An Empire of Their Own Quotes

“What Mayer did in the thirties― what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong― was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith― a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“Listen, a picture, all it is is an expensive dream,” he later told a reporter. “Well, it’s just as easy to dream for $700,000 as for $1,500,000.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“The real tragedy, however, was certainly the Jews’. Their dominance became a target for wave after wave of vicious anti-Semites—from fire-and-brimstone evangelicals in the teens and early twenties who demanded the movies’ liberation from “the hands of the devil and 500 un-Christian Jews” to Red-baiters in the forties for whom Judaism was really a variety of communism and the movies their chief form of propaganda. The sum of this anti-Semitic demonology was that the Jews, by design or sheer ignorance, had used the movies to undermine traditional American values.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

“he had become the patriarch of horseflesh.”
― Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood