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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 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 first let me state that I categorically disagree with the collaboration hypothesis of Urwand's book.  As Doherty observed, there is plenty of evidence showing Hollywood fell short of taking an unequivocal stance against Nazi anti-Semitism.  However, to conclude from this evidence that the film industry collaborated with the Nazis only further confuses an already misunderstood and complex history, even obscuring blame where blame is due.

To be fair, The Collaboration is not the first film history to flatten and oversimplify the diversity of institutions, individuals, religious affiliations, and ethnic backgrounds all engaged in the corporate enterprise of making movies.  Rather than crying over a few high profile titles of films never made, or plucking out of context a few smoking guns from the archives, we would do well to recall screen depictions of Nazism were part of an ongoing and contested globalized struggle.  If the specters of globalization have heavens to direct them, to paraphrase Hamlet's Horatio, the local terra firma is still their haunting place.  Recent scholarship has only begun to tap the textures and flavors of local Los Angeles history.  Laura Rosenzweig's important recent essay in theJewish Review of Books goes a long way toward illuminating this new direction.  Her essay details the central role Hollywood studios played in establishing and funding a secret and vast espionage network in Los Angeles.  Its purpose was to infiltrate 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 real time and place, embedded within a local context.  Like other mature and complex industries, Hollywood maintained local and day-to-day relationships with community organizations like the Motion Picture Division of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee.  In far less dramatic fashion than the secretly funded espionage network, archival materials between 1938 and 1946 also show the Division operating as an important if impromptu liaison between Hollywood and the Jewish Federation Council of Los Angeles Community Relations Committee Collection.  To understand a fuller history of Hollywood and Nazism, then, one must begin to understand the nature of the relationship between the film industry and the local Jewish community as it existed on the ground, especially in terms of how the industry eventually chose to respond to Nazi anti-Semitism and the growing public awareness of the Holocaust.

While other garden variety histories of Hollywood and Nazism can overlook the ground of Los Angeles for the heavens of Hollywood, the collaboration hypothesis ups the historical ante with deeply problematic assumptions and oversights: it overlooks how the complexity and confusion of events leading up to World War II challenged the film industry and its ability to respond to them; it refurbishes, even if unintentionally, the same anti-Semitic stereotypes historically held against an industry profoundly aware of their potential backlash; it gives both audiences of the time and their ability to interpret meaning short shrift; and it ignores Hollywood's other relationships and alliances, such as those with the State Department and the Los Angeles Jewish community.  Incidentally, both the State Department and the Jewish community cautioned against making anti-Nazi films, though often for divergent reasons.  Concluding that these groups simply played into the hands of the Nazis would be a gross miscalculation.

But even beyond these problematic assumptions, film history of this period must get over its mania for Hitler and the Nazis.  An extant but by no means exclusive history, a popular obsession with Hollywood's alleged ties to Nazis risks eclipsing other important dimensions of this history.  At least equal in importance, the quieter history of how Hollywood responded to growing worldwide anti-Semitism and revelations of the Holocaust are long overdue.  These examinations might account for the difficulties in which many American Jews found themselves, amid the gradual public awareness of the Holocaust, public panics over propaganda and media power, and the relative toleration of American anti-Semitism before World War II in everyday public life.

Neither Urwand's nor Doherty's book fully accounts for the tenuous situation Jewish film industry personnel, working alongside or participating within Los Angeles Jewish community organizations.  Fearing a rising tide of worldwide anti-Semitism specifically targeting so-called Jewish control over Hollywood, enduring attacks even from fellow Americans, these individuals faced a difficult dilemma.  Use their high-profile positions inside 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 the studios enough to combat Nazism, and did this strategy ultimately diminish Hollywood's ability to take a stronger stand against the Nazis?

Before considering the unique circumstances Hollywood and the Los Angeles Jewish community faced, recall the tumultuous and confusing sequence of events that gradually unfolded as the Nazis consolidated their power.  Germany democratically elected the Nazis to power in March 1933, but did not issue the Nuremberg Race Laws until September 1935.  Kristallnacht, an orchestrated nationwide pogrom, did not occur until early November 1938.  The 1938 Munich Agreement allowed Germany to annex certain areas of Czechoslovakia, and in August 1939, the Soviet Union abruptly reversed course and signed the infamous Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Agreement.  On September 1st, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, marking what many believe the beginning of World War II.

The collaboration thesis overlooks the tumult of this unfolding timeframe, and thus overlooks how those working in Hollywood might have had difficulty making sense of it.  Nazi anti-Jewish laws unfolded incrementally, producing a tremendous and confusing bureaucracy.  The Nazis regularly signed peace treaties and then broke them.  One moment the Soviet Union was the enemy of Germany; the next, they had signed a treaty.  If nothing else, the 1939 invasion of Poland struck a note of clarity for Hollywood.  Studios moved a number of anti-Nazi films into production after 1939, not because European profits had dried up, but because war had broken out in Europe.

The confusing sequence of these events leading up to war created 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, demonstrates how the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee could help 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."  One easily can forget that 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," but even more important was what Cantor said in his closing.  Anticipating further attacks, the star asked Lewis for guidance on how to handle a threatening situation involving the politics of his public persona. 

Just as the collaboration hypothesis overlooks the complex play of identity politics during this period of historical tumult leading up to World War II, it also unwittingly evokes common anti-Semitic beliefs in pervasive Jewish control.  Before World War II, with public anti-Semitism far more prevalent in daily American life, one easily could call upon those stereotypes to suggest that greedy and powerful Jews in America had capitalized on the misfortunes of Jews in Europe.  As I noted in Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, that view clearly took shape by 1938 when the editor of the Hollywood Spectator Welford Beaton published an open letter "to the Jews Who Control the Films," urging that only Hollywood Jews could use the "one mighty voice in America" to save "your persecuted blood-brothers.  You control that voice. . .  You have used it only as something to make money for you."  Yet as historian Michael Birdwell noted, the same magazine issue berated Warner Bros. for moving forward on an upcoming project titled Concentration Camp, demanding public pressure to "put a stop on the Warner effort to capitalize the tragedy."

