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‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers
(JTA) — In the hit show “The Sopranos,” veteran actor Jerry Adler plays mob-adjacent Jewish businessman Hesh Rabkin, who made a fortune in the music business decades earlier. In a first season episode, Hesh is confronted by a rapper seeking “reparations” for a late Black musician who he says Rabkin didn’t pay fairly for a hit record.
When Hesh responds by bragging that he wrote the hit songs he worked on back in the day, Tony Soprano corrects him: “A couple of Black kids wrote that record, you gave yourself co-writing credit because you owned the label.”
The greedy Jewish music mogul has been a common trope, from the acclaimed work of Spike Lee to the rants of Kanye West. “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” a 2003 parody of music biopics, made fun of the trope itself by making the record executives into Hasidic Jews, led by Harold Ramis. (They were depicted as friendly and not so greedy, and the film’s writers, Judd Apatow and director Jake Kasdan, are both Jewish.)
The new movie “Spinning Gold,” which opened in theaters last week, tells the real-life story of Neil Bogart, the founder of Casablanca Records and a top music executive of the 1970s. It breaks from the mold of most other music biopics in a couple of key ways: The protagonist is a music executive, not an artist or a group, and the music mogul character — in this case, another Jewish one — is not treated as a villain.
The Jewish Brooklyn native whose given name was Neil Scott Bogatz helped promote bubblegum pop and early disco, signing artists such as Donna Summer, Gladys Knight, Cher and the Village People. A notable rock signing was Kiss. In one scene of “Spinning Gold,” the Bogart character (played by Jewish actor Jeremy Jordan, who starred in the Broadway hit “Rock of Ages”) implies to Kiss’ Gene Simmons that he signed the band, in part, because Simmons’ and guitarist Paul Stanley’s real names are Chaim Witz and Stanley Eisen. He relates to them, the film argues, as fellow Jewish guys who hailed from the outer boroughs of New York City. Bogart died of cancer in 1982.
The movie covers a long span in Bogart’s life and career, and it shows him struggling for many years before striking gold by shepherding Donna Summer’s single “Love to Love You Baby” to hit status. Timothy Scott Bogart, the mogul’s son and the film’s director, did not want to depict Bogart as an unambiguous hero. In the story, the elder Bogart is shown cheating on his first wife with the woman who would become his second, and the film also makes clear that his record label was heavily in debt for many years. It does sometimes show him at odds with the talent, such as when the members of Kiss complain to him that their career hasn’t taken under Bogart’s tutelage.
“I don’t know that I looked at it as protagonist or antagonist, I think he was a bit of both,” Timothy Scott Bogart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“But I do think the character of the executive, in general, has been a much-maligned character… certainly in the music biopic world,” he added. “And that’s not who Neil Bogart was.”
He added that the personal relationships between his father and the label’s artists were always valued. He remembers his family going on vacation with Donna Summer, and Gladys Knight and members of Kiss being at his home.
The younger Bogart, who previously produced the 2019 Vietnam War drama “The Last Full Measure,” said that rather than relying on any book or article, he constructed the film based on interviews he did with his artists, executives and others involved in the story over several years.
Jews have been part of the business side of the American music industry for most of its existence, in part because of the way they were shut out of many professions in the first half of the 20th century. Music executive Seymour Stein, who passed away this week after a long career of working with the likes of Madonna and The Ramones, said in a 2013 interview that “music is something Jews were good at and they could do. All immigrants into America tried their hand at show-business.”
Some executives in the early days of the music industry — Jewish and non-Jewish — did exploit their artists, doing everything from underpaying Black artists to denying them songwriting credits or royalties. Moguls of the past with reputations for doing so included Herman Lubinsky of Savoy Records. Others, like the recently deceased Stein and Milt Gabler of Commodore Records, had better reputations. Historians have differing opinions on specific individuals.
Neil Bogart is shown with The Isley Brothers in June 1969. (Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
“There is a scholarly controversy between those who look at the moguls and say that they exploited the [Black] musicians and those who say that they encouraged and made possible Black success in music,” said Jonathan Sarna, the professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “Both use the same data, but some point to the money Jews made and others point to the musicians that Jews discovered and promoted.”
