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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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Jewish New Yorkers rally outside Park East Synagogue, 2 weeks after anti-Israel protest there
(JTA) — Hundreds of New York City Jews and their allies braved the cold Thursday evening for a rally outside Park East Synagogue, where pro-Palestinian protesters had demonstrated two weeks prior shouting chants like “Globalize the Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.”
Thursday’s demonstrators carried signs distributed by organizers that read “Proud New Yorkers, Jews, Zionists.” Others brought signs from home with messages including “Proudly Park East” and “Anti-Zionism is Jew hate is not OK.” Messages from speakers focused mostly on the protesters’ rhetoric and embracing Israel as an important part of Jewish life.
“This evening we come together representing the scale, strength and diversity of our incredible New York Jewish community,” said Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, which spearheaded the rally. “And we gather outside the sacred space that was so violently targeted a few weeks ago.”
In referring to “sacred space,” Goldstein was using the language that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani used when he responded to the protest in a way that many of his Jewish critics found disappointing. But if it was meant to be an allusion, Goldstein didn’t say. In fact, no one mentioned Mamdani directly from the speaker podium as a number of Jewish elected officials and community leaders addressed the crowd and denounced the rhetoric used by the protesters.
Joanna Samuels, CEO of the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, came the closest with comments that appeared to allude to criticisms of the incoming mayor, a longtime and staunch devotee to the pro-Palestinian cause.
“The great leaders of our city have sought to unite people of all backgrounds around broad common goals,” she said, adding that New York’s greatest leaders “have not been ideologues.”
“Our great leaders have had the maturity and discipline to get rid of divisive language and rhetoric in service of their love of our city and their love of New Yorkers,” Samuels said. “I invite all of our leaders and our future leaders to uphold these values, and to demand them from those who speak in your name and on your behalf.”
The rally, which also featured a performance by the musician Mastisyahu, drew both critics and allies of Mamdani in politics. It represents a show of force as Jewish leaders in the city ready themselves for Mamdani’s inauguration on Jan. 1, when the city will go from having a mayor who prides himself on being pro-Israel to having one who has called for its boycott.
Mamdani was asked about the pro-Israel solidarity rally at an unrelated event earlier on Thursday.
“On those who are rallying today, and on Jewish New Yorkers across the five boroughs, I look forward to being a mayor for each and every one of them, and each and every person who calls the city home,” Mamdani said. “And being that mayor means protecting those New Yorkers, it also means celebrating and cherishing those New Yorkers.”
A spokesperson for Mamdani said two weeks ago that he would continue to “discourage” the language used at the Park East protest. But speakers on Thursday called out the protesters in far more explicit terms, saying they used antisemitic rhetoric.
Those speakers included Mark Levine, the comptroller-elect who traded endorsements with the mayor-elect, and will be one of the most powerful officials in the city government alongside Mamdani.
“We are out here in the cold to denounce the hatred that was directed at our fellow Jewish New Yorkers outside of this synagogue,” Levine asserted. “It is never OK to call for the death of anyone, as these protesters did. It is not OK to obstruct and threaten people entering a house of worship, as these protesters did.”
Levine himself has been the subject of protests by left-wing groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, which endorsed Mamdani and, like the mayor-elect, opposes Levine’s intention to invest city funds in Israel bonds.
Levine also defended attendees of the event inside Park East, which was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit that facilitates North Americans’ immigration to Israel, saying, “You can be interested in immigrating to a country even if you don’t agree with every policy of the government of that country.”
He added, “And in the case of Israel, one of the most common reasons people are interested in immigrating is to flee antisemitism, which is on the rise in New York and America — a fact perhaps lost on the protesters, who were busy trying to make the attendees feel unsafe.”
Jewish State Assembly member Micah Lasher, who is running for Congress in the 12th district which includes Park East, commended Levine on social media for his “powerful words.”
Lasher arrived at the event alongside Brad Hoylman-Sigal, the Jewish state senator and incoming Manhattan borough president who endorsed Lasher in October.
