Flags and bunting graced every building and sound stage. There was band music and rows of picnic tables groaning under the weight of food.

L.B. Mayer, a man without a birth date

Every MGM star was expected to attend and pay homage to America-and to L.B. Mayer. For in Mayer’s mind, the two were inseparable. All complied, except Greta Garbo, a woman far too narcissistic to lavish attention on any country or person other than her own mirrored island.

Though Yiddish was his first language, L.B. Mayer delivered a rousing Fourth of July speech. Mayer could be a forceful English speaker, mixing deeply personal anecdotes—usually about his beloved mother—and soaring rhetoric about his adopted home, America.

To date, every Mayer biographer and film writer with whom I’m familiar repeats the familiar anecdote in which Mayer “claimed to have lost his birth certificate” when crossing from Europe to America. The quotation marks tell us—with a condescending wink and nudge—that Mayer fibbed in order to adopt July Fourth as his birthday, thereby conflating his identity with America’s.

However, the truth of Mayer’s birth date can best be appreciated and understood within the context of the Eastern European Jewish culture from which the junk man turned film pioneer emerged.

L.B. Mayer, real name Lazar Meir, was born in Minsk, today the capital of Belarus, but at the time part of the Russian Empire known as The Pale of Settlement where Jews were forced to reside by the viciously anti-Semitic Tzar.

For the most part, Jews of the Pale lived in grinding poverty and the constant threat of pogroms—state sanctioned murder, pillage and rape by the Cossacks. But in spite of their oppression and status as second class citizens, these Jews were overwhelmingly pious and ritually observant, preserving Judaism thorough faith in the G-d of Israel, adherence to the Torah and the study of Talmud.

This was a culture steeped in preserving Jewish traditions, traditions where Biblical and Rabbinic literature is marked by an absence of birth dates.

In the Bible we are informed that men and women lived for a specific number of years—and there is considerable Rabbinic debate at to what constitutes a year in the Biblical age. In addition, the great Rabbinic sages are, at best, recorded as living during the reign of whichever King was, at the time, ruling.

Crucial to understanding life in The Pale, is an awareness that birth certificates were avoided by Jewish families because the Tzar used this information to draft Jewish children—as young as 12-years old—into the Russian army for a period of twenty-five years. The goal being to rid the child of his religious identity and convert him to Christianity.

Studying Jewish tombstones that were documented before the onslaught of the Communist bulldozers in Eastern Europe, there is a marked absence of birth dates. Most often the name of the deceased—for instance, Jacob son of Aaron, no family names—is inscribed, accompanied with a biblical inscription, usually from King David’s Psalms, and finally, the yahrtzeit, the date of death. It is rare to see a birth date chiseled into the stone.

Most Jews confined to The Pale marked their birthday through an association with a specific Jewish holiday.

As an example, my paternal grandfather, Rabbi Samuel Avrech, also from The Pale, told me that he was born “… sometime around Chanukah.”

In contrast, I tell people that I was born in the year of All About Eve.

L.B. Mayer, like every pioneering Jewish mogul, was anxious to shed his Jewish identity. These rags to riches studio chiefs were unable to reconcile Judaism with their aspirations to be real Americans.

And so, it seems more than likely that rather than admit to a vague birth date—associated with an ancient Jewish festival—Mayer crafted the lost birth certificate story, thereby avoiding what he viewed as his embarrassing Jewish heritage.

In any case, L.B. Mayer, the man who invented the star system and who headed the most powerful studio in Hollywood, was intensely patriotic—he emigrated to America from Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada—and insisted that MGM films reflect his deeply held values.

Every Hollywood studio produced thousands upon thousands of still photos as a means of promoting their stars. There were basic, canned poses used over and over again: Starlets in swimsuits, swashbuckling actors with swords, a male and female star locked in a passionate embrace. There were also photo sets celebrating Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

And there were Independence Day stills.

To jaded eyes, these photos appear artless and heavy-handed. To be sure, the great glamor photographers George Hurrell and C.S. Bull did not snap the shutter for these novelty poses.

But to me, studio produced July Fourth pictures represent a genuine love of America and the values of democracy, liberty and freedom. These are refreshing images, free of tedious, post-modern irony, images that speak deeply of Hollywood’s Golden Age and it’s place in the American grain.

Always an explosive performer, Joan Crawford celebrates liberty.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

To be fair, I actually gave the President credit in this March 26th opinion piece entitled “Is President Obama Turning The Tables on Iran?” See, it occurred to me that the President might be undertaking a very brilliant strategy toward the Islamic Republic. If the President offers the Iranian regime nothing but carrots and gets nothing but sticks in return, then the regime is exposed as the hard case it really is. Nobody could say the President hadn’t tried every means at his disposal to make peace.

