Authors – Forward.com

Thomas Doherty

Was Hollywood’s Famed Censor an Antisemite?

By Thomas Doherty

‘These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,” fumed Joseph I. Breen in a letter to the Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of the Jesuit weekly America. The year was 1932, and the hot-tempered Irish Catholic, lately summoned to Hollywood, Calif., by motion picture czar Will H. Hays to convert a reprobate medium, was raging at the moguls who blocked his missionary work. “People whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house hold the good jobs out here and wax fat on it,” he marveled. “Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”Read More