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
After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains.
In the aftermath of 9/11, New Yorkers found countless ways to help. They lined up in record numbers to donate blood, delivered meals and medical supplies to first responders, and opened their homes to strangers with nowhere else to go.
And then there were the people who sat with the dead.
Starting on Sept. 20, 2001, Jewish volunteers took four-hour shifts at the city medical examiner’s temporary morgue in lower Manhattan, reciting psalms and keeping watch over the remains.
Without fail, a member of the Jewish community was there — 24/7, for more than seven months.
They were sitting shmira, fulfilling the Jewish tradition of staying with the dead from the moment of passing until burial. The volunteers — some of them college students — sat with and prayed for each of the victims, whether or not they were Jewish.
“Right after 9/11, all the way down till the next May, it was never a missed moment,” Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Congregation Ohab Zedek, which organized the shmira, told the Forward. “We never had a problem filling a spot.”
A congregation responds
Like many houses of worship, Congregation Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side, mobilized after 9/11. Congregants collected masks, filled boxes with clothing, and set up an assembly line to make sandwiches for those in need.
Schwartz also recognized the importance of shmira — determined that the horror of 9/11 would not interrupt the tradition that brings dignity to the dead. He asked a congregant, recently retired shoe salesman Armin Osgood, to coordinate.
“When Rabbi Schwartz asked you to do something, you did it,” Osgood, now 91, told the Forward. “There was not a question at that point.”
Osgood sketched out a schedule on a big yellow legal pad and began filling it in with names. Many Ohab Zedek congregants signed up. Others heard about the effort through word of mouth, sometimes from friends of friends. Some traveled from out of state.
The group included people with different levels of religious observance. All that mattered to Osgood was that they were willing to help.
“People called, and they said, ‘I don’t speak Hebrew. I can’t read Hebrew.’ I said, ‘So read the Psalms in English.’ ‘Well, I’m in a congregation where women wear pants.’ I said, ‘So wear pants,’” Osgood said. “Nobody gets excluded. If they want to do it, I’ll find a way.”
Ely Razin, 35 at the time, was among the Ohab Zedek congregants who volunteered. He took a shmira night shift, reciting tehillim next to the remains and trying to concentrate on the meaning of the ancient words.
“It helped me feel like I was doing something,” Razin told the Forward. “The act of shmira, in and of itself, somewhat gives you a sense of personal peace.”
Rabbi Schwartz took a weekly Friday morning shift, where he found himself providing spiritual comfort to people of all faiths. He befriended a Protestant minister who was often there to pray with bereaved families. Once, a Catholic family, unable to find a priest, asked Schwartz to say the last rites.
Unfamiliar with the Catholic tradition, Schwartz recited the Jewish memorial prayer kel maleh rachamim in English.
“I don’t know what their last rites look like, but I said the [Jewish] prayer we say at the funeral,” Schwartz said. “So it was a kiddush Hashem. That was a very meaningful moment.”
Keeping the chain
Keeping the morgue staffed 24/7 was no easy task. It was even more difficult on Shabbat — partly because Ohab Zedek, on the Upper West Side, was too far from the morgue in lower Manhattan to walk.
An Ohab Zedek congregant reached out to Jessica Russak-Hoffman, then a senior studying English at Stern College, Yeshiva University’s women’s college. Its dormitories were within a few blocks of the morgue.
“My dad always said, ‘If a mitzvah lands on your lap, you’ve got to pick it up,’” Russak-Hoffman said. “So I grabbed a clipboard, and I went outside and started recruiting.”
She ended up enlisting more than a dozen women. One was Judith Kaplan, then a junior at Stern, who often took the midnight-to-4 a.m. shift — spending many Friday nights as a college student at the morgue.
Kaplan’s nearby apartment became a home base for the volunteers. She cooked lunch and dinner for those sitting shmira, many of whom were missing communal Shabbat meals to take their shifts.
“It’s not everybody’s cup of tea to do this kind of thing, so you have to find someone who has the stomach for it, and the emotional capacity for it,” Kaplan said. “This is not an easy mitzvah.”
As the months went on, the group had fewer volunteers. Kaplan began taking eight-hour shifts, sometimes in the dead of winter and in the middle of the night. Stern College security guards accompanied her on the walk to the morgue.
“I felt a very big responsibility,” Kaplan said. “I felt very strongly that if we can’t find someone to sit, then I have to do it. I didn’t want to break the chain.”
Russak-Hoffman also took night shifts. She recalled how, whenever a first responder’s remains were identified, everyone would pause, stand and pay their respects.
For Kaplan, those moments underscored how the Jewish volunteers had become part of the broader recovery effort. Shmira, she emphasized, was never about distinguishing Jewish victims from others.
“They could have told me that every single Jewish body was identified, and I still would have sat there,” Kaplan said. “It did not matter what your faith was or what your culture was — we were all there for the same reason.”