The BusHitler isn’t around for the regime to hide behind anymore. Just the opposite, in fact. President Obama has gone out of his way to accommodate the regime in Tehran, and it is unacceptable for the Iranian government to only respond with continued contempt and hostility toward America and the Obama White House. They then become exposed for all the world to see what they really are: a hard-line extremist dictatorship with absolutely no interest in diplomacy.

Yet if exposing the regime were the President’s goal, it has long been achieved. In the case of Roxana Saberi, the regime promised to release her ’soon’ on March 6th, a day after Secretary of State Clinton’s demand for her release. But instead of a timely let-go as promised, the regime not only continued to hold Roxana in Evin prison in defiance of international law and simple human decency, the charges against her escalated from buying a bottle of wine to reporting without press credentials to trumped-up charges of espionage, for which Roxana was sentenced to eight years in Evin prison in a fifteen-minute lawyer-free religious tribunal kangaroo court.

I’m sure many liberals and lefties consider the Iranian regime’s release of Roxana Saberi as a magnanimous humanitarian gesture and a hopeful sign, an opinion the President himself expressed. Yet there was nothing humanitarian at all about Roxana’s months-long unlawful detention in Evin. I remember the psychological deterioration. The hunger strike. Fears for Roxana’s safety, health, and well-being. The torment of Roxana’s parents throughout the ordeal, never mind for Roxana herself. The worldwide condemnation and outrage.

If Iran has been magnanimous here, it is only in the way an armed robber in Boston was once merciful to me as a teenager, taking everything I owned at gunpoint, but leaving me a dollar so I could catch a train back home to Cambridge instead of having to walk ten miles. And don’t think the regime released Roxana because they’re nice guys. The heat on the regime to release Roxana was nuclear. If there’s one thing dictatorships despise, it’s bad PR. Ruins their image.

For fascist dictatorships like Iran’s, as with Hollywood celebrities, Image Is All.

But Roxana was not the only glaring example of the Islamist Iranian government’s hostility and intransigence. After President Obama personally approved visas for the nine members of AMPAS and their historic cultural and diplomatic mission to Iran, Team Oscar was met fresh off the tarmac with heated and unreasonable demands for apologies and submission, even with complaints that thirty films currently in production in Tinseltown did not meet Mad Mullah standards.

Civilized nations don’t act like this. Olive Branch #1 slapped out of the President’s hand.

On March 20th, even as Roxana was still being held in Evin despite SOS Clinton’s demand for her release two weeks earlier, President Obama sent a video message of peace to the Iranian people. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, perhaps the most powerful official in Iran, responded to that diplomatic outreach by throwing Death To America rallies to remind the Iranian people that the Great Satan was just Under New Management.

Meet the new bosses. Same as the old. Olive Branch #2 slapped out of the President’s hand.

And on the day North Korea set off its second nuke, President Ahmadinejad reiterated that the West would receive absolutely no cooperation whatsoever regarding their shady nuke program. The President has since stated that Iran has a right to nuclear power, yet that is not the question here. Every nation should have the right to nuclear power. Even Japan, which has a ‘no nukes’ clause written into their Constitution, is currently operating 55 nuclear reactors for their energy needs.

Yet Japan does not find it necessary to place anti-aircraft missile batteries at their nuclear facilities, as Iran has at their nuclear site at Natanz and elsewhere. Nor has Japan, or any other nation, been caught with its pants down trying to use the New York banking system to finance the smuggling of bootleg nuclear components that have no peaceful purpose whatsoever.

The President has given Iran until the end of the year to comply with international demands to open their shady nuclear program up to inspection. Yet famed Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau testified to Congress on May 19th that Iran may be within six months of getting a nuke. At that point, the horse is out of the barn.

This takes us to yet another common talking point among liberals and lefties. If the United States and Israel can have nukes, why not Iran? The answer to me is very simple. When it comes to nuclear weapons, Sanity Matters. North Korea would sell nuclear and other WMD technologies to the highest bidder, and if Al Qaeda wins the auction, ka-ching! And Iran’s extremist leaders have sworn up and down that Israel is radioactive history just as soon as they get theirs.

Funny thing about libs, lefties, and Iranian nukes. If a radical Christian nation were racing to build illegal nukes, while at the same time promising nuclear Armageddon on a Muslim neighbor, they’d all be excreting bricks. But even all this is only scratching the surface of the horrors of the Islamist regime in Tehran. At home, they stone and hang women and young girls, murder bloggers, execute minors, hold mass hangings (as recently as May 15th), and hunt down and exterminate LGBTs.

Outside their borders, they fund and arm their terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah to the teeth, and supply heavy weaponry to both Shiite extremist militias in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Iranian EFPs alone have killed hundreds of American and British soldiers in Iraq. Yet even despite this evidence of Iranian complicity in the spilling of yet another ocean of American blood, the Obama Administration invites Iran to the Afghanistan Conference in The Hague to discuss security with the regime that is backing all the killing, and undermining every allied effort to stabilize the region.

