Dorothy Parker and antisemitism

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 Writers Guild. Tragically, she fell victim to the McCarthy hearings and found herself, along with her friends Lillian Hellman and Dashielle Hammett, victims of the communist Hollywood Blacklist scare of the 1950s.

During World War II, Dorothy Parker passionately protested the persecution of the Jews in Europe. Her passion to courageously defend human rights made her a hero on both coasts and on the other side of 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 she 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 height. She therefore, she was very sensitive to the unwanted discrimination that accompanied the knowledge of her Jewish name, Rothschild. She therefore retained the surname of her first husband, Edwin Pond Parker II, after her 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 only the parent is Jewish, the child is not considered a Jew. The reasoning for this is that people knew that a child came from his mother; however, in those days you could not prove who the real father was… So someone with a Gentile mother and a Jewish father had the distinction of carrying a Jewish last name, but was not considered a Jew by other Jews because the mother was not Jewish.

Such prejudice on several fronts would affect Dorothy Parker, who concealed from friends and fans the fact that her father was Jewish. Remarkably, in 1936, Ella 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 cover for the Communist Party, which could possibly have been the basis for the eventual persecution of Dorothy 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 film’s director was Otto Preminger, whose most notable film, Exodus, is credited with ending the Hollywood blacklist in 1960 when he openly acknowledged blacklisting screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in the film. Exodus was a “Zionist epic” that described the true story of a ship of refugees who were denied entry to the United States because they were Jewish.

Having grown up surrounded by antisemitism, Dorothy Parker was particularly sensitive to discrimination against blacks. When Dorothy Parker died of 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 the Colored People. In 1988, the NAACP dedicated a memorial garden in memory of Dorothy Parker. She is praised for her efforts to maintain “the bonds of eternal friendship between the black and Jewish peoples.”