Comedy Writer Rick Rosner on Hollywood, Jewish Peoples, and Antisemitism

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): A Further Inquiry

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/25

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rosner dismantles the persistent myth of a “Jewish cabal” controlling Hollywood, tracing the industry’s roots instead to entrepreneurial immigrants escaping Edison’s patent wars. He reflects on shifts from creative passion to corporate greed, recounts Soviet propaganda attempts in the 1930s, and critiques rising antisemitism in modern digital spaces. Rosner also contextualizes contemporary confusion about Israel, media polarization, and the resurgence of extremist ideologies.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Something that has arisen in many of these conversations is the idea that Jewish people—particularly a small, elite cohort—own and run Hollywood, and that they have always done so. The claim usually implies some form of organized, nefarious intent.

You have worked in Hollywood, either consecutively for twelve years on a single program—which is uncommon—or across a range of productions such as The Man Show and Crank Yankers. You therefore possess far more experience than most of the other interviewees. You also have a strong Ashkenazi background. My own background, for context, is genetically Ashkenazi—approximately ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent.

I grew up in New Mexico and Colorado, so my own practice of Judaism is reform, lapsed, and quite dilute. You probably now hold the title of my longest-standing writing partner—approximately eleven or perhaps twelve years.

To me, you are a trusted friend, colleague, and voice of reason. I expect, as always, that you will provide straightforward and honest answers. About that stereotype and your professional experience, what is the reality? How does it differ from the racist myth?

Rick Rosner: In reality, as far as I know, Jews are not uniquely dominant in entertainment, though there are undoubtedly many Jewish individuals working within the industry.

Historically, the film business in Los Angeles was built by entrepreneurial immigrants who had engaged in various trades before discovering the motion picture business. In the early 1900s, the Motion Picture Patents Company—connected to Thomas Edison—enforced patents, making film production on the East Coast difficult. That pressure drove many filmmakers west to California, where the distance from Edison’s legal reach and the region’s reliable weather created ideal working conditions. They settled in Los Angeles because it offered abundant sunshine, diverse landscapes, and year-round shooting opportunities.

The natural light was ideal. Early film studios often lacked roofs or used glass stages to take advantage of sunlight, as early film stock required immense illumination. Los Angeles proved perfect for that reason. Many of those early pioneers were Jewish immigrants—business-minded individuals who founded the great Hollywood studios.

They went on to become the studio moguls, and many of them genuinely loved storytelling. The films of the 1930s and 1940s—from Warner Bros. and other studios—were created by people who, once they found this business, took joy in its creative potential, its power, and its glamour. In contrast, eight or nine decades later, the major studios are primarily controlled by large corporate conglomerates and executives whose priorities are financial rather than artistic.

For example, Warner Bros. Discovery cancelled Batgirl in 2022 as part of a cost-saving and tax strategy, and initially shelved Coyote vs. Acme—a Looney Tunes feature—in 2023 for similar reasons. Although both films were completed and were of high quality, the corporation determined that shelving them would yield greater tax benefits. Another distributor later acquired Coyote vs. Acme and is now slated for release in 2026.

Jewish people have a long tradition of humour. If you are funny, you can find work in entertainment. But there is no conspiracy in the entertainment industry—no coordinated effort by Jews to plant ideas in people’s minds. Everyone in Hollywood wants to make money and get their creative work produced.

There have been times when genuinely insidious influences were at play. In the 1930s, Soviet communists attempted to infiltrate the American film industry for propaganda purposes. My understanding, though I cannot verify every detail, is that they sometimes employed what were called “honeypots”—attractive women who would seduce writers at Hollywood gatherings. The stereotype then was that writers had a harder time attracting attention than others in the business. As the old saying went, “Writers are schmucks with Underwoods,” referring to the popular typewriter brand of the early twentieth century.

The story goes that these “honeypots” would charm the writers and then try to persuade them of the greatness of the Soviet Union during the 1930s—a period when few Americans were actually visiting Russia and many had to take such claims at face value. As a result, a small amount of pro-Soviet sentiment appeared in certain films of that era. But that was not “the Jews being up to no good.” That was the Soviet Union attempting to influence Hollywood. There has never been a Jewish conspiracy in that regard.

As for American television, by the 1960s and 1970s, I was often frustrated with it. Much of it was uninspired and formulaic, though it was beginning to diversify its voices. Norman Lear, for instance, started producing programs featuring Black and Latino families, which was groundbreaking at the time. But many of those shows—like All in the Family—centred on people arguing constantly, which did not appeal to me as a teenager.

I was also a typical adolescent boy; I wanted television that was entertaining and, frankly, titillating. There were plenty of jokes in Lear’s shows, but they were not what I would call sexy. Even Three’s Company, which was a very white show, was hardly fulfilling in that sense. Still, television was slowly evolving.

We now have a far greater diversity of voices and subjects. The television I truly disliked was the kind exemplified by The Brady Bunch—safe, sanitized programming that avoided any real issues. Back then, everything was so clean that even The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights—wholesome to the extreme—was something to look forward to simply because it broke the monotony.

In my own experience, I have never encountered a “Jewish monopoly” on entertainment work, nor have I experienced significant antisemitism—either personally or professionally. I did not enter entertainment because I was Jewish.

I found my way into it by accident. I kept returning to high school using a fake ID, and MTV was looking for teenagers to appear as contestants on a new game show that turned out to be Remote Control. They wanted ordinary teens, and my fake ID said I still was one. I showed up, played the game, enjoyed the people, and asked if I could work for them. They said yes, though they would not pay me, and I agreed. It turned out that MTV—and, in truth, much of Viacom—was mainly run on unpaid interns at the time. My Jewishness had absolutely nothing to do with that series of events.

