Less than a month after unveiling a long-awaited exhibition on Hollywood’s Jewish founders , the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures announced it will be revising the exhibit following criticism that it perpetuates antisemitic tropes. The exhibition, titled “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” spotlights the key role of Jewish immigrants such as Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn in establishing the film industry.
The museum, designed to celebrate Hollywood’s rich and complex history, had faced fierce criticism when it opened in 2021 for leaving out Hollywood’s Jewish roots — an omission that it spent more than two years working to address with a permanent exhibition. But soon after the new exhibit opened, some within the industry’s Jewish community criticized it as a skewed and overly negative portrait of Hollywood’s Jewish moguls, one that perpetuates antisemitic stereotypes. On Monday, a group called United Jewish Writers sent an open letter to the museum objecting to the use of words such as “predator,” “tyrant,” “oppressive” and “womanizer” to describe the Jewish executives in the exhibit, suggesting that they were being held to an unfair standard.
“It is the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate,” reads the letter, which had garnered some 350 signatures as of Monday, including actor David Schwimmer, writer Amy Sherman-Palladino and sports and entertainment execu.