As a bonus, Iran has now successfully exported their own anti-gay pogrom to Iraq, much as Hitler exported his to Poland. Am I the only one seeing all this? Again, what’s the script? How many times do you have to be beaten and bloodied to realize that the storyline to date just ain’t working?

For those who think the upcoming elections in Iran could bring a new era of peace and democracy to that troubled nation, should a wave of so-called ‘moderates’ win hands-down, you don’t know Iranian politics. Moderates are routinely disqualified from the election process by Supreme Leader Khamenei and his Guardian Council of Mad Mullahs. Party Members in Good Standing only.

Example. Conservative reform candidate Mohsen Rezaei, now running against Ahmadinejad, is wanted by Interpol for his involvement as an Iranian ‘diplomat’ in the worst terror attacks in Argentina’s history. That warrant was issued on May 22nd. That’s the reform candidate? And regardless of any election outcome, the theocrats rule supreme in Iran, and can overturn any government decision or ruling by the Majlis, Iran’s Parliament, if deemed ‘un-Islamic’ by the Mullahs.

No separation of church and state in Islamist Iran. The church, in fact, IS the state.

No Hope for Change on that score anytime soon. Yet despite all the hostility, all the belligerence, all the horrific human rights violations, all the arming and funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and our mortal enemies in Iraq, which is impeding our desire to detach ourselves from that mess, as in Mosul, where Iranian-funded militias are causing all sorts of bloody mischief, the President continues to consider Iran a worthy diplomatic partner. Based on what evidence, I ask you?

And now, he invites them to Fourth of July parties. What does he hope to accomplish with that? Reciprocal invitations of American diplomats to Death To America rallies in Tehran? Hell, the regime’s idea of the Fourth of July is lighting up the night sky with burning American flags and setting off fireworks on the US!

I really just don’t get this story at all, people. The Obama Plan For Iran seems to me a not well thought-out, incredibly naive, and ill-advised production that appears to be headed for a very tragic ending. Though no one in their right minds would advocate war with Iran, the President’s rose-colored glasses approach is leading us straight down that path. You don’t stop crime by taking all the policemen off the streets. You only invite chaos.

By acquiescing to Iran’s demand for ‘peaceful’ nuclear power, despite all the evidence to contrary, the President has practically assured war by leaving Israel no other choice but to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities out of pure self-preservation. Let’s face it, if Mexico were a fascist Islamist regime arming hostile neighbors who attacked us at every opportunity, was working on a shady nuke program, and was threatening our nuclear annihilation on a regular basis, what would YOU do?

President Obama now finds himself in the same position British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain found himself in at Munich in 1938, given all the glaring evidence. He can choose dishonor or war. If he continues to choose the former, he will get the latter. The Iranian regime to date has hit us with enough sticks to tell us in very clear terms that the carrots just ain’t working. Just like Chamberlain got pummeled. More pressure on the regime, not less, is what is called for here.

Hollywood Diplomacy isn’t working. Never has. Given the circumstances, I would even go so far as to demand the regime open up its nuclear facilities to international inspection and put an end to this impending threat of Iranian nukes once and for all, or cut off all their processed gasoline imports. See how fast nationwide gas rioting gets them moving in the right direction.

There are alternatives to war, like squeezing the regime until they cry uncle. But with each passing day, those alternatives grow fewer. You can practically smell the anxiety wafting over from Israel, and newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has never been one to sit by with his thumb up his ass as an existential threat grows on Israel’s horizon.

The history is clear. When the Osirak reactor posed a mortal threat to Israel in 1981, Israeli jets took it out (ironically, the Iranians also took potshots at Osirak during the Iran-Iraq War). They likewise took out a suspect nuclear site in Syria last year. And I can guarantee you, the Israelis don’t give one hoot about what Obama would think about it. This is a matter of survival to them. Would you?

Even further muddying the storyline here are President Obama’s recent declarations regarding America being a major Muslim nation, and revelations of his own Muslim heritage he found so necessary to deny during his presidential campaign. Just where exactly do his sympathies lie in all this? As an American citizen watching this bizarre story unfold, I think that’s a very fair question.

How will it all end? Who knows what plot twists lie in store? I could be totally wrong, and I hope I am. But I’ve seen enough productions like this in the past to know that happy endings are rare.

Again, I ask you, Mister President: What’s the script? Because if you want me to back this production, I want to know where this story is going. There ain’t a filmmaker or studio in Hollywood that would invest in a Cecil B. DeMille-scale venture like this without knowing the endgame. Israelis aren’t the only ones vulnerable to dispositions of intense anxiety. And if the story ends tragically, like Michael Caine in “Dark Knight,” it will bring me absolutely no joy to tell you, “I told you so.”

But I already read the book.