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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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Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war
Israelis have once again been asked to live under the shadow of war. Sirens and missiles punctuate sleepless nights. Families sleep beside safe rooms. Children measure their days between alarms.
People will endure that, when they believe there is a purpose behind the sacrifice.
Yet three weeks into the current confrontation with Iran, Israel’s government hasn’t offered anything resembling such clarity. Nor has that of the United States. And as the costs of war accrue in both countries — with Americans worrying about forces deployed across the region, and paying the price of the conflict at the gas pump — citizens of both countries deserve something basic from their leaders: a direct, compelling explanation of what this war is supposed to achieve.
In a democracy, citizens who are sending their children to shelters and their soldiers to the front absolutely have the right to know the objectives of a war. Yes, you cannot reveal operational details that could endanger pilots, intelligence sources, or soldiers in the field.
But explaining the purpose of a war is not the same thing as revealing tactics. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump aren’t exhibiting prudence by keeping things, as the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “incoherent.” Instead, they’re showing contempt for those they govern.
The hubris would be troubling even if either government in question enjoyed broad public trust. But neither Netanyahu nor Trump are leaders who command such confidence. And the arrogance that has infected even officials under them reflects a deeper pattern that has long defined both men’s leadership: an extraordinary sense of entitlement to power.
An Israel defined by hubris
Many Israelis believe that Netanyahu bends the truth routinely and will do almost anything to remain in power. Under those circumstances, demanding blind faith in this war is insulting.
Consider the extraordinary elasticity of the government’s claims. In June, after the earlier 12-day confrontation with Iran, Netanyahu declared that Israel had pushed back Iran’s missile and nuclear threats “for generations.”
If anyone made the mistake of believing him at the time, it is now obvious that he was lying. Iran still possesses missiles, which we know, because they have rained down on Israel throughout this war. If this conflict is now necessary to confront the very same dangers, the public deserves an explanation of what exactly happened to the supposed “generations” of security their leader had promised.
Yet instead of engaging with tough questions from the press about why Israel engaged in this war, what its goals are, and when it will end, Netanyahu has opted to exclusively discuss the war on friendly platforms. There are social media videos produced by his team, which are pure propaganda; the rare stage-managed “news conference,” usually with the few questioners selected in advance; and a studious avoidance of interviews with the Israeli media — with the sole exception of the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14.
Incredibly, when asked by a reporter from Haaretz a few days ago what the goals of the war were — and why no explanation has been offered to the citizens of the country — Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs actually had the temerity to respond that, in his eyes, citizens don’t need to know about those goals. Some have been set, he said, but they are confidential.
This posture invites, of course, even more suspicion.
Muddled American messaging
If Netanyahu says too little, Trump, on the American side, possibly says too much.
He speaks constantly about the war, yet always seems to struggle with precision or coherence.
One day he suggests the conflict could last a long time. The next he says he thinks it may end soon. When asked about terrorism that could follow escalation, he shrugs that “some people will die.”
This is not surprising; Trump’s rhetoric on these things has always been belated, confused and focused on spectacle. Within hours of the bizarre American seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a reprehensible figure but still the head of a sovereign state — Trump appeared on television explaining that the U.S. needed access to Venezuelan oil.
With short-term operations like that in Venezuela, Trump’s inability to explain why the U.S. needed to engage, and outline what Americans can expect going forward, was less glaring. Now, as he waffles between demanding NATO allies come to aid the war and insisting their help isn’t needed; bizarrely declares the war will end “when I feel it in my bones”; and makes clear that the war was initiated with no strategic foresight, it’s impossible to ignore
So Americans, like Israelis, are left struggling to understand what exactly their government is trying to accomplish. And while in Israel the war is still broadly supported — so great is the anger at the Iranian regime, and so effective has been Israel’s missile defense — that is hardly the case in the U.S.
The blame game
The risks of a war defined by ever-moving goalposts and a deliberately obscure timeframe are obvious and terrifying. Just look at the war in Gaza.
