Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

African Americans and Jews in Hollywood \\ 271
African Americans and Jews withdrew into their respective ghettoes of the mind
where culture identities might be cultivated in a sealed-off nutrient broth. The
entry of Blacks arid Jews into a cultural mainstream—in this case Hollywood—
threatened to end in a featureless homogeneity. As the Black bourgeoisie blanched
at the prospect of separation both from "the brother on the block" and from
"Mother Africa," so Jews feared the loss of Jewishness as the incidence of intermarriage
across lines of faith increased. But the two groups remained linked by
forces of history and circumstance that the rise and fall of cycles of moviemaking
and of ethnic antipathies could not diminish.
Notes
1. In more elaborate form, this notion was taken up by Glazer in a morning seminar
on the occasion of the inaugural of President Rudenstein in Harvard University
in the fall of 1991.
2. Lerner interviewed by James Bock, Sun (Baltimore), Feb. 17, 1994.
3. Nina Mjagkij, "A Peculiar Alliance: Julius Rosenwald, the YMCA, and
African Americans, 1910-1933," American Jewish Archives, 14 (Fall/Winter 1992),
598.
4. Melvyn Douglas, himself Jewish, quoted in Sun (Baltimore), Aug. 9, 1981;
Whitbeck quoted in Beth Day, This Was Hollywood: An Affectionate History of
Filmland's Golden Years (London, I960), 45.
5. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black; The Negro in American Film, 1900—1940
(New York, 1977), Chap. 3.
6. Cruse quoted in an anonymous "book notice" in American Jewish Archives, 14
(Fall/Winter 1992), 657; Spike Lee quoted in New York Times, March 28, 1994, as he
appeared at a conference on Blacks in film at the New York University Tisch School
of the Arts.
7. Albert F. McLean, Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual (Lexington, 1965), 7-8.
8. The Fights of Nations (1907), print in Library of Congress.
9. Laemmle's removal to Southern California was itself a step toward Jewish
hegemony in moviemaking in that it was meant to break the hold of the "motion picture
patents trust," a creature of the old-stock moviemen of the East Coast.
10. See Selig's catalogue, Special List of Films Made Expressly for Selig (Chicago,
1900), 8-9; review of How Rastus Got His Pork Chops cited in footnote 30, Chap. 1,
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black; Selig's "fast Black show" cited in Terry Ramsaye, A Million
and One Nights (New York, 1926), 303.