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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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The post ‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Palestinian Islamic Jihad Said to Be Expanding Military Presence in Syria With Government’s Knowledge
Terrorists stand during the funeral of two Palestinian Islamic Jihad gunmen who were killed in an Israeli raid, in Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank on May 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group is reportedly expanding its military presence in Syria, a move that could put the Syrian government in violation of US conditions for restoring full diplomatic ties and lifting additional economic sanctions.
According to Israeli public broadcaster Kan News, PIJ has expanded its military wing — the al-Quds Brigades — within Syria in recent weeks, notably increasing activity in Palestinian refugee camps near Damascus, apparently with the full knowledge of the Syrian government.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is said to have appointed an envoy to oversee PIJ’s activities in the country, responsible for facilitating communications between the Palestinian terrorist group and the government, Kan reported.
However, a government security source denied such accusations, saying there is “no intention to allow military operations against Israel,” which borders Syria.
PIJ also denied reports of intensified activity in Syria, saying they are entirely fabricated and intended to provoke hostility against the Palestinian people and their refugee camps
Following the United States’ recent statements that it does not support Israeli airstrikes in Syria, the embattled Middle Eastern country could now provide a particularly convenient base for PIJ, allowing the group to expand its operations with less risk of Israeli retaliation.
Under the Trump administration, Washington has lifted sanctions on the Syrian government to support the country’s reconstruction efforts and pushed for Damascus to normalize relations with Israel. Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump hosted Sharaa for the first-ever visit by a Syrian president to Washington, DC, vowing to help Syria as the war-ravaged country struggles to come out of decades of international isolation.
To pave the way for the full restoration of US diplomatic relations, deeper economic ties, and the lifting of additional economic sanctions, Washington has set five conditions for the Syrian government, including deporting Palestinian militants, joining the Abraham Accords with Israel, and expelling foreign terrorists.
The government must also help prevent an Islamic State (ISIS) resurgence and take responsibility for detention facilities holding ISIS fighters, supporters, and their families in the northeast.
If the Syrian government is aware of the reported PIJ activity, it risks jeopardizing its relationship with Washington by effectively endorsing the operations of a designated foreign terrorist organization — in open defiance of a key condition for improving bilateral ties.
As Damascus seeks to restore international credibility and strengthen its standing on the global stage, Israeli officials have remained highly cautious of Syria’s new leadership.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has previously described the current Syrian regime as “a jihadist Islamist terror group from Idlib that took Damascus by force.”
He has even warned senior European officials that Hamas and PIJ were operating in Syria to create an additional front against Israel
“We will not compromise the security on our border. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are acting in Syria to create another front against Israel there,” the top Israeli diplomat said earlier this year.
According to Hebrew media reports, Defense Minister Israel Katz warned lawmakers in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, this week that armed groups operating inside Syria, including the Yemen-based Houthis, are considering launching attacks on the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria.
Hamas, PIJ, and the Houthis are all backed by Iran, which provides the internationally designated terrorist groups with arms and funding.
Israel has consistently vowed to prevent the Syrian government from deploying forces in the country’s southern region, along its northeastern border.
Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander who until recently was sanctioned by the US as a foreign terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, became Syria’s transitional president earlier this year after leading a rebel campaign that ousted long-time Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, whose brutal and authoritarian Iran-backed rule had strained ties with the Arab world during the nearly 14-year Syrian war.
The collapse of Assad’s regime was the result of an offensive spearheaded by Sharaa’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, a former al Qaeda affiliate.
Following Assad’s fall in December, Israel moved troops into a buffer zone along the Syrian border to secure a military position to prevent terrorists from launching attacks against the Jewish state.
The previously demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights was established under the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem that ended the Yom Kippur War. However, Israel considered the agreement void after the collapse of Assad’s regime.
Now, Israel and Syria are reportedly in the final stages of months-long negotiations over a security agreement that could establish a joint Israeli, Syrian, and US presence at key strategic locations.
Jerusalem and Damascus have agreed to form a joint Israeli-Syrian–American security committee to oversee developments along their shared border and uphold the terms of a proposed deal.
Al-Sharaa told The Washington Post earlier this month that his government has expelled Iranian and Hezbollah forces from Syria and is ready for a new phase of ties with the United States. However, Syria’s reported knowledge of PIJ activity may be a hurdle as talks between Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem proceed.
Earlier this year, tensions escalated after heavy fighting broke out in Sweida between local Druze fighters and Syrian regime forces amid reports of atrocities against civilians.
At the time, Israel launched an airstrike campaign to protect the Druze, which officials described as a warning to the country’s new leadership over threats to the minority group. The Druze, an Arab minority who practice a religion originally derived from Islam, live in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon. In Israel, many serve in the military and police, including during the war in Gaza.
Jerusalem has pledged to defend the Druze community in Syria with military force if they come under threat — motivated in part by appeals from Israel’s own Druze minority.
