Why so many jewish actors

You do know it's not just a religion, right? There are plenty of secular Jews...

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I really don't see the offensive aspect of this thread since no one seems to be suggesting that jews being over represented in show business is part of some zionist world domination conspiracy. Which it's not.

Historically, many jewish artists have fled from Europe to America to escape persecution, not least in the 1930's. Possibly, this created a tradition within the Jewish-American community to pursuit careers in show business.

One common explanation to how the Holocaust could possibly happen has been that the jews in Europe were rich and stayed rich while other people became poorer and poorer. This is presumably not true. Like all ethnic groups, the European jews were a heterogenous group - some were poor, some were middle class and a few were rich. Like everybody else, most of them struggled during the Depression. When the Holocaust began, those who were able of course tried to get away. Probably a little bit of money made a successful escape more likely.

And it's not so hard to figure out why jewish business men choose to go into show business in their new country. It's natural to seek out your fellow landsmen for support and protection when you come to a new country. If there is an over representation of jewish producers, directors and actors in the American film industry, this might be part of the explanation for it.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

A lot of people are assuming there is a trend here, but where's the proof? What was the total Jewish population in the US in any one year and how many worked in the movie industry? Anyone got accurate numbers on any of this? How many other minorities were living in the US that same year and how many of them were employed in the movie industry? And how does the proportion of blacks, catholics, Irish, etc. in the movies break down? Are there some groups that have a bigger number of people employed in the movies than do the Jews?

Nobody so far has shown any evidence of a real trend other than a stereotype of a Jewish dominated industry. I suspect if an accurate count of minorities in the population and in the movie industry were to be made, you find that, like the US in general, the proportion of Asians and Hispanics are rising faster than the proportions of Jews. Certainly there is a bigger proportion of women in the industry than 90 years ago, perhaps an unusual proportion compared to the total number of women in the US or some other businesses.

Wouldn't surprise me if the most disproportionate group in the movies compared to their proportion of the total US population are white Anglo-Saxon protestant males. Seems to me there's been a trend of us dominating most industries and lines of business in this country for 200-plus years.

ITT:

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The founders of Fox, MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Columbia, and Universal were Jewish. That's a pretty high proportion on the producing end. I don't think when you break it down Jews were ever over represented on the acting end. I suspect they were under represented in the silent era. The reason more Jewish actors appeared in the sound era was because a lot of the actors came from the New York stage (Broadway) and a higher percentage of Jews live in New York than the rest of the country.

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