An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

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Description

A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces in the back of the creation of The united states’s motion picture industry.
 
The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of recent Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream.  Even to this day, the American values defined in large part by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.
That subtitle may inspire in some readers waves of ethnic pride, and in others waves of ethnic revulsion, but the point of this book is that its claim of origin is fairly literally true. And what makes it a fascinating read for political types is the way it demonstrates that no matter how much the founding Hollywood moguls and their successors tried to peddle an idealized, escapist form of entertainment, bubbling up under and around their each project used to be ideology, racism, ethnic prejudice, class friction, domestic and international politics and all of the other raw, seething stuff that distinguishes this country from all others. In Gabler’s hands, the Industry draws a picture of American political history regardless of itself.

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