Academy Museum to highlight Hollywood’s Jewish history after all

After initially drawing criticism for failing to acknowledge the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in the creation of Hollywood and the film industry, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday announced details of a new permanent exhibition that will highlight their contributions.

The exhibit, called “Hollywoodland,” is scheduled to open May 19 and will highlight “the influence of Jewish-dominated filmmakers whose creation of the American film studio system transformed Los Angeles into a global center of violence,” the museum said in a press release. Cinema.”

When the museum opened in 2021, it made sure to highlight the contributions of women, artists of color, and people from other backgrounds, but there was barely a mention of the Jewish immigrants who were instrumental in establishing the Hollywood studio system — giants like Harry. Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Goldwyn and Mayer.

The deletion, which came at a time of growing concerns about anti-Semitism, sparked complaints from Jewish leaders and concern from museum supporters, many of whom saw it as an example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history. In seeking assimilation, Hollywood’s founders feared being identified as Jewish.

Various publications denounced this insult, such as The Forward, which published an article entitled “The Jews Built Hollywood.” So why was their history erased from the new academy museum?

The museum said at the time that it had always intended to open a temporary exhibition dedicated to the subject, but in response to the backlash it decided to create a permanent exhibition, consulting rabbis and Jewish scholars about what to include.

“We learned,” Bill Kramer, CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who was the museum’s director at the time, said in an interview. “We took a lot of information from the conversations we had and evolved from that.”

The show will be organized into three distinct parts: “Studio Origins,” which explores the founding of Hollywood’s original eight major film studios and their studio heads; “Los Angeles: From Film District to Industrial City, 1902-1929,” which traces how the city developed alongside the film industry; And “From Shtetl to Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” a short documentary — narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, host and author of TCM — that looks at Jewish immigrants and the first generation of Jewish Americans who built the Hollywood studio. System.

The exhibition was organized by Dara Jaffe, associate curator, with assistance from Gary Duffin, former associate curator for digital displays, and José L. Lopez, research assistant. Neal Gabler, the author and film critic who wrote An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Invented Hollywood, served as a consultant.

“They were the ones who founded this system,” Jaffe said of the pioneering Jewish filmmakers. “They were drawn to this industry because it was off-limits to many other industries.”