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From Mel Brooks to Elaine May to Ethan Coen: Producer Julian Schlossberg writes memoir about working with Jewish stars over 6 decades
(JTA) — On a couple of occasions in Julian Schlossberg’s early life, he found himself in parts of the United States where some people he talked to had never met a Jewish person. The first was a stint in the Army, the second was while selling movies to rural television stations.
But over the next six decades — once Schlossberg embarked on a long and successful career that included stops as a Hollywood studio executive with Paramount Pictures and later as a prolific distributor of movies and producer of off-Broadway and Broadway shows — he was rarely the only Jew in the room ever again.
Schlossberg tells those stories and many more in his new memoir “Try Not to Hold It Against Me: A Producer’s Life” (Beaufort Books). He writes about how he went from a child in the Bronx to an influential show business figure who mingled and worked with countless movie stars, having enjoyed a long career that shows no signs of being over at age 81.
Schlossberg was born in 1941, and grew up in what he describes as a middle class family, in a Bronx neighborhood that at the time was heavily Jewish and Irish. His father Louis played semi-pro baseball, but as Schlossberg writes in the book, turned down the chance to play for a team in Kansas City in part because “there were almost no Jews in baseball.” Instead, Louis spent most of his professional life working in Manhattan’s Garment District.
The family lived near the Kingsbridge Armory, then likely the largest of its kind in the world, which hosted conventions, car shows and rodeos that came through the city at the time. Those rodeos, in fact, were Schlossberg’s introduction to showbiz.
“I would go as a kid and just revel in the fact that I was meeting these incredible stars,” he said.
Schlossberg with Jewish star Michael Douglas. (Courtesy of Julian Schlossberg)
Meeting stars would eventually become commonplace. Before and after his time in the Army in the early 1960s, Schlossberg worked as a cab driver, a busboy, a waiter, a counselor, a typist and more while taking college classes at night. He got a job at the ABC in 1964 and worked his way up the company’s ranks.
“I had decided, as a very young man, that since I didn’t have a law degree or a dental degree or a medical degree, I was going to learn every aspect of show business that I could,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was going to do, but I knew that knowledge was power, and that if I had knowledge, maybe I’d get some power.”
He would live out that goal, working in just about every area of entertainment, from radio to movie distribution to theater producing. (He goes back and forth on which one he likes best.)
In the 1970s, he hosted an AM radio show called “Movie Talk,” for which he interviewed hundreds of movie stars. WMCA station executives wanted Schlossberg to use a different stage name, to sound less Jewish.
“They didn’t want it to be ‘a Jewish name,’ and I said ‘Wait a second — if I’m going to be on the air in New York City, I can’t be a Jew?’ So they gave in, and I kept my name,” he said. “You kind of want to remember the times you did stand up, I guess. Not that it was a giant standing up, but I would have not done the show if they had asked me to change my name, because it made no sense to me.”
Speaking of Jews, Schlossberg has worked with a virtual who’s-who of famous Jewish entertainers over the years, from Neil Simon to Lillian Hellman to Sid Caesar to Mike Nichols to Peter Falk to Ethan Coen. And the ones he didn’t work with, he hung out with socially. Barbra Streisand invited him to a famous birthday party (that ended up taking place at Liza Minnelli’s house), and Mel Brooks has always greeted him as “Schloss Berg,” as if his name were two words.
Schlossberg with Barbra Streisand, right, and Merryn Jose. (Courtesy of Julian Schlossberg)
Schlossberg’s film production credits range from the 1994 British mystery “Widows’ Peak,” starring Natasha Richardson and Mia Farrow; to the 1980 “No Nukes” documentary that filmed an anti-nuclear weapons concert with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne; to a revival of the long-buried version of Orson Welles’ “Othello.”
