Movie reviewer Michael Medved, one of the film industry's few observant Jews, has enraged Tinseltown with a book that charges the studios with corrupting and debasing the American publicFilm critic Michael Medved, co-host of Public Television's movie-review program "Sneak Previews," is these days finding himself on the receiving end of some heavy criticism. "Much as I disdain blacklists," wrote Variety's influential editor Peter Bart in a recent column, "a case could be made to banish Medved from all future screenings."

This harsh condemnation was one of several in the film industry sparked by the publication last month of Medved's new book, "Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War in Traditional Values" (HarperCollins, $ 20.00). In it, he argues that the entertainment industry has fallen so critically out of sync with prevailing social, cultural and religious mores in America, that it has become almost terminally dysfunctional.

"As a nation," he writes, "we no longer believe that popular culture enriches our lives. Few of us view the show business capital as a magical source of uplifting entertainment, romantic inspiration, or even harmless fun. Instead, tens of millions of Americans now see the entertainment industry as an all-powerful enemy, an alien force that assaults our most cherished values and corrupts our children. The dream factory has become the poison factory."

Medved believes that the most cursory glance at the entertainment industry whether film, TV or popular music discloses rampant cynicism and unremitting hostility to conventional family values, patriotism and socially valuable concepts like selflessness or genuine heroism. Instead there is obscenity, misogyny, mindless violence, hostility towards religion, soulless sex and worse.

Films about cannibalism and voluntary incest abound, says Medved, although neither practice is particularly widespread. Medved finds it telling, in contrast, that Hollywood has yet to make a major movie about the Gulf War, arguably the most popular armed conflict in recent U.S. history. It was no secret, though, that the film community by and large opposed the war.

Medved does not advocate government censorship or the imposition of a production code. "Obviously," he acknowledges, sitting in the sukkah of his Santa Monica home, while his small daughters, Shayna and Sarah, work on their Simhat Torah flags, "one of the important things film can do is to raise questions, challenge values and shake people up. I think that's an extremely appropriate use of the media, and I have been supportive of several films that challenged values I cared about deeply, such as Platoon.' The original Alien' and the dystopian Bladerunner' were brilliant films, some of the best of the last decade. "What I find dangerous is that you have an entire industry whose emphasis is so clearly in that direction. There's no mix, no balance."

The critic's self-appointed task as Hollywood's moral assessor is complicated by his religious background and identification. A co-founder and president of Pacific Jewish Center, an innovative and sometimes controversial Venice Beach congregation that has succeeded in attracting many unaffiliated Hollywood Jews to Jewish tradition, Medved received B'nai Zion's 1991 America- Israel Friendship Award. He may be the one Jew in the film industry who sports a yarmulke in public.

In the hinterlands of America, he says, many believe that Jews have been spearheading Hollywood's attack against American values. When Vice President Dan Quayle lashed out at the so-called "cultural elite" some months ago, not surprisingly, some observers shuddered at his choice of terminology; the term had once been used by Josef Stalin to characterize Jews.

"I was greatly upset when I heard Quayle's attack on the so-called cultural elite," recounts Medved, who still tilts toward Republican positions despite genuine unease with the outgoing administration. "I had just turned in the manuscript and felt he was poaching on this issue, trying to reduce it to a simplistic political cudgel."

Medved's background, in fact, places him squarely within the so-called cultural elite Quayle has disparaged. Born in Philadelphia in 1950, he grew up in San Diego and Los Angeles, and attended Yale as a National Merit Scholar, graduating with honors in 1969. After completing his first term at Yale Law School he took a leave of absence to write speeches and consult for politicians such the late congressman Allard Lowenstein and former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern. Medved later completed his legal studies, but since 1974 has devoted himself to writing. He is the author of several books, including "What Really Happened to the Class of '69," made into a NBC-TV mini-series, and the popular worst-movies-of-all-time tome, "The Golden Turkey Awards." As co-host on "Sneak Previews," which broadcasts to over 170 stations, he is one of America's best-known film critics.

However disquieting the prospect of seeing his argument coopted by forces possibly inimical to Jews, Medved regards as far more damaging the plethora of films coming out of Hollywood that appear to engage in outright Christian-bashing. A notorious recent example, says Medved, is a comedy called "Breaking the Rules," which was written and directed by Jews. Actor Jonathan Silverman plays a medical student who meets a seductive young woman who spirits him back to her apartment, encouragingly dons a negligee and then informs him that as a born-again Christian, she believes that Jews who don't accept Christ as their savior are doomed to hellfire. The breathless young man agrees to an impromptu baptism in her bathroom.

"Aside from presenting an insulting stereotype about the horny Jewish guy who will do anything to score," says Medved, "imagine you are a born-again Christian seeing this thing and then noticing the names on the credits. I felt horrible as a Jew. I certainly wouldn't want to see someone attacking Yiddishkeit this way."

Medved says he has defended Hollywood Jewry during frequent encounters nationwide with Christians critical of alleged Jewish control of the industry. The films they tend to find most offensive are not anti-Christian so much as they are anti-religious. Hollywood, Medved frequently reiterates, is no longer a Jewish family business. And when it was, the Jewish moguls, all of them proudly American and eager for acceptance by the mainstream, fostered movies that were respectful of traditional American values. The industry is now owned and to an increasing extent managed, Medved stresses, by multi-national corporations, like Japan's Sony (Columbia) and Matsushita (Universal), which can hardly be accused of being dominated by Jews. Those Jews who continue to make their living in the entertainment world, moreover, tend to be those most ignorant of Jewish values and least committed either to their people or to the state of Israel.

Several literary reviewers have charged Medved of making a simplistic, contradictory and unsubstantiated argument. In the New Republic, film critic David Denby called Medved's work "the stupidest book about popular culture I have ever read." The New Yorker's Louis Menand wrote that " Hollywood vs. America' is not cultural criticism; it's cultural fundamentalism." The New York Times's Christopher Lehmann-Haupt derided it as an "ack-ack attack of a book."

But Medved denies his intention is to encourage hostility toward Hollywood. "It was to make the industry aware that this hostility exists, and that it's powerful. It's a huge force in this country and the industry knows it, but so far, they are still in denial behavior."

Medved: The dream factory has become the poison factory'