Looking back
There would never be a moment when all the victims’ remains were identified. But at some point, identifications slowed. Schwartz decided to end the shmira on Lag B’Omer — a Jewish holiday that marks the end of a mourning period.
But for so many of the volunteers, the shmira’s conclusion was not the end of mourning.
“I definitely spent the next 20 years looking at open sky and expecting planes to go by and hit things,” said Russak-Hoffman, who now lives in Seattle. “Every time a proper commercial plane went by without context, it flashed me back.”
Razin, who now lives in Israel, said similar emotions resurfaced for him after the Oct. 7 attacks. Sitting shmira is considered chesed shel emet, the highest level of mitzvah because it is truly selfless, as the dead cannot repay the act. But Razin came to understand that the ritual also serves the living.
“They’re there to help not only the person who’s departed, but the people who are left behind,” Razin said. “It put a frame around something that otherwise was incomprehensible and monstrous.”
For Kaplan, who now lives in Jerusalem, the experience was formative. The tehillim — its pages now held together with a hairband — became a keepsake of that time. She has since brought the prayer book to her wedding and to the birth of her child.
“That’s how meaningful the experience was for me,” she said.
Schwartz plans to reflect on 9/11 and its aftermath in his Rosh Hashanah sermon this year, which falls on Sept. 11. Twenty-five years later, he said, the volunteers’ mitzvot offer a reason for hope.
“This was barbaric evil on the part of some people, but it really brought out the most incredible goodness in many more people,” Schwartz said. “We shouldn’t give up hope in mankind.”
The post After 9/11, Jewish volunteers kept watch over the dead. 25 years later, the grief remains. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Disappearance of the “Reel”: Why Online Slots No Longer Look Like Slot Machines
For more than a century, a slot machine was easy to recognize. Three reels. A lever. A row of fruit, bells or lucky sevens. Pull, spin, stop. Even someone who had never played one knew exactly what the machine was supposed to do.
Open a modern online slot today and things can look rather different. Symbols fall from the sky. Winning icons explode. Grids change size. Multipliers appear from nowhere. Sometimes there is barely anything that looks like a reel at all.
So, when exactly did slots stop behaving like slot machines?
The reel survived its own disappearance
The change did not happen overnight. Mechanical reels began losing their practical importance decades ago.
In 1976, Fortune Coin Company developed an early video slot using a modified 19-inch Sony television. Instead of watching actual wheels rotate behind glass, players watched electronic representations of reels. The physical reel was gone, but designers kept its visual language. It made sense. Players already understood it.
Digital technology eventually made that imitation unnecessary. A screen does not have to obey the laws of a spinning cylinder. Once developers embraced that fairly obvious fact, slot design became much stranger — and more creative.
A good milestone is NetEnt’s **Gonzo’s Quest**, released in 2010. Its Avalanche mechanic made winning symbols disappear before new ones dropped into their places. One wager could therefore produce a sequence of cascading results rather than the familiar spin-stop-spin rhythm. The game still had a 5×3 layout, but the screen was beginning to behave more like a dynamic puzzle board.
Then the grid started fighting back
The next step was to make the reels themselves unstable. Big Time Gaming’s Megaways feature was a big sample. The launch of Bonanza in 2016 helped to build a system with the number of symbols on the reels being variable, creating up to 117,649 winning combinations. It was then licensed to many other developers, and Megaways was the result.
It’s a significant design change. With the old machines, players would need to watch the set paylines. Current games can have them grasp clusters, varying reel heights, tumbling sequences or symbols wherever on a grid. The similarity, but the old machine is a distant cousin.
One such sweet bonanza is Sweet Bonanza 1000. In Pragmatic Play’s 2024 title, players earn prizes for getting 8 or more matching fruit or candy symbols with a 6×5 grid. Symbols are removed and other symbols drop and when you get a multiplier in the bonus round they can be worth 1000x. It remains a slot game, but in terms of graphics, it has much more in common with a cascading mobile puzzle game than a traditional three-reel game. The reel has not exactly died. It has been chopped up, covered in candy and taught new tricks.
Why designers abandoned the old machine
There is a simple reason: screens offer freedom.
A mechanical reel has physical limits. A digital grid does not. Developers can make symbols disappear, expand, split or trigger another sequence without asking players to press spin again. Themes can also become part of the mechanics rather than decoration pasted around three rotating wheels.
Recent releases show how normal this language has become. Pragmatic Play now openly describes games using terms such as “cluster-pays,” “tumbling reels” and “multiplier spots.” Big Time Gaming continues producing Megaways titles built around changing symbol configurations and cascades.
And perhaps that answers the original question. A slot stops *looking* like a traditional slot when the reel is no longer the main visual event.
But it does not necessarily stop being one.
The reel has become less a piece of machinery than a design ancestor. You can still see its DNA in columns, symbols and randomized outcomes. What changed is the canvas around it.
The funny part is that the slot machine escaped its physical cabinet only to discover it never really needed the reel in the first place.
