Abstract
Despite its title's protestations, Carr's book is not a cultural history of the complex and multifaceted topic of Hollywood and antisemitism. Instead, the book limits its focus to antisemitic responses to the Jewish presence in the film industry and particularly to the Jewish Hollywood moguls, which Carr argues can be used to trace American anti-Jewish attitudes from the 1880s to World War II. The strength of Carr's presentation is his comprehensive documentation of what I would call "antisemitica" relating to Jewish Hollywood, including newspapers, magazines, ephemeral materials, memoirs, novels, posters, plays, and congressional reports. The book, however, suffers from Carr's dense and inaccessible writing. The more significant problem is his rigid adherence to a theoretical framework—of his own design—that is at once obtuse and too narrow, disallowing a more satisfying and historically rich context for the materials he presents. Stymieing this important topic is Carr's definition of what he identifies as "the Hollywood Question." The term, he argues, "asks whether Jews, given their quasi-racialized difference, should participate in the regular affairs of mediated life" (9).