Uncategorized
‘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.”
—
The post ‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Three simple rules for navigating a new season of protest against Israel
Spring. The season of graduations and protests.
A tenured professor and faculty chair at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, recently used the commencement stage to denounce Israel’s war in Gaza — remarks that drew applause from some as others experienced them as alienating and unwelcome. At New York’s Park East Synagogue, a group of masked, hate- spewing demonstrators waving Hezbollah flags while protesting the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event.”
If the settings of these incidents differ, one underlying question they raise remains the same: What are the ethics of protest? At what point does dissent deepen democratic life and moral accountability, and when does it begin to fray the trust, dignity and shared sense of belonging upon which a society depends?
While these tensions may be hard to resolve, I’d like to put forward three guiding principles for how best to engage on the subject of free expression in such a hot-zone climate.
Protest is essential
Protest is foundational to what it means to be both a Jew and an American.
Look to Abraham standing before God at Sodom and Gomorrah; Moses standing before Pharaoh; the prophets calling kings and nations to conscience; and Esther risking all for her people. All of their examples show that to be a Jew is to take note of the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be, and then to summon the moral courage, communal will, and spiritual audacity to help close that gap.
Jews understand that to protest is a religious act. That’s why rabbis so often quote Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous reflection after marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 1965: “I felt my legs were praying.”
And as the United States turns 250 years old, it’s worth remembering that our country began with a protest movement. Since then, many of our country’s finest moments have emerged from moral protest — including the labor movement, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights Movement.
As Jews and as Americans, we are heirs to two traditions of protest.
So is self-interrogation
Where we draw the lines around acceptable protest says as much about us as it does about the protest itself.
A prime example of this: During my 25-plus years as a rabbi, no congregant has ever told me that the pulpit is no place for politics — so long as they agree with my politics.
I had little difficulty admiring the activist Greta Thunberg when she sailed across the Atlantic to raise awareness about climate change. I found it much more challenging to view her kindly when she joined a flotilla protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Similarly, the faculty speaker at Michigan’s commencement sounded pretty good when championing the university’s first Jewish faculty member and a curriculum more attentive to Black American history. It was only when he condemned Israel that many listeners, myself included, recoiled at his remarks.
None of us are the neutral arbiters of protest ethics we may imagine ourselves to be. Progressives who passionately defend buffer zones around abortion clinics but not around houses of worship should ask why one form of vulnerability warrants protection and another does not. Student activists who champion on-campus encampments protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, but would never tolerate a white nationalist rally on campus, should ask where principle ends and preference begins. Conservatives who invoke the First Amendment to defend provocative speech they favor, yet denounce positions they dislike as treasonous or un-American, should examine where principle gives way to ideology. And activists who mobilize when civilians die in Gaza but remain deafeningly silent when tens of thousands of Iranians are murdered by their own regime must interrogate what moral framework governs that selective outrage.
Where we draw the lines — whom we applaud, what we excuse and what we denounce — reveals not only our principles, but also our loyalties, fears and tribal attachments. Moral seriousness requires the humility to examine ourselves before we protest — to check ourselves before we express ourselves.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
As Jews, we believe in buffer zones — not just the kind debated at City Hall. The rabbis believed in moral buffer zones, a principle they referred to as living “lifnim mishurat hadin” — “beyond the strict line of the law.”
Rabbinic tradition in part explains the semi-somber period between Passover and Shavuot, in which we currently find ourselves, using precisely this idea. When 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died in one day, the Talmud teaches, they perished because they followed the letter of the law but failed to go beyond it and treat one another with respect — “kavod zeh lazeh.” They failed to embody the deeper demand of leadership: to live not merely according to what one is allowed to do, but by what one ought to do.
What might that mean for us today?
The answer: just because you have the legal right to express yourself doesn’t mean you should.
The Michigan commencement speaker may have been within his rights to voice his objections to Israel. But his decision to do so in that setting reflected a breathtaking failure of leadership, reminding us there is no direct correlation between tenure and wisdom, expertise and judgment. Like a teacher who hijacks a classroom to air political grievances under the guise of education, the speaker demonstrated an astonishing lack of discernment by alienating a sizable portion of the very students and families he was there to honor and congratulate.
Regarding the protests outside Park East Synagogue, the letter of the law may protect those who wave the flags of a terrorist organization, chant antisemitic slogans, or proclaim that the Jewish state itself should cease to exist. That such speech is protected does not mean it is right. It is, instead, intimidation masquerading as activism.
I was also deeply troubled by the response of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who prefaced his condemnation of the protests by first denouncing the event itself. The mayor should have simply said: no house of worship should be targeted or intimidated, full stop.
