Review of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler

Slice of the American psyche

Gabler is a uniquely erudite cultural critic. This book is about the founding fathers of Hollywood, the dictatorial dreamers and shapers of its golden age (to the late 1940s). In Gabler’s telling, they are all Eastern European Jews, striving to become part of the American dream and at the same time providing many of the images that entered the American …