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
US Senate Vote to Block Arms Sales to Israel Fails — but Raises Questions About Future Democratic Support
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to the media following a meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, US, July 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
A failed Senate vote to block US arms sales to Israel has further exposed a deepening divide within the Democratic Party, one increasingly defined by younger voters and liberals whose views on Israel are shifting rapidly.
The Senate on Wednesday rejected two resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have halted roughly $450 million in weapons transfers to Israel, including bombs and bulldozers. The measures failed, ensuring the sales will move forward. But the margin, and who supported the effort, marked a significant political inflection point.
Of the 47 Senate Democrats, 40 voted in favor of blocking sales of bulldozers and 36 voted in favor of blocking transfers of so-called “dumb” bombs. The failed vote represents the largest show of opposition to military aid for Israel within the party in recent memory. While previous efforts spearheaded by Sanders drew support from a smaller bloc, this vote saw roughly 80 percent of Senate Democrats vote against transferring aid to the Jewish state, signaling a seismic shift in the dynamic between the Democratic Party and Israel.
Further, many traditionally stalwart supporters of Israel, such as Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin (MI) and Cory Booker (NJ), voted in favor of Sanders’s resolution, signaling that anti-Israel sentiment has migrated from the far-left fringes of the party into the mainstream.
That change is closely tied to evolving public opinion, especially among younger Americans.
Recent polling, including newly released data from the Yale Youth Poll, shows that younger voters are far more critical of Israel than older generations. Large shares of voters under 30 now support restricting or even ending US military aid, a position that departs sharply from the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington. Polls show that a supermajority of Democrats believe that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza, an assertion which lacks little evidence and has been boosted by foreign entities tied to Iran.
Data also suggests that increased social media consumption aligns with more skeptical attitudes toward foreign policy regarding Israel. Those who receive their news from social media, especially youth-centric platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, are far more likely to exhibit anti-Israel animus than those who consume traditional broadcast news media.
The Senate vote reflects the increasing pressure of Democratic lawmakers to stake an aggressive stance against Israel. Several lawmakers who backed the resolutions argued that continued arms transfers should be reconsidered amid the expanding regional conflict involving Iran and mounting humanitarian concerns. They argued that the Trump White House has not sought out appropriate congressional approval for the ongoing war in Iran. Many also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct, suggesting that he has escalated hostilities in the region rather than acted in self-defense from existential threats. These same voices expressed dismay at civilian casualties in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.
The lawmakers largely framed their votes not as opposition to Israel’s existence, but as a challenge to current policies and the use of US-supplied weapons.
Opponents, including most Republicans, maintained that US military support remains essential to Israel’s security, particularly as tensions with Iran escalate. They warned that blocking arms sales could weaken a key ally in a volatile region.
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization dedicated to increasing support for the GOP among Jews, framed the vote as reflective of a broader anti-Israel sentiment within the Democratic Party.
“There is only ONE pro-Israel party, and it is the Republican Party,” RJC wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the group J Street, endorsed the vote as an “encouraging” sign of progress.
“It’s encouraging to see a growing number of senators recognize that unconditional US military support for Israel is no longer tenable in light of the Netanyahu government’s policies. The work now is to translate that shift into action: alleviating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, stopping violence on the West Bank and pursuing paths to end the ongoing fighting across the region,” Ben-Ami wrote.
A self-proclaimed “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying organization, J Street has come under fire for allegedly not doing enough to combat antisemitism or anti-Israel narratives within liberal political circles.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), one of the most strident defenders of Israel in Congress, criticized his party’s turn against Israel, saying in a new CNN interview that they have “boxed themselves in” by supporting Sanders’s resolution. He dismissed the notion that Democrats would become more likely to support Israel with a change in Israeli leadership.
“When Netanyahu goes, and you’re now on record with this, you’re going to revert back and say that now that he’s gone, I can now start sending offensive weapons?” Moskowitz pondered.
Despite the failure of the resolutions, the size of the Democratic vote in favor underscores how quickly the political landscape is changing ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
Uncategorized
Duke University Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Over Antisemitic Political Cartoon
Aerial view of Duke University on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Duke University has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter and impounded its money for posting an antisemitic political cartoon on social media, The Duke Chronicle reported on Tuesday.
According to the student paper, the illustration depicts a pig labeled “Zionism” hoisting a Star of David as its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty. The image was created in 1970 by political cartoonist Emory Douglas, a Black Panther party official who harbored hostility toward the US and Israel.
The Chronicle said the image elicited no fewer than 10 formal complaints from Jewish students for showing a blatant antisemitic trope. Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork. The Nazis notoriously did so, but the practice reaches back further into history, when medieval Germans proliferated the Judensau drawings which portrayed Jews drinking pig’s milk and excrement.
