Jews are dominant in virtually all controlling facets of the modern art world. In the world of "high-culture" dance, music, and theatre, for decades S. Hurok Productions was the major force in performance promotion. When Sol Hurok (born Solomon Izrailevich Gurkov) died in 1974, notes Harlan Robinson, "he was the last large-scale independent commercial producer of high culture in the United States ...  [ROBINSON, p. xv]   ... [He] was an important force behind the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts." [ROBINSON, p. xiv] An early Hurok partner was Jacob Berman. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 120] An early competitor in the "concert management business" was Daniel Mayer's and Marks Levine's National Broadcasting and Concert Bureau, with links to the fledgling NBC broadcast network. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 133] In 1972 Hurok's head of publicity, Martin Feinstein, became the Executive Director of Performing Arts for the newly created John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC. (Hurok's son-in-law, Barry Hyams, originally hired Feinstein to the Hurok firm. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 298] In 1975, the president of Hurok Concerts, Sheldon Gold, was replaced by Maynard Goldman. Gold became president later of the major talent agency ICM Artists Ltd., a newly formed classical music and dance division of Marvin Josephson Associates.

     In assessment of Hurok's closest associates, Harlan Robinson notes that "beyond his domestic employees [cook, servant], Hurok had not real close friends, with the possible exception of [Jewish violinist Isaac] Stern. The violinist was also a favorite with Peter Hyams and Peter's sister Nessa. They also remember their grandfather had a group of 'cronies,' including some Russian Jews, whom he had known for years and to whom he remained steadfastly loyal. These included his accountant and his longtime lawyer, Elias Lieberman, an old-time socialist who had helped to found the International Ladies Garment Workers Union" [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 405] At Hurok's death, he "left money to his grandchildren and to a variety of Jewish charitable organizations ... Surprisingly, only one performing arts organization was included in Hurok's will: the Musicians' Emergency Fund, Inc." [ROBINSON, H. 1994, p. 462]

     Hurok was even succesful in getting a Hollywood movie made about his life (screenplay writers: Harry Kurnitz and George Oppenheimer; producer: Georgie Jessel). [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 320] "Highest on the list of Hurok's demands [for the movie] was the removal of any Jewish ethnicity in the character of the impressario hero or his associates ...[ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 321] ... Similarly, Hurok strongly objected to the presence of 'the stock figures of cigar-smoking impresarios' present in the script's original opening sequence. Such images would, he feared, detract from the image of refinement and good taste he wanted his fictionalized self to convey ... [He did not want to appear as] some sort of back-room shyster." [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 322] In the mainstream, the resultant film was not widely acclaimed. The Jewish Ledger declared, however, that "Jews in America will be proud of the film ... Himself a very modest person, Mr. Hurok is very much interested in everything that is Jewish and lends a helping hand in Jewish affairs." [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 332]

     In the world of theatre, notes Lester Friedman, "by the early 1890s a good deal of the theatrical booking business in New York City was in Jewish hands, thanks to the Klaw & Erlanger syndicate, the Shubert brothers, Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor, the Schenck brothers, and a host of other agents and stage managers." [FRIEDMAN, L., 1982, p. 9] 

     Likewise, for decades the most prominent mogul on Broadway was a Jewish producer, David Merrick (born David Margulies). Merrick's abusive personality saddled him with a widely known nickname: "the abominable showman." Another Jewish theatre mogul, Joseph Papp (Papirofsky), founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, created the influential Public Theatre for playwrights, and produced such Broadway hits as Hair and A Chorus Line. Papp's "ego was huge," says Jewish author Helen Epstein,

       "but instead of slickness, he exuded reserve and a sobriety that made me think
        of Old Testament patriarchs ... Papp had influenced a huge number of his
        contemporaries and younger people in the arts. Hundreds of writers, actors,
        directors, composers, dessigners, producers, arts administrators, stage managers,         journalists and critics traced the beginnings of their careers to the [Shakespeare]
        Festival. Thousands more dated thier first exposure to Shakespeare to a production
        in Central Park. Millions of others had seen yhis productions on television and on
        Broadway. The name Joseph Papp embodied the history and very best possibilities
        of New York." [EPSTEIN, H., 1994, p. 10-ll]