That conflict dragged on for nearly two years, accompanied by repeated declarations that Hamas would soon be eliminated. Today, Hamas still exists. Yet the government has offered no serious accounting of that reality. On the way to this endgame, in which the status quo has ended up preserved but with Gaza in ruins, Netanyahu repeatedly blocked off-ramps. He was clearly indifferent to the widespread perception that he was using the continuation of the war to avoid accountability: he explicitly and shamelessly argued that spectacular breakdown on Oct. 7 could not be investigated while the war continued.
In fact, he is using the exact same playbook in this new war, arguing last week — with Trump’s support — that Israeli President Isaac Herzog should issue him a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial so that he can focus on the war.
Some Israelis now genuinely fear that prolonged emergency conditions could become politically convenient. Netanyahu’s critics openly speculate that a monumental national crisis might provide justification to delay or manipulate elections — as Netanyahu is obsessed with remaining in power and is badly behind in the polls.
In the U.S., this fumbling has opened the door to an alarming new reality: one in which Israel and its international supporters are blamed for dragging the U.S. into war. On Tuesday, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the war with a public letter making unproven allegations that Trump fell prey to an Israeli “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform.” There is a clear risk that such rhetoric, fueled by the sense of directionlessness in this war, will increase already surging antisemitism.
The paradox of justification
Netanyahu and Trump’s failure to clearly justify the war does not mean that the Iranian regime deserves indulgence.
Tehran has brutalized its own citizens for decades and exported violence throughout the Middle East. Through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq, it has helped fuel conflicts that have cost countless lives. The regime has given the world many reasons to wish for its disappearance.
For the past month I have been arguing relentlessly that the Iranian regime has forfeited any claim to sympathy and that its actions have justified the Israeli and U.S. attack.
A long war determined to bring the regime to its knees may not be fundamentally unjustified. But requiring blind faith in the leaders prosecuting that war is.
The post Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Official Resigns Over Iran War, Blames Israel
Mattie Neretin – CNP/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A senior U.S. counterterrorism official resigned Tuesday in protest of President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran, accusing Israel of playing an outsized role in pushing the United States into conflict.
Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said he could not support the war, arguing Tehran posed “no imminent threat” to the United States. But it was Kent’s broader assertion, that pressure from Israel and pro-Israel voices influenced the decision to go to war, that drew swift pushback from the White House and national security experts.
In his resignation, Kent also drew parallels to the Iraq War, suggesting that similar dynamics shaped both conflicts, arguing that Israel pushed the US into the conflict. His comments revived long-running debates about how U.S. intelligence and foreign alliances factor into decisions to use military force, though many officials and analysts have rejected such comparisons as misleading.
“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in his resignation letter.
Kent further claimed that he lost his wife in a “war manufactured by Israel.” Kent’s wife, Shannon Kent, died in 2019 when an ISIS suicide bomber detonated an explosive device during a U.S. military operation during the Syrian Civil War. Kent’s assertion suggests that Israel started the Syrian Civil War is completely unfounded. However, the notion that Israel controls the ISIS terror group is a popular conspiracy online.
The Trump administration forcefully disputed Kent’s claims, maintaining that the decision to strike Iran was based on credible intelligence about threats to U.S. forces and interests in the region. Trump dismissed Kent as “weak on security,” defending the operation as necessary to deter Iranian aggression and protect American personnel and allies.
Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, lambasted Kent’s letter as inaccurate .
“The absurd allegation that President Trump made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries, is both insulting and laughable. President Trump has been remarkably consistent and has said for DECADES that Iran can NEVER possess a nuclear weapon,” she wrote.
National security experts and former officials also criticized Kent’s framing, arguing that it oversimplifies the policymaking process and risks promoting narratives that inaccurately portray Israel as driving U.S. military decisions. They emphasize that while Israel is a close ally that shares intelligence and strategic concerns, particularly regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions and support for proxy groups, decisions to go to war are made by U.S. leadership based on American intelligence assessments.
