A Hollywood exhibition at the Academy Museum, Los Angeles, has attracted criticism for highlighting the “sins” of the mostly Jewish immigrants who founded the industry rather than praise their achievements.

Lawrence Bender, an American film producer, has condemned the exhibition as “uninspired”, “joyless” and full of bias for its derogatory language about the industry’s leading legends. He also said the exhibition was “complicit in the hatred of American Jews, by using anti-Semitic tropes and dog-whistles”.

He said: “You think ‘Oh, we’re back in the shtetl, we’re back in the ghetto,’” speaking after seeing the Hollywoodland show at the museum owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas), the organisation behind the annual Oscars.

Harry Cohn, the co-founder of Columbia Pictures, is accused in information placards of being a “tyrant and predator” who modelled his office after Mussolini’s, “built to intimidate anyone who entered”. 

Harry Warner of the Warner Brothers is described as “frugal” and a “womaniser”, while Carl Laemmle, the president of Universal, is called out for nepotism.

“Why did they choose these words?” demands Bender, who produced Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting and Reservoir Dogs, telling Los Angeles Magazine: “Nowhere else in the museum do they talk about anyone’s personal life like that. Why don’t they talk about their love and joy of filmmaking like they do in every other part of the museum? It’s a complete double standard.”

The criticism was echoed by Patrick Moss, the television writer, who said: “The exhibit is a lazy and insidious condemnation of Hollywood’s founders,” writing in an outraged letter to Ampas: “The focus is not on the founders’ achievements, but on their sins.”

Alma Har’el, the music video director, wrote to Ampas with accusations of anti-Semitism and resigned from the museum’s inclusivity committee after touring Hollywoodland on opening night.

The display had been intended to correct the impression that the immigrant founders of the film industry had been completely written out of the story when the Academy Museum opened in 2021. 

It prompted the chief executive of America’s anti-defamation league to ask “Where are the Jews?” when he visited, while John Goldwyn, the producer whose grandfather Sam founded MGM, called the omission of the founders’ contribution “an egregious oversight”, adding, “If you’re going to have a museum…that celebrates arguably the most significant art form of the 20th century, how is it possible not to acknowledge the Jewish men who started it all?”

Leading donors have demanded redress of the fact the industry founders had been excluded, while Marvin Hier, the double-Oscar-winning rabbi and founder of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, called the omission “a form of intellectual discrimination”, adding, “Without the Jewish leadership in Hollywood, there would be no Hollywood.”

In response, the Academy Museum promised that Hollywoodland, which opened in May, would comprehensively tell the story of several seminal studio heads in the first permanent exhibition in the £400 million museum.

Dara Jaffe, its curator who has borne the brunt of the criticism for the exhibit, claimed the show would get prominent space in the popular area where visitors had previously paid to be filmed picking up their own Academy Awards in a simulated ceremony. 

But its location has been condemned as small, dark and unimpressive, “up on the third floor where nobody is going to see it”.

Ampas has acknowledged receiving letters of criticism and promised to “move quickly and thoughtfully” in addressing concerns.