24 (pt. 3)
JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA
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 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 Leaderand 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 theUnion 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]
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 friendds 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]
[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 friendds 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
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], judiging 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 roughtly 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 Artistotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. That system influnenced 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 Schlessinger, and other prominent authors. In Canada, Avie Bennett is president of McClelland & Stewart (1992).
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 Schlessinger, 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]
"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]
"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.
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 theTurtle 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 ofHarperCollins. 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 atICM; 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 Investormagazine. 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 Sheindlen 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 protege, 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 th Post's coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
in the summer of 1982 and of the subsequent siege of Bierut. Throughout that
period, the paper was without a single reporter on the scene, yet its stories were
laced with unattributed 'eye-witness' descrptions 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]
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 th Post's coverage of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon
in the summer of 1982 and of the subsequent siege of Bierut. Throughout that
period, the paper was without a single reporter on the scene, yet its stories were
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 is 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 man 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 timebomb.'
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 Timesreporter 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]
"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
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 bumpted 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]
"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 andCommentary," 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 Rampartsmagazine, 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 theWashington 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, 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 Nationeditor, 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.
"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).
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.
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:
"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 ChicagoSymphony, 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 theSavannah (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 theBoston 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: violinst 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 onced 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]
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: violinst 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 onced 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]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]
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,6]
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.
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,
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 antiblack 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 sucesses 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]
"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 sucesses 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 theDouglas, 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]
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]
"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 Picadilly
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 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 coluld 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 Beachrecords 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:
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 apparances beame 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]
Not Jewish? Want to make it in the music business? Enhance your chances by learning Yiddish:
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 apparances beame 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]
"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]
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 (calledStramsact 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 thier worldwide acclaim and the milions 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]
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 thier worldwide acclaim and the milions 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 Timesin 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 Lineafter 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] TheLeber-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 (theHandleman 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]
"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 inWoodstock 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]
[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.
"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 filmsOne 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 CBSand 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 Ameri cans 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-MCAholdings 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 Polygramstable 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]
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]
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 atCBS 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 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 entireMotown 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 Wisenthal "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]
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:
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.
"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, whento 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 Daivd holding
a trumpet and a sign saying, 'It'sthese Jews that are bringing in this music call
jazz.'" [COHEN, R., 6-21-01]
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, whento 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 Daivd holding
a trumpet and a sign saying, 'It'sthese 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]
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]
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 theWashington 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 JewishForward notes the brand of Judaism she practices:
"Ms. Schelssinger 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]
"Ms. Schelssinger 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 toldPeople 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:
"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]
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]
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 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 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 colun, 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 tht it would
spread thorughout the culture at large." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 12]
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 colun, 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 tht it would
spread thorughout 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 Spectatoraccusing 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]
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]
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.
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]
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]
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