stars like Cantor actively seeking it in dealing with a politically threatening situation involving his public persona.

In addition to helping Jewish celebrities negotiate their public persona, especially with regard to politics, Lewis frequently provided an interface for discussions considering the overlap between Hollywood, personal identity politics, and the crisis of Nazism.  In June 1939, as Charles Chaplin was beginning production for The Great Dictator, the director and star visited jeweler Strasburg's of Hollywood.  A subsequent letter from owner Max Strasburg to Leon Lewis indicated that Chaplin and two of his friends ended up speaking with Strasburg "for nearly one hour upon Jewish conditions."  Strasburg, an active member of the CRC, advised Lewis of Chaplin's upcoming production, which was then titled The Dictator.  Such discussions of upcoming releases and potential concern to area Jews were common among CRC members.  Surely by 1939, many working in Hollywood would have known about Chaplin's new project.

What seems more unique was how the visit occasioned a discussion among CRC members regarding Chaplin's religious affiliation and its relevance to the world situation in 1939.  That discussion took place across multiple lines of communication, not just between Strasburg and Lewis, but also between Strasburg and fellow CRC member, producer Walter Wanger.  Strasburg was particularly taken by Chaplin's identity politics:

He has no religious affiliation whatsoever, but believes entirely in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. He does not believe in national boundary lines, thinks that patriotism belongs to the middle ages; that today all of our hope and faith is in humanity as a whole and that the world is so close together that there is only one brotherhood of man and that is the human bond, regardless of race, religion, or nationality.

Chaplin's identity politics, as reported by Strasburg, reaffirms an especially compelling imagining of American Jewish identity that also could serve as a bulwark against Nazi anti-Semitism: non-Jewish Jewishness.  According to this view, the injustice of anti-Semitism was not that it alone singled out Jews for being observant.  Rather, it singled out Jews as Jews when there was no discernible difference between Jew and Gentile.  Chaplin epitomized this ideal, so much so that his public persona still could allow Jews to claim him as their own: was he or wasn't he Jewish?  When Lewis shared Strasburg's letter with producer Walter Wanger, Wanger wrote Lewis that he was "not certain that C. C. is not a Jew - his wife's name by the way is LEVY."

How did the Motion Picture Division continue to mediate these views of Jewish identity after Liberation and when many motion picture executives witnessed first-hand European conditions in July 1945?  Correspondence between CRC members and industry executives Barney Balaban and Sol Lesser from September 1945 reveal the extent to which industry members, acting on behalf of the Jewish community, could work in tandem with American Jewish organizations to put pressure on the Allied military government for its treatment of Jewish war refugees.  Both men had visited Europe under the auspices of the army in the summer of 1945 to review conditions there.  The letter comments favorably on an Eisenhower directive declaring that stateless and non-repatriable people receive the same treatment as United Nations displaced persons, and that Jewish refugees would receive care in special Jewish centers in Germany.

As historian Arieh Kochavi notes, treatment of Jewish refugees was particularly contentious immediately following Liberation.  The British pressured the U.S. to close off its occupational zone so that Jews could not use Germany to as a way to emigrate to Palestine.  "Were it not for the pressure being brought to bear on the Administration by Jewish organizations in the U.S.," Kochavi claims one British diplomat reported, "the State Department would have taken the necessary steps to halt the further influx of Jewish refugees into Germany" (171).

Without delving too much into the complexity of these post-war conditions, I simply would note that this correspondence shows industry executives acting in concert with other American Jewish organizations to help ameliorate the plight of displaced persons immediately after Liberation.  As part of the Motion Picture Division, these executives had access both to a local Jewish organization as well as to military leadership stationed in Europe.  They thus were well positioned to advocate for policy regarding the treatment of Jewish refugees, even after the industry executives returned from from their tour of Europe.  "Whether or not we were helpful, I don't know," Balaban wrote Lesser.  "But at least the relief is just what we were looking for."

Such correspondence can continue to reveal the deep complexities of Hollywood and its relationships to both Jewish organizations as well as to the government and to the military.   Rather than focus upon fruitless debates over collaboration or looking only at a few film titles in isolation, we would do well to pay attention to the various alliances between and among the film industry at this time, the possibilities for multiple meanings and interpretations, and the various strategies - not always evident - employed by the industry as it walked a tightrope between seeming too Jewish or not caring enough about the Jews in Europe.

Abstract: Two new books published in 2013 highlight divergent understandings of Hollywood’s role in combating Nazism before 1939, with one alleging collaboration with Nazis and the other maintaining the studios’ steadfast anti-Nazism.  Neither of these books, however, fully explores the extent to which film industry personnel worked within Los Angeles Jewish community organizations apart from their studio roles.  Fearing a rising tide of worldwide anti-Semitism specifically targeting so-called Jewish control over Hollywood, these individuals faced a difficult dilemma.  Use their high-profile positions within the industry to combat Nazism, and risk incurring an anti-Semitic backlash against Hollywood for peddling so-called Jewish propaganda?  Or do nothing and let one of the most powerful media industries in the world succumb to the growing tide of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Europe?  Working outside the studio system and behind the scenes with the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee promised to resolve this dilemma.  But was working outside Hollywood to combat Nazism enough, and did this strategy ultimately diminish Hollywood's ability to take a stronger stand against the Nazis? 

Original Abstract

Surprisingly little scholarship exists on the relationship between the Los Angeles Jewish community and Hollywood, especially during the period between 1938-1946.  Understanding this period today seems particularly important, especially with regard to the film industry's responses, both to Nazi anti-Semitism and to a growing public awareness of the Holocaust.  Extraordinary changes implicated or altered the film industry during this era, perhaps the most momentous in its history: increasing standardization in technological innovations and in industrial practice; a shifting global context ever more hostile to foreign distribution of American films; a domestic tautening of public opinion between isolationism and intervention; unprecedented industry-goverment cooperation during World War II; and ultimately, atrocity footage revealing the full extent of Nazi anti-Semitism.  While these shifts had a global dimension, they most certainly had a local texture to them as well.

While recent scholarship has begun to engage more deeply the complexity of Hollywood's response to Nazism and the Holocaust, the relationship between the film industry and the Los Angeles Jewish community during this period remains something just short of a mystery.  This project proposes to better illuminate this local relationship through an examination of the Motion Picture Division of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee, a group that served as a liaison to the film industry during 1938-46.  Using archival materials from the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles Community Relations Committee Collection, this paper attempts to better understand the nature of the relationship between the film industry and the local Jewish community, especially in terms of how the industry eventually chose to respond to Nazi anti-Semitism and the growing public awareness of the Holocaust.