To imply that the nature of the event somehow mitigated the harassment outside was not only irresponsible, offering moral cover for behavior that crossed the line from protest into menace, but also a troubling form of moral equivocation that shifted responsibility onto those being targeted — if not outright victim blaming. A peaceful protest calling for Palestinian self-determination alongside Jewish self-determination? As a liberal Zionist, that sounds like my kind of protest! But in an age in which there is a direct line between anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitic violence, our mayor must do more than merely follow the letter of the law. True leadership begins where the letter of the law ends.
The issue is not whether dissent is permitted, but whether we are not losing the capacity for kavod zeh lazeh.
As the secular prophet of our time, Bruce Springsteen, has been reminding audiences across the country on his current tour: “America, from the beginning, was born out of disagreement. It was built on argument, on disagreement. We can argue about what course we thought the country should take while recognizing our common humanity, our dignity and, yes, our unity.”
Whatever our differences, the challenge before us is whether we can disagree without severing the ties that bind us — as Americans, Jews and human beings.
The post Three simple rules for navigating a new season of protest against Israel appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters
(JTA) — This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.
Jewish groups in the Bay Area are protesting a judge’s removal of a local Jewish district attorney from a case involving pro-Palestinian protesters accused of vandalizing Stanford University’s president’s office.
The district attorney, Jeff Rosen, was disqualified from retrying a felony case against five protesters after the judge ruled that Rosen had crossed a legal line when suggesting in a campaign message that the protest was antisemitic.
“Rosen is allowed to take a strong stance against crime in the community, against antisemitism. But caution and care need to be taken when utilizing active litigation in campaign communication,” Judge Kelley Paul said from the bench.
The judge said Rosen had erred when publicly labeling the incident antisemitic when it was not charged as a hate crime.
“This case is not a hate crime,” Paul said. “The characterization of the prosecution as a fight against antisemitism runs afoul of case law.”
In an email to J. The Jewish News of Northern California, Rosen’s office wrote that while it “disagrees with the judge’s ruling, we respect it.”
In a joint statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley wrote that they are “deeply troubled” by Paul’s decision and that the case “must proceed.”
“This decision uniquely targets minority prosecutors, suggesting they are incapable of pursuing justice in cases perceived to be impacting their own communities,” the statement says, adding that it “risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them.”
The five protesters face felony vandalism and conspiracy counts stemming from a June 2024 protest in which 13 people broke into Stanford’s executive offices and caused an estimated $300,000 in damages. A jury deadlocked in February, splitting 9-3 on the vandalism count and 8-4 on conspiracy. Rosen quickly announced his plan to retry them.
The disqualification motion was filed by deputy public defender Avi Singh, who argued that Rosen had compromised his office’s neutrality by featuring the prosecution on a campaign fundraising page titled “DA Rosen Fighting Anti-Semitism,” alongside a donation button.
Singh argued that the fundraising campaign falsely implied that the defendants were antisemitic. None was charged with a hate crime.
Rosen, who has spoken publicly about his commitment to fighting antisemitism and supporting Israel, has denied any conflict of interest.
In her decision, Paul pointed to Rosen’s remarks in a March 2025 speech he gave for the San Jose Hillel, about a month before his office filed charges against the protesters. A video of the speech is linked on the “Fighting Anti-Semitism” page on his campaign website.
In the speech, Rosen equated antisemitism and “anti-Americanism,” a phrase that Deputy District Attorney Robert Baker also used to describe the conduct of the protesters during the trial’s closing arguments. Paul ruled that the similarities in the language disqualified the entire DA’s office from the case, not just Rosen.
In their own statement, the local Jewish groups suggested Rosen was being disqualified because he is Jewish.
“Generations of American Jews in positions of public trust have all too often been treated as suspect or inherently conflicted,” JCRC Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley said. “This decision risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them, casting any public opposition to hate as grounds for disqualification.”
Rosen’s challenger in his June primary election, former prosecutor Daniel Chung, has turned the ruling into a campaign video. Chung called Rosen’s pursuit of the Stanford case “overzealous” and “a waste of time and money.”
“This is a humiliating loss for DA Rosen and his entire office,” Chung said in an Instagram video. “For years, millions of dollars have been spent trying to prosecute Stanford student protesters with felony charges.” Rosen’s actions, Chung said, “jeopardized the due process of the defendants” and “exemplifies the undermining of integrity, competence and compassion under DA Rosen for the last 16 years.”
The ruling hands the case to California’s attorney general, which will decide whether to retry the defendants — German Gonzalez, Maya Burke, Taylor McCann, Hunter Taylor-Black and Amy Zhai — or drop the charges.
