Experts: Walt Disney was a lot of things, but he wasn't an anti-Semite

Walt Disney.
(Image credit: R. Mitchell/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

One thing that viewers won't be seeing on the upcoming American Experience documentary on Walt Disney is any discussion about the animation legend being anti-Semitic.

Panelists at the Television Critics Association press tour for Walt Disney — including documentarians, authors, and people who actually worked with Disney — all agreed on Sunday that he did not harbor any Nazi sympathies, despite rumors to the contrary that have been swirling since the 1940s. Director and producer Sarah Colt said she looked for evidence while working on the series, but couldn't find any (that wasn't the case for another man she made a documentary about, Henry Ford, "who was a virulent anti-Semite"). "It's not based on any truth, so we saw no reason to bring it up in the film," she said. "It wasn't relevant to who he was, so it's not part of the film."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.