    Oscar Hammerstein I, also Jewish, by the early years of the 20th century built thirteen theatres/music hall (often for the opera) in New York, Philadelphia, and London. "The name and personality of Oscar Hammerstein," notes Vincent Sheean, "became as familiar to the nation as if he had been elected its President ... Oscar Hammerstein ... commanded more space in the press than the Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans, than William Jennings Bryan or indeed any other personage of his day except President Theodore Roosevelt." [SHEEAN, V., 1956, p. 3-4] Hammerstein (and son Willie) even owned the Victoria Theatre ("the great nut vaudeville house of New York") which was famed for freak shows, featuring "persons notorious for whatever reason" -- "bridge jumpers and stunt flyers, divorcees, channel swimmers, and record-breakers of any kind; whether they had stage talent was irrelevant." [SHEEAN, 1956, p. 112] Hammerstein's greatest rival in the opera world (who eventually bought him out) was also Jewish, Otto Kahn, "banker and connoisseur of the arts [and] principal financial power of the Metropolitan [Opera Company]." [SHEEAN, V., 1956, p. 296]

     But the most powerful entrepreneurial network in theatre production and control has long been the Shubert company. Jerry Stagg notes that Samuel, Jacob, and Lee (Levi) Shubert "invaded New York City in 1900, armed with tireless energy, boundless confidence, a lust for money, power, and fame, and $15,000, most of it borrowed. A quarter of a center later, their worth was estimated at half a billion dollars. [The Shuberts] took control of theatre in America." [STAGG, p. 3] (Shubert CEO in the year 2000? Gerald Schoenfeld). More at ground level, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler of New York's Group Theatre were legendary and profoundly influential acting teachers. Lawrence Langner was one of the founders of the Washington Square Players.

   As Ellen Schiff notes:

     "A few years ago, Tyrone Guthrie speculated that if Jews withdrew from the
      American theatre, the institution 'would collapse about next Thursday.'
      Guthrie was no doubt assessing Jewish contributions at every level of
      of show business from artistic, to administrators, to 'angels.' [i.e,
      philanthropists]." [SCHIFF, E., 1986, p. 79]

     By 1999, Jewish entrepreneur Robert F.X. Sillerman's SFX company was causing shock waves in the live theatre and music promotion worlds. In one and a half years it had spent $1.5 billion in gobbling up other companies. The Financial Post noted that he was still attempting to "strengthen his domination of live theatre promotion in the United States. SFX also is the single largest player in [music] concert promotion. So large, in fact, that regulators expressed concern last year ... SFX is now believed to be close to purchasing its only major rival, Universal Concerts, a division of Montreal firm Seagram Company [controlled by the Jewish Bronfman family]." [LANG, A., 5-28-99, p. C1, C17]

     SFX also owns or operates over 80 venues in the United States, mostly concert halls, as well as the rights to many theatrical productions (Phantom of the Opera, et al). It also produces over 13,000 events a year. Its recently purchased Falk Associated Management Enterprises division manages 650 professional athletes and broadcasters -- basketball star Michael Jordan among them. "Talent agencies, ticketing companies, and independent promoters," notes the (New York) Daily News, "have complained that the new live entertainment giant exerts too much control over the industry." [FURMAN, 6-7-99, p. 57]  In August 1999 SFX moved into Great Britain too, purchasing the Apollo Leisure Group (one of the largest theatre and arena operators in that country) for $254 million. The purchase also included Tickets Direct and the Barry Claymore Corporation. [FARMER, N., 8-21-99, p. 13]  

     In the dance world, Martha Graham was one of the icons of this art form in the 20th century. She wasn't Jewish. But in her early seventies her "right hand man" became Ron Protas, Jewish and in his twenties, who eventually positioned himself to inherit her entire estate at her death. As Ismene Brown notes

     "When dance great Martha Graham died at the age of 96, she left him

      [Protas] everything. It was the greatest legacy to dance this century.

      Five years later Ron Protas stood as the only inheritor of the Graham

      works, the Graham company, and the Graham industry. After reading

      the section on Protas in the huge biography of Graham by her long-term

      colleague and fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille (Rodeo, Oklahoma!);

      it's hard not to expect to meet Svengali, Mephistopholes, and a leech

      rolled into one. No one could have been more damned in print. He

      caused a 'blood-letting,' 'policed' Graham, de Mille says; turned her

      against old friends, made her into an elderly fool performing into

      her seventies, and tainted a monumental career with sleazy celebrity

      games. The object of this scorn (shared by many) is a shock to meet --

      an amiably shambling, hunched-up man of 49, black curly hair,

      chubby Jewish features, constantly wreathed in smiles, very disarming."