Just as the collaboration hypothesis misses the difficult position Jews working within the film industry faced, encountering enormous public pressure and scrutiny, the hypothesis also refuses to give audiences of the time credit for reading between the lines of many films offering pointed commentary on the plight of Jews in Europe.  In a story for The Chronicle for Higher Education appearing in July, I cautioned then - and still caution now - not to forget a thinking and active audience who could make sense of the films Hollywood did produce.  “There’s a misconception that audiences knew nothing,” I said.  “Audiences very much could understand what these films were trying to address, even if the films were doing so indirectly.”  As an example, I used publicity for the 1937 Warner Bros. film The Life of Emile Zola.  Though the film depicted the author’s involvement in a famous 19th century case involving widespread anti-Semitism in the French military and the persecution of an officer simply because he was Jewish, audiences easily understood that the film really was a commentary on present-day European anti-Semitism.  Warner Bros.’ publicity helped grease the wheels for these meanings, quoting a testimonial from Louis Rittenberg, editor for The American Hebrew magazine.  “Disaster upon the Jews of France” could spell disaster “indirectly upon Jews everywhere,” Rittenberg recalled.  “Today, when the prejudices are more rampant than ever,” there is a pressing need for “understanding which humanity must have before people of divergent faith and opinion can live together in peace."

Finally, the collaboration thesis miscalculates the extent to which other organizations and institutions could influence what Hollywood did and did not do during this period.  In the second of two essays New Yorker critic David Denby published on The Collaboration, I told Denby that Urwand had mistaken a tactic for a strategy and that it was the State Department that had counseled the studios to remain in Germany for as long as possible:

Rightly or wrongly, the government-industry alliance saw Hollywood films at the front lines of a cultural battle, and if Nazi films edged out American ones in theatres because they overtly antagonized the Nazis, that battle would be lost and European and even Latin American audiences would find themselves under the sway of Nazi films instead of ones that made the soft sell for the American way of life.… There is no doubt in my mind that the executives were staunchly patriotic, and if they negotiated with the Nazis as they did with Italy, Spain, and any other abhorrent regime, they did so with guidance from the State Department and behaved as any other diplomat would behave in resolving differences and keeping channels of communication open. Certainly one can find fault with that strategy, but it seems like making a distinction between diplomacy and collaboration might matter before one issues the indictment.

In order to fully appreciate the value of this tactic, forged out of an alliance between Hollywood and the State Department, one must look beyond the familiar "Hollywood and Hitler" paradigm.  Just as Hollywood negotiated with the Nazis to keep American films promoting an American way of life in Germany, the film industry also negotiated anti-Nazi meanings within films through a variety of genres that did not necessarily announce themselves as anti-Nazi films.  Thus the place to find anti-Nazi content was not in the films Hollywood did not make, or was not able to make, but in the films that announced themselves as something else, such as bio-pics like The Life of Emile Zola, a costume epic like the 1934 British film Jew Suss, or a horror film like RKO's 1939 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where Gypsies could easily serve as ciphers for European Jewry.

Such indirectness was key to Hollywood’s strategy.  Often using published novels to leverage Hollywood's cultural cache, literary adaptations helped meanings that walked a tightrope between appearing to side too much with so-called Jewish causes; and appearing to publishers like Welford Beaton as not doing enough to use the industry's "one mighty voice."  In 1938, the studios charted a course distinguishing entertainment films from propaganda:

In a period in which propaganda has largely reduced the artistic and entertainment validity of the screen in many other countries, it is pleasant to report that American motion pictures continue to be free from any but the highest possible entertainment purpose. The industry has resisted and must continue to resist the lure of propaganda in that sinister sense persistently urged upon it by extremist groups. The function of the entertainment screen is to entertain, by whatever wholesome theme or treatment writers, artists and dramatists can create. There is no other criterion. Only those who have a selfish purpose to serve can cry out against such a policy.

By taking this position, the industry did not collaborate with Nazis, but was reacting to the threat of federal censorship in the U.S.  For example, in September 1939, news reports indicated that Oklahoma Democratic Senator Elmer Thomas would introduce legislation creating a federal censorship board that would review all films for compliance with the Neutrality Act.  The bill came in response to the reissue of All Quiet on the Western Front and perceived unsympathetic depictions of German characters in 1939 films.

In closing, I'd like to consider two additional documents demonstrating the not just the role the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee in mediating Hollywood with local Los Angeles, but also how both Jewish, professional, national, and civic identities could interlock and coincide.  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 LAJCC, advised Lewis of Chaplin's upcoming production, which was then titled The Dictator.

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 brotherhoodof 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.

Yet Chaplin's ethnicity still could serve as a cipher for Jewish identity.  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."

The final document from September 1945 involved correspondence between industry executives Barney Balaban and Sol Lesser, both of whom also were active with the LAJCC.  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 displaced persons, and that Jewish refugees will receive care in special Jewish centers.  Without delving into the complexity of post-war conditions, I would simply note that this correspondence shows that industry executives had discussions with military personnel regarding the treatment of Jewish refugees even after they returned from 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 tell us a great deal about how little we know of Hollywood and Nazism during this period.   Rather than focus upon fruitless debates over collaboration or looking only at films themselves, we would do well to pay attention to the complexity of various alliances with the film industry at this time, the possibilities for multiple meanings and interpretations of these films, 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.