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Amazon Prime doc details the wild life of Jewish gangster Myron Sugerman
(New York Jewish Week) — Mafia movies will have you believe that wise guys aren’t born, they’re made. But that wasn’t the case for Myron Sugerman, a second-generation Jewish gangster who is the subject of the new documentary, “Last Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugerman.”
Sugerman — who made his mark (and his money) by becoming, as he says in the film, the “godfather of the illegal slot machine business” — took up the mantle from his father, Barney “Sugie” Sugerman, who kept company with and served as a partner in the New Jersey Jewish mob alongside the likes of Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Joe “Doc” Stacher and Abe Green.
In his heyday, Sugie cavorted with the legendary mobster Meyer Lansky, as well as some other bold-faced names who made their money a little more honestly, like singers Perry Como and Tony Bennett.
“Our lives were basically in Newark and Manhattan,” Sugerman, 85, says in the documentary. “Tenth Avenue on the west side was Jukebox Row. From 42nd Street all the way up to 45th, 46th Street were all jukebox operators. I would go into the city in the afternoon after school, and on Friday nights we used to go to Madison Square Garden with all the fellas who worked for my father.”
Per Sugerman, his father “missed nothing” — he had his hand in everything from “bootlegging, boxing, fixing fights, thievery” to “jukeboxes, vending machines, pinball machines, slot machines,” all of which were either illegal or could be used as fronts in money laundering schemes.
But these Jewish mobsters could be called upon for nobler pursuits as well. In 1939, Newark was home to both large Jewish and German populations — Fritz Kuhn, leader of the American Nazi party, included. As Sugerman tells it, Kuhn and his cronies would follow their meetings and rallies with trips into Jewish neighborhoods where they would terrorize their residents. Together with the Jewish prize fighter Nat Arno, Sugie’s associate Longy Zwillman formed an association called The Minutemen, named after the New Englanders who took up arms against the British.
The Newark Minutemen would throw stink bombs into the halls where Nazis met. “As the Nazis came running out, our guys were like a gauntlet. They’re standing there with the monkey wrenches and baseball bats and brass knuckles. And they beat the s*** out of these Nazis,” as Sugerman tells it.
Sugerman’s version of these stories might be lost to time if it weren’t for director Jonny Caplan and his production company Tech Talk Media. Released last January — and now available to stream on Amazon Prime — Caplan’s film features extensive interviews with Sugerman himself, a character who might remind you of your own Jewish grandfather — and also the guy who keeps putting the fix on the temple’s bingo game.
In a recent Zoom interview, Caplan told the New York Jewish Week that he was “kind of blown away” when he first heard Sugerman’s story, courtesy of a colleague who was helping Sugerman with his 2019 memoir, “The Chronicles of The Last Jewish Gangster: From Meyer to Myron.”
Later Caplan watched Sugerman’s interviews online. “He’s just such an amazing character that I fell in love with,” Caplan said. Although Tech Talk mostly covers the world of innovation — previous productions include documentaries about flying taxis and “robots that look after the elderly” — Caplan said they couldn’t resist bringing Sugerman’s story to life.
Born in 1938, Sugerman took up the family business at the age of 21, following his graduation from Bucknell University. Fluent in six languages (seven, if you count profanity, as Sugerman says in the documentary), he was given $3,000 in travelers checks by his father and sent off to Europe to start an “export business.” Sugerman hit a number of countries on the Continent, all while building his reputation and ability to sell pinball machines, slot machines and arcade equipment.
Eventually, Sugerman’s specialty would become Bally Bingo pinball machines, an addictive, “dynamite” arcade game that attracted gamblers and operators who handed out prizes. After its interstate shipment was banned in the United States in 1963, Sugerman would buy parts from all over the country in order to get the machines assembled. “I was the biggest contrabandist and bootlegger of Bally Bingo machines across the states,” he recalls in the documentary. Those efforts got him named in three state cases and three federal cases for illegal gambling and organized crime. And yes, he did serve jail time.
In a highlight of the documentary, Sugmeran is eventually connected with the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, Sugerman happened to find himself in Vienna. Feeling galvanized by the successful hunt for the man who drew up the plans for the Holocaust, Sugerman knocked on Wiesenthal’s door and asked how he could be of service. The answer, like so many other things in life, was money.
