1 Yeah, yeah It's interesting to reflect that a large component of the development of motion pictures (both as commerce and as an art form) had to do with Jews being locked out of so many other industries and lines of work. It's as if, in the first half of the 20th Century, a group of Eastern European immigrants found themself here, and realized they had to earn a living. So they invented their own line of work. As a resident of L.A. I have that LA/New York mindset and am always shocked anew when I hear the real statistics about the proportion of Jews in the population at large: it sounds like such a tiny number, compared to my own circle, which is probably 45% Jewish. My favorite little detail about the evolution of Old Jewish Money is when some of the newly wealthy entertainment people wanted to join a country club, but couldn't join the ones dominated by WASPs. My recollection is that it was Harpo Marx who argued that, no, it wouldn't be ethical to exclude non-Jews from the new club they were creating at the time: that would be bringing themselves down to the bigots' level. I say all this, of course, as a blue-collar WASP (though one who converted to Catholicism a few years ago for complex reasons).