But the Syrian government has accused Israel of fueling instability and interfering in its internal affairs, while the new leadership insists it is focused on unifying the country after 14 years of conflict, which began with Assad violently cracking down on anti-government protests in 2011.
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The Dangerous Legacy of the 1840 ‘Damascus Affair’ Blood Libel (PART ONE)
Smoke rises from a building after strikes at Syria’s defense ministry in Damascus, Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
According to a recent article in Aish:
On November 11, 2025, Dr. Samar Maqusi, a researcher at the University College London (UCL) proudly stated that in 1838 a group of Jews kidnapped and murdered a priest in Damascus and used his blood in order to make special pancakes for their Feast of the Tabernacles (Sukkot). She added that for Jewish people the blood used in their pancakes must be from a gentile. She asserted that a group of Jews admitted to murdering this priest in order to use his blood in their food.
Her lecture was hosted by UCL’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) titled “The Birth of Zionism.”
The Damascus Affair of 1840 (not 1838) was an infamous blood libel that became international news and led to one of the first instances in which Jewish communities around the world worked together to demand justice for another Jewish community.
The Damascus blood libel is recognized as one of the turning points of modern Jewish history, when Jews around the world realized the importance of uniting to advocate for each other.
The Blood Libel
On February 5, 1840, Father Thomas, an Italian Friar of the Capuchin Order who lived in Damascus, disappeared with his Muslim servant Ibrahim Amara.
They were assumed murdered, possibly by businessmen with whom Thomas had had shady dealings, or by a Muslim who was infuriated by an insult to Islam that Father Thomas had uttered.
But the Jews were to bear the blame, as the Capuchin friars began spreading rumors that the Jews had murdered the two men to use their blood for Passover. This led to one of history’s most famous blood libels, the Damascus Blood Libel, better known as the Damascus Affair of 1840.
Damascus was then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Since the Ottoman Empire was weak, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, primarily ruled over both Egypt and Syria as quasi-independent principalities, with just nominal subordination to the Ottoman Empire. France also retained some measure of control in Syria, as the French had maintained a presence in the region since the time of the Crusades. The Catholics of Syria, including Father Thomas, were officially under French protection.
Due to the French jurisdiction over this case, the French consul, Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, known for his anti-Jewish views, presided over the investigation.
Along with the governor-general, Sharif Pasha, he conducted a short investigation, and a barber named Shlomo Negrin, among others, was arbitrarily arrested and tortured.
They managed to extort a “confession” from Negrin that the monk had been killed in the house of David Harari by seven Jews. The men whom he named were arrested and tortured. Two of the detained men died, one converted to Islam to be spared, and the statements made under torture by the others were considered adequate as an admission of guilt.
Bones that were discovered in a sewer were “identified” as those of the monk and buried in a funeral on March 2nd, which increased the anger against the Jews. The inscription on the monk’s tombstone stated that this was the grave of a saint tortured by the Jews.
After the “funeral,” attacks began against the Jews, and Sharif Pasha had to move hundreds of soldiers to protect the Jewish quarter.
The focus of the “investigation” was now on the servant, Ibrahim Amara. More torture extracted the “confession” that he had been murdered by Jews, among them members of the prominent Farhi and Picciotto families, and the authorities sought to arrest them.
Knowing the torture that they would be subjected to, some of the accused tried to hide or escape. Rabbi Yaakov Antebi, accused of having received a bottle of the blood of Thomas, was arrested and tortured, yet he held strong under the torture and would not confess to anything.
More bones were found, and the investigators claimed they were the remains of Ibrahim Amara. However, the physician in Damascus, Dr. Lograso, did not believe they were human bones and, considering the pressure on him, requested that the bones be sent to Europe for examination. Ratti-Menton refused and instead announced that based on the confessions of the accused and the remains found of the victims, the guilt of the Jews in the double murder was proven beyond a doubt.
One of the Jews who was arrested during the second round of accusations was Isaac Levi Picciotto, an Austrian citizen and thus under the protection of the Austrian consul. Initially, he was also subject to torture, but on March 8th, there was a sudden turnabout.
The Austrian vice-consul, Caspar Giovanni Merlato, a personal friend of Picciotto, demanded that Picciotto be returned to Austrian jurisdiction and that the investigation be carried out at the Austrian consulate.
With Merlato’s involvement, things changed dramatically. Picciotto proved he was in a different place the evening of the murder, and a Christian corroborated this. Picciotto now moved from the defensive to the offensive and began accusing officials of instigating this blood libel, carrying out investigations under torture, and openly accusing Ratti-Menton of murder.
He demanded that the Austrian authorities carry out the investigation. As torture methods were seen as unjust, cruel, and backward by Western countries, his accusations put Ratti-Menton and his aides on the defensive.
