Two recent books — “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler” by Ben Urwand and “Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939” by Thomas Doherty — investigated the alleged complicity between the Hollywood Jews and the Nazis to protect the studios’ German profits, books in which Laemmle is scarcely mentioned. But there is another reason to tell the story now. Knowing of my interest in the subject, a longtime entertainment executive named Sandy Einstein asked me to write about Laemmle’s efforts, and provided documentation he had collected. Mr. Einstein had a personal motive: His father was among those whom Laemmle had saved.

It may seem strange that Laemmle alone among the Hollywood chieftains — a group that included Adolph Zukor of Paramount, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, Harry Cohn of Columbia and the Warner brothers — sought to save Jews, since all of those studio heads were Jews themselves and nearly all of them had emigrated from Eastern Europe, over which Hitler was casting his ominous shadow. But almost from the inception of the American film industry, the Hollywood Jews were dedicated to assimilation, not religious celebration. They had come to America to escape their roots, not embrace them.

Image Laemmle with Margaret Apt Weissman, who immigrated to the United States with his help. Credit... Collection of Rosemary Hilb

Much of this was psychological — a way to begin life anew. But it was also self-protective. Though America’s self-appointed cultural commissars didn’t much care about Jewish domination of the film industry in its infancy, they began to care very much when the motion picture became the center of the country’s popular culture, and they inveighed against Jewish influence, which many Christian religious groups and civic organizations dedicated to cultural uplift felt would undermine traditional American values. These groups would eventually lobby against Jewish control in the media, fight for government censorship to diminish that control, and even call for boycotts of Hollywood films, arguing that they were corrupting the nation’s soul.

In a way, these efforts would come to define Hollywood just as much as Hollywood would come to define the country. They forced the Hollywood Jews to demonstrate that they weren’t cultural saboteurs, that they were actually Americans first and Jews ... well, Jews last, which is why, in Hollywood, Judaism was always sotto voce. For all its power and visibility, Hollywood was a community racked by the fear that everything the Jews had won could be taken away, if they didn’t tread lightly.