Journal of Jewish Identities 2014, 7(2) Review Essay Tarnishing Tinseltown: Hollywood’s Responses to Nazi Germany Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. 448. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0231163927. Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013. Pp. 336. Hardcover $26.95. ISBN 978-0674724747. Not since the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners has a scholarly monograph generated so much controversy within and outside of academia as Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration. He indignantly indicts Hollywood for colluding with Nazi Germany’s censorship demands to purge Jewish characters and anti-Nazi themes from American movies during the 1930s. Urwand’s sweeping condemnation of Hollywood’s complicity contrasts sharply with Thomas Doherty’s more balanced assessment of how the American ilm industry responded to Hitler’s incremental escalation of antiSemitic, expansionist, and repressive policies before the outbreak of World War II. The initial trigger for the debate over the conlicting interpretations proffered by the two authors was the publicity campaign for The Collaboration. Harvard University Press hired Goldberg McDuie Communications to promote Urwand’s book, scheduled for release in October 2013, seven months after Doherty’s hit the shelves in April. In what appears to have been an attempt to counteract the positive reviews Hollywood and Hitler had begun to receive, the marketing irm provided advance copies of The Collaboration to prospective reviewers in June. The cover leter accompanying the review copies denigrated the depth of Doherty’s research and touted that of Urwand’s: “Whereas Doherty relied on lawed, supericial accounts in domestic trade papers, Urwand discovered a vast array of primary resource materials.”1 While Urwand does not speciically mention Hollywood and Hitler (which he presumably had not read when he was writing The Collaboration) in the text of his book, he curtly dismisses it in a footnote as “a lively account, but one that is limited to reports that appeared in American trade papers.” (256) To be sure, Urwand delved into the German archives to unearth reports about the 60 Journal of Jewish Identities July 2014, 7(2) 61 Review Essay Lawrence Baron hectoring of the ilm industry by Georg Gyssling, Nazi Germany’s consul in Los Angeles, but Doherty also draws on a “rich repository of archival sources” beyond the trade press, including the iles of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), and memos from federal oicials. (375) Both books reveal how the major studios avoided direct criticism of Hitler and his anti-Semitic policies, abandoned or altered scripts that might antagonize Nazi Germany, and eliminated Jewish characters from their movies in the 1930s. They similarly atribute these concessions to the ilm industry’s commercial stakes in the German market. A main point of contention between the two scholars is whether this self-censorship constituted “collaboration,” exacted primarily by Germany’s threat to deny distribution licenses to the ilms of studios that did not abide by the content parameters it established, as Urwand claims, or a continuation of Hollywood’s standard practice of editing ilms and scripts to gain the approval of the PCA and local and state censorship boards in the United States and to placate domestic interest groups and foreign governments, as Doherty posits. The irst reviewers of Urwand’s book seized upon the incendiary charge he leveled at the movie moguls by giving their pieces sensationalist titles such as, “Hollywood’s Creepy Love Afair with Adolf Hitler,” “Scholar Asserts That Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis,” “When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler,” and “Hollywood’s Deal with The Devil (Hitler).”2 Yet these titles only slightly exaggerated Urwand’s censure of Hollywood’s kowtowing to Nazi demands. In the prologue to his book, he unambiguously declares, “Over the course of the investigation, one word kept reappearing in both the German and American records: ‘collaboration’ (Zusammenarbeit). And gradually it became clear that this word accurately described the particular arrangement between the Hollywood studios and the German government in the 1930s.”(8) Amplifying his thesis, he argues, “The studio heads, who were mostly immigrant Jews, went to dramatic lengths to hold on to their investment in Germany. Although few remarked on it at the time, these men followed the instructions of the German consul in Los Angeles, abandoning or changing a whole series of pictures that would have exposed the brutality of the Nazi regime.” (9) Urwand concludes his prologue by maintaining that “at the center of the collaboration was Hitler himself” because he appreciated the propagandistic inluence exerted by American feature ilms and beneited from aligning it with his aims and ideology. (9) Although Urwand acknowledges that other American corporations kept doing business with Nazi Germany throughout the Thirties, he deems the studios’ unprincipled pursuit of proit uniquely reprehensible because they acted as “purveyors of ideas and culture,” a phrase borrowed from a U.S. Department of Commerce memorandum, and could have alerted the world to the danger Hitler posed to Europe and its Jews. (8–9) Reacting to excerpts from Urwand’s book published in The Hollywood Reporter, Doherty disputed the “slanderous and ahistorical” use of the term collaboration: “’Collaboration’ is how you describe the Vichy government during the Nazi Occupation of France or Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian doublecrosser whose name became synonymous with treason. To call a Hollywood 62 Journal of Jewish Identities mogul a collaborator is to assert that he worked consciously and purposely, out of cowardice or greed, under the guidance of Nazi overlords.” Doherty moreover objected to Urwand’s characterization of Hollywood’s interactions with Nazi Germany as a “pact,” implying equivalence to the notorious Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pacts. According to Doherty, Urwand’s excoriation of the studios’ accommodations to Nazi ultimatums stems from the hindsight of the terrible toll of lives lost in World War II and the Holocaust, neither of which seemed the likely, let alone inevitable, outcome of Hitler’s reign before 1938. Like the governments of the Western democracies, the studio heads appeased Hitler with the expectation that he would moderate his anti-Semitic and foreign policies as Germany’s economy recovered and its legitimate territorial demands were satisied.3 Many reviewers echoed Doherty’s consternation over Urwand’s conlation of the studios’ compliance with Nazi dictates to “collaboration.” Writing in Die Welt, a German journalist pointed out that Urwand’s repeated mistranslation of Zusammenarbeit as “collaboration” elided the distinction Germans make between “value neutral cooperation” (i.e. Zusammenarbeit) and “(treasonous) collaboration”(i.e. Kollaboration.)4 In his scathing critique of Urwand’s book, David Denby, the movie critic for The New Yorker, opined that “the charge of ‘collaboration’ is inaccurate and unfair―a case of scholarly sensationalism. The studios didn’t advance Nazism; they failed to oppose it.