Myron Sugerman, right, meets with famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in New York City in an undated photograph. Sugerman says he “sent very generous amounts of money” to help Wiesenthal hunt down war criminals. (Myron Sugerman/Impossible Media LLC)
“I was religious every week — we sent very generous amounts of money to Wiesenthal,” Sugerman says in the film. The pair struck up a friendship, and with each trip Wiesenthal took to New York City, Sugerman says Wiesenthal’s first call was to him. Eventually, prior to one of Sugerman’s trips to Asuncion, Paraguay, Wiesenthal asked the contrabandist to get him information regarding the whereabouts of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who was rumored to have decamped there. I don’t want to give too much away, but if you enjoyed seeing Nazis killed in the film “Inglourious Basterds,” you might like how this story ends.
Sugerman provides details of his life, confessional style, as he leads the camera crew to local haunts in Little Italy and Brooklyn’s Kings Highway. Along the way, he meets friends who help him tell his tales of the old days, like “Baby John” Delutro, also known as “The Cannoli King,” and Johnny Chinatown, who points out a Chinatown landmark seen in “The Godfather.” Both are 20-plus years Sugerman’s junior, but still have ties to the Mafia life he knows and loves. (Those old days might be gone, but the incredible nicknames persist.)
At Grill Point, a now-shuttered kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, we see Sugerman chatting with Moishe Peretz, a retired mob boss who calmly recalls getting shot in the chest in 2016.
Though the mob plays a central role in Sugerman’s identity, his Jewish bona fides are just as significant. “The Jewish gangster really had a need, a psychological need, to show that the Jews could be just as tough as any other ethnicity, because they were going to break with the 2,000 years of our heads down, living in the ghetto, living fearful,” he says in the film. “There was definitely no identity crisis. These Jews were tough and ready to prove it.”
These days, Sugerman lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Clara. Though his life may be quieter now, his sense of humor and joie de vivre endure, and now as much as ever he’s committed to the work of defending the Jewish people. “Most guys at 85 years of age, if they’re lucky to be alive, are sitting in front of a lawn of grass, watching the grass grow,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “But I’m not comfortable — I’m not comfortable when the hair on the head of a Jew is moved out of place by an antisemite.”
To that end, Sugerman is putting together an organization with the goal of promoting Jewish pride — and he encourages all those interested in joining to reach out via his website.
More than anything, the toughness and tenacity of the Jewish people is a message that Sugerman wants to continue to send today. “That the era of bending your head, that the era of dismissing antisemitism as a mosquito on the tuchus of an elephant is over with,” he said.
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Trump administration drops demand that Penn turn over list of Jewish employees
(JTA) — The Trump administration has withdrawn a controversial demand for the University of Pennsylvania to produce a list of Jewish employees as part of a larger investigation into alleged employment discrimination at the Ivy League university.
The withdrawal ends a round of lawsuits over the legality of such a demand, which alarmed Jewish groups on campus and beyond.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is overseeing the probe, did not explain its decision to drop the subpoena in its Thursday court filing. A representative for the agency declined further comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In its own statement, Penn, which had been engaged in a legal back-and-forth over the school’s refusal to compile such a list, said it had “protected its employees’ rights.” The school had shared the names of Jewish staff who had consented to the probe, but resisted sharing the names of all Jewish staff.
“Penn remains committed to fighting antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination, to ensure everyone it serves can learn, work, and thrive,” a university spokesperson said.
The unusual demand, first made in November, came as the Trump administration has aggressively targeted a handful of elite schools accused of failing to curb antisemitism on campus. Most of the time, its intervention has come through the education and health and human services departments, which have cited civil rights violations in seeking to yank billions of dollars in federal funding.
But the EEOC has gotten involved, too, arguing that Penn, in particular, had failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli employees from discrimination. Its case against Penn originated in 2023, and its subpoena had included demands to reveal members of “all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation groups” that were “related to the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.” The subpoena also targeted the school’s Jewish studies personnel.
Jewish groups, including Penn Hillel, had argued against the demand, as did free-speech organizations. In an email, Penn Hillel’s director, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg, told JTA the organization welcomed the news.
“Over the past year, I have spoken with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff across the University of Pennsylvania regarding this issue. Every single person expressed objections to the EEOC’s attempt to compel the University to surrender data on Jewish identity and affiliation,” Greenberg said.
He continued, “While many in our community share Penn Hillel’s conviction that campus antisemitism requires urgent, sustained action, demanding ‘lists of Jews’ was a fundamentally incorrect and inappropriate way to address it.”
