Last May, after a rash of suicide bombings in Israel and the Israeli army's incursion into Palestinian territory, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had breakfast with some Hollywood players. These weren't his usual conservative hosts but mostly liberals, among them TV legend Norman Lear, "Rock the Vote" co-founder and record executive Jeff Ayeroff, and film director Jon Turteltaub.
Most had paid $10,000 apiece for this sit-down, money that was to seed a new Hollywood group seeking to somehow help Israel in the court of public opinion.
After listening to what some perceived as Netanyahu's right-wing politicking, though, many were overwhelmed with the sense that Israel was in desperate need of a distinctly Hollywood commodity: the public relations blitz.
There's hardly a cause in the world that isn't attempting to harness Hollywood's star power to raise awareness and cash. Elizabeth Taylor drew the limelight to the AIDS crisis, for example, and Charlton Heston has become an advocate for the right to bear arms.
Yet the question of Israel and whether to wholeheartedly embrace its cause is posing a surprisingly provocative and uncomfortable dilemma for many in the industry, all the more notable because the movie business was founded by and is still well-populated by Jews. It's one issue on which few are speaking out, rare in a town where people spout off on almost every political concern from guns to whales.
"There's been a puzzling silence," says Dan Gordon, screenwriter of "The Hurricane" and a strong supporter of Israel. "We're in an industry that takes stands on everything. People can't shut us up! I'd love to see the indignation about homicide bombers that is reserved for smokers. You smoke in this town, and you're dead. Rob Reiner will come after you."
Like Jews in many communities in America, Jews in Hollywood are divided, from those who support Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government to others who question his settlement policies or commitment to the peace process but don't want to do so publicly for fear of appearing anti-Israel.
Unlike Jews elsewhere, though, those in Hollywood are in the hot seat because of who they are and what they do. They also spring from an industry with a history of ambivalence toward its heritage. And though few in Hollywood are nervous about appearing pro-environment or anti-smoking, there is trepidation about the unwelcome typecasting that being unabashedly pro-Israel might bring. "One of the stereotypes is that the Jews control the media," says David Brandes, writer-producer of the 1991 film "The Quarrel." "A lot of Jews have been intimidated unnecessarily because of the stereotype."
"I don't think Jews in general know what to do, and Hollywood knows even less what to do," journalist-turned-screenwriter Andrea King says. "Jews in Hollywood have never been big flag-waving Jews to begin with. If the Jewish community is struggling, then the Hollywood community is paralyzed."
Publicist Howard Bragman goes further: "It's easier to come out as a gay in Hollywood than as a Jew. I'm frankly shocked at how many people are in the closet about their Jewishness."
Now a nascent effort, spearheaded by a mostly younger group of rising players, is trying to challenge the status quo and galvanize Hollywood's powerful communication machine.
Unofficially spearheaded by Dan Adler, a 39-year old Creative Artists agent who organized the Netanyahu breakfast, the effort, dubbed Project Communicate, this fall will launch a marketing push on college campuses. The idea is "to create defenders and advocates of Israel," says Adler, the son of a Holocaust survivor whose group is trying to navigate Hollywood's political divisions by adopting a non-ideological stance.
"We're trying to be pro-humanity and pro-solution, rather than simply pro-Israel," he says. As for creating advocates and defenders of Israel in Hollywood, that could be a unique challenge of its own.
Israel's consul general in L.A., Yuval Rotem, says he's made dozens of phone calls trying to get a high-profile Hollywood figure to visit Israel and so far has failed. "Ever since March, when we lost 140 people in one month, which was the trigger for our incursion into the territories, I've asked this question over and over again: 'Where have they been?' " Rotem says.
Ever since the movie industry's founding, many Jews in Hollywood have had ambivalent feelings about their heritage. The founding studio chiefs, primarily Jews, were leaders in the charge for secularization and ultimately assimilation. According to Neal Gabler's book "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," they tended to compensate for their ethnicity, and rebuff the anti-Semitism they faced, by promulgating an image of America as a corn-fed, Midwestern, paternalistic utopia.
