The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles will make modifications to a new exhibition about the Jewish film-makers and businessmen who helped create Hollywood’s studio system following criticisms from a group of Jewish activists.
The exhibition, Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital, opened last month and is the first permanent display at the Academy Museum. It was curated by associate curator Dara Jaffe and organised in part in response to criticisms following the museum’s grand opening in 2021 that it lacked any acknowledgement of the foundational role of Jewish directors, studio executives and other leaders in creating Hollywood. The exhibition spotlights the roles of influential film industry leaders like Columbia Pictures co-founder Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn (a co-founder of Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM) and fellow MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer.
However, members of a group called United Jewish Writers have written an open letter articulating their “extreme disappointment in, and frustration” with the exhibition. Specifically, they criticised the displays’ descriptions of several historical figures in unflattering terms, including texts that call certain Jewish men who played foundational roles in Hollywood’s development as a “tyrant”, a “womanizer” and a “predator”, and characterises their behaviour as “racial oppression”, “nepotism” and “offensive”, among other unfavourable descriptors.
The letter notes that “it is the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate”. It adds: “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, antisemitic.” The letter has been signed by more than 300 Hollywood workers.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Academy Museum said that the institution has “heard the concerns from members of the Jewish community regarding some components of our exhibition” and is “committed to making changes to the exhibition to address them”. The spokesperson added: “We will be implementing the first set of changes immediately—they will allow us to tell these important stories without using phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes.”
Beyond this first set of changes, the spokesperson said, the museum is “convening an advisory group of experts from leading museums focused on the Jewish community, civil rights and the history of other marginalised groups to advise us on complex questions about context and any necessary additions to the exhibition’s narrative”.
In an interview last month with The Hollywood Reporter, Jaffe linked rising incidents of antisemitism today to the treatment of the film industry’s foundational Jewish leaders during their time. “I see a cycle of antisemitism in how people talk about Jews in Hollywood, and how Jews in Hollywood work with Jewish lawyers and bankers,” she said. “There are reasons, driven by antisemitism, for why they worked together in the first place, and now it’s twisted to further antisemitism. The rhetoric that was used against the founders is the same as it is today.”
One of the Academy Museum’s stated goals when it opened was to tell a more diverse and inclusive story of the history of film and the movie industry—including an exhibition on the foundational influence of Black actors, film-makers and other creatives—as well as acknowledging some darker chapters in that history.
