In “The Limits of American Cinephilia“, Richard Brody provides a glowing profile of leftwing film critic Amos Vogel:
In 1947, when he was twenty-six and a student at the New School for Social Research, Vogel founded Cinema 16, a film society where he could show what, even then, he called independent films—“documentary, nonfiction, and experimental films,” as he later explained. He was an anti-Soviet socialist who, as a Jew, had been forced from Austria by the rise of Nazism; he saw himself as a defender of “human values” and considered Hollywood movies to be inimical to them. Cronin’s book includes a previously unpublished 1947 essay by Vogel, written for a New School class, called “The Ideals of the American Middle Class in U.S. Movies,” which begins by defining Hollywood as a “vehicle” for ideological indoctrination of the mass audience and concludes that Hollywood movies are “hokum.”
How many times have we seen this pattern: Socialist Jews who fled Nazi Germany — where they were persecuted for pushing a socialist agenda in Weimar Germany — only to arrive in America, newly free to… push a socialist agenda.
