Examples of movies or shows set in New York where a main character is Jewish and/or Jewish culture features in the plot somehow? Surely you’re joking.
Believe me, you’re sensitive enough.
And the “net result” is that New York is depicted as a “giant Jewish enclave”?
What movies do you believe do this? TV shows?
Did you resent “The Godfather” movies for portraying New York (or Las Vegas) as a “giant Italian enclave”? Were “Southie” and “The Departed” the result of efforts to portray Boston as a “giant Irish enclave”?
I see spoke once again has nothing factual to contribute.
What? We should quilt WASPs?
I am fairly sure that Jews are over-represented in the medical profession and among Nobel Prize winners too. Have that lawyer look into that statistical data and sue the medical schools and the Nobel Prize committee for discrimination too. Ah, but the lawyers are all Jewish. Dayum. That must be why no one has brought the case.
I think that’s true. Although I’ve read all about how much of a multi-ethnic city New York is and always has been, thanks to the likes of Woody Allen and others, I too tend to think of New York as a “Jewish city” regardless of stories like The Godfather and others. The Jewish aspect just seems to get more play, at least as far as I’ve noticed. The same with the wife, who is possibly Woody’s biggest Thai fan. In fact, she’s fascinated with the different aspects of New York – watch a lot of Godfathers type productions and you start thinking of it as an Italian city. Watch or read another type and it’s all Irish there etc. It’s as if there were lots of different NYCs existing in parallel universes. But if I’m not under the influence of any particular ethnic style of story, the wife and I both think of NYC as a Jewish city despite reason telling us otherwise. I keep promising her someday we’ll go take a look at the place ourselves, but we never seem to get around to it.
Hell, google “New York Jew” and you get a lot of hits, including an entry in the Urban Dictionary. Google “New York Italian” or “New York Irish” and you do get more hits, but the term seems to be mostly followed by “restaurants” or “pubs” rather than referring to the people themselve, for whatever that’s worth.
More than 23% of the New York Metropolitan area is Jewish. And roughly one out of three White New Yorkers is Jewish.
Are you saying that it is inaccurate to have a few shows that are set in New York have a main character and/or have something culturally Jewish feature in the plot somehow?
Well first, I kind of wonder why feathers are getting so ruffled when I mention that NYC is portrayed as a large Jewish enclave, when to all objective appearance it is a large Jewish enclave. On my mobile, else I’d confirm it, but isn’t nyc supposed to hold the largest Jewish community outside of Israel.
But the point is that outside of Mob movies, the only time an ethnic identity is introduced in a mainstream movie or show for purposes of plot tension or comic relief, it’s Jewish; with even black characters being a distant second.
Wikipedia’s Demographics of New York City confirms NYC to be the largest Jewish community outside of Israel. But it says the 2000 census shows the Italians are the largest single ethnic group there. And the Puerto Rican community is the largest outside of Puerto Rico.
I have seen a lot of ethnic comedies and other non-Mob stories centering on Irish, Puerto Rican and other families, but they just can’t seem to shake the notion of Jewishness out of my head.
Well what was your point, about how the city is portrayed?
As far as ethnic identification “only” being Jewish … huh? Over-represented relative to population size in the country? Maybe. Only? Even as a bit of hyperbole that is too hyperbolic.
As far as the op goes: Jews are indeed over-represented relative to their share of the American population in the media business at all levels. And among Nobel Prize winners. And … the list can go on. As has been illustrated by some posts in this thread, some have a problem with that, and see it as a threat or a result of a conspiricy of some sort.
What kinds of projects do these media honcho Jews greenlight? Apparently the ones that sell well; that’s how they became the heads of the studios.
According to Wiki, 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.
Maybe the real deal is that New York itself is overrepresented in movies. Sure, it’s big and exciting with many things to see and do, but couldn’t many stories set there be set somewhere else? And if not…why not?
I admit to a sort of - problem’s the wrong word - unease with the situation of a few big cities being winner-take-all in the cultural and/or intellectual competition. Even though I don’t believe in conspiracies. (At least not conscious ones, and usually not ethnic ones, BTW.)
It’s as if a glass ceiling has developed on culture, and to break through it, you usually do need to walk the walk and talk the talk of New York or LA (whatever you think that implies). There is a lot more going on in this creative and diverse nation for us to have to “type” our culture this way, as if we were in some pre-electronic or even pre-media era where if you didn’t know people you never got to know people.
