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Seymour Stein, Jewish music mogul who discovered Madonna and The Ramones, dies at 80
(JTA) — Seymour Stein, one of the most influential music executives of the 20th century, who frequently throughout his career referred to his Jewish Brooklynite roots, died at 80 on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles.
The cause was an unspecified form of cancer, according to reports.
Stein, born Seymour Steinbigle in 1942 and raised near Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, signed artists to his Sire record label ranging from pop superstars like Madonna to punk rockers like The Ramones to New Wave pioneers like the Talking Heads. He also helped found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the early 1980s and was inducted with a lifetime achievement award in 2005.
As he details in his 2018 autobiography, Stein’s father became closer to Orthodox Judaism in his 30s and 40s, regularly bringing his family to a nearby synagogue, where he was a vice president. Stein wrote that his father stopped by the synagogue at 6 a.m. before working in Manhattan’s Garment District and then again after work on his way home every day.
He described the Jews of 1940s Brooklyn in detail in “Siren Song: My Life in Music”:
We had every flavor of Ashkenazim — Russian, Polish, Baltic, Romanian, Austrian, Hungarian, German, and Czech Jews, including about fifty thousand survivors from the concentration camps. We had lost tribes you didn’t even know existed — Syrian, Iraqi, Persian, Yemeni, Ethiopian, even some Sephardic Jews whose family trees had curled through Spain, North Africa, the Middle East, and South America…. [E]ach Jewish community was distinct, often with its own native food and language.
In 1966, Stein — who shortened his last name on advice from an early mentor, the Jewish executive Syd Nathan — co-founded Sire Records, which would go on to sign and promote artists from a range of burgeoning genres in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: British indie rockers like The Smiths and The Cure, electronic innovator Aphex Twin, the rapper Ice-T.
“He knows all the lyrics to every song you’ve ever heard,” said Chrissie Hynde, the famed leader of The Pretenders, another Sire band.
Along the way, Stein wrote and mentioned in interviews how he found camaraderie with other Jewish executives and stars, after having grown up in an era when Jews were implicitly banned from some professions in the United States but found a haven in the entertainment industry. In his autobiography, for instance, he calls Lou Reed and New Wave electro-rocker Alan Vega fellow Brooklyn Jews.
“It’s amazing now that so many doctors and lawyers are Jewish,” he said in a 2013 interview with Tablet magazine. “Jews in America weren’t allowed in those professions 120 years ago. Music is something Jews were good at and they could do. All immigrants into America tried their hand at show-business.”
Stein signed Madonna from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from an open-heart surgery in 1982. She would release three top-of-the-charts albums with Sire before creating her own imprint in 1992.
In 1975, his wife, Linda, encouraged him to look into The Ramones, a group of scrappy punks in ripped jeans from Queens (two of whom were Jewish). She would co-manage the band for a time before becoming a real estate agent.
Stein, who later came out as gay, wrote that “the roles were a little confused” in his marriage and that he felt pressured to hide his attraction to men in part because of his traditional Jewish upbringing. “Just because I may have been gay didn’t mean I wasn’t Jewish,” he wrote. He and Linda had two children but eventually divorced.
In the Tablet interview, Stein mentioned that he stayed observant, though not Orthodox, throughout his life. He visited Israel several times and worked with Israeli pop star Ofra Haza on multiple albums. In the 1990s, he visited the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, a small town where thousands of Orthodox Jews gather each year on Rosh Hashanah.
“I feel a strong attachment to Nachman’s teachings,” he said.
Linda Stein was murdered by her assistant in 2007, and their daughter Samantha died in 2013 from brain cancer. Stein is survived by their other daughter Mandy, a sister and three grandchildren.
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I Have Worked With the Heritage Foundation — but Embracing Antisemitism Will Doom America
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
The Heritage Foundation is the country’s leading conservative think tank. President Donald Trump’s last campaign platform was partly dreamed up in its sleek Capitol Hill headquarters. Thousands of young people, myself included, have gained valuable knowledge and experience via Heritage’s various programs. What it does and says matters.
And what it did and said last week endangers not just the Jewish community — but our country’s social fabric.
That might come as a surprise. After all, Heritage recently launched its laudable Project Esther, a national strategy to “combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States.”
Heritage’s detailed blueprint was published following an onslaught of anti-Jewish violence and rhetoric after the October 7th massacre, particularly from the anti-Israel far-left and those who endorse Hamas and other Islamist terrorist groups.
Among Project Esther’s aims are to “erode support for antisemitic behavior, expose the individuals and organizations supporting such conduct to discourage it, and laud the individuals and organizations effectively countering it to encourage others to join.”
Last week, though, Heritage incentivized precisely the opposite behavior.
In an on-camera statement shared on X, Heritage President Kevin Roberts told followers: “We will always defend truth, we will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and, as I have said before, always will be, a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”
The statement was posted less than 48 hours after Carlson, who began his career at the think tank, took much-deserved criticism for holding a softball interview with far-right podcaster, antisemite, and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Responding to widespread concerns about the interview, Roberts complained of a “venomous coalition attempting to cancel” Carlson, adding that the right should not “cancel its own people.” Christians, he said, “can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic.”