… None of this makes Hollywood any less cowardly, but Urwand, writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, which few people in the mid-thirties could have imagined, recasts every act of evasion as the darkest complicity.”5 Denby subsequently impugned the judgment of Harvard University Press for puting its imprimatur on such a lawed book and urged the press to recall it and require Urwand to revise it for republication.6 Gavriel Rosenfeld traced the historical roots of the German word “Kollaboration” back to nationalistic denunciations of German oicials who implemented Napoleon’s policies when France occupied Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The term eventually took on its current sinister meaning when invoked to discredit the puppet governments and local oicials that Nazi Germany relied on to administer conquered countries during World War II. Like Doherty, Rosenfeld objects to Urwand’s categorization of Hollywood’s relationship with the Third Reich as a pact, conjuring up the ghosts of the Munich and German–Soviet Pacts and implying “a level of formality―indeed ideological ainity―that did not exist in reality.” Finally, he observes that although Urwand presents a fascinating overview of Hitler’s ideas about ilm and which American ones he loved and detested, Urwand fails to establish any direct link between the führer and the changes made to ilms. The changes that the German Foreign Oice and Propaganda Ministry demanded the studios make in their movies to render them suitable for screening in Germany were as often arbitrary as they were ideological.7 In his book and rejoinders to Urwand, Doherty stresses that the studios were more constrained by domestic considerations. American courts viewed motion pictures as a commodity rather than as free speech and ruled that municipal and state censorship was constitutional. Henry Ford, and other July 2014, 7(2) 63 Review Essay Lawrence Baron anti-Semitic demagogues of the era, viliied the movie industry as a tool Jews exploited to corrupt the morality of American audiences. To avert the introduction of federal censorship and congressional investigations into the cartelistic control the major studios wielded over the production, distribution, and exhibition of their products, the ilm industry created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association in 1922 and appointed Will Hays, a rock-ribbed Republican, to assure Congress and the public that the industry would monitor itself. In 1930, the MPPDA promulgated the Production Code, which consisted of moral and political content guidelines for American ilms. Enforcement of the code was lax until 1934, when the inluential Catholic journalist and lay leader Joseph Breen assumed leadership of the PCA in a move to preempt a boycot of Hollywood ilms by the newly founded Catholic Legion of Decency. Thereafter scripts that failed to obtain the PCA’s seal of approval had to be revised to the satisfaction of Breen in order to be produced and merit mass distribution by their respective studios.8 Two provisions of the Production Code restricted what was permited in ilms regarding Jews and Nazi Germany. The irst barred movies from ridiculing any religion, its clergy, and its rituals. Acutely aware of the depth of antiSemitic atitudes in the United States, which he himself often expressed in private conversations and correspondence, Breen cautiously decided to excise both negative and positive depictions of Jewish characters, lest the former reinforce anti-Semitic stereotypes and the later lend credence to the accusation that the Jewish movie moguls were promoting a parochial political agenda.9 The second provision required that “the history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall be represented fairly.”10 Breen and Hays concurred that American ilmmakers should entertain and eschew politics to maximize their proits at home and abroad. Since the United States was not at war with Germany, both men believed that explicitly anti-Nazi ilms would violate the fairness doctrine and feared provoking reprisals by Germany against the ofending studio. Indeed, the redaction of ilms to conform to foreign censorship criteria was a standard practice to prevent the banning or limited distribution of ilms exported to other countries. For example, Doherty and Urwand discuss Universal Picture’s decision to withdraw the original version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) from German theaters and rerelease a bowdlerized version of it. For Doherty, the furor caused by the ilm was an ominous warning of Nazi fanaticism. (1–10) For Urwand, Universal’s acquiescence to reedit the movie, even for prints screened outside of Germany, was a portent of Hollywood’s obsequious “collaboration” with Hitler. (21–37) As the terms of Nazi Germany’s ilm policies emerged in 1933, the stance the American movie industry should adopt toward the new regime evolved through exchanges among George Canty, the Department of Commerce’s Motion Picture Division commissioner in Germany, Frederick Herron, the foreign afairs chief of the MPPDA, George Gyssling, the German consul dispatched to Los Angeles to deal directly with the studios, and the owners of the Hollywood studios. In spring 1933, Canty focused his eforts on how the studios could Aryanize their work force in Germany after the Jewish manager 64 Journal of Jewish Identities of Universal Pictures had been imprisoned and the Jewish manager of Warner Brothers had been savagely beaten. The later died in Stockholm at the end of the year from liver disease, but Jack Warner labored under the false impression that his untimely death resulted from the pummeling he had received. In most cases, Jewish agents and salesmen were transferred to other posts in Europe and replaced with Gentile Germans and studio personnel already stationed in Europe. By May, Canty counseled the studios to follow a “conservative course” expecting that things were bound “to cool down [and return] to some degree of normalcy.” (Canty cited in Doherty, 39.) The irst test case for how studios would cope with Gyssling’s blinkered vision of what cinematic fare was appropriate for German audiences was Warner Brothers 1933 ilm, Captured! In June, the studio invited Gyssling to preview the ilm to solicit his suggestions. He demanded extensive changes in the portrayal of the German guards and commandant in this British POW story set in World War I. Rather than heed Gyssling’s advice, Warner Brothers released the movie in the United States without the cuts. Extrapolating from future leters Gyssling wrote to other studios, Urwand assumes he warned Warner Brothers to make the cuts or have their license to distribute ilms in Germany revoked. Warner Brothers turned to Frederick Herron, who considered Gyssling a fanatic. Herron circumvented Gyssling by screening a reedited version of the ilm, but one without all of the requested changes, to a more a moderate German consul posted in New York. This diplomat generally approved of the ilm and asked for only minor emendations. The MPPDA and Warner Brothers believed they had resolved the problem amicably. Urwand speculates that Gyssling was so enraged by Warner Brothers evading his supervision that he instigated the Propaganda Ministry to expel the studio from Germany and order German consulates and embassies to denounce the ilm. (55–58) Thus, Urwand includes Warner Brothers among the studios that “collaborated” with the Nazis since it assented to redacting Captured! Yet he mentions elsewhere that Gyssling “kicked Warner Brothers out of Germany for not making changes to Captured!” (178) Noting this discrepancy, ilm historian Mike Greco has commented, “’Collaboration’ is a strange word to use for noncompliance.”11 While not broaching this particular incident, Doherty contends that Warner Brothers was “the irst of the majors to withdraw on principle” and does not deserve to be tarred with the same brush Urwand uses to paint his contemptuous portrait of the other studios. (35–38) To further substantiate the charge of “collaboration,” Urwand demonstrates how the studios buckled to German pressure to shelve anti-Nazi scripts. This precedent was set in 1933 and 1934. The plotline of The Mad Dog of Europe dramatized the anti-Jewish boycot, the iring of a Jewish professor, the dissolution of a mixed Aryan-Jewish marriage, and the murder of Jewish man by Nazi thugs. Since the project was shopped as an independent ilm seeking inancing, Gyssling lacked the leverage of withholding screening permits in Germany. Instead, Urwand surmises, Gyssling contacted Will Hays to discourage the production of the movie even though Urwand admits that “the evidence is inconclusive” that Gyssling ever approached Hays on the July 2014, 7(2) 65 Review Essay Lawrence Baron mater. (68) Hays did meet with the ilm’s backers and warned them that such a tendentious ilm might hurt Hollywood’s business abroad. He delegated Breen to convey his concern to the advisory council the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently had started in Los Angeles. Breen also shared his concern that the ilm might generate an anti-Semitic backlash against an industry that many Americans perceived as dominated by Jews. The members of the council recommended that the story be transformed into an allegory about a ictitious fascistic dictatorship. When the feisty Hollywood agent Al Rosen purchased the rights for The Mad Dog of Europe, he unsuccessfully sued the Hays Oice for conspiring against its production. Meanwhile, Gyssling urged the State Department to suppress the ilm, which, in turn, transmited his appeal to Herron of the MPPDA. The MPPDA soon adopted the ADL’s position not to sponsor anti-Nazi activities if they might unintentionally exacerbate American anti-Semitism. Uwand insists that the primary reason that the studios failed to produce The Mad Dog of Europe was “to preserve their business interests in Germany” (75), but the only proof he cites is a private remark Louis B. Mayer allegedly made to Rosen which the later entered as testimony in a 1947 lawsuit.12 (272) Doherty’s interpretation of “the unmaking of The Mad Dog of Europe” partly coincides with Urwand’s, but spreads the blame for the outcome more broadly. Sam Jafe, the irst owner of the rights to the ilm, was told to drop the project by the MPPDA. After Rosen purchased the rights, Frederick Beetson of the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP) rebuked Rosen for pursuing a project that would jeopardize the German market for American ilms. Failing to procure suicient funding because investors shunned such a risky endeavor, Rosen nevertheless submited his proposal for the motion picture to the PCA in 1934. Breen issued an advisory opinion that “such a picture should not be produced.” Doherty emphasizes that “around Hollywood, in dealing with the Breen oice, an oicial prohibition and an ‘unoicial judgment’ was a distinction without diference.” (58) Breen elaborated on his rationale by underscoring the likelihood of a domestic backlash against Hollywood by German Americans and anti-Semites and by diferentiating between blatant propaganda and entertainment. Thus, Doherty does not discount the loss of the German market as a reason for torpedoing the ilm, but Gyssling plays a minor role in the fate of the picture compared to that of the AMPP, MPPDA, and PCA. Surprisingly, Doherty omits any mention of the lobbying campaign mounted by Jewish organizations to scutle the project despite Felicia Herman’s indings that the ADL and Los Angeles Jewish Community Commitee LAJCC) founded in 1934 worked in tandem with the MPPDA to squelch The Mad Dog of Europe.13 Since mainstream Jewish organizations sensed that American Jewry was vulnerable to atacks from domestic pro-Nazi and fascistic groups, they became increasingly concerned about how Jewish characters were depicted in Hollywood ilms. When Darryl Zanuck announced that his new studio, Twentieth Century, contemplated producing a ilm about the Rothschilds, the ADL and the LAJCC atempted to dissuade him. Zanuck sought a prestige picture 66 Journal of Jewish Identities to launch the company and signed the famed British star George Arliss to star in it. Best known for his performances as famous historical igures like Benjamin Disraeli and Cardinal Richelieu, Arliss seemed the perfect choice to play the dual roles of Mayer and Nathan Rothschild in a saga about the rise of the Rothschild banking dynasty. With the debacle of The Mad Dog of Europe fresh in his mind, Zanuck relished the opportunity to criticize the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany by implying parallels between it and the hatred Jews endured in Germany during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Since the plot was situated in the past, he did not solicit feedback on the script from Gyssling. The movie contained two scenes that could be construed as antiSemitic caricatures of Mayer hiding his accounting ledgers from a corrupt tax collector and then instructing his sons from his deathbed to establish branches of their bank in major European cities to guarantee that loans to governments there would not be stolen while in transit. While these scenes replicated common anti-Semitic stereotypes of avaricious and cunning Jewish inanciers who covertly controlled world politics, the premium the Rothschilds put on wealth was justiied as a reaction to the discrimination and persecution Jews confronted in that era. Moreover, Nathan Rothschild loans money to Britain to save Europe from Napoleon’s tyranny. While recognizing Zanuck’s good intentions, the ADL implored him to halt production, anticipating that negative images of Jewish conniving and greed would resonate with audiences during the Depression and Hitler’s irst year in power. When he rebufed their appeals, they asked Hays to intercede. Zanuck countered by sending Hays positive testimonials from viewers who had seen a preview of the ilm, an endorsement from the National Council of Jewish Women, and a glowing leter from the editor of the B’nai Brith Messenger. The ADL then turned to Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, Louis B. Maier, and Harry Warner. The irst two men watched the picture and did not ind it ofensive, while Warner did not want to get involved since he had sold the script to Zanuck. The movie was a critical and popular success. Many reviewers discerned similarities between the precarious status of German Jews during the time of the Rothschilds and under Nazi rule. Others appreciated that the Rothschilds triumphed over adversity. Still convinced that negative cinematic images of Jews made audiences susceptible to anti-Semitic demagoguery, the LAJCC formed a ilm commitee that included owners of the studios or their representatives. The commitee decided that the studios must be highly circumspect in representing Jewish characters and themes in their movies. In practice, this resulted in the rapid elimination of Jewish characters from Hollywood productions on the grounds that presenting unsavory Jewish characters would reinforce negative stereotypes; whereas idealizing Jewish characters would substantiate charges that the ilm industry was beholden to Jewish interest groups. Urwand goes into far more depth than Doherty about the background maneuvering surrounding the production of The House of Rothschild and the long-term impact it had on the reluctance of the studios to tackle Jewish issues in their ilms. He clearly sides with those who atempted to prevent it July 2014, 7(2) 67 Review Essay Lawrence Baron from being made or released during the Depression, even though their dire predictions of it precipitating an anti-Semitic backlash never materialized. Their anxieties, however, arose from the minority insecurity that made Jewish organizations such as the ADL caution against making the sort of blunt antiNazi ilms Urwand wishes American studios had produced in the 1930s. To bolster his argument, Urwand could have cited Judith Doneson’s analysis of the dangers of making a ilm about the Rothschilds in the midst of the Depression. She keenly focused on the mixed messages imparted by the ilm beyond the obvious dichotomy between the unlatering portrait of Jewish avarice and the inequality that engendered it. Public opinion surveys from the decade reveal that Americans admired the ambitiousness, business acumen, and industriousness of Jews, but disliked their clannishness, crass materialism, and crooked business practices. She understands that for the majority of Americans the Rothschilds evoked admiration of their success and resentment of the deceptive means they furtively employed to achieve it.14 Although The House of Rothschild could be misconstrued as anti-Semitic, Urwand condemns it for containing “ideas so compatible with Nazi ideology that it was incorporated into the most extreme Nazi propaganda ilm of all time.” (94) Here, he is referring to The Eternal Jew (1940) which featured clips of Mayer deceiving the tax collector and dispatching his sons to create a multinational banking network. Of course, the Propaganda Ministry deleted Mayer’s dialogue about how discrimination and persecution forced Jews into banking and commerce since wealth aforded them some protection in an anti-Jewish society. German audiences never heard Mayer uter: “We are Jews―taxed to death, forbidden to learn a trade, to own land…Money is the only weapon a Jew has to defend himself with.” Nor did they hear his inal words to his sons: “And remember this before all: that neither business, nor power, nor all the gold in Europe will bring you happiness, till we―our people―have equality, respect, dignity.” Devoid of these pleas for tolerance, and crammed with other heinous images of Jews as communists, criminals, iconoclasts, perverts, and vermin, the ilm concludes with Hitler’s threat from January 1939: “If the international inance Jews inside and outside Europe push people into another world war, the result will not be a victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Urwand asserts that The House of Rothschild’s depiction of Mayer was so noxious that The Eternal Jew was “unthinkable” without it. (91–92) He insinuates this visually by juxtaposing a still of George Arliss portraying Mayer across the page from the visage of the bearded hooknosed Jew featured on the poster for The Eternal Jew. It never seems to dawn on Urwand how deeply ingrained conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds, and pernicious caricatures of Jews, already were in both modern European and American anti-Semitism. Urwand reserves much of his ire for the three studios who remained in Germany after 1936: Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. By that year Warner Brothers, RKO Radio Pictures, Disney, Universal Pictures, and Columbia Pictures had withdrawn from the German market. The companies that stayed faced higher import fees for their ilms, 68 Journal of Jewish Identities fewer of which passed German censorship. MGM ofered to vacate its German operation if Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox would do likewise, but neither agreed. Since German law prohibited foreign companies from transferring their money outside of the country, the surviving studios made greater compromises to mollify the censors or ind legal ways around the law banning the export of currency. For example, at the insistence of Breen, who had been bombarded by leters from Gyssling, MGM removed anti-Nazi and proJewish references from its 1938 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades. Based on hearsay recounted by Budd Schulberg in an interview sixty-ive years later, Urwand accuses Louis B. Mayer of personally screening ilms with Gyssling, including Three Comrades and “in all likelihood” (189) preparing a list of changes he demanded to render Three Comrades innocuous and forwarding it to Breen.15 While MGM eviscerated the anti-Nazi politics of Remarque’s novel, viewers who followed the news emanating out of Germany would have no trouble identifying the mob protesting peacetime Germany as Nazis and the paciists whom the street demonstrators assault as supporters of the Weimar Republic’s ledgling democracy. At the same time, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox invested more in their newsreel divisions in Germany even though they could only ilm things that the state permited their cameramen to cover. The two studios utilized the approved footage in their newsreels exported abroad to generate revenue not blocked in German accounts. Urwand’s most damning discovery is an American trade commissioner’s report from December 1938 about MGM loaning money to German irms in exchange for bonds that it subsequently sold abroad for approximately 60 percent of their face value as a circuitous method to extract cash from Germany. The report disclosed that the companies receiving the loans were “connected with the armament industry especially in the Sudeten territory or Austria.” Given that this transaction occurred after the Anschluss, the Munich Agreement, and Kristallnacht, it demonstrated political insensitivity even if was a clever ruse to circumvent Germany’s currency laws. Nevertheless, the trade commission did not embark on an investigation or prosecution of MGM because many American corporations were still permited to conduct business in Germany. Appalled by MGM’s poor judgment, Urwand declares, “the largest American motion picture company helped to inance the German war machine.” (147) At the moment he adduces his strongest piece of evidence of a studio abeting Hitler, Urwand exaggerates its signiicance by overlooking that the outbreak of World War II lay nine months in the future for Europe and three years away for the still neutral United States. Unlike Urwand, Doherty does not narrowly equate “Hollywood” with the major studios or ascribe its self-censorship primarily to the intimidating presence of Gyssling and the potential loss of the German market. For example, his analysis of the newsreel coverage of Hitler’s Germany encompasses more than Urwand’s two paragraphs on this topic. Doherty shares Urwand’s disdain for the newsreels produced by Fox Movietone and Paramount News under close German scrutiny, which amounted to litle more than what the HolJuly 2014, 7(2) 69 Review Essay Zehavit Stern lywood trade press contemptuously dubbed “naziganda.” (92) Yet he adds that the most emblematic ilmed images of the Third Reich appeared in 1933 before the Propaganda Oice vitiated foreign newsreels. Paramount News projected ilm of the abhorrent SA boycot of Jewish stores and the burning of proscribed books onto American screens. Considered journalism, the newsreels were not subject to PCA, municipal, or state censorship, but the production companies practiced “voluntary restraint” (85) seeking to relect rather than shape public opinion. Since Hitler was a polarizing igure, exhibitors had the discretion to cut newsreel footage of him according to the predominant ethnic backgrounds and political leanings of their regular patrons. The March of Time, a monthly motion picture digest produced by Time magazine and distributed internationally to 11,000 theatres by RKO, constituted the exception to the rule of neutral newsreel coverage of Hitler’s Germany. Interspersing actual footage with dramatic reenactments, the series qualiied as pictorial journalism exempting it from the strictures imposed by the PCA and other American censorship boards. Therefore, it could criticize Nazi Germany and domestic pro-Nazi and fascistic groups. In its most controversial episode, Inside Nazi Germany (1938), the voice-over commentary reproached Germany’s belligerence towards bordering countries and repression of its own citizens, particularly Jews and dissident Christian clerics, undermining the sanitized images of the orderly, prosperous, and resurgent nation that the German government provided and sought to disseminate abroad. In the absence of footage about Nazi inequities, The March of Time simply staged them. The Chicago Board of Censors initially banned the ilm for being “unfriendly toward a nation oicially friendly to the United States,” but eventually yielded to protests lodged by the U.S. Secretary of State, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee, and the Cardinal of Chicago. (250) Doherty considers Inside Nazi Germany “an early harbinger of what would become one of the most popular motion picture genres of the twentieth century, the Nazicentric documentary.” (256) Doherty deems the independently produced ilm I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany (1936) an amateurish precursor to subsequent Hollywood exposés of Nazi despotism. In 1934, Isobel Steele, a young American woman studying music in Germany, was arrested for espionage because she was unwittingly dating a Polish spy. When the American ambassador had secured her release after four months of incarceration, she returned to the United States and authored an account of her imprisonment that was serialized in American newspapers. She formed a partnership with Alfred Mannon, a former president of Republic Studios, to adapt her memoir into a feature ilm. Infuriated by the damage the movie would inlict on Germany’s reputation, Gyssling demanded that the MPPDA halt its production. When the MPPDA declined because it lacked jurisdiction over independent production companies that did not belong to the organization, Gyssling threatened to blackmail Steele over her sexual escapades in Germany. To fend of Gyssling’s atempts to suppress the movie, Mannon submited the completed ilm―instead of the preproduction script, which was the usual procedure―to the PCA. Breen urged 70 Journal of Jewish Identities Mannon to abandon the project because it violated the national fairness doctrine of the Code. Mannon retorted that the incidents depicted in the ilm were based on actual events that had been extensively reported in American newspapers about Hitler’s regime and Steele’s internment. Breen belatedly granted PCA approval to it. I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany sufered from inadequate funding, limited bookings, low production values, and Steele’s poor acting. According to Doherty, the ilm’s signiicance is that Mannon “had forced the Breen oice to concede that fair treatment of a foreign nation did not mean sympathetic treatment,” thereby creating “an opening for anti-Nazi cinema that any of the major studios might have slipped through―had they been so inclined.” (73) An upsurge in anti-Nazi activity within Hollywood’s ilmmaking community nurtured this inclination. Founded in April 1936 at a gala dinner, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL) enlisted not only the support of famous actors, actresses, directors, and screenwriters, but also that of movie moguls like David O. Selznick and Jack Warner. As a Popular Front organization, it forged a broad coalition of Catholics, communists, Jews, New Deal Democrats, and socialists to alert Americans to the dangers of fascism and Nazism in Europe and the United States. HANL counted over 4,000 members who atended its rallies, donated money, signed petitions, or wrote articles for its gazete, the Anti-Nazi News: A Journal in Defense of American Democracy. It also produced two weekly radio programs transmited without charge by KFWB, the Los Angeles station owned by Warner Brothers. HANL launted its gaggle of celebrities to atract public atention to the causes it championed. When producer Hal Roach invited Mussolini’s son Vitoria to Los Angeles to close a deal establishing a joint American-Italian production company, HANL assured that he was treated as a persona non grata, prompting Roach to withdraw from the venture. On her visit to Hollywood, Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite director, encountered the same cold shoulder. Doherty devotes a chapter to HANL, one to the snubbing of Vitorio, and another on the rebuf of Riefenstahl. Conversely, Urwand disposes of the later two episodes in one sentence and of HANL in a few paragraphs because “the organization could not make movies.” (199) But Warner Brothers could and did make movies. Leting the past preigure the present, Harry and Jack Warner authorized the production of The Life of Emile Zola (1937), They Won’t Forget (1937), and Juarez (1939). The irst two ilms hearkened back to ignominious anti-Semitic incidents in recent history: the Dreyfus Afair and the Leo Frank trial and lynching. The studio cautiously planted a visual clue to Dreyfus’s religious background and the reason he was framed in the inal version of The Life of Emile Zola. Yet the movie still delivered a stinging tirade against Nazi chauvinism, intolerance, and mass hysteria through Zola’s eloquent defense of Dreyfus and a scene of a mob consigning the novelist’s works to the lames of a bonire. Steven Carr has documented how Warner Brothers prepared special press kits for Jewish publications to highlight the Jewish dimension of the ilm.16 Most critics spoted the parallels between the wave of anti-Semitism that swept France during the trial and July 2014, 7(2) 71 Review Essay Lawrence Baron Hitler’s crusade against the Jews.17 Exercising the same solicitude as Ward Greene’s ictionalized novel about the Leo Frank Trial, They Won’t Forget portrayed its doomed protagonist as a victim of Southern distrust of Northerners rather than of anti-Semitism.18 Reviewers recognized the judicial travesty on which the ilm was based; so did the Atlanta censorship board, which banned the movie from the city’s theatres.19 Touching on The Life of Emile Zola and They Won’t Forget only leetingly, Doherty strangely spends more time explicating the anti-Nazi themes of Juarez. This historical drama reconstructed the mission Maximilian undertook at the behest of Napoleon III to quell the insurrectionary Mexican Republic led by Benito Juárez. Its contemporary meanings ran along two lines. Obviously, it depicted the epic struggle between an imperialist tyrant and a democratic man of the people, but the conlict possessed a racial dimension as well. The aristocratic scion Maximilian epitomizes the Aryan type, “tall and fair with blue eyes and a beard yellow like the silk of corn.” (347) His nemesis, Juárez, was a swarthy Indian who aspires to be the Abraham Lincoln of Mexico. The movie also served two purposes. It ostensibly represented a good will gesture to Latin America as part of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy while simultaneously issuing a clarion call to resist Hitler’s expansionism and racism. In this later regard, Frank Nugent of the New York Times lauded the ilm: “With pardonable opportunism they [the Warner Brothers] have writen between the lines of Benito Juárez’s deiance the text of a liberal’s scorn for fascism and Nazism.” (348) Ignoring They Won’t Forget and Juarez, Urwand deprecates The Life of Zola’s subtle reference to the rabid anti-Semitism behind the railroading and public pillorying of Dreyfus. He predictably detects Gyssling’s interference in the attenuation of this theme. On February 9, 1937, Gyssling phoned Warner Brothers and expressed his concern to an associate producer that dredging up the Dreyfus Afair would fuel anti-Nazi sentiment in the United States. The associate producer calmed Gyssling down by falsely assuring him the movie dealt only tangentially with the trial. Several days later Jack Warner ordered the word Jew struck from the dialogue and shown only as Dreyfus’s religion on the registry of oicers who were suspects for handing military secrets over to Germany. Urwand jumps to the conclusion that Warmer fulilled Gyssling’s demands, but never discloses the conlicting evidence of who instigated this cut. (179–180) Steven Carr cites a memo Breen sent to Warner a week prior to Gyssling’s phone call, in which he warned that the ilm might be construed as anti-German propaganda unless scenes, speciically the shot of the book burning, or dialogue lending credence to such an interpretation were excised.20 Felicia Herman’s research reveals that although the ADL advised the studio in September 1936 to refrain from inserting “unduly favorable” references to Jews in the movie, It tasked the LAJCC to follow up on this mater and privately congratulated itself for inluencing the content of the ilm.21 Michael Birdwell atributes the deletion of the word Jew in the dialogue to French Prime Minister Leon Blum’s plea to the studio to drop the ilm because it might exacerbate political tensions in France.22 Mortiied by a subsequent re72 Journal of Jewish Identities quest from producer Hal Wallis to eliminate even the visual cue to Dreyfus’s Jewish identity, Urwand surmises it remained in the ilm due to an oversight. It strikes me as equally plausible that the image never would have remained in the ilm without Jack Warner’s post-production consent.23 Warner Brothers’ historical allegories, and its grity reenactment of how an anti-immigrant and racist ofshoot of the KKK terrorized Detroit, Black Legion (1937), paved the way for the studio’s irst explicitly anti-Nazi ilm, Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. In 1938, the FBI broke up a German espionage ring in New York for conspiring to procure American military codes, and it successfully prosecuted several of the spies later that year. The agent in charge of the investigation wrote about the case, and Warner Brothers snapped up the ilm rights to the story. Upon hearing of the project, Gyssling sent a leter to Breen to nip it in the bud. Warner Brothers refused and leaked the leter to the trade press to generate publicity for the forthcoming ilm. Having lost patience with Gyssling’s relentless entreaties, Breen decided to green-light the movie with a rationale echoing his argument for granting I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany a PCA seal of approval: “The activities of this nation [Germany] and its citizenry, as set forth in this script, seem to be supported by the testimony at the trial and evidence adduced by the United State Atorney and the federal operations.” Atuned to security threats posed by the German American Bund and other fascist groups operating in southern California, Warner Brothers cloaked the shooting of the ilm in a shroud of secrecy. Parenthetically, the Warners and the other studio owners took such threats seriously because they had been funding iniltration of these subversive groups since 1934.24 Borrowing from the cinematic conventions of The March of Time, Confessions of a Nazi Spy establishes its authenticity with commentary by an authoritative narrator and clips from newsreels. It exposes not only Germany’s treachery, but that of its stateside ifth columnists too. The movie castigates Nazi despotism and racism as fundamentally un-American, but veers away from tackling the topic of anti-Semitism to allay suspicions of