Dorothy Parker and anti-Semitism

Definition of anti-Semitism: discrimination, prejudice or hostility towards Jews.

Dorothy Parker fans know her best-selling books, poems, and short stories. They are also well aware that Dorothy co-founded the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s. In the 1930s she was nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplay for A Star Is Born. Also in the 1930s, Dorothy Parker co-founded the Anti-Nazi League and the Screenwriters Guild. Tragically, she fell victim to the McCarthy hearings and found herself, along with her friends Lillian Hellman and Dashielle Hammett, a victim of the communist Hollywood Black List scare of the 1950s.

During World War II, Dorothy Parker passionately protested the persecution of Jews in Europe. Her passion for speaking out boldly for human rights made her a hero on both coasts and in half the world.

Few of Dorothy’s fans knew that her maiden name was Dorothy Rothschild. Dorothy’s mother, Annie Eliza Martson Rothschild, was of Scottish descent and died at the age of 44, when Dorothy was 5 years old. Dorothy’s father, Jacob Henry Rothschild was of German Jewish descent, Dorothy Parker lived in an era when anti-Semitism was at its peak. Therefore, he was very sensitive to the unwanted discrimination that accompanied the knowledge of his Jewish name, Rothschild. Therefore, she kept her first husband’s last name, Edwin Pond Parker II, after their divorce, and enjoyed writing under the name Dorothy Parker.

In the Jewish religion, a child of mixed parents is considered Jewish only if his mother is Jewish. In the Jewish religion, when the father is only Jewish, the child is not considered Jewish. The reasoning for this is that people knew that a child came from its mother; however, in those days you couldn’t prove who the real father was … So someone with a gentile mother and a Jewish father had the distinction of bearing a Jewish last name, but other Jews did not consider him Jewish because the mother was not bean.

Such prejudice on various fronts would affect Dorothy Parker, who hid the fact that her father was Jewish from friends and fans. Amazingly, in 1936 Dorothy helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The League’s membership grew to over 4,000 members, raising much-needed funds for persecuted Jews abroad. Some accused the Anti-Nazi League of being a front for the Communist Party, which could possibly have been the basis for Dorothy’s eventual persecution by McCarthy’s anti-Communist hearings in Hollywood.

In 1949, Dorothy Parker wrote the screenplay for the film The Fan, based on Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan. The director of the film was Otto Preminger, whose most notable film, Exodus, has the merit of ending the Hollywood blacklist in 1960 when he openly acknowledged the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in the film. Exodus was a “Zionist epic” that depicted the true story of a ship of refugees who were denied entry to the United States because they were Jews.

Having grown up surrounded by anti-Semitism, Dorothy Parker was particularly sensitive to discrimination against blacks. When Dorothy Parker passed away from a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 73, she bequeathed the rights to her writings to Martin Luther King, Jr., who in turn left them to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1988, the NAACP dedicated a memorial garden in memory of Dorothy Parker. She is recognized for her efforts to maintain “the ties of eternal friendship between black and Jewish peoples.”