Hollywood's Unofficial Film Corps by Michael Berkowitz
When America plunged into World War II, Hollywood followed. USO work was almost mandatory for actors, and several stars, including Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, joined the service in combat roles. Many directors and cameramen enrolled in the Signal Corps, making instructional and morale boosting clips for the military. The most famous among those projects, Frank Capra’s series “Why We Fight,” was screened to civilians in theaters across the country.
In Hollywood’s Unofficial Film Corps, University College of London historian Michael Berkowitz investigates the largely unknown and particular role played by Jews in coordinating Hollywood’s response to the federal government’s wartime propaganda agenda. Most Hollywood studios were owned and operated by Jews who preferred to keep their heritage hidden in plain sight. In those years, Hollywood operated under a censorship office dominated by Roman Catholics and was a punching bag for Protestant fundamentalists and right-wingers. Conspiracy theories about the alleged Jewish influence over the Roosevelt administration circulated. Jewish participants in Hollywood’s war effort had reasons to keep their heads down as they did the work of showing why America had to win. Democracy was at stake.
Like a detective with a hunch and a nose for clues, Berkowitz searches for the fingerprints of Jewish contributors to the wartime Hollywood-federal government collaboration. Many preferred to be uncredited for the films they helped produce for fear of inflaming antisemitism. Berkowitz identifies Leo Rosten, deputy director of the Office of War Information, as “the designer and instigator” behind Hollywood’s filmmaking contributions to the struggle against the Axis. Rosten was determined to place Gentile directors such as Capra and John Ford in prominent roles to evade any charge of Jewish special pleading.
Rosten and his associates, notably Bud Schulberg, “were motivated to make movies that would matter, along with sincerely having answered the call of duty,” Berkowitz writes. After the war ended, Schulberg was in charge of finding evidence in the Nazi film archives, assembling a documentary screened at the Nuremberg trials to demonstrate Germany’s agenda for atrocity.
Unofficial Film Corps: American Jewish Moviemakers and the War Effort is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