Spike Lee drew fire for his depiction of fictional Jewish music executives Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John and Nicholas Turturro) in his 1990 movie “Mo’ Better Blues.”
“In the history of American music, there have not been Jewish people exploiting black musicians?” Spike Lee said in his defense to New York Magazine in 2006. “In the history of music? How is that being stereotypical?”
Other “bad guy” examples include Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller in 2015’s “Straight Outta Compton” and David Krumholtz’s Milt Shaw in 2004’s “Ray.” “Cadillac Records,” from 2008, starred Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the Jewish founder of the legendary Chess Records who, the film implied, gave his mostly Black artists Cadillacs, but not always the money they were owed. “Get On Up,” the 2014 biopic of James Brown that starred the late Chadwick Boseman, cast Fred Melamed as famed Cincinnati mogul Syd Nathan (a mentor to Seymour Stein); journalist RJ Smith criticized the film for depicting Nathan as a “bumptious racist.”
Actor Seth Rogen discussed the trope in his 2021 memoir “Yearbook.” He tells the story of running into comedian Eddie Griffin, who at a late point in his career had been struggling to get movie roles. Griffin told Rogen to “tell your Jews to let other people make some movies!”
Rogen called this “insane because he’s really ignoring the fact that if there’s one thing that Jewish people are NOT above, it’s making money producing things that are fronted by Black people. Anyone who’s ever seen a biopic of any Black musician knows the character I’m talking about, and he’s usually very appropriately played by my dear friend David Krumholtz.” (Krumholtz played one of the Hasidic producers in “Walk Hard.”)
“It’s certainly true that, in the post-war U.S. music industry, Jews were more likely to be producers and impresarios than performers. And, given the importance of African-Americans in the post-war U.S. music industry, that inevitably created a particular kind of relationship with certain Jews in the music industry,” sociologist and music critic Keith Kahn-Harris told JTA.
“That relationship starts to be put under scrutiny and under strain from the late 1960s, as the civil rights coalition started to fall apart and people of color began to assert their agency,” he added. “It’s also true that the post-war music industry was an unregulated space with an almost-normative pattern of exploitation of performers. Put all that together and you have all the ingredients for significant African-American-Jewish tension. Plus, the rapacious Jewish impresario sits easily with ingrained antisemitic stereotypes.”
“Spinning Gold” isn’t the only counterexample to the trend in film. In last year’s Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” the Jewish label honcho character, Clive Davis (played by Stanley Tucci), is treated as a benevolent guiding light. In that case, Davis was among the producers of the movie.
“Jewish promoters, like all music promoters, were and are first and foremost business people selling a product. Their goal: promote a performer to reap income. The performers have obviously a different stake in the transaction, although both depend on the other,” said Hasia Diner, an American Jewish history professor at New York University.
“If the hero of the film is the performer then her/his perspective is the focus and almost by definition the promoter’s perspective has to reflect the antagonist encounter. Does that merit being called antisemitism? Not in my estimation. By doing so it undermines real antisemitism. It also ignores the inherent business transaction involved,” Diner said.
How can filmmakers navigate this?
“With great care,” Kahn-Harris said. “It does mean paying attention to how such a portrayal can be accurate and not feeding on deeper antisemitic stereotypes. There’s no one way of doing this. It requires care and attention to the historical record.”
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The post ‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran’s Rulers Seek to Die for God as Jews Aspire to Live for Him
Emergency personnel work at the site of an Iranian strike, after Iran launched missile barrages following attacks by the US and Israel on Saturday, in Beit Shemesh, Israel, March 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Iran’s increasingly reckless attacks across the Middle East have reached a new level. This week, debris from an Iranian missile struck the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, just yards from the Al-Aqsa Mosque — Islam’s third holiest site.
The assumption was that this proximity would protect Christianity’s holiest site. Instead, the incident highlights a disturbing shift: Iran’s hostility toward Israel now seems to include a disregard for the holy sites of other faiths, and even Islamic holy sites.