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.
Think back to the days when corporate boards tended to be lily white, male, and Protestant. Couldn’t the same defense of the status quo have been made then?
“Hey, I didn’t get where I am because I am white/male/Protestant! I got here because I know how to run the business!” Look at our bottom line!
That’s really no argument at all. We know you can run the business; what we don’t know is whether someone else could have run it as well or better had they been given the chance.
The way discrimination often happens is at the lower levels, via networking. It may not even be conscious discrimination. What often happens is that the corporate higher-ups tend to use their connections to find a job for their cousin/nephew/buddy’s-kid. Now maybe that cousin/nephew/buddy’s-kid does a bang up job and winds up running the company some day. And maybe they are a big success. But that person got their chance in the business because of the good-old-boy network.
Well, given that we accepted that white men were discriminating against women and blacks without there having to be any organized conspiracy of white men to do so, why should we not accept that the Jews who dominate the media are discriminating against gentiles, not out of any organized conspiracy, but just taking care of their own … just as white men once did?
That’s pretty much what I said, isn’t it? 
I said I didn’t think it wasn’t anything more sinister than a good-old-boy network.
Jackmannii reeeeeally wants me to be a conspiracy theorist, though.
Moreover, if we wanted to explain why corporate boards a generation or two back were composed exclusively of visionary white Anglo Saxon Protestant males, we could also weave a self-congratulatory tale of how the hardworking visionary WASPs of ages past (John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and so on) had certain cultural traits (e.g., the Protestant work ethic) that brought them to create all of these titans of industry . . .
. . . and because of this legacy, it’s natural that today’s corporate boards should be composed exclusively of WASP men.
But I suspect that somehow might not go over so well, eh?
Except that those lily white boards had explicit anti-minority policies. OTOH White Protestant males are given a chance, have owned companies, have run them, have submitted scripts. They are still the majority of the producers, the directors, the leading men.
Oh but sure, have it your way. If not for subtle taking care-of-their-own clannishness and good-ole-boydom there would not be so many Jews in charge of Hollywood studios, not so many Jewish Nobel Prize winning scientists, and, I am sure, many more White Protestant NBA stars.
Hey, you were the one weaving the mythology. It sounds a bit like “How dare you suggest that Jews dominate media – but if they do, you should recognize that it’s because of the Unique Jewish Experience ™”
OK, DSeid, and you stick with that Jewish supremacist mindset of yours. Because that’s not bigoted at all.
Mythology is my post in the old person thread. This is not mythology in any sense of the word, even if it is a speculation to some degree.
Accepted as factual: Jews are over-represented relative to their numbers in the highest levels of intellectual and creative fields, (including Nobel Prize winners* - 37% of US winners and 22% worldwide, US National Medal of Science winners - 38%,, and the Japanese Kyoto Prize - 25%) ranging from physics, to chemistry, to economics, to medicine, to art, to comedy, to movie making. In terms of the last one, they are not just the heads of studios and over-represented as writers, but disproportionate to their numbers the Academy Award winning directors, roughly 37% of the best director awards have gone to a director with some Jewish cultural tie from its inception to 2004 anyway. 40% of the American Film Institute’s best movies of all time had directors with Jewish cultural ties as well.
Call my being willing to acknowledge those as facts as having a “Jewish supremacist mindset” if you need to, or “bigoted” if it pleases you, but they are what drove this op. Those Jews achieving things.
So the question is why? Why over the course of nearly a century so many Jews in positions of high achievement particularly in the space of dealing with new ideas?
Conspiracy? Well no one here has trotted that out, anyway. But it has been an accusation made often historically and currently in other venues. And one that many in this country and around the world still believe even if most are not so dumb as to state it outright.
Clannishness? Well that has been a common accusation made, and is why so many Jews want to downplay the accomplishments of others who share their cultural heritage. We fear the consequences of that conclusion. It gets really ugly really fast. Sometimes really really ugly.
Genetically intellectually superior? I really don’t think so. Really.
Something intrinsic to the cultural heritage? Uh, yeah, that’s my belief. And my speculation as to what aspects of the cultural heritage have been key are what you have dismissed as mythology. Or bigoted supremicist thinking.**
Oy.
*Not just science, over-represented as winners in literature and as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize as well.
**Oh spoke, if you are going to call me a bigot then don’t pussyfoot around with it. Pit me and I’ll be glad to discuss it with you further.