      [BROWN, I., 10-16-96, p. 17]

    Famed dancer Isadora Duncan's accompaniest was Max Rabinovitch. [ROBINSON, H., 1994, p. 91] Duncan's husband, Russian poet Seregei Yesenin, was once publicized as an "anti-Semite." "Not surprisingly," notes Harlow Robinson, "and probably with [Jewish impresario Sol] Hurok's help, the story of Yesenin's anti-Semitism immediately hit the newspapers, elaborately embroidered." [ROBINSON, M., 1994, p. 92] As Julia Foulkes declares about the Jewish angle to the modern dance world:

     "Although the leaders of modern dance in the 1930s -- Martha Graham, Doris
     Humphrey, Chalres Weidman, and Haya Holm -- were not Jewish, Jewish
     women filled modern dance classes, companies, organizations, picket lines,
     and concert audiences. Teachers, such as Blanche Talmud and Edith Segal,
     taught performers, such as Lily Mehlman and Lillian Shapero; performances
     by choreographers such as Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow, were reviewed
     by critics, such as Edna Ocko; while organizers, such as Helen Tamiris and
     Fanya Geltman, hassled labor unions and the federal government for increased
     attention to dance. These efforts in substantiating a new art form have been
     overlooked because our view of the arts tends to focus on a few stars,
     emphasizing individual genius rather than collective momentum and organizational
     drive. Jewish women shaped the foundation of modern dance, and in the mid-
     1930s their impact was well enough known that the eminent social commentator
     [and Jewish comedian] Fanny Brice could unleash her satire on the subject,
     playing Martha Graham in a sketch entitled 'Modernistic Moe,' in which she
     cried 'Rewolt!' in a Yiddish accent." [FOULKES, J., JUNE 2000, p. 233-252]

      Even the best known mime in history, Marcel Marceau (originally Mangel), is Jewish. To his credit, he once told a Jewish ethnic newspaper: "I find it hard to identify with Jewish issues -- humanity is my overriding battle cry." [JOSEPHS, J., 3-30-01] Performer Meredith Monk is also Jewish. [TWICE BLESSED, online gay/Jewish website]

      Jewish influence in the visual arts is a huge story. "Modern art" (hereafter defined as painting, sculpture, and other visual arts) in capitalist society is a paradox. Its practitioners generally believe that their personal expressions of the human experience through physical objects are secularly sacred. Yet, to survive and prosper as artists, to garner the support to do further work that transcends mere consumerism, this belief itself must be fundamentally prostituted. "Fine art," notes anthropologist Stuart Plattner, "is similar to religion ... as an institution that counteracts the crassly commercial search for advancement in a capitalist art world. At the same time, these objects of supposedly sublime vision are bought and sold as commodities." [PLATTNER, p. 4]

     The elitist "art world" strata -- so-called "High Art"-- is the milieu of painting provenances, artist pedigrees, and the changing "avante-garde" superstar brand-names. There are, strangely, no objective standards in this strata to discern quality or value in either the artist or his creations. Not only are there no clear standards of evaluation, "in the age of conceptual, minimal, and performance art, it is often unclear what museum quality art is supposed to look like." [PLATTNER, p. 5] The confirmation of artistic importance (and, hence, quality and value) is merely the decision of the "informed opinion" of High Art insiders, whose dictates are often self-rewarding. Such insiders include an incestuous cabal of professional art curators, critics, and dealers who swim back and forth among these occupational categories of art trade. (There are other entrees to the art community, of course. One of the most prominent art critics of the 1960s and 1970s was Harold Rosenberg who was trained as a lawyer and who became an influential "art critic" after a career in advertising. [JACOBY, p. 110] As Rosenberg himself once noted, "Since the rise of art history, in the nineteenth century, art historians have been directly linked with the market prices of paintings and sculptures because of their authority in deciding attributions. By the 1970s, art history, having achieved the leading role in the day-to-day life of art, had overgrown all its theoretical boundaries and gone to seed; it was now prepared to put the stamp of value on anything, not excluding publicized fakes." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 186]

      While there is no clearly unifying and objective standard of art evaluation, there is a referential High Art history, the entwined tales of artists and wealthy business patrons who brought them to public attention and acclaim. There is also an art jargon, and meta-language "art talk" for those in the know.