The same disregard is evident elsewhere. In the Arab town of Beit Awwa near Hebron, a makeshift beauty parlor — a converted caravan — was filled with women preparing to celebrate the end of Ramadan. It was reduced to rubble by an Iranian missile, and three women were killed. So much for solidarity with the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, missiles continue to streak across the Gulf, slamming into energy infrastructure in Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Gas fields are burning, refineries are ablaze, and the Strait of Hormuz is effectively impassable.
Oil prices are surging, sending shockwaves through the global economy. And behind it all, the Iranian regime — now increasingly opaque, guided by shadowy figures claiming to act in the name of both nation and God — promises “zero restraint.”
This, despite the fact that Iran itself is already teetering on the brink. Its economy is shattered, its infrastructure is battered, and its leadership has been irreparably weakened by targeted assassinations and sustained military pressure from the United States and Israel.
And yet, they fight on. At a certain point, this all stops looking like strategy and looks like something else entirely. Wars are usually fought for territory, security, economic gains, or – pointedly – for survival.
Even brutal wars tend to follow a basic logic: Preserve what you have, weaken your enemy, and live to fight another day. Even when nations act ruthlessly, they are still, at some level, trying to ensure that there is a tomorrow. But what we are witnessing now feels different.
When a government targets global energy infrastructure, knowing it could cripple entire economies — including its own — when it risks sacred sites and civilian lives while claiming religious legitimacy, you have to ask: What is the endgame? What if survival is no longer the primary goal? What if the objective is something else entirely — something closer to sacrifice than strategy?
Not all Iranians share this trajectory. Voices like Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi — along with many Iranians inside and outside the country — have long argued for a future defined by stability and openness, the very opposite of the path the current regime seems determined to pursue.
There is a dangerous idea that surfaces from time to time in human history — often cloaked in religious language — that elevates destruction, even self-destruction, into an act of devotion. Not everywhere, and not in every interpretation.
But in certain ideological strands, including within the worldview of Iran’s ruling elite, conflict and chaos are more than political tools. They are seen as redemptive — even apocalyptic. And once you start thinking that way, the line between serving God and sacrificing everything — your people, your future — begins to blur.
We’ve seen this before. Such movements stop trying to build anything lasting; instead, they become intoxicated by their own vision: an idealized world that must either be realized in full or swept away entirely. The present moment becomes everything. The aftermath is an afterthought.
All this makes the third book of the Torah, Sefer Vayikra, all the more striking. On the surface, Vayikra reads like a manual of ritual sacrifice. Animals and birds are brought to the altar, slaughtered, their blood sprinkled, their lives offered back to God.
It is easy — almost instinctive — to see it as a theology of death. But that is a profound misunderstanding. The sacrificial system was never meant to glorify death. Quite the opposite. As Maimonides explains, its purpose was to transform the living.
A sacrifice is not about annihilation — it is about encounter. The Torah’s word for it is korban, from the root meaning to “draw close.” It is about proximity — kirvah — about narrowing the distance between human beings and God.
The ritual sacrifice experience was meant to be unsettling — to shake a person out of complacency and force a confrontation with the fragility of life and the weight of existence. After that, a person would walk away changed. The animal remains behind, but the human being surges ahead.
Yes, there are moments in Jewish history when one is called to give up life for Kiddush Hashem. Those moments are real and sacred. But Judaism never built its identity around dying for God — or destroying in His name. Instead, the Jewish people built a civilization around living for Him.
Dying for God is a single, dramatic act. Living for God is relentless. It means waking up every day and choosing discipline over impulse, responsibility over instinct, and purpose over comfort. It means biting your tongue instead of lashing out, acting with integrity when no one is watching, and showing up — again and again — long after inspiration fades.
It means sustaining a relationship not through intensity but through the quiet consistency of daily life. And that, as anyone who has tried it knows, is far harder. Grand gestures are easy. Consistency is exhausting.
That is why Vayikra is not just a book about sacrifices. It is the Torah’s handbook for sustained holiness. As it tells us, clearly (Lev. 19:2): “You shall be holy.” Not just once, for show, or to make a point. Not only in a moment of crisis. And certainly not in a surge of religious passion.