being pro-communist or proJewish. Only a year earlier, the House Commitee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had convened hearings about communist iniltration of Hollywood. While Confessions of a Nazi Spy seems too generic and tepid in retrospect, Doherty praises it as the irst Hollywood salvo against the Third Reich.25 Urwand concedes that Confessions of a Nazi Spy “pulled no punches, depicting all Nazis―whether spies or members of the German American Bund―as radical fanatics who took their orders directly from Berlin.” Nevertheless, he belitles its signiicance, labeling it an “obvious B-picture with exaggerated German characters, a cheesy narrator, and a simpleminded script” which failed to “broach important subjects such as the persecution of the Jews” or “the fascist tendencies in American life.” (208) More importantly from his perspective, MGM, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox continued to do business in Germany until 1940. As President Roosevelt gradually shifted American policy away from neutrality and towards economic and military assistance to Great Britain, and as revenues from the German ilm market shrunk, these studios started to make anti-Nazi July 2014, 7(2) 73 Review Essay Lawrence Baron ilms like MGM’s The Mortal Storm (1940), Twentieth Century Fox’s Four Sons (1940), and Paramount’s Mystery Sea Raider (1940). Once the United States entered the war, the major studios whole-heartedly aligned their productions with America’s propaganda needs. Urwand emphasizes that their prior reluctance to make anti-Nazi fare and the omission of Jewish characters altogether or coding of them as non-Aryans in early anti-Nazi ilms like The Mortal Storm dispel “a common idea about Hollywood, one that has been recycled in dozens of books about Hollywood―namely that Hollywood was synonymous with anti-fascism during its golden age.” (7) This stunning revelation, however, stems from an invalid premise. The vast majority of ilm scholars clearly demarcate between Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and its anti-Nazi mobilization for the war efort after 1939. Despite HANL’s lurry of anti-Nazi broadcasts, demonstrations, and manifestos, Warner Brothers was the noteworthy exception to the rule of studio quiescence about Hitler during the 1930s. In a footnote appended to his pronouncement that he has shatered the myth of Hollywood anti-Nazism in its heyday, Urwand lists nine monographs that have fostered this myth. All but one restrict their coverage to the period from 1939 to 1945; the other begins in 1937. (257) Let me look at a few of the books that purportedly perpetuate the myth of Hollywood anti-fascism during the studio system’s Golden Age. In his book about Warner Brothers’ “campaign against Nazism,” Michael Birdwell writes, “Most studios argued that abandoning the Nazi market would bankrupt them, and they continued to acquiesce to German demands.”26 From his The Star Spangled Screen, Bernard Dick declares, …in the mid-Thirties, it [the rise of fascism] could not be realistically dramatized. Apart from being imperfectly understood, there was a possibility of antagonizing Italians who admired Mussolini for geting the trains to run on time, and Germans who lauded Hitler’s restoration of national pride. There was also the Production Code, which required that all nations be treated fairly (although that would soon change) to be considered.27 Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black enumerate the factors that deterred studios from churning out anti-fascist broadsides before 1939: the MPPDA’s preference of movies as entertainment rather than political tracts, the fear of losing box-oice revenue from Germany, Italy, and Spain, and Joseph Breen’s curb on anything that smacked of being overtly pro-communist or pro-Jewish.28 Though cited elsewhere in Urwand’s book, Felicia Herman articulates the scholarly consensus most succinctly: “Historians who have studied the image of Jews in American ilm generally have perceived the decade leading up to World War II as one of cowardice and avarice in the American ilm industry.”29 Urwand is loath to give much credit even to the irst major motion picture that mocked Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). He reminds readers that Chaplin contemplated cancelling his parody of Hitler in 1938 and ultimately softened its ending. The original script traced the divergent fates of the dictator Hynkel [not Hinkel, as Urwand spells it] and his Jewish lookalike Charlie. After scientiically segregating Aryans 74 Journal of Jewish Identities from Jews, Hynkel deports the Jews to concentration camps, but Charlie escapes. Mistaken for Hynkel at a mass rally, Charlie convinces the crowd to disavow fascism. An epilogue discloses that Charlie dreamed of this liberating scenario while remaining in the camp. The inal version of the ilm is situated in a gheto. The Jewish barber who is Hynkel’s double usurps the later’s place on a podium and delivers what Urwand derides as “a long rambling, speech at the climax that had virtually nothing to do with the Jewish question.” (219) Urwand’s synopsis of The Great Dictator grotesquely distorts Chaplin’s insights into Hitler’s ideology and the democratic principles that were antithetical to it. After twenty years of amnesia induced by an airplane crash towards the end of World War I, the barber returns to his shop to ind its front window painted with the word “Jew.” Storm troopers chase him and try to hang him from a lamppost until his former commander from World War I intervenes and spares his life. In his irst speech, Hynkel’s gestures and vocal inlections mirror the ferocity of his animus towards Jews and his idealization of Aryans. He juggles a globe in a dance that caricatures the boundless scope of his territorial ambitions and enjoins his minions to invent more eicient methods for killing people. The movie reenacts a milder version of the Kristallnacht pogrom. When the barber pretends he is the Phooey, Chaplin’s term to ridicule the pretentious title of Führer, he gives a serious political speech in which he proclaims, I should like to help everyone —if possible—Jew, Gentile—black man— white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. …Let us ight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Film critics and scholars have faulted the speech for departing from the comic tone of the rest of the picture and for being too platitudinous, but not for saying “virtually nothing” about the oppression of Jews under Nazism.30 After the number of anti-Nazi ilms increased in 1940, isolationist suspicions that Hollywood was trying to plunge the United States into another European war intensiied. Both Doherty and Urwand discuss the hearings conducted in fall 1941 to “ascertain whether they [the movies] are being used to deluge the people with propaganda tending to incite war” under the auspices of the Senate Interstate Commerce Commitee “and spearheaded by Senators Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye.” (Worth Clark cited in Doherty, 361.) Urwand erroneously implies that this was a new cudgel to browbeat the ilm industry into silence about Hitler. (222) Doherty amply demonstrates that not violating American neutrality had been one of the factors that inhibited Hollywood from taking a more anti-German stance in its ilms in the previous decade. The anti-Semitic innuendo of Nye’s interrogations, the efective defense of the ilm industry ofered by its lawyer, Wendell Wilkie, and studio heads Darryl Zanuck and Harry Warner, and the fact that the United States severed relations with Germany several months earlier in 1941 discredited the hearings in the minds of most Americans. Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States nulliied whatever qualms the studios July 2014, 7(2) 75 Review Essay Lawrence Baron still harbored about participating in the American propaganda batle against the Axis powers. One might reasonably expect Urwand to end his book at this moment in history as Doherty does. Instead, Urwand cursorily surveys some of Hollywood’s wartime productions like The Pied Piper (1942), Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942), The Seventh Cross (1944), and None Shall Escape (1944). With the exception of the last ilm, these ilms relegate the persecution of the Jews to a subplot. Since the Oice of War Information (OWI) had commended Once Upon a Honeymoon for depicting the persecution of Jews in two scenes, Urwand concludes that the American government granted the studios carte blanche to portray the horrors Germany was inlicting on the Jews who fell under its control; yet few movies broached the topic. Urwand atributes this omission to the habit nurtured by the studios’ prior collaboration to abstain from introducing the travail of the Jews into their feature ilms. For some reason beyond my comprehension, he describes a notable exception to this rule, To Be or Not to Be (1942) in a footnote (309) and overlooks other movies like Address Unknown (1944), The Hitler Gang (1944), Mister Skeington (1944), and Tomorrow the World (1944), which contained references to Nazi anti-Semitism.31 Urwand appears to be unaware that several federal agencies monitored the content of American ilms and that the “oicial” position of what was appropriate to screen to American audiences varied during the course of the war. The Allies did not conirm reports that Germany was atempting to exterminate European Jewry until late 1942, and the State Department persisted for another year in downplaying or suppressing such information.32 Both the Oice of Censorship and the OWI cautioned the studios against singling out Jews as targets of Hitler’s hatred, anticipating that Germany would perceive this approach as validation of the pro-Jewish bias Hollywood purportedly promoted. 33 When the American Jewish Congress (AJC) implored Lowell Mellet, the chief of the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, to pressure the studios to produce feature ilms revealing the lethal onslaught against Europe’s Jews, Mellet consulted with the studio owners and informed the AJC in 1943 that “it might be unwise from the standpoint of the Jews themselves to have a picture dealing solely with Hitler’s treatment of their people, but interest has been indicated in the possibility of a picture covering various groups that have been subject to Nazi treatment. This of course would take in the Jews.”34 The OWI directed the media to publicize credible and veriiable Nazi atrocities like the reprisal massacre in Lidice instead of the unimaginable and more sketchily documented reports of atrocities such as the horrors of the “Final Solution.” Despite the accumulating evidence that the Jews were being annihilated, most Americans could not fathom a crime of this magnitude and suspected that accounts of it were wartime propaganda that did not accord with their perceptions of the Germans as a civilized and cultured people.35 Urwand predicates much of his diatribe against the “collaboration” of the studios on the wishful thinking: if only they had opposed Hitler and his antiSemitic excesses earlier and more energetically, they might have mitigated the terrible toll his regime inlicted on the world in general and on the Jews in 76 Journal of Jewish Identities particular. Consequently, the heroes of his book are the Cassandras of the era, including Steven Wise, whose American Jewish Congress called for a boycot of German goods in 1933; Al Rosen, who indefatigably pushed to get The Mad Dog of Europe produced; Sinclair Lewis, whose novel It Can’t Happen Here envisioning a fascist takeover of the United States was slated for production and then cancelled by MGM; and Ben Hecht, who placed his pen at the disposal of Peter Bergson’s Commitee for a Jewish Army and the Emergency Commitee for the Rescue of European Jewry. While this exercise in counterfactual history may be morally edifying, it does not take into account the considerable forces arrayed against the eicacy of a more militant response to Nazi Germany. Mainstream Jewish organizations adopted more moderate positions to avoid charges of dual loyalty by American anti-Semites, isolationists, and nativists. Preoccupied with getting New Deal legislation passed and keeping its electoral coalition together, the Roosevelt administration placed foreign policy on the backburner in its irst years and steered clear of divisive issues like liberalizing immigration quotas or deploying troops to stop German expansion. For many American businesses, including the ilm industry, abandoning commerce with Germany was not prudent iscal policy in the midst of a Depression. Add to these considerations Hitler’s Manichean anti-Semitism, Germany’s military might, Western appeasement, the Soviet Union’s temporary alliance with Germany, and America’s late entry into World War II, and it becomes understandable, if not ethically excusable in retrospect, why the major studios―hamstrung by their own regulatory system, fearful of having their movies banned at the local, state, or international levels, and worried about impending federal investigations into their monopolistic practices and political priorities―generally opted to pacify the PCA, federal agencies, and Germany by cancelling or reediting controversial scripts and ilms. The relationship of ilms as art form, industry, popular entertainment, and vehicle of political expression within the state of the nation where they are produced, and the conditions in the world when they are released is a complicated topic. Doherty presents its complexity and diversity neither apologizing for Hollywood’s crass commercialism and political insensitivity in response to the threat Hitler posed to Europe and its Jews nor withholding praise for Warner Brothers, The March of Time, and HANL for exhibiting more courage and foresight in sounding the alarm about what was transpiring in Nazi Germany. While he has dug up much new material on Gyssling’s eforts to intimidate the movie moguls and Germany’s policy toward American ilms, Urwand falls prey to tunnel vision. He is so intent on proving the charge of Hollywood collaboration that he stretches his evidence beyond what it actually substantiates, minimizes alternative explanations for the studios’ compliance, or buries them in footnotes. The accusatory and revelatory tone of his book is scintillating, but in the end, he produces a smokescreen, and not a smoking gun.36 Lawrence Baron, San Diego State University July 2014, 7(2) 77 Review Essay Lawrence Baron Endnotes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 78 The irst mention of the cover leter’s disparaging characterization of Doherty’s research was revealed by Alexander C. Kaka, “When Hollywood Held Hands with Hitler,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2013, htps://chronicle.com/article/When-Hollywood-HeldHands-With/140189 (accessed December 16, 2013.) Its praise for Urwand’s thoroughness is quoted by Merve Emre, “Speculative Evidence: Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration,” The Millions, September 18, 2013, htp://www.themillions.com/2013/09/speculative-evidence-benurwand-collaboration.html (accessed December 16, 2013.) David Mikies, “Hollywood’s Creepy Love Afair with Adolf Hitler, in Explosive New Detail,” Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, June 10, 2013, htp://www.tabletmag.com/jewishnews-and-politics/134503/hollywood-nazi-urwand (accessed December 16, 2013); Jennifer Schuessler, “Scholar Asserts That Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis,” New York Times, June 25, 2013, htp://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/books/scholar-asserts-that-hollywood-avidly-aided-nazis.html?pagewanted=all (accessed December 17, 2013); Alexander C. Kaka, “When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler”; Danielle Berrin, “Hollywood’s Deal with The Devil (Hitler),” JewishJournal.com, August 7, 2013 (accessed December 18, 2013.) In these early reviews of The Collaboration, only Kaka goes into any depth to provide Doherty’s interpretation of Hollywood’s accommodation to Nazi demands. Thomas Doherty, “Does ‘The Collaboration’ Overstate Hollywood’s Cooperation With Hitler?” The Hollywood Reporter, July 31, 2013, htp://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ does-collaboration-overstate-hollywoods-cooperation-595678 (accessed December 17, 2013.) Also see Ben Urwand, “The Chilling History of How Hollywood Helped Hitler,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 9, 2013, htp://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-hollywoodhelped-hitler-595684 (accessed December 17, 2013.) Uwe Schmit, “Wie Hollywoods Boss mit Hitler ‘kollaborierten,’ Die Welt, June 27, 2013, htp://www.welt.de/geschichte/zweiter-weltkrieg/article117495278/Wie-HollywoodsBosse-mit-Hitler-kollaborierten.html (accessed December 17, 2013.) David Denby, “Hitler in Hollywood: Did the Studios Collaborate?” The New Yorker, September 19, 2013, htp://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/09/16/130916crbo_books_ denby (accessed December 17, 2013.) David Denby, “How Could Harvard Ever Have Published Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration?” The New Yorker, September 23, 2013, htp://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/09/how-could-harvard-have-published-ben-urwands-the-collaboration.html (accessed December 17, 2013.) See Harvard University Press’s response as reported by Jennifer Schuessler, “Harvard University Press Defends Controversial Book on Hollywood and Hitler,” New York Times, September 26, 2013, htp://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/harvard-university-press-defends-controversial-book-on-hollywood-and-hitler/?