Earlier this year the agency chair, Andrea Lucas, defended the list-of-Jews demand during an antisemitism conference at Harvard. Lucas told the roomful of Jewish professionals that her office needed the list to identify “potential victims,” including as a means of distributing potential payouts.
(L-r) Andrea Lucas, chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, speaks with Brandeis Center founder Kenneth Marcus at an antisemitism conference held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 16, 2026. (Dillon Meyer Media)
“At some point, either the government will know information about individuals related to their religion or we will not be able to enforce the laws on their behalf,” Lucas said at the time.
A federal judge had ruled in March that the request was reasonable, dismissing efforts by Penn and Jewish groups to declare the ruling unconstitutional. However, the judge delayed the deadline by which Penn would have been forced to comply, giving the university more time to appeal.
The EEOC’s larger antisemitism inquiry into Penn continues.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Austrian town turns Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to keep neo-Nazis at bay
(JTA) — How do you stop neo-Nazis from meeting up at Adolf Hitler’s birthplace? Station officers there around the clock, of course.
That is just what the small town of Braunau in Austria has done — but the officers are not providing surveillance. Instead, they will be on site as part of their regular duties, because Hitler’s first home has become a police station.
After years of discussion, planning and construction, the new police station on a corner near Braunau’s town square opened July 22, in the house where the future Nazi dictator was born in 1889 and spent the first few months of his life.
The building looks different, and there will now be surveillance cameras out front. The city’s aim was “to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a recent tour.
At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner emphasized that today’s police are “the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” The Associated Press reported.
Some 50 local and district police officers will be stationed at the new site. And there will also reportedly be a police training program on issues related to human rights.
“They will probably also do antisemitism training. And I think that’s a good thing,” Hannah Lessing, who was on the expert commission to decide what should be done with the property, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. Lessing, who co-chairs the Austrian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, was opposed to tearing down the building:
Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, Austria, as seen on Jan. 15, 2015, as the Austrian government considered forcing a sale to prevent the site’s misuse. A commemorative plaque denouncing fascism was preserved during a later renovation into a police station. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
“I don’t like historical cancellation. But we should use it for something,” she said. “A museum was for me not a good idea, because it would attract automatically people who are probably Hitler fans.”
Thomas Ulmer is a retired officer with the Stuttgart police who fought to turn a former Gestapo headquarters in his German city into a place of remembrance. He said the new site could benefit the officers who are stationed there.
“It’s very important to convey the memory and the history to young people, to young police trainees,” he said.
Today — as an activist in the VelsPol advocacy organization for queer staff in the police and justice system — Ulmer brings police recruits to the Hotel Silber Memorial and Learning Center, where they learn how police were co-opted into the Nazi machine.
Recently, he helped design an exhibit in another former Hitler dwelling that became a police station: a nine-room apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. The exhibit, which spanned 100 years of history, included the years in which Hitler’s popularity grew after the Beer Hall Putsch, his attempted coup in 1923.
The Munich station’s head, Andreas Franken, doesn’t hide the building’s history, Ulmer said. In his office, Franken even has the famous photo of the American war photographer Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bathtub.
“When people come to him, whether they’re new police officers or just other people, they always ask him about this picture, and then he can tell the story of the building again,” Ulmer said.
Back in Braunau, the new police station “will continue to be known as ‘Hitler’s birthplace’ and will attract visitors accordingly,” laments Austrian filmmaker Günter Schwaiger, who had opposed the plan back in 2023. In his documentary, “Who’s afraid of Braunau?”, he claimed that Hitler himself wanted to have local officials move into the rooms where he was born.
“It used to be a modest house, but now the Austrian government has turned it into a monument,” he said in an email to the JTA. “We probably need a different generation — one that isn’t afraid of the truth and has the courage to truly come to terms with the past. I hope that generation will emerge.”
A swastika flag flies outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, Austria, around 1933. (Imagno/Getty Images)
Also disappointed is California attorney Cary Lowe, who was born in Braunau to Holocaust survivors. He was originally in favor of turning the site into a “House of Responsibility.” That plan is still alive, with another local site in mind. The city did “their best to come up with a result that’s acceptable to everybody,” he said. “And now it’s a done deal, so I think we just have to move on.”
The building where Hitler was born dates back to the early to mid-19th century and sits, along with some other structures, on about three quarters of an acre. It has been privately owned, and over the years has housed a school and a branch of a disability support organization.