Both politicians had endorsed Mamdani in the general election, as did Assemblymember Alex Bores, one of Lasher’s opponents in the 12th district; Sen. Liz Krueger, who is Jewish; and City Council Member Gale Brewer, who were all present. Meanwhile, another notable attendee — Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League — has had an antagonistic relationship with the mayor-elect, who is the subject of the ADL’s “Mamdani Monitor.”
While Mamdani was alluded to in Samuels’ remarks, some attendees said they felt that he should have been discussed explicitly.
Aaron Herman, a former New York City resident who commuted in from White Plains, in Westchester County north of the city, said he and his rabbi were discussing the subject.
“He brought up to me, like, ‘There’s one thing that was missing during this incredible rally: No one actually mentioned our mayor-elect, Mamdani,’” Herman said. “The mayor-elect said something wrong. It needs to be addressed.”
Herman shared a video he took at the rally of Rabbi Avi Weiss, the founder of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in which Weiss noted that Mamdani had not been mentioned. “We’re 15 minutes into this rally and I’ve not heard the word Mamdani,” Weiss said. “He’s the problem. … I’m so proud of this rally and the people who planned it but don’t be afraid to stand up to the challenge that we face in the future — and that is the mayor elect, Mamdani.” He then sought to lead others in the crowd in chanting, “Mamdani, we are Israel.”
Still, Herman and other attendees said they appreciated the event altogether, which brought Jews from around the city to the Upper East Side. Buses were chartered from areas like Riverdale, a Bronx neighborhood with many Israeli and Orthodox Jewish residents.
“It was nice to see everyone come together,” said Allison Levy, who was also among the pro-Israel counter-protesters outside the Nefesh B’Nefesh event. “I wish we could do this more often because it seems like we’re really divided, so it was nice that people showed up — especially considering how cold it is.”
The rally included performances from Jewish musician Matisyahu, who has been a vocal supporter of Israel, and Park East Synagogue’s youth choir. Park East’s 95-year-old senior rabbi, Arthur Schneier, spoke, imploring lawmakers to implement a law prohibiting protests directly outside houses of worship.
Schneier’s son Marc, also a rabbi, has urged Mamdani to support such legislation, to which Mamdani’s team has expressed openness. Lasher co-introduced a bill banning protests within 25 feet of houses of worship on Wednesday.
Other speakers included Rabbis Joseph Potasnik and Sara Hurwitz of the New York Board of Rabbis, and 92NY’s David Ingber. Potasnik is one of five rabbis sitting on Mamdani’s transition committees.
Police blocked off the entire block of 68th Street between Lexington and Third avenues, accompanied by security from Hatzalah and the Community Security Service, Jewish security groups. Multiple speakers commended the NYPD, which had previously drawn criticism for not properly responding to the initial protest, leading commissioner Jessica Tisch to apologize at a Park East Shabbat service.
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JD Vance rejects claims that antisemitism is growing inside the GOP, breaking his silence on the topic
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that he does not believe antisemitism is surging inside the Republican Party, pushing back on prominent conservatives who have raised alarms about hostility toward Jews among young right-wing activists.
“I do think it’s important to call this stuff out when I see it. I also, when I talk to young conservatives, I don’t see some simmering antisemitism that’s exploding,” Vance told NBC News in an interview marking his first year in office.
Vance said antisemitism is wrong, stating that “judging anybody based on their skin color or immutable characteristics, I think, is fundamentally anti-American and anti-Christian.” (Vance himself is a convert to Catholicism who recently said he hopes his Hindu wife chooses to become a Christian in the future.)
Vance added, “In any bunch of apples, you have bad people. But my attitude on this is we should be firm in saying antisemitism and racism is wrong. … I think it’s kind of slanderous to say that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, is extremely antisemitic.”
These remarks amount to Vance’s most direct response to Sen. Ted Cruz and other prominent figures on the right who have in recent weeks have warned of rising antisemitism among conservatives especially after Tucker Carlson, a Vance ally, hosted Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes on his podcast.
Vance’s comments land amid a larger, unresolved debate inside Republican circles over how seriously to treat the rise of explicitly antisemitic figures such as Fuentes, whose online “groyper” movement has attracted a following among young GOP staffers and activists. Jewish conservatives and other right-leaning commentators have expressed alarm at Fuentes’ influence, estimating that significant numbers of junior Republican staffers consume his content. Fuentes has described “organized Jewry” as a threat to American unity.
