Hollywood loves a cause, except when the cause is Jewish - The Jewish Chronicle

In the perfect Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder Tugg Speedman, an action star loosely modelled on Tom Cruise, played by Ben Stiller, fronts an ad campaign to save the panda, presumably because he likes its colour scheme. It's a mockery of the Hollywood fashion for spurious, self-serving, and ultimately performative political activism: later, Speedman kills a panda, and wears it as a hat.

The film is droll and knowing: it foresees the Hollywood response to #MeToo in 2019, which saw actors appear at the Academy Awards with pet activists in tow – all involved looked ridiculous – and it echoes Sacha Baron Cohen’s cry as Brüno, an early fashion influencer: “Clooney's got Darfur, Sting's got the Amazon, and Bono's got Aids!"

Nowhere does this activism extend to Jews. Long gone are the days when Paddy Chayefsky, author of Network, rebuked Vanessa Redgrave from the stage at the Academy Awards in 1978 for talking about “Zionist hoodlums (whose behaviour is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression)” with the line, ‘I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed”. Hollywood, despite its posturing – I suspect its inhabitants are faintly ashamed of being rich – is home to the most conservative of all art forms, and it does not like to expose its Jewish bones. If Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas, Bing Crosby sang it.

Take the new live action Snow White from Disney, out this week. The film is called “controversial”, partly because Gal Gadot, who plays the wicked queen, is Israeli, and Rachel Zegler, who plays Snow White, is “pro” Palestine. The launch was pared down, presumably to avoid pickets and boycotts: there are rivers and seas in fairyland too.

And then there is the feature length documentary October 8.

It is from the film-maker Wendy Sachs, and it tells the story of the explosion of global antisemitism after the massacres of October 7: in the words of the writer Dan Senor, who Sachs interviews, “the outrage…directed at the Jews for refusing to be slaughtered”. October 8 details the ecstasy at Jewish murder, the terror of Diaspora Jewish students assaulted by “pro” Palestine activists, the blood libels and the firebombed synagogues, and the relative silence of the world.

“No one was interested in working with me on the film, and no one was interested in representing the film, and no one was interested in acquiring the film,” she says. “Netflix passed. Amazon passed”. Sachs says that Hollywood, “is allergic to this kind of film: afraid of subscribers cancelling, afraid of protests, afraid of the noise out there on the other side”. October 8, she adds, “is not political. It doesn't litigate the war. It's just documenting the epic rise of antisemitism since October 7”.

October 8 was rejected by the big film festivals, though Woodstock took The Bibi Files, Sachs says, because a demonic Jew is “safe territory” for the independent film community, which has, “a sort of insidious hostility [to Zionism] that's deeply embedded”. October 8’s Academy Award campaign was likewise thwarted. Sachs says that she asked the IDA [International Documentary Association] to publicise the film to Academy voters, a common path for such films. “We had funding for it,” Sachs says. “We were ready to go. It was scheduled. And then we were told, ‘sorry, there's no room in our calendar for your film to be included.’”

Eventually October 8 got a distributor in the US and Canada, though it has yet to be released in the UK: three companies have passed so far. The IDA did not respond to my request for comment.

Why the silence, and in such a Jewish town? Fear is the answer, and a peculiar self-loathing: even the Jewish moguls who founded Hollywood didn’t want to be recognised as Jewish, for fear of jeopardising their American paradise. This month I interviewed Jeremy Dauber, the great Jewish American critic, about his history of horror films American Scary. Dauber said the Jewish contribution to American horror is negligible, because America has been the promised land for Jews. He thinks this will change now. Consider October 8 the first instalment.

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Film