Holiness, in the Torah’s vision, is continuous. Like the Shema, recited quietly every morning and every night, it is about keeping the connection alive. Like acts of charity, given not as a one-off gesture but whenever they are needed.
Relationships — real ones — are not built on intensity or bursts of devotion that fade quickly. They are built on constancy. Anyone can make a grand gesture. Maintaining a relationship — with another person or with God — demands something far more difficult: presence, patience, and persistence.
That is what makes the current moment so unsettling. When a regime that claims to represent God’s will begins to romanticize destruction — even self-destruction — and escalation becomes an end in itself, chaos is embraced rather than avoided. It reveals a worldview in which dying for God has eclipsed living for Him.
Judaism rejects that idea at its core. God does not ask us to destroy the world in His name. He asks us to build it, and to build within it. In particular, He asks us to build in a way that will endure beyond us. To create families and nurture them. To form communities and care for them. To pursue justice, even for those with whom we disagree. Above all, He asks us to take a flawed, imperfect world and elevate it — not to burn it down, but to engage with it.
The altar in Vayikra was never meant to be a destination. It is a starting point. It is a place where a person confronts what could be lost — and then recommits to what must be lived. It reminds us that what God truly wants is not the life that ends in sacrifice, but the life that continues — day after day — in relationship, in responsibility, and in quiet, stubborn faithfulness.
The real test of faith is not whether you are willing to die for God. It is whether you are willing to live for Him.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Joe Kent’s Resignation Isn’t Actually About the War
Then-National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”
That’s what Joe Kent, now the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter this week.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Read that without context — exactly how much of the media prefers to present it — and you might start to think that perhaps the United States is inserting itself into a conflict it has no business being part of. And frankly, I wouldn’t blame you. The clickbait headlines of the past week have incited and invited these conclusions.
But look just beneath the surface, and it becomes clear: This resignation has very little to do with the US military campaign and everything to do with a conspiratorial, antisemitic narrative dressed up as dissent. One that might resonate with figures like Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson but has no grounding in reality.
Let’s start with facts.
Iran has spent over four decades funding, training, and directing terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians — including Americans — worldwide. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias across Iraq and Syria are all backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, collectively receiving at least (and likely more than) hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
At the same time, Iran has aggressively pursued nuclear capabilities while openly signaling how it intends to use them. In Tehran’s Palestine Square, a literal “doomsday clock” counts down to 2040, marking the regime’s stated goal of Israel’s destruction, an outcome it fully intends to be responsible for.
Given that reality, it is hardly irrational for a country, or its allies, to act before those capabilities are fully realized, or before Iran further entrenches itself as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Which is why Kent’s framing matters.
When the director of counterterrorism resigns, claims opposition to military intervention, and then blames that intervention on the Jewish state, it begins to look less like principle and more like narrative-building. A deliberate contribution to the growing wave of anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
Because the idea that Israel “forced” the United States into war is not just wrong; it’s absurd.
It requires believing that a small Middle Eastern country somehow coerced the world’s most powerful military superpower into spending billions of dollars, mobilizing naval fleets, deploying troops, risking strategic alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and disrupting global energy markets, all against its will.
It also requires believing that US President Donald Trump, known for being both unpredictable and strategic, was somehow pressured into a war he did not want to fight.
That simply does not pass the most basic test of logic.
Kent’s resignation letter is his ticket to fame. His introductory essay into conspiracy college, where his classmates and apparent mentors include none other than the likes of Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly.
It also could be his ticket out of legal trouble — at least in his mind. Multiple media outlets reported that before Kent’s departure, the FBI opened an investigation into the counterterrorism chief for allegedly leaking classified information. Many observers have speculated his resignation could have been an effort to get ahead of the story and obscure the situation with as much conspiratorial nonsense as possible.
It’s worth noting that, according to a former Trump administration official, Kent frequently clashed with senior leadership, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel. Former White House staffer Taylor Budowich went even further, taking to social media to call him “a crazed egomaniac who was often at the center of national security leaks, while rarely (never?) producing any actual work.”