Vance’s silence on antisemitism was a prominent topic of conversation at a recent confab for Jewish conservatives, where speakers questioned his close association with Carlson.
President Donald Trump recently defended Carlson after the podcast host interviewed Fuentes, saying, “You can’t tell him who to interview.” Carlson campaigned for Trump in 2024 and remains influential within the administration. Trump himself met with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, later claiming he did not know who Fuentes was.
Vance has taken a similarly restrained approach. He defended Carlson’s son, Buckley, from accusations of antisemitism without addressing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes. In October, he was criticized for responding to a college student’s question about Jews and Israel without acknowledging its antisemitic framing.
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Ireland, Spain, Netherlands announce boycott of Eurovision following failed effort to oust Israel
(JTA) — Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia’s public broadcasters said they will boycott this year’s Eurovision Song Contest after a Thursday meeting of the European Broadcasting Union confirmed Israel’s participation.
The Thursday General Assembly meeting in Switzerland of the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the annual song competition, was convened to discuss some members’ calls to have Israel ousted from the contest over the war in Gaza and allegations of voting interference.
But despite calls for a vote on Israel’s participation, the EBU instead said that its members approved new rules prohibiting voter interference from governments and third parties. (Several countries called for an audit of Eurovision’s public voting system after Israel’s Yuval Raphael took second place last year after being bolstered by the audience vote.)
While the EBU did not reference Israel in its press release following the meeting, it said that there would be “no need for a further vote on participation.”
“A large majority of Members agreed that there was no need for a further vote on participation and that the Eurovision Song Contest 2026 should proceed as planned, with the additional safeguards in place,” the EBU said in a statement Thursday.
Delphine Ernotte Cunci, the EBU’s president, praised the decision in a statement, saying that the result “demonstrates our members’ shared commitment to protecting transparency and trust in the Eurovision Song Contest.”
Israeli President Isaac Herzog wrote in a post on X that he was “pleased” that Israel will be included in this year’s competition, adding, “Israel deserves to be represented on every stage around the world, a cause to which I am fully and actively committed.”
And Golan Yochpaz, the CEO of Israeli broadcaster KAN, told EBU members during the meeting that “the attempt to remove KAN from the contest can only be understood as a cultural boycott.”
“A boycott may begin today with Israel, but no one knows where it will end or who else it may harm,” continued Yochpaz. “Are EBU members willing to be part of a step that harms freedom of creation and freedom of expression?”
But after the meeting, several public broadcasters that had previously stated their intention to boycott the competition if Israel was allowed to compete followed through on their promises.
The Netherlands’ public broadcaster AVROTROS said in a statement that it had finalized its decision to boycott the competition, citing the “severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza, the suppression of press freedom, and the political interference during the last Eurovision Song Contest.”
RTÉ, the public broadcaster of Ireland, also announced that it was pulling out of the song contest:
“RTÉ feels that Ireland’s participation remains unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, which continues to put the lives of so many civilians at risk,” the broadcaster said in a statement. “RTÉ remains deeply concerned by the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza during the conflict and the continued denial of access to international journalists to the territory.”
The secretary general of RTVE, the public broadcaster in Spain, also criticized the EBU for declining some members’ requests to hold a vote on Israel’s participation in a press release announcing its withdrawal.
“We would like to express our serious doubts about the participation of Israeli broadcaster KAN in Eurovision 2026,” RTVE Secretary General Alfonso Morales said in an address at the meeting. “The situation in Gaza, despite the ceasefire and the approval of the peace process, and Israel’s use of the contest for political purposes, make it increasingly difficult to maintain Eurovision as a neutral cultural event.”
In her address to EBU members before the decision, the president of the board of Slovenia’s public broadcaster, Natalija Gorščak, said, “We are hostages of the political interests of the Israeli government.”
“For the third year in a row, the public has demanded that we say no to the participation of any country that attacks another country. We must follow European standards for peace and understanding,” said Gorščak. “Our message is: we will not participate in the ESC if Israel is there. On behalf of the 20,000 children who died in Gaza.”
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