WHEN VICTIMS RULE. A CRITIQUE OF JEWISH PRE-EMINENCE IN AMERICA
"What about the mass media situation in Canada (aside from the already mentioned Hollinger dynasty)? "Jews," notes Morton Weinfeld, "have been statistically over represented in both the financial and the creative aspects of the entertainment business. It is a short step from that observation to the vicious canard that the Jews, in some collective, conspiratorial sense, control Hollywood. One could also possibly construct a similar argument for the Canadian scene. People such as Izzy Asper, Garth Drabinsky, Harold Greenberg, Robert Lantos, Ed Mirvish, and Moses Znaimer are just a few of the Canadian Jews who have played innovative roles in the popular entertainment industry in Canada." [WEINFELD, p. 10]
In that country, Israel "Izzy" Asper controls CanWest Global. He is the chief officer of the company that by the mid-1990s was "already the largest private sector television broadcaster in the country." [CHISHOLM, p. 36] CanWest is also the country's "most profitable broadcaster" and has media outlets in every Canadian major markets except Montreal and Alberta. [TELEVISION BUS. INT'L] Asper also controls TV 3 in New Zealand (68% of its stock) and founded TV 4, as well as FM radio network MORE, in the same country. In Australia, CanWest has a 76% stake in Network Ten, the second-most profitable TV station in that country. In Ireland, Asper is the largest investor in TV3, and his firms also have a financial stake in Ulster TV. [SCOTLAND, Business, p. 4]
A TV colleague calls Asper "the most aggressive businessman I know. The guy is a Machiavellian genius." [CHISHOLM, p. 36] MacLean's notes that:
"Asper's lock on [CanWorld's] multiple voting shares -- he holds all 26 million -- has also made him one of the country's richest corporate players.... By the time he is through, he wants to carve a global broadcasting force. He does not say that he will build a dynasty, but his three offspring [including Leonard, CanWorld's vice president for corporate development; David, the vice president for programming; and Gail, another executive] have taken on key corporate roles, and they will accede to ownership, so there is that too." [WELLS, p. 40]
Asper blatantly uses his ownership powers to melodramatically propagandize on behalf of the state of Israel, as he did in the National Post (a newspaper he controls) in 2001:
"Israel, after 53 years of statehood, remains the only isolated island of democracy, human rights and rule of law -- a lonely outpost of Western civilization and its values in a sea of terrorism, corruption, dictatorship and human enslavement.
Countries like Canada should therefore be in the vanguard of its support, for mutual economic, military and ethical reasons ... It is therefore a dismaying sight for knowledgeable Canadians to watch our Foreign Affairs minister, John Manley, either a prisoner of naievete, or political opportunism, embracing this war criminal, [Yassar] Arafat, on Mr. Manley's recent visit to the Middle East." [ASPER, I. H., 6-19-01] [See chapter on Israel for the details of Israel's "democracy."]
Other important Jewish executives at CanWorld have recently included president Steve Gross, and David Mintz, the head of programming.
Also in Canada, the wealthy Greenberg family began moving into the mass media in the 1990s, controlling Astral, Canada's largest pay-per-view and specialty TV company. The chairman of Astral, Andre Bureau, is also the former chairman of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. Astral Home Entertainment is the largest wholesaler of video cassettes in Canada. Harold Greenberg's original co-partners in his ventures were Phyllis Switzer, Ed Cowan, and Jerry Grafstein. Barbara Frum host Canada's prominent TV news program, The Journal.
In Montreal, another Jewish mogul, Moses Znaimer, is president and executive producer of CITY-TV, Much Music, Musique Plus, and the Bravo Network. His sister, Libby, is CITY-TV's news program money specialist. [HUSTAK, GAZETTE, p. C7] Much Music's (an MTV clone) video host is also Jewish -- Erica Ehm. Znaimer started out in the media business by putting soft pornography on public TV -- fellow Jewish media mogul Robert Lantos sold him the rights to some films from the New York Erotic Film Festival early in both their careers, "start[ing] Robert Lantos in business.'" [ZNAIMER, 9-21-98] A London newspaper headlined Znaimer as "the King of Me-TV, Znaimer's Influence on Canadian Culture -- and on Television Worldwide -- Is Difficult to Overstate ... Znaimer Has Shaped An Entire Generation's Self-Perception." [FRASER, p. F3] Toronto Life described him as "shirt-buttoned to the collar [with] large, tinted glasses that evoked a 1970s porn-magnate." [FRASER, M.]