The Blood Libel Spreads
The predictable result of the accusations was that the Jews of Damascus and other parts of Syria began to suffer from antisemitic mobs. Synagogues were destroyed and looted, cemeteries were desecrated, and Jews were attacked all over the country.
News of the atrocities spread throughout the Jewish world, causing waves of shock and anger at what was going on in Syria.
The first Jewish attempt to intervene in the tragic situation came via a petition initiated by Israel Bak addressed to Muhammad Ali, as he was the governor of Syria. At the same time, the Austrian Consul General in Egypt, Anton Laurin, received a report from the Austrian consul in Damascus. Recognizing the tremendous injustice, Laurin became very involved in the case, and he began by using his influence to petition Muhammad Ali to stop the torture methods used by the investigators.
Muhammad Ali agreed, and instructions were issued accordingly to Damascus by express courier. As a result, the use of torture came to an end on April 25, 1840, which caused a new round of riots in Damascus.
The accusation of murder and blood libel remained, and the investigation against the Jews continued, albeit without torture. Now, Austrian Consul General Laurin attempted to influence the French Consul General in Egypt to order his subordinate, Ratti-Menton, to stop the libel, but this effort was unsuccessful.
At this point, Laurin went against all procedures and decided to send the information he received from Damascus to Baron James de Rothschild, the honorary Austrian consul in Paris.
Baron Rothschild appealed to the French government to stop the injustice, but when his appeals were ignored, he chose to turn to the media and publish the report in newspapers worldwide, creating public pressure to halt this travesty of justice.
His brother in Vienna, Solomon Rothschild, worked alongside him and used his influence to speak to Chancellor Klemens von Metternich about the situation. Metternich ultimately supported his consul, Laurin, since the negative publicity for France, archenemy of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was to his benefit. The British also chose to support the Jews in fighting the libel, and the British Consul General of England in Egypt expressed those policies.
As a result of the advocacy, a message was sent to Damascus on May 3, 1840, ordering protection for the Jews from the violence of Muslim and Christian mobs.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA from 2007 – 2020. He is a popular speaker and has written for numerous publications. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org. A version of this article was first published at: https://aish.com/the-damascus-affair/
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A Personal Perspective From Israel: The Signs Are Small, But We Are Still at War
An Israeli police officer investigates a crater at the site of a missile attack, launched from Yemen, near Ben Gurion Airport, in Tel Aviv, Israel May 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Avshalom Sassoni
Israel is an unusual place, where we balance war and daily life on a constant basis. So today, I’m taking a moment away from deep analysis, and instead sharing something a bit more personal — my weird/normal life as an Israeli.
In addition to my work at RealityCheck, I also teach as an Adjunct Professor at Reichman University (formerly the “IDC”) in Herzliya, Israel. I absolutely love my students — who are enthusiastic, intelligent, and in many cases, actively risking their lives to protect mine.
Last week, a student came to class in uniform — not מדי א׳ , which is the dress uniform that soldiers typically wear when traveling home for the weekend, but מדי ב׳, which is the full combat uniform. I asked if he was in מילואים (reserves) and he said yes, that he’s serving in Syria right now.
Only later I realized that when he said “right now,” he meant RIGHT now: his commander had given him a special pass to come to class for a few hours, after which he was leaving my classroom and returning straight to Syria. I don’t know what’s more impressive — that my students are out there protecting our safety, or that when they have a moment away from combat, their first priority is to come to class.
This is Israel. These are Israelis.
Though it’s not strictly speaking a part of my course, students ask about the legal status of Israel at The Hague so often that I prepared several slides on the topic. Once, a student asked whether she should expect that her boyfriend (a combat soldier) would get arrested on their upcoming trip to Europe. Fortunately, I had the knowledge to explain that topic, and to recommend certain precautionary measures, which gave her a degree of comfort. Sadly, those same precautionary measures may soon be relevant in New York City.
I sometimes enjoy sitting on my balcony, eating dinner, and watching passenger planes fly across the Mediterranean into Israel on their standard flight path toward Ben Gurion International Airport. Yet the other evening, I noticed something unusual: several aircraft turned away from the Tel Aviv shore at the last moment, and took strange detours. Minutes later I saw (and mostly heard) several fighter jets heading northward, intersecting the commercial flightpath.
Perhaps air traffic control needed to clear the skies for the fighter jets? I may never know for certain, but the next morning, I read about an unusually large IDF operation in Lebanon, across Israel’s northern border.
Other days, I see helicopters heading south, most likely to Gaza. But on one special day, October 13, 2025, I saw the very helicopters that were bringing the hostages back home. All this, right from my window.
These small but striking experiences serve as a constant reminder that we are not really at peace.
For the moment we aren’t dodging rockets, running to bomb shelters, or watching the ominous orange glow of Iranian missiles as they heat up upon re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere — on their way to strike our cities and communities. Yet Israel is very much still at war on multiple fronts: we see and feel it every day, in the most unusual and ordinary ways.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.