In 1989, a memorial stone taken from the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp was erected in front of the house, and inscribed with a warning “Never again fascism.” Noticeable visits by neo-Nazis declined since then, Cary Lowe told JTA.
“Yes, they still get the occasional individual that wants to carry out a pilgrimage or do a photo op or something in front of the house,” he said. “But it’s on a much smaller scale.”
Braunau’s mayor, Johannes Waidbacher, stands outside the renovated police station in Hitler’s birthplace, July 16, 2026. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2017, the city of Braunau expropriated the vacant property and organized an expert commission to debate possible uses, or even demolition. Suggestions ranged from the serious — a museum — to the wild: An Austrian artist collective called Total Refusal suggested that a controversial statue of Vienna’s wartime mayor Karl Luegers, a devoted antisemite, be picked up by helicopter and dropped over Hitler’s birth house.
But that was not to be. After deciding on the police station option, renovation began. Even then, the idea that Hitler fanatics might seek relics led the city to grind down all the construction rubble and bury it in a secret location.
Lessing hopes that the new police station will reach the younger generation, with lessons of the past accessible in Braunau without having to journey to concentration camp sites in the region.
“We didn’t need another museum,” she said. “We have Mauthausen for that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Stabbing of Jewish man in Manhattan prompts calls for Mamdani to turn down temperature
The stabbing of two men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday — one of whom was wearing a kippah on his way home from a Tisha B’Av service at a modern Orthodox shul — has intensified New Yorkers’ fears of being visibly Jewish in public, leaders and community members said.
“Fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers. That is not normal,” Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said at a press conference Friday near the location of the stabbing. “Today, Jewish parents are asking whether it is safe for their children to wear a kippah or a Magen David in public. Synagogues preparing for Shabbat are wondering whether they can afford additional security.”
Police said on Thursday afternoon, the suspect — identified as 51-year-old Raul Morales — stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife before approaching a Jewish man and stabbing him in the torso with a screwdriver. Authorities said he yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack. Both victims are expected to recover.
Morales is expected to face charges on Friday. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement Thursday that while the attacker did not have a known history of mental health issues, “the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the attack as “horrifying” and wrote on X that “these hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.”
At Friday’s press conference, City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she was having conversations with her daughter about whether it was safe to wear a Jewish star and with her sons about whether they should wear yarmulkes.
“How can this be normal?” Menin said. “We have to change what is happening in our city.”
But even as New York Attorney General Letitia James urged people not to “assign any particular outcome to this investigation,” adding she did not want to “draw any conclusions,” some leaders were quick to link the attack to a rising political temperature.
Some directly expressed their anger with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who on Wednesday issued a video address conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Unable to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The UJA-Federation of New York and Orthodox Union said at the time that the mayor’s words put Jews in greater danger.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, wrote in an open letter addressed to Mamdani that “you promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”
Mamdani was not at the press conference, and organizers did not answer a question about whether he had been invited.
“His words have profound, real-world consequence on us,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told the crowd. “Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequence for the Jews of New York. He must stop. He must stop.”
Rabbi Yosie Levine of the Jewish Center — where the victim had attended a Tisha B’Av service before he was stabbed — also expressed disappointment at Mamdani’s remarks.
“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside of my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak,” Levine said. “The police were there to protect him. Today, every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”
“No elected official is responsible for every act of hate, but every leader is responsible for helping shape the climate in which we all live,” Treyger said.
New York City Comptroller Mark Levine at Friday’s press conference cast the attack as part of a broader trend of rising attacks on Jewish New Yorkers, citing 178 acts of antisemitic hate crimes in the first six months of this year.
Menin pointed to the dozens of swastikas painted on a playground at a Brooklyn playground earlier this year and swastikas spray painted on homes and a synagogue in Queens last month. On Wednesday, a Jewish man was shoved to the ground in Brooklyn, with the attacker making antisemitic remarks, leaving the victim with back and hip injuries.
Thursday’s attacks were just the latest in a series of crimes targeting the Jewish community, they said.
Rabbi Mark Wildes of the Manhattan Jewish Experience told the Forward he was teaching his weekly class when the attacks occurred nearby.
“It literally happened on my block,” he said. “Two of my kids were out and about, and this guy was still at large before they had caught him.” Wildes, whose children are visibly Jewish, said he and his wife immediately tried to get them home. “We were saying, ‘Where are they? Get them inside.’”
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