In 1998 a Canadian magazine called Robert Lantos, head of Alliance Communications, and later Serendipity Point Films, "one of the original architects of what we have now [in the Canadian mass media]." [GROSS, P., 9-21-98] The Toronto Star noted Lantos and Garth Drabinsky (eventually caught in a financing scandal) as "Canadian's two most emblematic, brash, creative and -- according to some -- egocentric entertainment figures." [ADILMAN, 8-29-98, p. M4] Drabinsky founded (with Myron Gottleib) Livent, America's largest theatre production company, and Cineplex Odeon, by the 1980s one of North America's largest movie theatre chains. Until recent scandals, Livent owned the $43 million Ford Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, the Pantages Theatre in Chicago, and the Center for Performing Arts in Chicago, among other holdings.
In his autobiography, Drabinsky notes the influence upon him of Canadian Jewish mogul Nat Taylor:
"He was big, the biggest, a legend in the movie business in Canada, the nearest thing Canada had to a Hollywood mogul. He had been an exhibitor, a distributor, a producer, and a TV-station shareholder. He was partners with Famous Players, the dominant exhibition chain in Canada. He owned the coutnry's largest movie-production studio, Toronto International Studios, in Kleinberg, Ontario. He was the man who opened the first Canadian movie-house for foreign and art films. He was the guy who came
up with the idea of multiple theatres." [DRABINSKY, G., 1995, p. 56]
Taylor also owned the influential trade journal, Canadian Film Digest, and hired Drabinsky -- in his early years -- to edit it. [DRABINSKY, G., 1995, p. 58]
Another noteworthy Jewish cinema/theatre mogul in the early years was Nathan Nathanson who "built the Panteges [theatre] in 1920 ... Even more significantly, Nathanson started not only the Famous Players theatre circuit in Canada but also Canadian Odeon ... He was single-handedly responsible for the two chains that formed the duopoly that dominated Canadian exhbition for so long." [DRABINSKY, G. 1995, p. 64] Then there is Allen Karp, "chairman and chief executive of the Toronto-based Cineplex Odeon Corporation, Canada's largest film exhibitor." [KIRSHNER, S., 1-7-99]
Also in Canada, Jewish mogul Paul Godfrey is the 1990s chairman of the Toronto Sun Publishing Company/ Sun Media Group and was the 1998 winner of the B'nai B'rith Award of Merit. Five families own TorStar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, the largest newspaper in Canada. One of the familiess is Jewish : the Thalls. "Their original name was Rosenthal. [Burnett] Thall says he lopped off the first two syllables to overcome the anti-Semitism of 1940s Toronto and improve his job prospects." [REGULY, E., 10-26-01] In 1992, a baptized Jew, Peter Herrnsdorf, became the CEO and chairman of TV Ontario, replacing Bernard Ostry. (For a decade Herrnsdorf had been the publisher of Toronto Life magazine. "Among those who championed Herrnsdorf's installation at TVO," notes Toronto Life, "was Howard Bernstein, a senior producer who had worked for Herrnsdorf at CBC," where Herrnsdorf had also been an executive). [CANADIAN BUSINESS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS, JULY 1996, p. 56-6; DINOFF, D., 7-26-99, p. 4]
Yet another Jewish media head, Jacques Bensimon, member of the "self-help Sephardic Network," stepped down in 2000 as the Managing Director of TFO, the French language division of TV Ontario. "He is widely considered," notes the Canadian Jewish News, "to be the father of TFO ... By Bensimon's estimation, his Jewish sensibility helped enormously, sensitizing him to the perspectives and needs of his French minority audience." Bensimon left TFO to become an executive at the Banff Television Festival. Bensimon had earlier served as a director at the Film Board of Canada. [KIRSCHNER, S., 7-13-2000]
Sandra Kolber, also Jewish, became a member of the board of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1991. [SINGER/SELDIN, 1992, p. 34] The very powerful president and CEO of CBC at the turn of the millennium is Richard Rabinovitch. (He "spent more than a decade as chief operating officer of Claridge Inc., [Jewish alcohol and media mogul] Charles Bronfman's private holding company in Montreal, and was chairman of the executive committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress's Quebec region). [GORDON, S., 11-30-01]
