Truth, Justice, and the Gentile American Way: A Reply to William E.H. Meyer, Jr
1999; Salisbury University; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoI cannot agree with my fellow-editors' decision to accept William E.H. Meyer, Jr.'s essay on collectively self-aggrandizing practices of Hollywood Jews because I find it radically disfigured by anti-Semitism. By this I mean not simply that Meyer's argument is blemished by hints of racism, but that it is racist to core, and that its racism fatally undermines its argument. Either Meyer's anti-Semitism or his specious reasoning would be sufficient grounds rejecting essay: it is no coincidence that here they appear together. Since editors have decided to print essay over my objections, I am obliged to point out logical flaws that subvert its argument, even though my analysis may burden essay with closer attention than it deserves. Meyer's argument is based on three premises. First, he claims that filmmakers in America, whether they assume producing, directing, writing, [or] acting roles (271), are constantly promoting pro-Jewish or pro-Israel agenda that dominates their films. Second, he contends that, given unparalleled power of filmmakers, this ethnically selfaggrandizing agenda is unmatched by other ethnic platforms in its distortions of reality. Finally, he concludes that reason Jewish moguls within world of movie-entertainment have hewn to such narcissistic agenda is that their dedication to their collective past via the Old World oral/aural tradition, and their immersion in a narrative concept of history, have set them and their often heavy-handed 'message' of confidant-value, patriotic loyalty. past suffering, and, above all, present claim to Israel's legitimacy vis-a-vis Arab 'terrorism' against present-oriented, hypervisual New World culture stipulated by Emerson's ahistorical 'genius of tyrannous eye' which assumes that we must 'forget past' and 'live ever in new day' (280). Unwilling to adapt to demands of New World visual culture, filmmakers have continued to live in past determined by prescriptions of oral narrative, and to foist idealized images of their past and their identities on unsuspecting audiences. It is true enough, but not very helpful, to observe that each of these three premises is informed and motivated by anti-Semitic bias. But I shall argue instead that each of them is also undermined by that bias: that Meyer's obsession with marking out filmmakers as socially deviant ends by destroying his argument logically from within. Let me begin with Meyer's first premise, which demonstrates his bias most clearly. When Neal Gabler published An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Invented Hollywood in 1988, he was taking closer look at phenomenon commentators had observed years: fact that many years Hollywood was dominated by presence because virtually all heads of major Hollywood studios. men who had power to decide which movies got made and how, were Jewish. It would be very strange if background Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer shared with Jack L. Warner and Harry Cohn and David Selznick did not affect films their studios produced. The question is how. For Meyer, answer is simple: involvement of any producer, director, screenwriter, or star in any film turns film into propaganda. Meyer nowhere makes this remarkable statement directly, but it is everywhere implicit in his analysis of continuing power of filmmakers today. Though some might conclude that with decline of studio system, the original powerful group of producers, distributors, writers, and directors is gone, Meyer reminds us that for every Sam Goldwyn or Louie [sic] B. Mayer lost, Steven Spielberg or Woody Allen is found (271). The reminder is accurate, but its implication that Spielberg and Allen are contemporary equivalents of Goldwyn and Mayer is broadly misleading. …
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