The post Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran’s Deepening Water Crisis Threatens 35 Million as Economy Buckles Under US Pressure, Mounting Domestic Strain
People walk on a street near a mural featuring an image of the late Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran, May 6, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
As talks with the United States over a possible deal to end the war remain uncertain, Iran’s economy is under mounting strain, with prolonged water shortages, pressure on energy infrastructure, and slowing industrial output deepening what authorities describe as an “economic war.”
With Iran entering the summer months amid a deepening water and electricity crisis, government officials estimate that around 35 million people will face water shortages, intensifying concerns over deteriorating living conditions, mounting economic strain, and daily hardship across the country.
On Monday, Issa Bozorgzadeh, a spokesman for the country’s water industry, reported that rainfall has fallen “below normal” levels across 11 provinces, warning that Tehran is among the worst affected as it enters its sixth consecutive year of drought.
Now, Iranian authorities are urging citizens to cut consumption and adopt stricter usage habits, pointing to deep structural failures in the water and power sectors as public frustration rises over supply disruptions, mismanagement, and declining living standards.
Officials have also announced planned summer power outages, warning that the deepening energy crisis could lead to factory shutdowns, reduced industrial output, rising unemployment, and higher prices.
On Sunday, Arash Najafi, head of the Energy Commission of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, noted that household, commercial, and office blackouts are likely to continue daily throughout the summer, while the industrial sector will continue to be targeted for power cuts” or “will continue to bear the brunt of power cuts.
Given the damage to several petrochemical facilities in Israeli and US strikes and their reliance on electricity from the national grid, Najafi said most available power would now be directed toward keeping these complexes operational around the clock.
“The Islamic Republic will be forced to impose electricity consumption restrictions for about 120 days, and given the lack of effective means for people to significantly reduce usage, this will result in widespread blackouts,” the Iranian official said in a statement.
Amid growing public frustration over the ongoing crisis, Majid Doustali, a member of Iran’s parliamentary planning and budget committee, called on citizens to cut back on electricity, water, and fuel consumption as part of the country’s resistance efforts in what he described as an “economic war.”
“Every effort by the public to save resources represents a direct challenge to the enemy’s economic conspiracy,” Doustali said.
Even as the crisis continues to weigh heavily on the Iranian people, a nationwide internet blackout remains in place, having exceeded 1,728 hours as of Monday, after authorities imposed the shutdown more than two months ago, effectively isolating millions of Iranians from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.
Across much of the country, unstable internet forces many people to rely on illegal black-market virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — to stay connected beyond Iran’s borders, with access costing millions, and users risking imprisonment and national security charges.
According to a CNN estimate, Iranians have spent roughly $1.8 billion on internet access over the past two months.
Soaring costs and crumbling infrastructure have also forced businesses to cut jobs on a massive scale, leaving many workers unemployed and intensifying social and economic pressures across the country, The New York Times reported.
Dozens of major companies have reportedly laid off hundreds of employees across multiple industries, with the industrial sector alone potentially putting up to 3.5 million workers at risk, as the country’s economy reels from the impact of a US naval blockade on Iranian ports that began in mid-April.
The US blockade has prevented the regime from exporting energy through the Strait of Hormuz — a critical global energy chokepoint through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.
With companies sharply reducing or freezing production amid shutdowns and mass layoffs, the private sector downturn is further threatening the regime by reducing tax revenues, which the government has come to rely on heavily amid mounting sanctions and trade restrictions.
Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has attempted to contain the fallout by urging companies to avoid layoffs “to the extent possible.”
But the regime’s internet shutdown alone has cost businesses and companies an estimated $80 million in daily losses, The New York Times reported.
As the Iranian currency continues to plunge and inflation peaks near 60 percent, senior official Gholamhossein Mohammadi said the war has already cost around one million jobs, alongside “the direct and indirect unemployment of two million people.”
Meanwhile, Iran’s energy sector is also under severe strain, with exports falling sharply, storage capacity nearing its limits, and infrastructure under growing pressure.
According to data from commodity analytics firm Kpler, Iran could exhaust its oil storage capacity within 25 to 30 days if the crisis continues, prompting cuts in output at several oil fields to ease pressure.
Amid an export collapse exceeding 70 percent, the government now faces a critical decision between shutting wells to manage storage constraints or risking long-term damage to key oil fields.
Even though Kpler’s report estimates Tehran may not feel the full revenue hit for another three to four months due to payment delays and pre-existing sales flows, the regime is expected to face a heavy blow, with losses potentially reaching $200–250 million per day.
With domestic tensions rising and the internal economic crisis worsening, Iranian officials are increasingly wary that renewed protests could erupt in the coming days, further destabilizing an already volatile situation.