Later, my boss for fourteen or fifteen years was Jimmy Kimmel. People sometimes assume he is Jewish, but he is not—he is of German and Italian descent. He has no Jewish background whatsoever. That, in a sense, encapsulates my experience: no conspiracy, no special access, just the usual mix of luck, persistence, and timing that shapes every career in entertainment.

The only place where I have encountered a substantial amount of antisemitism is X—formerly Twitter—after Elon Musk purchased it and transformed it into a haven for right-wing extremism and hate. He effectively ruined Twitter.

It used to be a space where I followed hundreds of comedians and comedy writers. I could read hundreds—sometimes more than five hundred—jokes a day. I would add my own jokes into the mix, and it felt like a lively, creative, and often joyful place. Then Musk took over and turned it into a platform filled with hostility. All the reasonable people left, and many of those who had been banned for spreading hate and misinformation were allowed back.

Now, there are numerous openly antisemitic accounts. Many of them have learned how to evade moderation rules. For example, users who would be banned for typing racial slurs often avoid penalties by deliberately misspelling the words—replacing letters with numbers or symbols. The same thing happens with antisemitic speech: people write “J-O-O” instead of “Jew,” and everyone knows what they mean. These coded forms of hate speech have become common, and it is profoundly disheartening.

We are speaking at the end of October 2025, and recently, there have been multiple cases of individuals in Republican political circles—some even in leadership positions—being exposed for sharing pro-Hitler messages or making statements glorifying Nazi ideology. One congressional aide, for example, reportedly displayed an American flag with a swastika embedded in it, thumb-tacked to the wall behind his desk.

In comedy, there is a long-standing idea of “too soon.” You cannot make jokes about a tragedy immediately after it happens. For instance, you can now make jokes about the Kennedy assassination—it has been sixty years—because time creates distance. Just about any joke on that subject, if genuinely funny, would not get you into trouble today.

We are also more accustomed now to people saying appalling things publicly. We are roughly eighty years past the death of Hitler, so it is certainly not “too soon” to make jokes about him. Yet, based on what I see online, particularly in right-wing spaces, it appears that enough time has passed for some of those individuals to begin embracing him again—quietly, but unmistakably.

That kind of quiet admiration is dangerous because silence rarely stays silent. There is a growing erosion of moral clarity, and more people are now openly discussing supposed “good points” about Hitler—of which, of course, there were none. He directly ordered the systematic murder of approximately eleven million people: six million Jews and around five million others whom the Nazi regime deemed enemies of the state. His role in World War II also contributed to the deaths of an estimated twenty-five million additional people through combat, famine, and displacement. Nothing was redeeming about Hitler, yet public disapproval of those who sympathize with him seems to be weakening.

There is also widespread confusion at the moment about Judaism and Israel—some of it understandable, much of it deliberately exploited by antisemites. We are now more than two years past the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, when militants killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and took about 250 hostages. In response, the Israel Defence Forces, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, invaded Gaza. The resulting war has killed tens of thousands of Gazans—estimates suggest over 68,000, amounting to more than three percent of the population—with roughly half of those casualties being women and children, and fewer than half identified as Hamas fighters.

Israel’s campaign has been brutal, and part of the reason, in my view, lies in Netanyahu’s political motivations. He remains in power largely to avoid the consequences of his long-running corruption trial. Once out of the office, he could face conviction and a likely prison sentence. At seventy-five, he appears to be trying to prolong his tenure to delay justice. Even if removed from power, he could continue to stall proceedings for years until his defence might argue that he is too old to serve time.

He has also maintained power by forming a coalition government with Israel’s most extreme right-wing factions. Because Israel’s parliamentary system requires coalitions to achieve a governing majority, he has aligned himself with some of the hardest-line and ultranationalist elements in Israeli politics—those least inclined toward restraint or compromise.

The people who support the most extraordinary brutality toward Palestinians tend to be the ones Netanyahu has aligned himself with. According to recent surveys, roughly 68 percent of American Jews do not support Netanyahu. Yet confusion persists. Many Jews say, “I support Israel, but I do not support its current leadership.”

When I was a child attending Sunday school, we were not taught—at least I do not recall being taught—that the establishment of Israel came at the expense of the Palestinians. That part of the story was absent. For a long time, many American Jews did not know how to feel about it. During the first months after the Hamas attacks, most supported Israel’s campaign against Hamas. But as the war dragged on and civilian casualties mounted, the sentiment shifted. Now, most American Jews I know would say something like, “To hell with Hamas, and to hell with Netanyahu too.”

Antisemites in America exploit this confusion. They spread the idea that Jews worldwide are collectively responsible for the deaths of Palestinians. It has been a devastating time for Palestinians, unquestionably, and that suffering extends back decades. Their leadership has often been corrupt or incompetent almost since the founding of Israel in 1948, and Israel has treated them harshly for generations. So, Palestinians have suffered under both their own governance and Israeli policy.

It is also a disorienting period for Jews. We are not being killed in large numbers, but antisemitic incidents in the United States had already tripled over five years before the 2023 war, according to FBI statistics. Antisemitism is on the rise again, and there are entire industries built on amplifying hate. Elon Musk has turned Twitter—now X—into a kind of hate factory. Television news, meanwhile, profits from political division, manufacturing outrage for ratings.

We are also witnessing a disturbing increase in what’s known as stochastic terrorism. The United States has more than 330 million people, including about 250 million adults. If even one in a thousand of those adults is severely unwell or unstable, that’s roughly a quarter of a million people in the 99.9th percentile of volatility. When you bombard those individuals with hate-filled content on social media or partisan cable news, a small but dangerous fraction will act on it. That is stochastic terrorism—spreading hate broadly and waiting for random extremists to commit violence.

It is, in short, a difficult time for everyone.

Jacobsen: Thank you, Rick.

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