An edited abridgement of E. Michael Jones’ 2003 essay, Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos, presented with pictures and captions by Lasha Darkmoon

“Sexual morality is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life…. If only Americans knew, we are bringing them the plague!” — Sigmund Freud

I never liked the title of Rabbi Dresner’s book: Can Families Survive in Pagan America? This was published in 1995 by Huntington House out of Lafayettte, Louisiana.

The Jews had prospered in America, we learn from the book, but they had paid a price for their prosperity. The chosen people seemed to flatten into normality, according to Dresner’s pessimistic view, becoming what the prophets had warned against: just like the other nations.

They had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in assimilating and achieving success. They even succeeded in remaking American culture in the course of the 20th century in their image, but in doing that they also discovered that they were no longer Jews.

Jews, according to Dresner, have tried all things. In the process they have exhausted modernity. And they have discovered, to their chagrin, the puzzling truth that

no license has replaced the Law; no symphony, the Psalms; no country club, the synagogue; no mansion, the home; no mistress, a wife; no towering metropolis, Jerusalem; no impulse, the joy of doing a mitzvah; no man, God. (p. 329)

1. Introducing Rabbi Dresner

Samuel H. Dresner was born into an assimilationist-minded Jewish family in Chicago in 1923. He was known in high school, at the time, as obsessed with sports and girls. Before long those obsessions were replaced by a loftier obsession. At the age of 15, Dresner became acutely and painfully aware of suffering in the world around him. As a result of his vision, he turned down what would have been a lucrative career in his uncle’s dress manufacturing business and decided to become a rabbi.

Dresner did not speak Yiddish. He was not a Polish Jew. His wife Ruth comes from a family of Orthodox German Jews. You would, however, not get this impression by reading Families, which is in many ways one long invidious comparison between the Jews of America and the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Dresner felt that Jews were better off, spiritually at least, in the ghettos of Eastern Europe. Now that they had arrived in just about every sense of the word in America, he was afraid that they had become “messengers who forget the message”:

For centuries the Jews, shut up in their ghettos, perfected their souls before God and had something to say to mankind. But no one listened. Now, Jews have the ears of non-Jews on every level of society. What a tragedy if now that the gentiles are listening, the Jews have nothing to say.

2. Rabbi Dresner’s assault on American Jewry

Rabbi Dresner was among the first to spot trends destructive of Judaism in literature, film and radical feminism.

I remember asking him what he thought of a piece I did on Jewish/Catholic Kulturkampf, which ended with an analysis of Alan Dershowitz’s The Vanishing American Jew. My point was that the Jews were putting themselves out of business by espousing sexual liberation. Dresner agreed with what I had to say, but added that Jews didn’t like to hear others (i.e., the goyim) say it. It was an honest response, and I valued his honesty.

In another conversation, he complained about me writing about “Jewish villains” and so in response I sent him a copy of my then just released book The Medjugorje Deception, with an inscription to the effect that there were no Jewish villains in it.

“What a tragedy,” Dresner points out, “if now that the gentiles are listening, the Jews have nothing to say.” When Families appeared, this gentile was listening, because he felt that this Jew had something to say.

Dresner singles out Isaac Bashevis Singer and Woody Allen for particular condemnation because of their contemptuous attitude toward things Jewish.

In wondering why Singer is so popular among American Jews and why his portrayal of Polish Jews as sexual degenerates had evoked no protest, Dresner levels a jeremiad of biblical proportions against American Jews, a group which he feels have made a caricature out of Judaism, not only by the vulgarism and crass commercialism that pervades their communal life, but, more to the point, by too often abdicating the intellectual life of the faith to the fads of the time.

The true creed of many American Jews, especially the intellectuals, has become whatever happens at the moment to be “in”: Marxism, deconstruction, consciousness-raising, permissiveness, liberation, cults, and sexual experimentation. (pp. 190-1).

If “the traditional family is under siege” in America, it is largely because of the influence of what Dresner calls “the Hollywood crowd”, a group of people who praise “rebellion, self-fulfillment, and promiscuity” and have a “debased view of the human body and spirit.”

