Ford's tenth chapter on Jewish influence in American culture opens with what he called the Theatrical Syndicate — a monopoly control of American theatrical booking and touring that Ford identified as primarily Jewish in ownership and operation. 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 virtually every major theater in America, giving its members the power to determine which productions toured nationally and which did not.
Ford documented the conflict between the Syndicate and actress Mrs. Fiske (Minnie Maddern Fiske), who refused to submit to Syndicate control and found herself locked out of every major theater in the country as a result. Ford also noted the challenge to the Syndicate mounted by the Shubert brothers — Lee, Jacob, and Sam Shubert — who built their own theater empire in competition with Klaw and Erlanger. Ford noted with apparent irony that the Shuberts were themselves Jewish, meaning that the conflict he was describing was an internal Jewish industry dispute rather than a Jewish-Gentile conflict. Ford's point was not that Jewish theater owners were malicious but that the cultural content available to American audiences was being determined by a small group of Jewish impresarios whose aesthetic and social sensibilities shaped what millions of Americans saw on stage.
Ford's chapter on motion pictures was written at the moment when Hollywood was consolidating into the studio system that would define it for the next 30 years. Ford documented the Jewish ownership and leadership 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, emigrated through Canada) at what would become MGM; and Carl Laemmle (born in Germany) at Universal Pictures.
Ford argued that this concentration of Jewish ownership in the motion picture industry was not coincidental but followed the same pattern he had identified throughout 'The International Jew': a new industry emerged, Jews recognized its potential for both profit and cultural influence, organized capital and communal networks were deployed to acquire control of the key chokepoints of the industry (in this case, the distribution and exhibition network as well as production), and by the time non-Jewish entrepreneurs recognized the industry's importance, the control structure was already set. Ford did not argue that the movies being made in 1920 were overtly propagandistic — he acknowledged that the studios were primarily producing popular entertainment — but he argued that the accumulation of cultural influence in the hands of a non-Christian minority would, over time, shift the cultural values expressed in American popular entertainment.
Ford addressed the music industry in his eleventh chapter, focusing on what was then called Tin Pan Alley — the concentration of music publishers and songwriters on West 28th Street in New York City that dominated American popular music from the 1890s through the 1930s. Ford cited Irving Berlin (born Israel Beilin in Tyumen, Russia) as the exemplary figure: a Jewish immigrant who had become the most commercially successful popular songwriter in America, with songs including 'Alexander's Ragtime Band,' 'God Bless America,' and hundreds of others. Ford argued that Berlin and composers like him — many of Jewish or Central European background — were shaping American popular musical taste in directions that reflected their own cultural backgrounds rather than the Anglo-Protestant tradition that Ford considered the authentic American musical heritage.