But it is false to conflate the Carlson-Fuentes interview and its overt anti-Jewish rhetoric with mere “critique” of Israel, and it is equally dishonest to suggest in turn that the speakers are mere “Israel critics.”
Both Carlson and Fuentes crossed that line long ago — and that is precisely why Heritage’s continuing proximity to them is a problem.
This is not new territory for Carlson. My organization, CAMERA, which takes no stances on partisan political issues, has outlined the ex-Fox News host’s grim pattern of appeasing anti-Jewish figures and myths.
In August, Carlson uncritically platformed an Orthodox nun who framed Hamas as a legitimate “resistance” organization, fawned over an antisemitic “poet,” and promoted laughably flimsy historical claims such as the idea that Palestinians, rather than Jews, were the first people to become Christians.
Then there was Carlson’s cozy chat with Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac, who blamed a relative collapse in Bethlehem’s Christian population on Israel rather than the Palestinian Authority’s misrule.
Carlson has also lately alluded to baseless conspiracy theories that Israel was behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination (Carlson has since been working with Kirk’s Turning Point USA.)
Carlson’s decision to play chummy with Fuentes, therefore, is nothing new.
Fuentes, an Internet figure with hundreds of thousands of followers, has called Adolf Hitler “really f***ing cool,” and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute “perfidious Jews.”
In 2019, Fuentes used an analogy of the Cookie Monster baking cookies in an attempt to deny the murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. His followers, known as the “Groypers,” routinely expressed their support for Fuentes by using the acronym “RKD4NJF,” which stands for “Rape, kill, and die for Nicholas Joseph Fuentes.” Carlson can hardly claim plausible deniability over Fuentes’s chilling record.
Fuentes used the podcast appearance with Carlson to argue that “organized Jewry in America” was a “big challenge.”
Fuentes did not level any criticism toward a particular Jewish organization or campaign group, just “Jewry” as a whole. Carlson, once known for his abrasive interview style, failed to push back against Fuentes, but instead joined in by charging that Christian Zionists had a “brain virus” and that he “dislike[d] them more than anybody.”
Kevin Roberts’ claim that his movement must “focus on its political opponents” simply does not align with his claim that truth must prevail.
If truth is a central value, Roberts should recognize Tucker and Fuentes — who are enemies of the truth — as “opponents.”
If antisemitism were something worth opposing, Roberts should speak out against it wherever in the media and political ecosystem it arises.
Some may perceive Roberts’ remarks as a fleeting public relations blip. Unfortunately, they reveal something more sinister.
As memories of the Second World War wane and libels regarding Israel are showcased daily by the mainstream media, antisemitism as an organized movement is ripe for a renaissance in the West. Too many major institutions, on both the Left and Right, are now either afraid to call it out — or are increasingly sympathetic to it.
D.C. policy wonks do not necessarily represent the views of ordinary people, but they are important political and cultural arbiters, suggesting to people what is acceptable, with potentially huge consequences. If these influencers are beginning to warm to the “Groypers” and their apologists, they must be called out and confronted, whatever their historically lofty stature.
Furthermore, we cannot simply ignore Carlson and Fuentes as Internet trolls. Both have huge followings, in part because they spread easily digestible lies about Israel and Jews. This needs robust pushback by all of us who genuinely care about “defending truth,” or our media and politics will be doomed to failure.
As Harvard professor Ruth Wisse notes: “Antisemitism is not about the Jews, but about those who organize politics against them. And any society governed by that ideology is doomed.” We must help Washington heed this warning.
Georgia L. Gilholy is a member of the Communications Team at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.
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Turkey, Hamas Team Discuss Next Gaza Plan Phases, Security Sources Say
The Beaver Moon supermoon rises above destroyed buildings amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Turkey‘s MIT intelligence agency chief met Hamas‘s negotiating team head Khalil Al-Hayya on Wednesday, and they discussed the path to be followed in implementing the next phases of the Gaza ceasefire plan, Turkish security sources said.
They said MIT chief Ibrahim Kalin met the Hamas delegation in Istanbul and they also discussed steps to ensure smooth operation of the ceasefire process and how to overcome existing problems.
Turkey, a longtime state backer of Hamas, has been pushing to have a significant role in Gaza’s reconstruction, including through military forces on the ground to help implement US President Donald Trump’s peace plan.
Israel has adamantly opposed such efforts, noting Turkey’s support for Hamas and hostile stance toward the Jewish state.
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Two French Nationals Freed by Iran Under ‘Islamic Clemency,’ Iran’s Foreign Minister Says
A woman walks past posters with the portraits of Cecile Kohler and Jacques Paris, two French citizens held in Iran, on the day of support rallies to mark their three-year detention and to demand their release, in front of the National Assembly in Paris, France, May 7, 2025. The slogan reads “Freedom for Cecile Kohler and Jacques Paris.” Photo: REUTERS/Abdul Saboor
Two French citizens were freed because of “Islamic clemency” and are still in Iran, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told state media on Wednesday.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday that Iran had released Cecile Kohler and her partner Jacques Paris, who were detained in Iran for over three years and were convicted of spying.
The two are currently at the French embassy in Iran, Araqchi said, adding an Iranian woman freed by Paris earlier this year is at the Iranian embassy in France.