In a statement to the Chronicle, SJP denied that it intended to endorse the cartoon’s antisemitic messaging, saying it “was never intended to be antisemitic” and that anti-Zionist activism is “not the same as targeting Jewish people.”
This was not the first time that the anti-Zionist group posted antisemitic imagery. In 2024, the Harvard chapter of its faculty spinoff, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FJSP), posted a political cartoon of a Jew lynching an African American and an Arab. In the illustration, a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David and containing a dollar sign at its center dangles a Black man and an Arab man from a noose. In its posterior, an arm belonging to an unknown person of color wields a machete that says, “Liberation Movement.”
Such activity is an integral part of the playbook of anti-Zionist and antisemitic messaging on social media, scholars have found.
From 2013 to 2024, the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University studied over 76,000 posts created by Students for Justice in Palestine and its affiliates, finding that over half, 54.9 percent, included only a single, evocative image.
“In contrast, Reels (5.3%) and Videos (4.9%) are used far less frequently,” the institute said in a report based on its research. “Based on these descriptions, we see a strong preference among campus-based anti-Israel groups for static visual formats, suggesting that this type of bimodal content represents the highest form of shareability within activists networks.”
To boost their audience and reach, pro-Hamas groups also post together in what ISCA described as “co-authored posts,” of which there were over 20,000 between 2013 and 2024. Their content set off strong emotions in the individual users exposed to them, inciting incidents of antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and violence. Such outrages, it added, increased in proportion to the concentration of anti-Israel groups on a single campus, evidence of “particularly strong” correlation.
ISCAP’s conclusions can be found in the real world, as SJP and its network of student groups have helped fuel a historic wave of antisemitic incidents on college campuses over the past two and a half years — from spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew” to gang assaulting Jews at Columbia University’s Butler Library.
SJP has also expressed its hope of inciting insurrection in the US and amassing a jihadist army.
In 2024, the national SJP organization proclaimed on X that the anti-Zionist student movement is a weapon for destroying the US, saying that “divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal” but enacted with the later goal of initiating “the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself.” On the same day the group issued the statement, Columbia University’s most strident SJP spinoff, created after SJP was suspended, was reported to have distributed literature which called for “popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to a previous event. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Netherlands Reports 867 Antisemitic Incidents in 2025 as Cases Remain at Alarmingly High Levels
March 29, 2025, Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands: A pro-Palestinian demonstrator burns a hand-fashioned Israeli flag. Photo: James Petermeier/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in the Netherlands remained at alarmingly high levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a persistently hostile environment marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Wednesday, Dutch authorities released a new annual antisemitism report showing 867 registered cases in 2025, a figure that remains at deeply troubling levels and virtually unchanged from the 880 antisemitic incidents recorded the previous year.
Even though Jews make up less than 0.3 percent of the Dutch population, anti-Jewish hate crimes account for 26 percent of all discrimination cases.
Eddo Verdoner, the Dutch national coordinator for combating antisemitism (NCAB), said the data reflects a worrying normalization of antisemitic incidents and called for sustained, coordinated action to address them.
“We have been recording hundreds of antisemitic incidents each year for years now. What I fear is that we are slowly getting used to figures that are unacceptable, that hatred is becoming the new normal,” Verdoner said in a statement.
“The figures once again paint a worrying picture, underscoring the need for decisive action in schools, online, and in the courtroom,” he continued.
The newly released report shows a decrease in violent antisemitic incidents, with 34 cases compared to 42 in 2024. However, local police registered an increase in antisemitic threats in 2025, with 93 cases compared to 88 the previous year.
Of the 867 registered incidents, more than 400 involved Jewish individuals or institutions in everyday settings, including residential neighborhoods, public streets, and areas around Jewish buildings and cemeteries.
In light of these figures, Verdoner called on authorities to strengthen enforcement and prevention efforts, prioritizing higher detection rates, expanding Holocaust education, and placing greater emphasis on Jewish life as a way to counter ignorance and prejudice.
“At the moment, Jewish life in the Netherlands can almost only continue thanks to the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the police, and interventions such as cameras and bulletproof glass,” he said.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, the Netherlands has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In one of the most controversial incidents, local authorities opened an investigation last year into Batisma Chayat Sa’id, a nurse who allegedly stated she would administer lethal injections to Israeli patients.
In another instance, Amsterdam-based Jewish columnist Jonath Weinberger publicly denounced rising antisemitism in health-care settings, saying she was denied medical care by a nurse who refused to remove a pro-Palestinian pin shaped like a fist.