An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler
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Book Summary Information
Author: Neal GablerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1989-09-08
ISBN: 0385265573
Number of pages: 512
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
Book Review: A Fascinating Portrait of Early Movie Moguls
Summary: 4 Stars
Film scholar and critic Neal Gabler offers a surprisingly well-researched, academically sound, and insightful study of the scions of early Hollywood and their vision for America. Ironically, and somewhat paradoxically, he finds that the early movie industry was largely founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. As outsiders in WASPish America, they nonetheless excelled at creating a vision of the United States that incorporated some of its most cherished principles and desires. Such studio executives as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, and the Warner brothers ensconced a vision of America at its best that stood far removed from the reality of their lives.
As Gabler wrote of these industry leaders: "What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country....something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America. Something drove them to deny whatever they had been before settling here" (p. 4). Gabler believes that these Jewish leaders "colonized the American imagination" (p. 7). Over time, their films embodied American values; the irony is that they were made by people alienated from that culture. As Gabler concludes, "the Jews reinvented the country in the image of their fiction" (p. 7).
This is a very interesting and useful study of the role of film in defining the American character in the early twentieth century.
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