Israel has long warned about the threat posed by Iran’s regional activities, including its backing of armed groups hostile to both Israeli and U.S. interests. Those concerns are broadly shared across multiple U.S. administrations and within the intelligence community, regardless of political party.
Kent’s resignation marks the most significant internal break so far over the Iran conflict and highlights growing divisions within the administration and across Washington. While some critics of the war have echoed his concerns about the lack of an imminent threat, others have expressed alarm at his decision to center Israel in his critique, warning that such claims can distort public understanding of how U.S. foreign policy decisions are made.
Kent came under fire during his confirmation process over his reported connections to white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Greyson Arnold. Kent admitted that he had conversations with Fuentes over social media strategy. However, Kent later distanced himself from Fuentes and repudiated his views.
Kent also holds other unorthodox foreign policy viewpoints, such as a relatively forgiving posture towards Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In April 2022, following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Kent argued that Putin was “very reasonable” and accused the US foreign policy establishment of aggravating Russia into war.
Kent’s comments on Tuesday drew widespread backlash from many who accused him of peddling antisemitic tropes. Ilan Goldberg, Senior Vice President and Chief Policy Officer of liberal pro-Israel organization J-Street, praised Kent for leaving the administration, but added “the antisemitic stuff in here blaming Israel for the Iraq war and a secret conspiracy of the media and Israelis to deceive Trump into going to war with Iran is ugly stuff that plays on the worst antisemitic tropes.”
“Donald Trump is the President of the United States and he is the one ultimately responsible for sending American troops into harms way,” Goldberg added.
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UK Hate Crime Prosecutions Reveal Stark Disparities Between Muslim and Jewish Victims
Demonstrators attend the “Lift The Ban” rally organised by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government’s proscription of “Palestine Action” under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Hate crimes against Muslims in the United Kingdom are nearly twice as likely to result in prosecution as those targeting Jews, newly released figures show, exposing a striking imbalance in how justice is ultimately delivered.
According to data compiled by the British Home Office, the government department responsible for policing and security, figures on hate crime offences recorded over the past year show that Muslim victims of Islamophobic attacks were 76 percent more likely to see their attackers prosecuted than Jewish victims of antisemitic attacks.
Across the United Kingdom, 6.7 percent of hate crimes targeting Muslims led to a charge or summons — around one in 15 cases — compared with just 3.8 percent of offences against Jewish victims, or roughly one in 26, over the period from April 2024 to March 2025.
The gap is particularly stark in certain offences. Religiously aggravated assaults without injury against Muslims were over six times more likely to lead to prosecution, with 6.3 percent of cases resulting in charges compared with just 1.1 percent for Jewish victims.
Similarly, racially or religiously aggravated criminal damage was around four times more likely to result in charges, at 3.4 percent versus 0.8 percent.
Although 4,478 religious hate crimes were reported against Muslims compared with 2,873 against Jews, the smaller size of the Jewish population means such offences are far more concentrated and statistically significant. By raw population, the contrast is stark: around 3.9 million Muslims live in England and Wales, compared with 287,360 Jews
The Home Office’s data also reveals that Jewish people are disproportionately targeted, experiencing religious hate crimes at a rate roughly ten times higher than Muslims.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) — the body responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales — said comparing crime reports with prosecutions is difficult because cases can only proceed once police submit sufficient evidence for a charging decision.
According to the CPS, a record number of hate crime cases were referred by police last year, with 11,140 defendants prosecuted for racially flagged offences, resulting in a charge rate of 87.1 percent and a conviction rate of 85.2 percent.
In the UK, the Community Security Trust (CST) — a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters — recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents from January to June last year. This was the second-highest number of antisemitic crimes ever recorded by CST in the first six months of any year, following 2,019 incidents in the first half of 2024.