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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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Germany’s antisemitism czar says slogans like ‘From the river to the sea’ should be illegal
(JTA) — Germany’s antisemitism czar has urged a law to ban pro-Palestinian slogans such as “From the river to the sea,” renewing a fraught debate over the country’s historic allegiance to Israel and freedom of speech.
Felix Klein’s initiative would ban chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction. His proposal has the support of German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and is now being reviewed by the Justice Ministry, he told Haaretz on Wednesday.
“Before Oct. 7, you could have said that ‘From the river to the sea’ doesn’t necessarily mean kicking Israelis off the land, and I could accept that,” said Klein. “But since then, Israel has really been facing existential threats, and unfortunately, it has become necessary here to limit freedom of speech in this regard.”
Klein, the first holder of an office titled “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism” since 2018, added that he believed the law must be passed even if it is challenged in court for violating free speech.
Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and the subsequent and devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza tore at the seams of Germany’s national doctrines. The war triggered a sharp rise in antisemitic and Isalmophobic incidents across the country. It also exposed charged questions about when Germany prioritizes its responsibility toward the Jewish state, which became central to German national identity after the Holocaust, and when it upholds democratic principles.
The legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech are already far from clear-cut. Currently, courts decide whether a person chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in support of peacefully liberating Palestinians or in endorsement of terrorism. In August 2024, the German-Iranian activist Ava Moayeri was convicted of condoning a crime for leading the chant at a Berlin rally on Oct. 11, 2023.
Shortly after the Hamas attacks, local authorities across Germany imposed sweeping bans on pro-Palestinian protests. Berlin officials authorized schools to ban the keffiyeh, a symbol of Palestinian solidarity, along with slogans such as “Free Palestine.”
Jewish and Israeli activists were caught up in the crackdown. In October 2023, a woman was arrested after holding a poster that said, “As a Jew and Israeli: Stop the genocide in Gaza.” And police prohibited a demonstration by a group calling themselves “Jewish Berliners against Violence in the Middle East,” citing the risk of unrest and “inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations.”
Earlier this year, German immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Three of the orders cited Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or “reason of state,” a doctrine enshrining Germany’s defense of Israel as justification for its own existence after the Holocaust.
But that tenet is not used in legal settings, according to Alexander Gorski, who represents the demonstrators threatened with deportation. “Staatsräson is not a legal concept,” Gorski told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in April. “It’s completely irrelevant. It’s not in the German Basic Law, it’s not in the constitution.”
Jewish leaders such as Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, have argued that anger toward Israel created a “pretext” for antisemitism. “It is sufficient cause in itself to fuel the hatred,” Knobloch said to Deutsche Welle in September.
In recent months, two German establishments made the news for refusing entry to Jews and Israelis. A shop in Flensburg, which posted a sign saying “Jews are banned here,” is vulnerable to German anti-discrimination law. Not so for the restaurant in Fürth whose sign read, “We no longer accept Israelis in our establishment,” according to anti-discrimination commissioner Ferda Ataman, who said the law does not apply to discrimination on the basis of nationality.
Klein said he has also initiated legislation to expand that law to protect Israelis and other nationalities.
He has a longstanding relationship with Jewish communities in Germany, starting with his Foreign Office appointment as the special liaison to global Jewish organizations. In that role, he helped create a “working definition” of antisemitism for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016. That definition has sparked contentious debate, as critics argue it conflates some criticisms of Israel with antisemitism.
Klein believes that anti-Zionism does largely fall in the same bucket as antisemitism. “I think in most cases it is — it’s just a disguised form of antisemitism,” he told Haaretz. “When people say they’re anti-Israel, what they really mean is Jews.”
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There’s something missing from John Fetterman’s memoir: Israel
There may be no senator who has committed more fervently to supporting Israel, at a greater personal cost, than Sen. John Fetterman.
In the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the Pennsylvania Democrat began taping hostage posters to the wall outside his office and wearing a symbolic dogtag necklace. He embraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a pariah to many Democrats. As the civilian death toll in Gaza mounted, he posted constantly on social media to defend the war.
The position has cost him followers, friends, staff and perhaps in the future his seat. But it has also made him a hero in parts of the Jewish community. He received awards from Yeshiva University and the Zionist Organization of America and he was brought onstage as a panelist at the national Jewish Federations of North America convention.
Given the centrality of Israel to his focus in office — he was sworn in only 9 months before Oct. 7 — and how often he posts about it on social media, one might anticipate Fetterman giving it a lengthy treatment in his newly released memoir, Unfettered. The title of the memoir, too, seems to promise candor.
Instead, Fetterman dedicates all of three paragraphs to Israel in a book that largely rehashes lore from before his time in the Senate and discusses his struggles with mental health. These paragraphs — which even pro-Israel readers will read as boilerplate — appear in the book’s penultimate chapter, which is about his declining popularity since taking office.
Some have suggested that the reason some of the media and former staffers turned on me was because of my stance on Israel. Others imply that my support of Israel has to do with impaired mental health, which isn’t true. My support for Israel is not new. I was quoted in the 2022 primary as unequivocally stating that “I will always lean in on Israel.”
There’s a paragraph here about sticking to his morals even if it means defying his party, then:
There was no choice for me but to support Israel. I remembered the country’s history — how it was formed in 1948 in the wake of the murder of six million Jews. Since then, the rest of the Middle East, harboring resentments going back thousands of years, has only looked for ways to eradicate Israel. It took less than a day after the formation of the Jewish state was announced for Egypt to attack it. Every day in Israel is a struggle for existence, just as every day is an homage to the memory of the Jews shot and gassed and tortured.