According to Dresner, any study of the films which got produced from 1945 to 1985 would reveal “a radical shift in values”, one which turned the world upside down: “Hollywood came to adopt a permissive, value-free attitude in the course of a few decades,” and when it went down the drain, it dragged the rest of America with it:

The underground has taken over. The avant-garde has become the man on the street. Bohemia is Broadway. The filthy jokes formerly restricted to burlesque houses and certain nightclubs are now available on films and TV for the millions. Las Vegas is no longer a city but a condition. (pp. 316-7)

Hollywood, in short, got corrupted around 1945 and is now responsible for the moral decline of American culture.

3. Hollywood’s decadence and subversion of morals

Dresner’s critique of Hollywood, however, is not as pointed as it needs to be. To say that the Hollywood elite came to adopt “a permissive, value-free attitude in the course of a few decades”, from 1945 to 1985, is not only not true, it misses certain salient points.

First of all, the Hollywood elite was then, and is now, overwhelmingly Jewish. Secondly, the Jews who ran Hollywood had always had this “permissive, value-free attitude” when it came to matters venereal.

Beginning in the 1920s, the outcry against Hollywood’s subversion of morals was so great that various forms of legislation — federal, state and local — were proposed as an antidote.

As a way of heading off this legislation, Hollywood’s Jews in 1934 entered into a voluntary agreement with the Legion of Decency, a Catholic operation. That agreement was known as the Production Code. The Catholics forced the issue by organizing boycotts at a time when the film industry was reeling from the effects of the stock market crash and their heavy indebtedness to the nation’s banks.

The most memorable and most effective boycott was organized by Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia, who forbade that city’s Catholics from watching movies in the city’s movie houses, which at the time were largely owned by Warner Brothers. His efforts created a situation in which Warner Brothers was losing $175,000 a week at the height of the depression.

The man who ran the Production Code office for the next 20 years was a Catholic by the name of Joseph I. Breen, a man who had no illusions about the attitudes of the Hollywood elite during the early 1930s:

They are simply a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money. . . . Here [in Hollywood] we have Paganism rampant and in its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant . . . any number of our directors and stars are perverts. . . . These Jews seem to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. They and they alone make the decision. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth (Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored, p. 70).

What was true then is a fortiori true today. Jews dominate Hollywood and always have.

4. Jews dominate Hollywood, but you mustn’t mention it

The immigrant Jews who created Hollywood’s major studios were followed by another generation of Jews who founded the nation’s major TV networks — William Paley’s CBS, David Sarnoff’s NBC, and Leonard Goldenson’s ABC.

Today, about two-thirds of leading TV and movie producers are Jewish. Four of the five companies that dominate American entertainment are run by Jews: Gerald Levin, who once considered a rabbinic career, runs Time Warner, Michael Eisner runs Disney, Mel Karmazin and Sumner Redstone run Viacom-CBS, and the Bronfmans run Universal.

This fact is rarely discussed in the mainstream media because Jews control that as well.

When British journalist William Cash wrote about Jewish control of Hollywood in the October 1994 issue of the Spectator, Hollywood and its academic support troops reacted with a rage verging on hysteria.

In the November 13, 1994 issue of Los Angeles Times, Neal Gabler attacked Cash’s article as “an anti-Semitic bleat from a reactionary crackpot” which could have been dismissed out of hand “if it didn’t have a respectable platform in the Spectator and didn’t play to a pre-existing prejudice—that Jews control the US media.”

Neal Gabler, it should be noted, is the author of An Empire of their Own: How Jews Created Hollywood. Gabler, in other words, was attacking Cash for saying precisely what Gabler had already said in his own book.

According to Cash:

That every major studio head is Jewish today is no different from 60 years ago. “Of 85 names engaged in production, 53 are Jews,” a 1936 survey noted. And the Jewish advantage holds in prestige as well as numbers. In a recent Premiere magazine “Special Power Issue”—ranking the 100 most powerful people in the ‘Industry’—the top 12 were Jewish. There were no black or British industry executives ranked.

Jewish domination of Hollywood, however, cannot be limited to numbers. The numbers simply give a pale approximation of the extent to which Jews determine the cultural matrix out of which the nation’s films get made. Cash cites an instance of the “extreme measures” non-Jews engage in to succeed in Hollywood: