Academy Museum opens permanent exhibition that shines spotlight on Hollywood's Jewish founders

LOS ANGELES – A few months shy of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ three-year anniversary, a glaring omission has finally been added to its exhibition roster: Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital.

The exhibition shines a light on the creation of the Hollywood film industry and the studio system in the early 20th century by Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe, including Adolph Zucker (Paramount Pictures), Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Samuel Goldwyn (Samuel Goldwyn Productions), Carle Laemmle (Laemmle Pictures), and Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner (Warner Bros.). 

It is the first permanent exhibition in the sprawling museum in Los Angeles, which opened on May 19. For many in the community, it was long overdue, given that when the museum first opened in September 2021, there was nothing on the Jewish founders. 

One of the most prominent voices decrying the omission at the time was journalist Sharon Rosen Leib, who upbraided the museum in an opinion piece in The Forward.

Jacqueline Stewart, the Academy Museum’s president and director, and curator Dara Jaffe, told The Jerusalem Post that they spoke with many members of the community when it came to putting the exhibition together, and, at the end of a 30-minute documentary in the exhibition about Hollywood’s Jewish origins, the museum includes Rosen Leib in its credits. 

However, Jaffe said that while it took about two years to put this exhibition together, “I began researching back in 2017 specifically on the Jewish founders of Hollywood.” 

Pushing back against the criticism, Stewart said, “One of the things people didn’t fully understand at the time is that we had conceptualized pretty much all of our exhibitions to have rotating elements. And we knew that when we opened, we would have a particular array of content.

“But research on other topics had started long before the museum opened for the rotations. I think the important point here is that we decided to make this a permanent exhibition and that came in response to listening to lots of our visitors.” 

An immersive experience outlining history of the industry 

THE EXHIBITION is in English and Spanish and billed as an immersive experience, with visitors entering a darkened space on the museum’s third floor. 

It is divided into three sections: “Studio Origins” explores the founders and founding of the eight major film studios and studio heads alongside their experiences as Jewish immigrants. The second section, “Los Angeles: From Film Frontier to Industry Town, 1902-1929,” depicts how the landscape of Los Angeles was developed alongside the burgeoning movie industry. This section is highlighted by a large, immersive tabletop topographic projection map. 

The map, said Jaffe, is just one element “where we are able to cover so much of this topic and with such complexity and nuance, and also tie together these stories of Los Angeles and the Jewish founders.” She added, “We wanted to give our visitors something that only a film museum in LA can give, which is the very tangible sense that you’re standing right in the middle of this history.” 

Stewart also noted that part of the plan was to have an exhibition that was “really accessible to young people; that educators can come in with a classroom and find something that would be dynamic.”

The third section is the documentary, From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood, produced internally and narrated by Turner Classic Movies’ Ben Mankiewicz, with in-depth information about the industry founders, including documentary footage and film clips. 

Author and film critic Neil Gaber was the exhibition’s adviser. “He had eyes on everything,” said Jaffe, “but we worked especially close together on the making of this documentary. In many ways, it is telling the story that he’s telling in his book (An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood).

The documentary does not shy away from how antisemitism drove the studios’ origins. At one point, Mankiewicz narrates: “Though the Jewish studio heads and executives had built themselves a seat of power atop the movie industry, it was a precarious perch with a lurking threat. This empire could be taken away at any moment by antisemitic forces that persistently questioned the Hollywood Jews’ commitment to America and if their Jewish identities became visible in their movies, they would suffer the consequences.”

Despite their attempts to assimilate into the mainstream – whether it was changing their names to sound more American – (Schmuel Gelbfisz to Samuel Goldwyn) or Louis B. Mayer choosing July 4 as his birthday by pretending his Russian birth certificate had been lost – they were unable to avoid efforts to remove them from their positions of power, including Henry Ford’s antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes in the 1920s and the attacks on them from The House Committee on Un-American Activities established in 1938.

THE ENTIRE exhibition feels prescient, although Stewart and Jaffe couldn’t have known that it would open amid a huge spike in antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist organization’s attack on October 7. Asked about concerns of a backlash, Jaffe was undaunted. “It’s always the right time to tell this story,” she said. “It’s always relevant. And I mean that both in good ways because it’s always the right time to celebrate and honor the Jewish founders, but also, more seriously, antisemitism has always been prevalent and continues to be prevalent.”

Stewart said she hopes the exhibition can be a way forward for dialogue. “It’s always important for cultural institutions to hold open that space for telling the truth and for being a platform for further conversation,” she said.

“The timing of world events is absolutely complex, but we have to fulfill our mission no matter what is going on in the world. And it’s incredibly important to us to be a space of constructive and safe dialogue about the histories that we present.”

At the end of the day, Jaffe said she hopes visitors come away with “a very deep understanding of who these founders were as individuals. We want them to understand that they did share this common trajectory that was shaped from the beginning by a dominant culture of antisemitism. And those two different approaches I think makes this a very human story.”