# "Jews totally run Hollywood" **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 4, 2010, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jews-totally-run-hollywood/556058 "2010-10-04T22:41:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 112
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2010, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jews-totally-run-hollywood/556058/112 "2010-10-10T19:56:40Z")
> [@Spoke](#): > > [According to Wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_lawyer#United_States), 22% of the lawyers in the top US firms are Jewish. So yeah, Jewish lawyers are overrepresented in the ranks as compared with the general population, but not so much that you couldn’t put it down to Jewish cultural emphasis on achievement. (I assume you weren’t suggesting genetic superiority as the explanation for the phenomenon?) > > On the other hand, the overwhelming numbers in the entertainment industry suggest that something more than cultural emphasis on achievement is going on. > > Look, everybody knows that connections matter in finding a job. And the numbers suggest to me that a good-old-boy network may be at play in Hollywood. And that’s exactly the sort of thing that leads to successful discrimination lawsuits. I think you mean good-old-boychick network bubbeleh. You do not succeed in running a movie studio because of who you know. You succeed because you figure out what the people want to buy, even before they know its what they want to buy. You succeed because you get the better creative talent. No, I am not suggesting anything genetic. I am suggesting that it has to with more than a culture of achievement. After all Jews don’t achieve across the board. There are other cultural factors that have led to achievement in some very particular venues, probably two factors most of all, both a result of this: for many many hundreds of years Jews have been the outsider, the “other” in any society in which they have resided. An educated literate outsider group spread across cultures and communicating with each other. Being an outsider group gives you a different perspective, drives you to prove yourself sure, and coupled with a history of persecution, drives you to try to gain security and both acceptence and respect. But that different perspective brings a willingness to try different ideas. And is in the context of a religion that highlights its myths that have its heros arguing with God himself. When your culture isn’t completely part of the box, it is easier to think outside of it. Being spread out among the world’s cultures and traveling between them, having nothing but knowledge and the ideas picked up from around the world as a meaningful asset, results in a culture that tends to recombine those ideas into new ones. What is in that box can be used for something slightly different in this box if we just tweak it a little, and maybe mix it up with something from this other box too. New York in particular was home to Jews coming from around the world all stuck together in small neighborhoods and exchanging ideas and perspectives and ambition. Hollywood was one of those ideas. More than any other group in America, Jews created Hollywood, because of the cultural willingness to gamble a little on an idea, a drive to prove oneself, a strong heritage of creative thought, and a tradition of having enough chutzpah to believe that we could. Those traditions are less strong than they once were and are less unique than they once were. But they have run deep. No we don’t “run” Hollywood. But the mindset of the first few generations of American Jews both created it and were a great fit for providing that which America wanted to hear and to see. And apparently the world as well. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jews-totally-run-hollywood/556058)._