Ford's tenth chapter on Jewish influence in American culture opens with what he called the Theatrical Syndicate — a monopoly over American theater booking and touring that Ford said was mostly Jewish-owned and run. The Syndicate was founded in 1896 by Marc Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, along with Charles Frohman, Al Hayman, Samuel Nixon (born Samuel Nirdlinger), and J. Frederick Zimmermann. By 1900, the Syndicate controlled bookings at nearly every major theater in America, giving its members the power to decide which shows toured the country and which did not.
Ford described the fight between the Syndicate and the actress Mrs. Fiske (Minnie Maddern Fiske), who refused to accept Syndicate control and was locked out of every major theater in the country as a result. Ford also noted the Shubert brothers — Lee, Jacob, and Sam Shubert — who built their own theater empire against Klaw and Erlanger. Ford pointed out, with clear irony, that the Shuberts were also Jewish, so this fight was a dispute within a Jewish-run industry, not a Jewish-Gentile one. Ford's point was not that Jewish theater owners were evil, but that a small group of Jewish showmen decided what American audiences saw on stage, and their tastes shaped what millions of people watched.
Ford wrote his chapter on motion pictures just as Hollywood was settling into the studio system that would define it for the next 30 years. Ford listed the Jewish owners and leaders of the major studios: William Fox (born Wilhelm Fuchs in Hungary) at Fox Film Corporation; Adolph Zukor (born in Hungary) at Paramount Pictures; the Warner brothers (Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack, all born in Poland or to Polish immigrant parents) at Warner Bros.; Louis B. Mayer (born in Russia or Ukraine, who came through Canada) at what would become MGM; and Carl Laemmle (born in Germany) at Universal Pictures.
Ford argued this cluster of Jewish ownership in movies was no accident but followed the same pattern he traced through 'The International Jew': a new industry appears, Jews see its potential for both profit and cultural influence, organized money and community networks move in to seize the industry's key chokepoints (here, production plus the distribution and theater network), and by the time non-Jewish businessmen grasp the industry's importance, the control is already locked in. Ford did not claim the movies made in 1920 were openly propaganda — he agreed the studios mostly made popular entertainment. But he argued that so much cultural influence in the hands of a non-Christian minority would, over time, shift the values in American popular entertainment.
Ford turned to music in his eleventh chapter, focusing on what was then called Tin Pan Alley — the cluster of music publishers and songwriters on West 28th Street in New York City that ruled American popular music from the 1890s through the 1930s. Ford's model example was Irving Berlin (born Israel Beilin in Tyumen, Russia), a Jewish immigrant who became the most commercially successful popular songwriter in America, with songs like 'Alexander's Ragtime Band,' 'God Bless America,' and hundreds more. Ford argued that Berlin and songwriters like him — many of Jewish or Central European background — were steering American musical taste toward their own backgrounds rather than the Anglo-Protestant tradition Ford saw as the real American musical heritage.