It’s also clear that war in Gaza [sic] has been a humanitarian disaster. At the time of this writing, roughly sixty thousand people have been killed in Israel’s air and ground campaign, over half of them women, children, and the elderly. I grieve the tragedy, the death, and the misery.
Satisfied with this examination of the hypothesis for his growing unpopularity, Fetterman then moves on to another possible reason: his votes on immigration.
It’s strange to read the Israel passages in light of Fetterman’s full-throated advocacy on any number of issues related or connected to the Israel-Hamas war, including the hostages, campus protests, and rising antisemitism. Even if he did not reckon more deeply with his support for a war that brought about a “humanitarian disaster,” he might have talked about meeting the hostage families, or visiting Israel, or his disappointment that some voices within his party have turned against it.
The production of Unfettered was itself a story earlier this year, and may explain the book’s failure to grapple with a central priority.
Fetterman reportedly received a $1.2 million advance for it, roughly a third of which went to Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger to ghostwrite it. But the two apparently had a falling out at some point, according to the sports blog Defector, which wrote in June that “in the process of having to work with Fetterman, Bissinger went from believing the Pennsylvania senator was a legitimate presidential candidate to believing he should no longer be in office at all.”
Bissinger is not credited anywhere in the book, and does not appear to have contributed. (He refused to discuss the book when a reporter called him earlier this year.)
But the mystifying section about Israel may have nothing to do with a ghostwriter or lack thereof. It may instead be explained by a letter his then-chief of staff wrote in May 2024, in which he said Fetterman “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.”
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How a Russian samovar connects me to the old country — and my black market dealing great-great-grandmother
For as long as I can remember, the golden samovar — a Russian teapot of sorts — has rested somewhere high in our home. In our first house, it sat imposingly on a shelf above the staircase. In our current home, it tops the boudoir in our guestroom. When I was growing up, I didn’t actually know what it was and, until a few years ago, I didn’t think to ask.
Spurred by some unknown impulse — possibly a quarter-life crisis or my mom and dad entering their 60s — I decided to interview my parents on the origin of every object and piece of furniture displayed in our home, gathering information that would otherwise die with them. Some of my questions yielded three-word answers (“It’s a lamp”); others evoked longer stories, like that of my black market-dealing great-great-grandmother.
Rivka Silberberg brought the samovar with her when she and her family — including my great-grandfather — immigrated to the United States from the Pale of Settlement sometime before World War I. According to my grandfather, while Rivka’s neighbors were fleeing religious persecution, she was evading authorities after a neighbor ratted her out for illegally selling items — some say tea, others tobacco — without the proper taxation. My mom thinks it was probably a combination of antisemitism and legal peril that motivated Rivka to leave.
Samovars were an important part of Russian social life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University and former Forward columnist, wrote, “The samovar loomed large in Jewish immigrant culture” and “a hefty proportion of Russian Jewish immigrants … lugged the heavy and bulky contraption to the New World.”
They acted both as a comforting, familiar sight and as something that could be pawned when money was tight, Joselit wrote. Clearly, my great-great-grandmother valued her samovar enough to drag it across the Atlantic.
Learning about the items in my house has given me a new appreciation for the objects that were always just a part of my background. Since the samovar is one of the only pieces of my family’s old world life we still have, it’s imbued with a certain sacredness. This samovar is not simply a vessel for brewing tea; It is a symbol of my ancestors’ forced migration, a testament to their ability to make the hard choices necessary for survival.
I am the only grandchild on my mother’s side. My grandfather was also an only child, meaning I am the only great-grandchild of his parents. I alone carry this history. Like the samovar, I am a physical testament to my family’s survival.
It’s a lot of weight to have on your shoulders — or on your shelf.
Being an only child is what made me feel such an urgent responsibility to capture my parents’ stories; if I didn’t save them, no one else would.
But objects are impermanent. They tarnish (as our samovar has). They shatter. They get lost.
As these sacred objects become more enchanted, we also become more vulnerable to their loss. Any damage to them would feel like a devastating blow.
Since my grandmother passed away in 2020, I have been the owner of her wedding band. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve worn it, primarily on occasions when I want to feel like she’s near, whether on Rosh Hashanah or my college graduation. Otherwise, I keep it in my jewelry box where it can stay safe.
My mom takes a much more relaxed approach. One Passover, a friend set down one of our dessert plates with too much force, and it cracked. My mom, in an effort to reassure the friend, said probably the last thing one wants to hear after breaking someone else’s belongings: “It was my grandmother’s.”
After the friend panicked for a moment, my mom realized how the words had sounded.
“No, no, no,” she said. “I mean that it’s so old.”
Old things break. It’s part of their natural course of existence. For my mom, this was just an inevitable fact of life. Even without the dessert plate, she has memories of her grandmother to hold onto.
It’s taken me longer to accept the impermanence of objects. Only recently has the loss of a cheap earring not felt like the end of the world.
Luckily, because of its size and shape, the samovar would be a hard thing to misplace. In the future, if it needs to be moved, I’ll make sure I do so with care. But if for some reason something should happen to it, I am comforted to know that the story of Rivka and her smuggling ways lives on within me.
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