Uncategorized
With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays
As Jewish New Yorkers prepare for the High Holidays amid continued worries about rising antisemitism, City Council Speaker Julie Menin says her historic role as the chamber’s first Jewish leader has become even more important than she expected when elected in January.
In an exclusive interview with the Forward earlier this week, Menin pointed to her synagogue-protection law and successful fight against the Met’s John Galliano exhibition as proof that having a Jewish leader with a powerful bully pulpit matters.
“It’s incredibly important at this pivotal time,” Menin said. “We need to be standing up loudly, clearly, unequivocally in the fight against antisemitism.”
Many Jewish leaders see Menin, 58, as a check on Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric on Israel and handling of antisemitism have strained relations with parts of the Jewish community.
Mamdani has met in recent weeks with Jewish leaders and visited the Orthodox-populated neighborhood of Borough Park. The administration was expected to release a comprehensive citywide strategy to combat antisemitism before the High Holidays. Mamdani’s spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the rollout timetable. Menin said that City Hall has not briefed her on its plan.
Services at synagogues across the city this year come against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. Synagogues already spend millions of dollars a year on security, a reality her children have noticed, Menin said. Recent NYPD statistics showed that in the first seven months of 2026, anti-Jewish incidents rose 8.5%, and 57% of the reported hate crimes in the city involved Jewish victims. “This has now become the new normal,” she said. “It’s terrible. It is just shameful that we have entered this new era.”
Menin is scheduled to speak at Central Synagogue, the site of an antisemitic attack last month, at its evening services before heading to a friend’s home, where she and her eight-year-old daughter will bring an apple pie they bake together as an annual tradition.
A High Holidays test
Menin said she hopes the Council’s recent efforts to combat antisemitism will help Jewish New Yorkers feel safer and more protected as they head to synagogues for the High Holidays.
One of Menin’s first legislative priorities after taking over the Council was a package of bills that included protest protections for houses of worship, a hate-crime reporting hotline, Holocaust education initiatives and additional security assistance. “I do see that we have made some real progress,” Menin said.
The most controversial part of Menin’s agenda focused on limiting protests outside synagogues. The Council ultimately passed legislation requiring the NYPD to develop a plan for establishing a buffer zone when demonstrations involve harassment, intimidation or physical threats. Mamdani, who had raised concerns about restricting protests, allowed the synagogue measure to become law without his signature.
The law now faces its first big test. The High Holidays coincide with the annual United Nations General Assembly, which is expected to draw protests against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, encouraged by Mamdani.
Menin said the new law should help protect people entering and leaving synagogues if tensions rise around Netanyahu’s visit, and demonstrations cross the line into intimidation. “I think that bill is really important in terms of making a difference to assure congregants of their safety and security as they enter and leave,” she said.
Asked directly what she would say to Jewish New Yorkers who remain worried about Mamdani, Menin avoided criticizing the mayor by name. But she also offered a pointed message about the political climate. “It is incumbent to ensure that the rhetoric is turned down,” Menin said, because there remains a “heightened sense of fear within the Jewish community.”
On Wednesday, Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a lifelong member of Central Synagogue who spoke at services after the attack, announced increased NYPD security outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions for the High Holidays. Mamdani acknowledged that some Jews are “understandably afraid to come together and celebrate openly,” and said their safety “during these sacred days is of the utmost importance to our administration.”
The power to speak out
Menin has also used her position to speak out beyond the Council chamber, pointing to her recent fight over a Metropolitan Museum of Art planned exhibition as an example of the power of her bully pulpit.
Menin scored a significant victory as fashion designer John Galliano — who has a history of antisemitic remarks — bowed out following mounting criticism. Menin said she privately warned museum officials before the exhibition was announced that she would oppose it. She later went public after realizing that others who objected were reluctant to speak out.
“They might have been upset by the decision, but they weren’t comfortable speaking out,” Menin said. “We can’t shy away from speaking out. We have to be loud.” Menin called the development “a huge victory in the fight against antisemitism.”
A wish for unity
When Menin became speaker in January, she told the Forward that she hoped to use the position to help bridge some of the deep divisions in the city. Nearly a year later, she said that mission has only become more urgent.
Menin traced her own path into public service to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when her Lower Manhattan business was devastated. She later chaired Community Board 1 and became involved in efforts to rebuild the neighborhood. What she remembers most from that period, she said, was a sense of unity that she believes New York has lost.
“Right now, it just feels very divided and very divisive,” Menin said.
As she approaches her first Rosh Hashanah as speaker, her wish for the new year is for some of those divisions to ease.
“As we really focus on the issue of atonement, we need to figure out how we can ensure the safety and security of the Jewish community at this very, very difficult time,” Menin said. “It’s my fervent hope and wish that we can try to galvanize the community together, and that we can bring along many of our allies who are not Jewish as well.”
The post With Jewish New Yorkers on edge, Julie Menin says new protections will help keep them safe over High Holidays appeared first on The Forward.
