6 - Answering the Hollywood Question

Summary

THE ANTI-SEMITISM OF “A VERY SICK DONKEY”

Because of its unique flexibility, the Hollywood Question was able to address a number of shifts taking place in America during the late 1930s. One of these was an emergent discourse on national identity and the changing role of America in foreign affairs. Capable of deferring internal conflicts over rapid urbanization, industrialization, and ethnic diversity, the anti-Communism of the Question connected older Populist sentiments with newer concerns for the national security state. The altered Question talked about Jews and anti-Semitism in a way that complemented this newer national identity. Hostile to anti-Semitism at home as well as increasingly sympathetic to the plight of Jews abroad, the more modern incarnation of the Question nonetheless still articulated mainstay precepts. Hollywood movies themselves, for example, responded to the Question by subsuming ethnic agency into a rubric of idealized, deethnicized narratives of “Great Men” in history. Meanwhile, various authors responded to the Hollywood Question by inverting its stereotype of racialized Jewish agency. These authors – Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Budd Schulberg – rehabilitated the Shylock Jew as part of a larger critique of the American Dream, locating this stereotype not in some Other but within the very fabric of everyday American life. Finally, Leo Rosten's “sociological” study of Hollywood – the first of its kind – implicitly responded to the Question by asserting a set of principles emphasizing a cohesive national identity. Rosten's “social science” response, as well as the literary ones of West, Fitzgerald, and Schulberg, ultimately resonated with the Question. While these responses helped set the stage for the isolationist 1941 propaganda hearings, they also acceded to basic tenets of the Question.