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media mogul. Technically he's not a
mogul at all, since he doesn't own the
company he manages. But he's so pow-
erful and so well paid that the manage-
ment-ownership distinction fades.
Levin isn't the first of the breed.
First was Michael Eisner, chairman of
Walt Disney Co. Eisner was hired by
Disney — the only Hollywood studio
actually founded by a non-Jew — in
1985, when Walt's children lost the
company in a hostile takeover. The
new owner, Walt's nephew Roy, had
been forced out of the family business
after Walt's death in 1966. He
returned with a largely Jewish manage-
ment team, a rich irony at a company
lona b regarded as anti-Semitic.
Levin and Eisner run a new type of
entertainment company. Each combines
movies, television (Disney acquired
ABC in 1995), cable, records, theme
parks, books and magazines into a single
company, for annual revenues topping
$20 billion. Boosters say the mix creates
synergy," meaning the parts reinforce
each other. Critics fear the companies
will become monopolies, stifling creativ-
ity and integrity.
Either way, they're the wave of the
future. Today just five mega-compa-
nies dominate American entertain-
ment. Biggest is Time Warner. Close
behind are Disney and the new Via-
corn-CBS. Fourth, with half the oth-
ers' revenues, is Rupert Murdoch's
News Corp. Fifth is Universal, bought
from Matsushita in 1997 by the
Bronfman family's Seagram Corp.
Those five — Time Warner, Dis-
ney, Viacom-CBS, News Corp. and
Universal — rule the entertainment
world in a way the old Hollywood
studio chiefs never dreamed of. And,
after all the deals and buyouts, four of
the five are run by Jews. We're back
where we started, bigger than ever.
Does it matter? It does if you're an
anti-Semitic conspiracy nut. Louis Far-
rakhan thinks a Jewish committee meets
in New York each year to decide what
movies will get made. He's wrong.
Most outside observers say the Jew-
ishness of Hollywood's Jews is meaning-
less. They're wrong, too. There was a
Jewishness in the dreams spun by the
old Jewish media moguls, of a world of
opportunity and possibility where every-
one was equal. Just the sort of America a
Jewish immigrant might hope for.
The new Jewish moguls dream sim-
ilar dreams. But their identities are
more secure while their empires are
shakier, and they rarely let their beliefs
show. It's no accident that Murdoch,
the only non-Jew in the group, is also

the only political conservative.
He's also the only one who risks
company money to promote his
beliefs. The others spend most of their
time making deals.
Too bad Murdoch wasn't bar-mitz-
vahed. fl

• Is your child gaining -too
much weight?

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run in your family?

A Safe Journey
To Al Bira

NECHEMIA MEYERS
Israel Correspondent

S

ome of my friends were taken
aback when I told them that
I was going to the Palestinian
Center for Traumatic Stress
Studies in Al Bira, a town controlled
by the Palestinian Authority. For while
Al Bira is just on the outskirts of
Jerusalem, it is virtually impossible to
know when you have moved from one
sector to the other. Most Israelis feel it
is "too dangerous" to visit there or any
place in "Arafatland."
I, nevertheless, went to Al Bira
because I was anxious to learn how the
center deals with the psychological
problems faced by Palestinians after
decades of conflict.
Its staff of psychiatrists, clinicians
and social workers couldn't have been
friendlier to me. They answered my
questions quickly and at length; more-
over, I might add, they did so in excel-
lent English (many of them hold doc-
torates from overseas universities).
My sojourn in Al Bira very much
reminded me of my first visits to the
West Bank in 1967, immediately after
the Six-Day War. In Ramallah, for
instance, I had a long talk with the
owner of a bookshop, who kept asking
about his old (Jewish) friends in
Jerusalem, and concluded my visit to
the city with a marvelous lunch at an
open-air restaurant. I went from there
to Hebron, where shopkeepers were
more than willing to sell their famous
glassware to visiting Israelis.
Each of my subsequent visits to the
West Bank, about a dozen in all, left
me more and more uneasy. There was
evident hostility on the part of the
Arabs and, of course, I wouldn't have
considered visiting a refugee camp,
even if I had been armed.
I hope that the friendliness I found
in 1967 will gradually return. My visit
to Al Bira was a hopeful indication. I I

Nechemia Meyers can be reached at
meyers@netvision.net.il

CCW M
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