At its core, Kent’s argument falls into something quite familiar, a narrative as old as it is dangerous: Just blame the Jews. Even if they have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Alma Bengio is Chief Growth Officer at The Algemeiner and founder and writer for @lets.talk.conflict.
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Are American Universities the Next Front in a Gulf Rivalry?
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
A recent report by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism in higher education delivers a stark conclusion: In the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, many US campuses have shifted from being sites of debate to environments where hostility toward Jewish students is increasingly normalized. The report documents rising harassment, rhetoric that blurs into justification of violence, and a growing reluctance by university leaders to enforce their own rules when speech is framed as political activism.
That warning points to a broader institutional problem. Universities are not only struggling to respond to ideological extremism; they are also increasingly embedded in global networks of funding, influence, and political engagement. In this environment, they risk becoming more than passive hosts of debate, emerging as spaces where external conflicts are projected inward, including the strategic rivalry between Gulf states now playing out on Western campuses.
Earlier this year, the United Arab Emirates suspended government scholarships for students planning to attend British universities, citing concerns about Islamist radicalization on UK campuses. For decades, Western institutions were viewed across the Arab world as gateways to modernity — exporters of science and pluralism. Now an Arab state is signaling that those campuses may no longer be ideologically neutral.
Britain’s situation reflects long-standing policy choices. The United Kingdom does not formally designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and has long served as a hub for Brotherhood-linked activism. British academia enrolls significant numbers of Qatari students and maintains financial and institutional ties with Doha, placing campuses within a broader ecosystem of Qatari engagement and soft power. That matters because Qatar and the UAE sit on opposing sides of a wider Gulf competition over political Islam.
Since the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, the UAE has positioned itself as a regional actor seeking stability, economic integration, and the containment of Islamist influence. Qatar, by contrast, continues to host Muslim Brotherhood figures and Hamas political leaders while expanding its global reach through media and partnerships with research institutions and universities.
The United Kingdom may have presented the most immediate concern for Emirati policymakers. But the broader question of ideological influence within Western institutions extends beyond Britain. Nowhere is that dynamic more consequential than in the United States.
Disclosures filed with the US Department of Education show that American universities have reported receiving more than $4 billion from Qatar over the past two decades, placing the Gulf state among the largest foreign funders of US higher education. Institutions such as Cornell University, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and Texas A&M University have reported substantial Qatari funding supporting research programs, faculty, and academic centers.
Foreign partnerships and international funding are common in global higher education and do not automatically translate into political influence. The concern arises not from these relationships themselves, but from the political environment in which they operate — particularly when ideological movements tied to geopolitical actors become increasingly visible in campus activism.
Recent events on American campuses help explain why this matters. After the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, universities including Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, and NYU witnessed demonstrations that in some cases moved beyond criticism of Israeli policy into justification of violence, calls for a “global intifada,” and rhetoric widely understood by Jewish students as eliminationist. Congressional hearings later exposed how difficult it had become for some university leaders to state clearly that calls for genocide violate campus rules when framed as political expression.
The issue is not protest itself, which is intrinsic to academic life, but ideological activism that normalizes movements rejecting liberal democratic principles. In such an environment, Gulf rivalry intersects with Western institutional hesitation, and campuses risk becoming arenas not merely of debate but of strategic signaling.
If Abu Dhabi concludes that British universities are incubating ideologies it considers destabilizing, the same logic could extend to the United States. American universities are even more globally influential than their British counterparts, educating future ministers, financiers, and opinion leaders from across the Middle East — making them higher-value terrain in any competition over ideas.
Whether the UAE would take similar measures regarding US institutions remains uncertain. The strategic partnership between Washington and Abu Dhabi is deeper than the UAE’s educational ties with Britain. And while the United States does not designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it does designate Hamas — which originated as a Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood — as a terrorist group.
The UAE’s decision regarding British scholarships should therefore be seen as part of a broader regional struggle over political Islam and the future direction of the Middle East. If that struggle is increasingly playing out on Western campuses, Americans should ask a sober question: Are their universities merely observers of this rivalry — or are they becoming its next front?
Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian edition, Enxugando Gelo), on media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups. She was a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and earned her master’s degree at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.