In 1995, Schlossberg worked with three prominent Jews on one off-Broadway production: a set of one-act plays performed together each night, called “Death Defying Acts,” written by Woody Allen, David Mamet and Elaine May. Schlossberg later produced the Broadway adaptation of Allen’s movie “Bullets Over Broadway,” while May, whom Schlossberg likens to a sister, contributed the forward to his book.
“Elaine is, as I’ve written, the smartest person I’ve ever met, and probably one of the most talented if not the most talented, because there is nothing that she cannot do,” Schlossberg said of the now 90-year-old Oscar, Tony and Grammy winner. “She’s a great actress, she’s a great writer, and she’s a great director. And she’s a hell of a friend.”
At one point in his career, as he details in one chapter, Schlossberg crossed paths with another Jewish producer: Harvey Weinstein. When Weinstein was young, the now-disgraced serial sexual harasser approached Schlossberg and asked him to teach him the movie business. The two men worked together for a time, although eventually they fell out.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought he would hit the heights that he hit, or the depths that he sunk to. Never,” Schlossberg said.
Another of Schlossberg’s mentoring experiences ended on a more positive note. Mark S. Golub, a rabbi, came to Schlossberg for advice in the late 1990s on learning the theater business. Golub, who died late last month at 77, went on to become a prolific Broadway producer and the founding president of the Jewish Broadcasting Service channel.
It was a fruitful partnership: Golub learned about the industry, and Schlossberg absorbed lessons about Judaism.
“It was a very interesting combination, of somebody who certainly knew a great deal about Judaism, and myself, who was learning a lot by that time about [Judaism],” Schlossberg said. “It was interesting to me to be partners with a rabbi.”
Schlossberg had several projects set to go at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but when the industry shut down, he wrote his memoir instead. Now he’s looking to rev up some of those projects. Next up on the docket is “Tales From the Guttenberg Bible,” an autobiographical, four-character play written by and starring the Jewish actor Steve Guttenberg. It is now set for its world premiere in April, at the George Street Playhouse in Rutherford, New Jersey.
“I think audiences will respond to it, because he’s so kind and personable and living… a nice Jewish boy,” Schlossberg said of Guttenberg.
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Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy report
(JTA) — Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in the Democrats’ 190-page autopsy of Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential election loss that the Democratic National Committee released to CNN on Thursday.
Critics of the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza that began on Oct. 7, 2023, have alleged that the party was suppressing its internal findings about the election, which returned President Donald Trump to office, because it would show that Biden’s stance was deeply unpopular.
Axios reported in February that the top Democrats who worked on the report concluded that Harris “lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza.”
If that’s the case, it’s not reflected in the document that CNN published on Thursday morning. Portions of the document were not included, however, with notes saying that the executive summary and conclusion had not been shared by the authors.
The report points to 10 different “strategic implications” for Democrats, including that “anti-Trump sentiment has limits,” male voters “require direct engagement,” and that voter demographics are not enough to determine which candidate they’ll prefer.
CNN reported that the document was written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera and annotated by the DNC. The DNC released the document following questions raised by CNN, the network reported.
DNC Chairman Ken Martin told CNN that the report was not yet ready to be publicly released, but concluded that withholding it would create a larger distraction than releasing an incomplete version. “I sincerely apologize,” he said.
“For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said she’d expected to see analysis related to Gaza and Israel in the report.
“As soon as it arrived in my inbox I immediately searched for the word ‘Gaza’ expecting there to be an entire section focused on this issue,” Soifer said in an interview. “So I was surprised that, in fact, there was nothing — on Gaza, Israel, Jewish voters, non-Jewish voters, it was just nothing.”
Though rumors had swirled about the role that Gaza played in the autopsy, Soifer said she heard from a DNC official that there was “never” a section focusing on the issue, “at least not in writing in this report.”
Meanwhile, the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a pro-Palestinian nonprofit, called on Martin to release “the information that the author of the autopsy told us clearly and unambiguously, which is that DNC officials’ review of their own data found Biden’s support to be a net-negative for Democrats in 2024.”
