David Thomson’s Warner Bros is part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series. The four Warner brothers, Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack, were born Jewish – their parents were Polish Jews who emigrated to North America in the late 1880s – and all except Jack remained more or less conventionally Jewish, and, indeed, dull. Jack, the protagonist in this drama of sibling rivalry, was different though: not exactly an apostate, but a convert to the secular religion of Americanism. Indeed, Jack’s was more of an American life than a Jewish life.

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