Very quickly, Protestants attacked the movie industry as a Jewish conspiracy to undermine "Christian" and "American" morals, especially in a period of large-scale immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Such beliefs in Jewish control, power, and conspiracy are traditional elements of anti-Semitic thinking. The role of these "Hollywood Jews" has been debated for years, but one thing is agreed on: most of them avoided identifying themselves as Jews at all, since their major desire was to assimilate and be accepted by the non-Jewish white establishment.