As Stan Lee did not say, "With great power comes great privilege"

The lavishly-funded Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on Wilshire Boulevard next to the La Brea Tarpits in 2021. That being the peak of the racial reckoning, the 11 opening exhibitions were hilariously woke for an industry that was overwhelmingly white during its titanic first half century:

Pedro Almodóvar - Gay
Black Lives Matter - Black (nothing to do with movies, but it was 2021)
Blackface, redface, and yellowface - Black, red, and yellow
Climate change - Huh?
Labor relations - Communists
Bruce Lee - Asian
Spike Lee - Black (Spike wasn’t even the best director named “Lee” who worked on Spike’s student film at NYU called Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads: his pal Ang Lee was)
#MeToo - Women
Oscar Micheaux - Black
Racism and sexism in animation - Blacks and women
Real Women Have Curves (2002) - Obscure fat Latina movie
Thelma Schoonmaker - Woman (but legit: she’s Scorsese’s editrix)
Citizen Kane (1941) - Finally, an actual great picture in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures …

Wikipedia goes on:

An area featuring Oscar statuettes will be dedicated to historic Oscar winners, including Ang Lee [Asian], Barry Jenkins [black], Sidney Poitier [black], and Buffy Sainte-Marie [Pretendian].

Here’s a picture of Buffy Sainte-Marie in her Oscar-winning role:

Oh … wait … Never mind. I’m being advised that’s Eva Marie-Saint.

Upon further inquiry, I’m pleased to say Eva is still alive at age 99 and has succeeded Olivia de Havilland as the oldest living Oscar-winner.

Ignoring Jews’ roles in motion picture history led to a not unreasonable outcry from Hollywood Jews: Wait a minute, we run Hollywood, so how come Jews don’t get mentioned in our own museum?

So, now the museum finally includes a display about Hollywood’s founding moguls.

But that has aroused yet more outrage among Hollywood Jews: They made it sound like Jews run Hollywood! They said not nice things about Harry Cohn! That’s anti-Semitic!

From The Forward:

Honesty about the flaws of Hollywood’s Jewish founders isn’t the same as antisemitism

Some people are outraged that a new exhibit portrays Hollywood’s Jewish founders as sometimes behaving badly — which, in fact, they did

Emily Tamkin, Contributing Columnist

June 13, 2024

American Jews are increasingly scared of antisemitism; an overwhelming 87% of respondents to a recent American Jewish Committee survey think that antisemitism has risen since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7.

But I worry about one response to that fear that I’m seeing more and more: My fellow Jews trying to make sure that people don’t say anything “bad” not only about Jews, but about things that Jews have done.

This kind of whitewashing of Jewish history is ahistorical and anti-intellectual. More than that, though, it confuses who is responsible for antisemitism.

To take one recent example: After originally coming under criticism for initially leaving Jews out of its depiction of the history of Hollywood, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures received pushback again — this time in the form of an open letter criticizing the museum for including too much of Jewish history.

A new, permanent exhibition on the Jewish history of Hollywood, informed by the research of Neal Gabler, the (Jewish) author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, drew outrage for how it portrayed certain actions by Hollywood’s early Jews. “Some critics took issue with what they saw as the exhibition’s implication that Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers had discriminated against other marginalized groups as a way to assimilate, noting its discussion of blackface in The Jazz Singer,” The New York Times noted.

It’s always been embarrassing that the historically most important movie in Hollywood history, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, starred Jewish superstar Al Jolson in blackface.

And, of course, the excuse that the Warner Brothers were forced into having Jolson appear in blackface as a way to victimize blacks as a way to assimilate to WASP norms is hooey. The truth is that everybody in 1927 loved blackface, especially Ellis Island immigrants, and extra-especially Jews. Today, of course, Jolson is the most baffling star in American entertainment history, but back then people, especially his fellow Jews, thought he was the cat’s pajamas.

But The Jazz Singer, a story of a struggle between a cantor father and an aspiring jazz singer son, does famously feature blackface. And racism was rampant in early Hollywood, including among its Jewish founders: Harry Cohn, co-founder of Columbia Pictures, ordered a Mob hit on Sammy Davis Jr., who was Black, unless he left star Kim Novak, who was white, and married a Black woman instead.

When Harry Cohn’s funeral in 1958 attracted a big crowd, screenwriter Budd Schulberg recycled George Jessel’s joke about an earlier nogoodnik executive’s funeral: that just goes to show you that the public can be trusted to turn out in vast numbers so long as you give them what they want.

Lots of similarly nasty jokes have been made over the last century about the old Jewish moguls, most of them by other Jews.

(The letter writers also objected to wall text in the exhibit that describes Harry M. Warner and his brother Jack as “frugal,” and calls Jack a “womanizer,” saying such descriptors are vilifying.)

The letter said, “We call on the Academy Museum to thoroughly redo this exhibit so that it celebrates the Jewish founders of Hollywood with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum.” And the Academy Museum has said it would revise the exhibit. That’s a shame, because pretending the bad parts of Hollywood’s Jewish past didn’t happen doesn’t change the past, or educate the visitor. …

But, so what? The people who are angry about the museum’s exhibit not fawning over their ancestors have power, so they are getting it changed. And the black woman who was hired to run the museum back during the George Floyd Era has been fired.

Stan Lee famously penned the wise words spoken by Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Yet, a more realistic saying is: “With great power comes great privilege.”