Also in Canada, Garry Schwartz heads Phoenix Pictures and Phyllis Yaffe is the president and CEO of Showcase Television. Both, too, are Jewish. (The chairman of the Canadian Television Fund, a private/public partnership that helped fund 330 TV programs and 17 feature films in 1997-98 alone is Richard Stursberg and Tim Kotchoff was sequentially vice-president of news programming for both CBC and CTV television networks. Are these two men Jewish as well?) At the lower media tiers, a panel discussion at a Canadian Jewish Congress luncheon in 1999 included CBC TV "senior reporter" Joe Schlesinger, "broadcaster" Evan Solomon, "editorial writer for the National Post" Ezra Levant, and "associate editor of Now magazine" Susan Cole. [ROSE, B., 12-9-99, p. 3, 5] Himie Koshevoy died in 2000. He had been the "managing editor of the Vancouver Sun and subsequently the Toronto Star." [KIRSCHNER, S., 9-14-2000, p. 11]
"Humble Howard" Glassman is a prominent radio show radio host in Toronto, as is Marsha Lederman. As one Jewish ethnic paper noted about the usual Jewish subtext in their commentaries:
"Glassman has been under fire from Christian groups for a few years now, culminating in last month's 26-page complaint to the Canadian Radio-Television and and Telecommunications Commission by the Catholic Civil Rights League and the Canadian Family Action Coalition. (They sent copies to the B'nai B'rith and the Toronto Police Hate Crimes Squad). Particularly at issue was a series of bits done by Glassman and sidekick Fred Patterson regarding Jesus (including the song 'Jesus Was a Fetus') and Easter (a giveaway of chocolate Jesus candles, promising to mail their producer to a cross and holding a
Jesus-lookalike contest ... While [Lederman] has sufficient respect for her background to not try to subvert Judaism, she is constantly at odds with how much her perspective is shaped by religion. She's been accused of being anti-Catholic after addressing issues, which she finds odd, since she currently cohabitates with a Catholic." [WEISBLOT, M., 9-2001]
In 1997, the Alberta Report reported about those who oversee moral issues for the Canadian television audience (the article was subtitled "Naked Lesbian Kissing Is Deemed Acceptable for Suppertime TV"):
"A recent decision by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council suggests that if Ellen [the American lesbian-oriented TV series] were produced here, the only controversy would be whether she would be shown naked in bed with her lesbian lover ... Nudity is not yet common on Canadian sitcoms, but the diaphanously-clad
models featured on such haute couture 'news' programs as CBC Newsworld's Fashion File and the syndicated Fashion Television often resemble Salome stripped to her last veil ... Two weeks ago the industry-funded CBSC (which haearlier dismissed two previous claims against Fashion Television) dismissed this
complaint as well. The CBSC cited a response from series producer CITY-TV --owned by [Jewish mogul] Moses Znaimer, who also co-owns Alberta's ACCESS-TV --'We do not equate nudity with pornography. Fashion and photography to our mind are art' ... The unnamed complainant had argued in a January 1995 letter, 'These areprime time family viewing hours and it is highly inappropriate for such sexually explicit material to be shown on television.' Ron Cohen, CBSC national chairman, rejects this argument as irrelevant, contending that the specialized nature of the program appeals to adults only ... Jay Levine, Fashion Television's producer, adds that nudity is to
be expected from a show covering an industry where 'being sexy is to be provocative.' He adds, 'We're doing something that obviously a lot of people don't have a problem with ... a few years ago it would have been inconceivable that producer-writer Ken Finkleman could utter 'the f-word' on his hit CBC sitcom The Newsroom.'" [SILLARS, L., 4-28-97]
(From the Jewish Tribal Review |
