TORAH and TARO

Let Me Entertain You Jewish Joel Cohen, dubbed as the foremost entertainer in Hawaii, founded the Honolulu Amusement Company (HAC) in 1902. In 1905, Cohen sponsored a very successful mainland tour of the Royal Hawaiian Band. He also sponsored one in 1906, which was somewhat of a disaster. In 1913, HAC became the Consolidated Amusement Company (CAC) with Cohen as its president and general manager. In that capacity, he ran the motion picture exchange which supplied all the theaters in Hawaii with film. Prior to that arrangement, films had arrived willy-nilly depending on which ships came to Hawaii and what films they had with them. The Maui News (October 22, 1922) indicated that such a film procuring organization and the building of neighborhood theaters provided Hawaii residents with “the advantage of playhouses second to none in America.” Among its many accomplishments in 1915, CAC managed to win legislative approval to show films publicly on Sunday. By the 1930s, CAC had built some four hundred neighborhood theaters on Oahu and elsewhere in Hawaii. In 1931, it installed the first sound equipment in a theater in Kalaupapa. Its trailer featuring torch-bearing and lighting hula dancers began. That trailer is the longest-running trailer in film history. It continues to this day at CAC theaters in Hawaii. The Hollywood Connection: A Two-Way Street of Benefits Cohen may well have been important to the distribution of films in Hawaii, but he was also the lucky guy who benefitted by what was essentially, as film historian Neil Gabler put it, “a Jewish industry” (with all due respect to Walt Disney, W. C. Griffith, and some significant others) in the twentieth century. Hollywood’s Hawaii There is another point of view. Delia Maria Capalosa Konzett, in her book Hollywood’s Hawaii, details the plot lines of the films that Jewish producers, directors, actors, and studio bosses brought to the silver screen during the pre-WW2 period and beyond. Citing important films as early as 1927 (Hula) and 1932 (Bird of Paradise), Konzett weaves her way through just about every film made in and about Hawaii to charge those making the films with “spreading . . . the influence of European Judeo-Christian belief systems” and “asserting (white) superiority” (Konzett, p. 3). This book takes a much more ameliorative, ascending, and optimistic point of view. It emphasizes that such films brought Hawaii many benefits. These benefits included tourism; political, social, and land reform; building development; military protection; jobs; economic advancement; international recognition; and educational enhancement. Whatever the differences represent, certainly, Jewish Hollywood impacted the direction of Hawaiian society during the territorial years and beyond. One would just have to look at the population and tourism data, the upgrade in the direction of statehood, the advancement of legal codes, the change in political party support, the impact of the Wagner Act, and economic benefits to recognize that Hawaii was “changed utterly” (Yeats). That change was, in part, because of Jewish Hollywood’s treatment of it before, during, and after WW2 and Hawaii’s willing acceptance of it.