Describing extreme concerns with an anemic programming slate, GE Head of Television and Microwave Programming Jack Donaghy identifies what he perceives as a cultural disconnect: “The audience doesn’t want elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left‑wing.…”
Liz Lemon cuts him off. “Just say Jewish, this is taking forever.”
There’s a 30 Rock joke for everything. But that one contains a germ of real insight. Rather than make the obvious joke about how Jews control the media, Tina Fey swerves and makes a joke about how the media’s most enthusiastic, Reagan-humping critics use every word in the book to avoid deploying the one problematic modifier they want to use. She’s not wrong. And it’s not because conservatives are anti-semitic. It’s because the media – the product as well as the people making the product – is distinctly Jewish. Also… Catholic.[1]
Just beneath reactionary caterwauling about liberal media bias lies a Protestant cultural anxiety about the intellectual ascendance of non-Protestants in America. The real objection to the media is not that it’s elite, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, or even left-wing, but that it’s constructed to reflect a religious – yes, religious – preference for shared truth over individual truth. There’s a political dynamic to be sure, but the politics are just a tarp pulled over ancient religious and class antipathies.
Do Jews run Hollywood because of a conspiracy? Absolutely. But the conspiracy was among the goyim. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants—all but barred from high-status positions in the law firms, universities, and banks controlled by WASPs[2]—moved west and founded movie studios because the pictures were a low-rent industry where a smart guy could make a buck. Adolph Zukor (Paramount), Hirsz and Jacob Wonskolaser (Warner Brothers), William Fox (Fox), Samuel Goldwyn (MGM), and David Sarnoff (RKO) saw and seized a Vaudeville-adjacent opportunity. Similarly, Irish-Catholics who, excluded from the same white-shoe firms as Jews, made a run on the newspaper business. William Randolph Hearst (SF Examiner, New York Journal, Being Citizen Kane), James Michael Curley (Boston American), John Dunne (The New York Globe), Joseph “Half Scottish” Meddill (New York Daily News) saw a business they could scale thanks to near-zero marginal costs and relationships with early ad firms run by fellow Sons of Erin like Bill Walsh, John Powers, Charles Murphy, and Patrick Egan.
None of these potato and latke enthusiasts were considered coastal elites when they started out. They were chancers doing dirty work that self-respecting Episcopalians wanted nothing to do with. They just turned out to be really, really good at it – for largely the same reason.
Upper Middle is a member-supported publication. Want access to the data and analysis that has helped 5,300+ anxious professionals re-negotiate their relationship with status, taste, and money?
Already a member? Sign In.
➺ Weekly research-focused "Class Notes" essays looking at learned behaviors, cultural/social biases, and internalized expectations.
➺ Biweekly survey data-driven "Status Report" teardowns of why people like us act like this. (Future state: Access to raw data via AI portals.)
➺ Invitations to "Zero-Martini Lunch" live Q+As with scholars, authors, experts and minor celebrities with insight into the Upper Middle lifestyle.
➺ Other stuff. Access to deals. Introductions…. We're always trying shit.