Rivera, the report’s author, met with the IMEU and told them that the war in Gaza hurt Democrats in the 2024 election, according to reporting by Axios.
Soifer said the JDCA was not contacted by Rivera, and did not meet with him.
The pro-Israel lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel also said it had not met with Rivera. “Our current leadership has not met with the author and hasn’t been contacted,” communications chair Rachel Rosen told JTA.
While Soifer was surprised by the report’s omission of Gaza and Israel, DMFI took it as a sign that support for Israel does not have a detrimental effect on Democrats’ chances in elections.
“We need to learn the lessons of 2024 so we can be successful in 2026, 2028 and beyond,” said Brian Romick, DMFI’s president.
“What is clear — autopsy or not — is a majority of Americans, including Democrats, support the U.S.-Israel relationship, and that support was not the reason Vice President Harris lost the election,” he said.
A DMFI staffer pointed to polling from last fall showing that a majority of Democrats support the U.S.-Israel relationship.
And Soifer pointed to a poll published Friday by the Jewish Voters Resource Center, a nonpartisan firm, that found that more than two-thirds of Jewish voters plan to vote for Democrats this November — suggesting that Israel was not significantly moving votes in one of the demographics most likely to be invested in the issue.
“The poll also demonstrated that the top issue driving the Jewish vote in 2026 – just as it was in 2024 – is the future of democracy, followed by the cost of living. While 70% of Jewish voters have an emotional attachment to Israel, 55% opposed Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza,” she said. “There is little evidence that the war in Gaza has impacted the Jewish American vote.”
A spokesperson for the Republican Jewish Coalition pointed to the episode as an example of infighting among Democrats.
“The Democrats are tearing themselves apart as they appease the ascendant far-left extremists in their party, from Maine to Pennsylvania,” wrote Sam Markstein, alluding to candidates Graham Platner and Chris Rabb.
“It’s bad policy and it’s bad politics. The GOP is the only party where it’s safe to be proudly Jewish and pro-Israel,” Markstein wrote. “Republicans are righteously taking on the tough fights and winning, while Democrats continue to whistle past the political graveyard.”
The post Gaza and Israel go unmentioned in Democrats’ 2024 election autopsy report appeared first on The Forward.
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Argentine official who investigated death of AMIA prosecutor charged with covering up evidence
(JTA) — The former prosecutor who led the investigation into a mysterious 2015 death that unnerved Argentina’s Jewish community has been charged with concealing evidence in the case.
Viviana Fein was indicted on May 12 on charges of “aggravated concealment” over her handling of the investigation into the death of Alberto Nisman, a special prosecutor appointed to investigate the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.
On Jan. 18, 2015, Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment with a bullet hole above his right ear, having been shot at point-blank range. His body was discovered hours before he was scheduled to present evidence before Argentinian lawmakers accusing then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and other senior officials of allegedly covering up Iran’s role in the AMIA attack.
At the time, Fein declared Nisman’s death a suicide, but in May 2016 she slightly amended her view saying that he may have been forced to kill himself. Then, in 2017, forensic investigators issued a report stating that Nisman was assassinated. Jewish institutions have also maintained that he was murdered.
Under the Argentine Penal Code, a person charged with aggravated concealment must not have actively participated in the original crime but joined in the aftermath, and Judge Julián Ercolini ruled that Fein allegedly failed to properly preserve the crime scene at Nisman’s apartment.
According to court filings, dozens of people entered and exited the apartment without proper controls, potentially contaminating evidence and compromising the investigation.
The controversy surrounding the handling of the original crime scene has persisted for years. Judicial investigations and expert reports described the apartment as chaotic in the hours after Nisman’s death, with allegations that evidence may have been mishandled or destroyed.
Fein, who could face up to three years in prison if found guilty, has denied any wrongdoing. A week prior to her indictment, her attorney, Lucio Simonetti demanded the charges be dropped, stating that in the case of a cover up, “There must necessarily be a connection between the perpetrator of the underlying crime and the person covering it up, since it is absurd to assume that someone would cover up for a complete stranger.”