_php=true&_ type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed December 17, 2013.) Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “Hitler’s Willing Hollwyood Collaborators,” The Jewish Daily Forward, November 8, 2013, htp://forward.com/articles/186509/hitlers-willing-hollywood-collaborators/ (accessed December 17, 2013.) For more on Breen, see Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.) For the best account of how the suspicion of Hollywood as an advocate of Jewish interests and purveyor of moral corruption evolved and afected the ilm industry, see Steven Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.) For the full text of the Production Code, see Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 347–367. Mike Greco, “Reader Book Review: The Collaboration,” American Film 17 (August 2013), htp:// americanilm.ai.com/issue/2013/8/screen-test (accessed December 17, 2013.) See the discussion of Rosen’s testimony in Jerome Christensen, “Competition over Collaboration: On Ben Urwand,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 8, 2013, htps://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/competition-over-collaboration (accessed December 17, 2013.) Felicia Herman, “Hollywood, Nazism, and the Jews, 1933–1941,” American Jewish History LXXXIX: 1 (March 2001): 63–70. Journal of Jewish Identities 14 Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 18–30. 15 Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), 439. Although Schulberg considered Mayer “vindictive, vicious,” and “egomaniacal,” he previously had not accused him of personally screening ilms with Gyssling until his interview for Kevin Brownlow’s documentary The Tramp and the Dictator (2002). See Urwand’s footnotes on this source on pages 256, 257, and 300. For a discussion of the dubiousness of Schulberg’s claim, see Stuart Schofman, “Hollywood and the Nazis,” Jewish Review of Books IV:4 (Winter 2014): 18–19. The most recent biography of Mayer mentions Gyssling’s eforts to shape the content of MGM’s ilms, but sees Breen as the conduit for communicating Gyssling’s concerns to MGM. See Scot Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 275–277. Another account of how Schulberg irst heard the allegations against Mayer can be found in Bill Krohn, “Hollywood and the Shoah, 1933–1945,” in Cinema and the Shoah: An Art Confronts the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century, ed. Jean-Michel Frodon (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2010), 154–156. 16 Steven Alan Carr, “Hollywood, the Holocaust, and World War II,” in Studies in Jewish Civilization XVII, eds. Leonard J. Greenspoon and Ronald A. Simkins (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2006), 48–54. 17 Nico Carpentier, “From Individual Tragedy to Societal Dislocation: The Filmic Representation of Tragedy, Dislocation, and Cultural Trauma in the Dreyfus Afair, “ in Culture, Trauma, and Conlict: Cultural Studies Perspectives on War (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 255–265; Herman, “Hollywood, Nazism, and the Jews,” 78–81. 18 Ward Greene, Death in the Deep South (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1936.) 19 Mathew H. Bernstein, Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 62–117. 20 Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, 208–209. 21 Herman, “Hollywood, Nazism, and the Jews,” 77–78. 22 Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 64. 23 For an account of Wallis’s response to Jack Warner’s request to omit the word Jew in the ilm’s dialogue, see Bernard F. Dick, Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 51. 24 Laura Rosenzweig, “Hollywood’s Anti-Nazi Spies,” Jewish Review of Books IV:4 (Winter 2014): 5–6. 25 For more on Confessions of a Nazi Spy, see Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers, 57–78; Steven J. Ross, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy: Warner Bros., Anti-Fascism, and the Politicization of Hollywood,” in Warners’ War: Politics, Pop Culture, and Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood (Los Angeles: Norman Lear Center Press: 2004), 49–59; article can also be found at htp://www.learcenter.org/pdf/WWRoss. pdf (accessed February 5, 2014); Eric J. Sandeen, “Anti-Nazi Sentiment in Film: Confessions of a Nazi Spy and the German American Bund,” American Studies XX:2 (February 1999): 69–81. 26 Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers, 19. 27 Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 43–44. 28 Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Proits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 20–22. 29 Herman, “Hollywood, Nazism, and the Jews,” 61. 30 Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unthinkable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 134–148; Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 31–43; Annete Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, 2nd Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press), 62–69. For a more extensive bibliography on The Great Dictator, see “Charlie Chaplin: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC–Berkeley Library,” htp://www.lib.berkeley. edu/MRC/chaplinbib.html (accessed February 6, 2014.) 31 For more extensive treatment of the handful of Hollywood wartime productions that addressed the issue of Nazi anti-Semitism, see Dick, The Star Spangled Screen, 188–210; Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 32–65; Krohn, “Hollywood and the Shoah,”149–171; K.R.M. Short, “Hollywood Fights Anti-Semitism, 1940–1945,” in Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II, ed. K.R.M. Short (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 147–172. July 2014, 7(2) 79 Review Essay Journal of Jewish Identities 2014, 7(2) 32 The most recent account of the belated American reaction to the Holocaust is Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.) 33 Thomas Doherty, Projections of War, Hollywood, American Culture and World War II, Revised Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 36–59, 122–133. 34 Lowell Mellet quoted in K.R.M. Short, “Hollywood Fights Anti-Semitism, 1940–1945,” 159. 35 Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War Against Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 56–72; Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131–152, 193–197. 36 For additional scholarly reviews not cited in my essay, see Vincent Brook, “Collaboration without Corroboration Is Tyranny,” Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, October 28, 2013, htp://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/blog/?p=2157 (accessed October 30, 2013); H. Hoberman, “Business as Usual,” London Review of Books XXXV:24 (December 19, 2013): 25–26; Mark Horowiz, “The Myth of Jewish Hollywood’s Collaboration with the Nazis,” Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life, December 20, 2013, htp://www.tabletmag.com/jewisharts-and-culture/156539/jewish-hollywood-collaboration (accessed December 21, 2013); Jon Wiener, “Hollywood, Hitler, and Harvard,” The Nation, September 30, 2013, htp://www.thenation.com/blog/176424/hollywood-hitler-and-harvard# (accessed December 20, 2013.) For a review that shares Urwand’s concern over the moral implications of Hollywood’s acquiescence to Nazi demands in the 1930s, but recognizes that his factual case is overstated, see Joel Rosenberg, “The Good, the Bad, and the Fatal: Ben Urwand on the Hollywood Moguls and Hitler,” Jewish Film and New Media I:2(Fall 2013), 190–214. 80 Journal of Jewish Identities July 2014, 7(2) 81