Jewish Film: From Hollywood Moguls to Unorthodox and Beyond

The People of the Screen

There is a joke — and like most good Jewish jokes, it’s also a truth — that goes something like this: Jews are the People of the Book, but in the 20th century, they became the People of the Screen.

The relationship between Jews and cinema is one of the most remarkable cultural stories of the modern era. Jewish immigrants who arrived in America with nothing built the studios that defined Hollywood. Jewish directors, writers, producers, and actors shaped the way the world sees itself — while often struggling with how to see themselves. And Jewish stories, from the shtetl to the suburbs to the ultra-Orthodox enclaves of Brooklyn, have provided some of cinema’s most powerful and enduring material.

This is not just a story of Jewish success in an industry. It’s a story about identity, assimilation, and the tension between wanting to belong and insisting on being different — played out on the largest screen in the world.

The Moguls: Building Hollywood

The founding of Hollywood is, in many ways, a Jewish immigrant story.

In the early 1900s, the American film industry was controlled by Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, based on the East Coast. A group of ambitious, mostly Jewish immigrant entrepreneurs — locked out of “respectable” industries by antisemitism — saw opportunity in this new, disreputable medium. They headed west, where Edison’s patent enforcers couldn’t easily reach them, and built studios in a sunny, affordable neighborhood outside Los Angeles.

The founders read like a roll call of movie history:

• Carl Laemmle (Germany) → Universal Pictures
• Adolph Zukor (Hungary) → Paramount Pictures
• Louis B. Mayer (Belarus) → Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
• Jack, Harry, Sam, and Albert Warner (Poland) → Warner Bros.
• Harry Cohn (New York, parents from Russia) → Columbia Pictures
• William Fox (Hungary) → Fox Film Corporation (later 20th Century Fox)
• Samuel Goldwyn (Poland) → Goldwyn Pictures, later MGM

As Neal Gabler documented in his landmark book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, these men didn’t just create an industry — they created an image of America. The Hollywood dream factory, with its idealized small towns, upward mobility narratives, and melting-pot optimism, was in many ways the America that Jewish immigrants longed for — a place where they could belong.

Ironically, the moguls were deeply ambivalent about their own Jewishness on screen. Jewish characters and themes were largely absent from studio-era Hollywood. The moguls assimilated aggressively, changed their names, and built an American mythology that had room for everyone — except, conspicuously, Jews.

The Jazz Singer (1927)

The first “talkie” — the first feature film with synchronized dialogue — was, improbably, a movie about Jewish identity. The Jazz Singer (1927) stars Al Jolson as Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who leaves his family’s tradition to become a popular singer. The film’s central tension — between the old world and the new, between religious duty and personal ambition, between being Jewish and being American — would echo through a century of Jewish cinema.

The Jazz Singer is also remembered for Jolson’s use of blackface, which complicates its legacy considerably. But its Jewish immigrant story was groundbreaking, and its technological innovation changed the industry forever.

Hiding and Seeking: Jewishness in Classic Hollywood

For decades after The Jazz Singer, explicitly Jewish content was rare in mainstream Hollywood. The reasons were a mix of assimilationist desire, fear of antisemitism, and commercial calculation — the moguls believed that Jewish-specific stories would alienate mass audiences.

Exceptions were notable:

• Gentleman’s Agreement (1947): Gregory Peck plays a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to expose antisemitism. The film won Best Picture — though its most radical statement might be that a non-Jewish actor was needed to make the Jewish experience palatable to audiences.
• The Diary of Anne Frank (1959): Adapted from the Broadway play, this film universalized Anne’s story — “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” — in ways that some felt downplayed its specifically Jewish dimensions.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Fiddler on the Roof — based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the Dairyman — is arguably the most beloved Jewish film ever made. Set in the fictional shtetl of Anatevka in Tsarist Russia, it tells the story of a poor Jewish father navigating tradition, modernity, and the threats that will ultimately destroy the world of Eastern European Jewry.

The film’s songs — “Tradition,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Matchmaker” — have entered the cultural bloodstream. Its portrait of shtetl life, though idealized, gave millions of viewers their first encounter with the world that produced most American Jews’ ancestors.

Fiddler’s genius is that it works on two levels: as a universal story about change and loss, and as a specifically Jewish story about a way of life that was destroyed — first by modernity, then by the Holocaust.

Schindler’s List (1993)

When Steven Spielberg released Schindler’s List in 1993, he did something that Hollywood had largely avoided for half a century: he put the Holocaust at the center of a major film and refused to look away.

Shot in black and white, devastatingly acted (Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as the sadistic Amon Goeth, Ben Kingsley as Schindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern), the film told the true story of a German businessman who saved over 1,100 Jews by employing them in his factories.

Schindler’s List won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It became a cultural touchstone — shown in schools, referenced in political discourse, and credited with deepening global awareness of the Holocaust. Spielberg used his profits to establish the Shoah Foundation, which has recorded over 55,000 survivor testimonies.

The New Jewish Cinema

Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s and 2010s, Jewish filmmakers became increasingly willing to tell specifically Jewish stories — not universalized, not disguised, but rooted in the textures of Jewish life:

• A Serious Man (2009): The Coen Brothers’ dark comedy set in a 1960s Minnesota Jewish community, wrestling with the Book of Job
• Yentl (1983): Barbra Streisand’s passion project about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to study Talmud
• The Pianist (2002): Roman Polanski’s harrowing Holocaust film based on the memoir of Władysław Szpilman
• Ushpizin (2004): A charming Israeli film about a Breslov Hasidic couple in Jerusalem

The Streaming Revolution: Shtisel, Unorthodox, and Beyond

The streaming era brought Jewish stories to audiences who might never have encountered them in theaters:

• Shtisel (2013–2021): An Israeli drama series about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. Warm, nuanced, and deeply human, Shtisel became an international sensation on Netflix, introducing millions to a world they had never seen depicted with such empathy.
• Unorthodox (2020): A Netflix miniseries based on Deborah Feldman’s memoir of leaving the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Intense, beautifully acted, and controversial within Orthodox communities.
• My Unorthodox Life (2021–2023): A reality show following Julia Haart, who left an ultra-Orthodox community to become a fashion executive.
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–2023): Amazon’s acclaimed series about a 1950s Jewish housewife who becomes a stand-up comedian — a love letter to Jewish New York.

Jewish Film Festivals

Jewish film festivals have proliferated worldwide, providing platforms for independent Jewish cinema:

• **The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (founded 1980) is the oldest and largest
• The New York Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center
• The Jerusalem Film Festival
• The UK Jewish Film Festival

These festivals screen documentaries, dramas, comedies, and experimental works that explore every dimension of Jewish experience — from Sephardi identity to Israeli-Palestinian relations to the humor of suburban American Judaism.

The Ongoing Story

Jewish cinema has come a long way from the moguls who hid their Jewishness behind American dreams. Today, Jewish filmmakers and showrunners tell Jewish stories with specificity, confidence, and humor — and audiences around the world are watching.

The screen remains, in some sense, a mirror. What it reflects — about who Jews are, how they see themselves, and how the world sees them — continues to evolve with every film, every series, every frame. The conversation between Jewish life and the camera that started with a cantor’s son in 1927 is still going, still surprising, still worth watching.