As anti-Semites go, Marlon Brando isn’t very good at it.
For one thing, he doesn’t hate Jews. Quite the opposite, he admires Jews deeply. Passionately. In his recent, rambling appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” he went on and on about how smart Jews were, how he sent his own kids to Jewish schools because they were “the safest and the best,” how much he admired Jews for enduring centuries of persecution and making innumerable contributions to America.
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But then he rambled on about how “Hollywood is run by Jews, it is owned by Jews” and that “they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering.”
Then he rattled off several racial and ethnic slurs to describe stereotypes that have been depicted on the screen, but then said “we never saw” Jews depicted derogatorily “Because they knew perfectly well, . . . that is where you draw the wagons around.”
A week after the TV show, after a severe battering in the court of public opinion, Brando was openly weeping with remorse in a private three-hour meeting with Jewish leaders in Los Angeles. “It took 30 to 45 seconds before he was able to compose himself,” Rabbi Marvin Hier said. The actor blamed the misunderstanding on the nature of TV talk shows, even though King gave him several opportunities to clarify himself.
Brando appeared to be carried away by his own anger, although he was less than crystal clear on what he was angry about. He had come to the show because he was angry about the police in Riverside, Calif., who pursued then beat a truckload of illegal immigrants under the watchful eye of a helicopter video camera. After ruminating aloud as to whether he had something to say, he abruptly took off on an attack against Jewish filmmakers.
It was shocking and sad to see this rambling wreck sitting in the place of bright young civil rights advocate who once marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
Like others, I had to wonder why he still singles out a Hollywood “owned by Jews” when that stereotype is falling out of date. It is true that enterprising, visionary Jews like Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn and the Warner brothers created Hollywood and ran its biggest studios in the industry’s early years. It is also true that to casual observers Jews might still seem to be as plentiful in Hollywood today as blacks are in the National Basketball Association.
But Jewish power in Hollywood peaked decades ago. The big studios have been taken over by big multi-ethnic corporations like Sony and Time Warner Inc. Their clout has been scattered out to independent producers from a rainbow of ethnicities, including African-Americans.
Why, I wonder, did Brando single out the Jews in his “they-should-know-better” diatribe and ignore other ethnics like, for example, his fellow Italian-Americans Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino or Francis Ford Coppola. Has he forgotten how offended some Italian-American groups were by “The Godfather”?
When it comes to putting stereotypes on the screen, Hollywood has been something of an equal-opportunity offender. Neal Gabler, in his book “An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” recounts how Hollywood under the original Jewish moguls catered (Dare one say pandered?) to a white-bread Protestant “Andy Hardy” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” vision of America that occasionally went so far as to stereotype Jews, right along with blacks, Arabs, Asians, Native Americans and anyone else who was vulnerable.
Hollywood’s depictions of America’s diversity continue to be too narrow in many ways, even as moviemakers become more diverse. When Bill Cosby, for example, criticized the “drive-by images” Hollywood produces of black life–images that look as though they were created by writers who did nothing more than “drive by” the neighborhoods they were depicting–he didn’t single out Jews. He found plenty of blame to go around, including some programs produced by blacks.
No, Marlon Brando is not a raving anti-Semite. He raves, but appears to me to be another tragic figure, the unintentional anti-Semite. Somewhere in his passionate pursuit of group rights, he began to embrace negative group stereotypes. Somewhere he became infected with the populist’s bigotry, the resentment of some groups for showing the very qualities of drive, ambition and achievement that we otherwise would admire in ourselves.
How widespread are such views? An Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith poll found as many as one out of five non-Jewish Americans hold some sort of view of Jews as being too smart, too powerful, too wealthy or too threatening. That figure may be high, but it serves as a reminder that the impressions Brando present were not unique to him.
It also shows the peculiar capriciousness of prejudice. Some groups are vilified as underachievers. Others as overachievers. Either way, it hurts, it dehumanizes and it is wrong.