     As Duncan Cameron, once-director of the Brooklyn Museum, said in a speech to the United Nations:

     "In summary, then, the traditional museum has been administered by a curatorial
     elite whose members are trained as scholars in disciplines relevant to the museum
     collections ... structured according to specific models of knowledge. These
     models are generally incomprehensible to other than those trained in a
     specific discipline and may be said to be encoded in the private languages
     of scholarship ... This situation has persisted through the reluctance of the
     public to protest it and the willingness of governing bodies to support it.
     Both have been in awe of the mystique of curatorship, both have been
     unprepared to admit that the content of the museum is meanignless and lacks
     a personal relevance ... For a few, the upper-middle class with higher
     education and therefore some key to the secret codes, it becomes a
     domain with class and status connections." [MEYER, K., 1979, p. 236-237]

       "Art has become a commodity," notes Sophy Burnham, "Collectors bought art as profitable speculation. Museums bought what their trustees (these same collectors) demanded they immortalize. Critics pushed art in which they had financial interest ... The artist had no part in these exchanges. Once his work passed out of his hands ... he received no further royalties. He watched the prices rise and the dealers in art get fat ... Art was whatever would sell." [BURNHAM, p. 9]

     "On the assumption that "he who pays the piper calls the tunes," says Judith Huggins-Balfe, "critics have accused both individuals and institutional private patrons of altering some presumably 'natural' development of art, in their own class and commercial interests." [BALFE, p. 314] Si Newhouse, for instance, (whom we have met before as chairman of the huge Advance media chain)," said dealer Leo Castelli, "is one who has put together a perfect choice of artists, starting out with Pollack and de Kooning." [WATSON, p. 104]

      While trained "art professionals" are influential, the foundation of the modern art world is those who buy and sell it (sometimes these very art professionals). Such people decide what has value, and even what art is and is not. Most do not truly care about cutting edge perceptual insights or transcendent visions but, rather, money. Most buying and selling of art today, especially in the realm of High Art, is an economic investment. In 1984 major art journals, including ArtNews and Art and Antiques, even began publishing lists of major art collectors. 60% of the list were Americans. The next most populous were Japanese, then Germans. [WATSON, p. 388] (In more recent years, with Japanese economic woes, Japanese influence has correspondingly diminished and a significant percentage of today's "German" art activity we can safely presume to be Jewish).

     The heart of the American (and international) High Art market is New York City. "Although Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and other centers have large demands [for art]," says Stuart Plattner, "New York is hegemonic on the national scale, and even the international level, meaning that only elite gallery exposure in New York creates art-historical significance." [PLATTNER, p. 8] New York City is also home for the most important art magazines and other periodicals whose sphere of reportage is usually its immediate vicinity. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80% of the 2500 core "art market' personnel -- art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors -- were Jewish. [BURNHAM, p. 25] These people -- and their progeny -- in New York largely control American artistic tastes and values at the most important tier. (In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravitz, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn). [ESTEROW, M., SUMMER 2001]

      When Alice Bellony-Rewald (an artist, critic, and art model) first moved into the New York art world from France, she noted that :

       "I was plunged into a world of highly sophisticated Jewish art collectors,

       and it took me a long time to reconcile my mental picture of speakeasies

       and the Wild West with people who spoke five languages fluently and

       lived surrounded by period furniture, Meissen china, and Old

       Masters." [PEPPIATT, p. 16]

     Jewish author Howard Jacobson wrote in 1993 about his experiences with prominent New York City art critic Peter Schjeldhal:

     "'I came to New York to be Jewish,' [Schjeldhal] once told me.

       'Did you make it?'

       'No.'

       'What were you before?'

       'Porcelain-sink Lutheran.'

       'And now? Since you haven't made it across as one of us?'

       He paused. He wasn't sure he wanted to be that un-Jewish.

       'A certain transformation has occurred; but a certain gulf

       remains.'

       It takes me a little while to put it together -- the fact that just about

       every gallery/space/loft we go into is run by a Jew. This isn't Jewish

       how I like it. This is slow-drawl, camp Jewish, retreating, high-toned,

       not very sense-of-humorish Jewish. The pallid women gallery-owners

      whose walls and wine we absorb are also Jewish." [JACOBSON, H.,

      1995, p. 84-85]

      Famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz notes in her biography her avenue into the upper tiers of the art world: "Polly Guggenheim, a sculptor who'd lived in Paris most of her life, became our guide into the art world." [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 324]

      In 1996, Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton admitted that the main reason she went into a career as an art historian was to be in a field dominated by Jews:

       "I wanted to be where Jews were -- that is, I wanted a profession that

       would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the