He added that the ruling “says nothing about any prior relationship existing between my client and the individuals who allegedly took part in the supposed murder of Natalio Alberto Nisman.’”
The prosecution comes as Argentina’s government takes a newly aggressive stance against Iran and Hezbollah, which are widely understood to have planned the bombing. Since Javier Milei, a conservative supporter of Israel, was elected in 2023, the country has officially declared Iran and Hezbollah responsible for the AMIA attack and another attack two years earlier on the Israeli embassy; designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization; and decided to pursue a trial in absentia for suspects implicated in the case.
The post Argentine official who investigated death of AMIA prosecutor charged with covering up evidence appeared first on The Forward.
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The Black Jewish experience, and Black-Jewish relations, take center stage on Fifth Avenue
The civil rights movement represented a kind of pax romana in Black–Jewish relations — symbolized most enduringly by the image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching beside Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.
While many Jewish and Black Americans recall that era with a sense of wistful nostalgia, the relationship has become increasingly strained amid debates over racial justice, Israel and Palestinians.
This week, Temple Emanu-El on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of the country’s most prominent Reform synagogues, is launching a new five-year effort as a contribution toward rebuilding those ties while also foregrounding Black Jews.
Shared Histories, Shared Futures: The Arielle Patrick & Aaron Goldstein Initiative on Black-Jewish Relations promises to bring scholars, activists, and religious leaders to the synagogue for a series of conversations on race, antisemitism and coalition-building. Its first event, set for May 29, will take place during a Friday night service.
“This is not a performance or a gimmick,” said Patrick, the Chief Communications Officer at Ariel Investments, a global investment firm, who endowed the initiative alongside her husband Goldstein. “This is intentionally not during Black History Month, it’s intentionally not on MLK Day. It’s embedded in how we’d like people to think about creating a better society for our children and grandchildren.”
A frayed bond
Patrick, who is a Black Jew, said part of the inspiration behind the initiative came from her sense that the relationship between the two communities is not what it once was.
“I think a lot of Jews felt that their Black brothers and sisters were silent after Oct. 7, and perhaps jumped into the conversation about Palestine versus Israel without having the full context,” she said. “And then I also think that for a long time, the Black community has felt almost deserted by the fact that Jews were enabled to be upwardly mobile from the communities we once lived in and shared because of assimilation.”
In recent years, debates over Israel have fractured many progressive spaces, leaving some left-wing Jews who refused to disavow Israel feeling isolated from circles they once felt a sense of belonging to. Segments of the Black Lives Matter movement have explicitly linked racial justice in America to the cause for Palestinian liberation, and some of its chapters have even endorsed militant resistance to that end.
At the same time, rising antisemitism in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has shifted how some Jewish organizations engage with social justice work. The Anti-Defamation League, which for years invested in broader civil rights and democracy initiatives, pivoted from much of that programming to focus its resources on the rise in antisemitism.
Fostering the relationship is also complicated by divisions within both communities themselves. “When we think about Black-Jewish relations, we have a tendency to assume that everyone who is Black thinks one way and everyone who is Jewish thinks one way,” said Dr. Susannah Heschel, the head of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth and the daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Of course, there’s enormous diversity of all kinds: political, cultural, religious,” she added.
Relations in New York City reached a low point in 1991 after a Hasidic driver struck and killed a Black child in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, setting off days of unrest that left a Jewish student fatally stabbed and two communities grieving.
Though strain has reemerged in recent years, particularly during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and the war in Gaza, organizations have emerged during that same period seeking to rekindle Black-Jewish dialogue.
“I think a lot of Jews are inspired by the civil rights era, by the fact that so many Jews participated,” said Heschel. “I know that photograph of my father marching in Selma is very important to a lot of people.”
She considers that photo a spur to new generations to continue the work. “The question is, what do you do with a photograph like that?” she asked. “Do you say, ‘Isn’t that great, what we did,’ in the past tense? Or do you take it as a challenge?”
Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism launched a partnership with Hillel and UNCF in 2024 to host unity dinners bringing together Jewish students and students at historically Black colleges and universities.
One might recall the viral Super Bowl ad, sponsored by Kraft’s Blue Square Initiative, where a Jewish boy is taunted by his classmates for being Jewish before his Black classmate fearlessly comes to his aid. The two boys walk off together in an idyllic (and, as critics have noted, somewhat antiquated) display of Black-Jewish solidarity.
Other groups, including Rekindle and CNN commentator Van Jones’ Exodus Leadership Forum, have launched programs aimed at fostering conversations between Black, Jewish, and Black-Jewish leaders. And this month, in a significant development, a National Convening on the Black-Jewish Alliance will be hosted in Miami, bringing together representatives from 75 organizations focused on cultivating the relationship.
A recent PBS series, Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, which came out in February also shed a light on the relationship, leaving many hoping to engage in the present — though also received pushback for not engaging seriously with the perspectives of Black Jews.
Centering Black Jews
Rabbi Joshua Davidson, the senior rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, grew up in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement and came to deeply value the stories of Black and Jewish communities working together.
“I knew that ultimately it would become an important part of my rabbinate too,” he said.
He says has been engaged in intercultural work for years, cultivating friendships with faith leaders across New York City, including at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn.
“One doesn’t enter into a relationship with the expectation that you’re going to get something in return,” Davidson said. “There’s a difference between allyship and friendship. The way I approach this is I want to establish friendships.”
Davidson said those relationships have allowed him to stand together with clergy members from those communities during difficult moments. Following the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, for example, he participated in a solidarity service at Abyssinian Baptist Church.
“There are times when a crisis hits, and you need allies, and so you reach out. You have no choice. But if you’ve been fortunate enough to be able to build the friendships when things were calm, you’re in a much better position,” he added, referring to the sense of abandonment many Jews felt after Oct. 7.
“I know around the country there’s been a great deal of frustration that expectations of one community showing up for another during moments of distress weren’t met. I can only say that my own experience has been different,” he said. “When something has happened to the Jewish community, I get the phone call from colleagues of other faith communities, and certainly among the leadership of the Black community in the city.”
The initiative also seeks to foreground Black Jews themselves, whose experiences are often absent from conversations about Black-Jewish relations.
“We have a tendency, all of us, to talk about Black–Jewish relations as if all Jews are white and all Black people are not Jewish,” Heschel said. “It’s gradually dawning on Jews that we have Black Jews in our community.” Estimates suggest Black Jews make up roughly 1% to 2 % of American Jews.
Patrick said she has often encountered those assumptions firsthand.
“When I go to synagogue or when I’m in a social setting, the first thing a person asks me is, ‘Did you convert?’” she recounted. “That’s not a normal question to ask anyone.”
According to a 2021 study by the Jews of Color Initiative, 80% of respondents who identified as Jews of color said they had experienced discrimination in Jewish settings. Another survey, conducted by the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, found that of 104 Black Jewish respondents, 62% reported feeling increased marginalization in Jewish spaces after Oct. 7.
Davidson hopes that bringing Black Jews to the fore, like Rabbi Tamar Manasseh — a Chicago-based activist and community leader known for her work combating gun violence, who will be Temple Emanu-El’s first speaker in the initiative — will encourage more Jews of color to feel at home in the congregation.
“If you don’t acknowledge that there are Jews of color, and if you don’t find opportunities for them to be front and center, then you’re less likely to actually have that segment of the Jewish community join you,” he said.
Temple Emanu-El has committed to the initiative for at least five years — a timeline Patrick said was intentional.
“I knew that just having one fun lecture was not going to do anything,” she said. “It has to be a sustained commitment.”
Still, she hopes the work will continue long beyond that.
“In my perfect world,” she said, “I’m 95 and still doing this.”
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