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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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Yiddishkayt LA and New Lehrhaus merge — but is this good for Yiddish?
For most Jewish institutions, “partnership” might mean a shared event or a guest lecture. But for Yiddishkayt LA and the Bay Area’s New Lehrhaus — two organizations separated by 370 miles and decades of distinct histories — this merger represents something far bolder. They are fusing identities, communities and visions of what West Coast Jewish culture can become.
Rob Adler Peckerar, formerly a key figure at Yiddishkayt LA, has now been appointed director of New Lehrhaus. In an interview he said that the merger strengthens both institutions rather than diluting either one.
Aaron Paley, the founder of Yiddishkayt LA, agrees. “We’re not amplifying one approach at the expense of the other; we’re amplifying both,” he said, adding that he first encountered the Lehrhaus tradition as a UC Berkeley student in the 1970s. The merger, he added, “immediately felt like a homecoming.”
Officially launched November 1, the merger wasn’t born of crisis. It grew from two organizations with parallel instincts: Yiddishkayt LA’s eclectic cultural programming and New Lehrhaus’s commitment to text, dialogue, and community learning.
A celebration — but not without concerns
But some Yiddish fans are concerned about the merger. “We’re 114 neighborhoods in a trench coat pretending to be a cohesive city,” said Aaron Castillo-White, director of the Yiddish culture organization Kultur Mercado and a former member of the Forward’s development staff.
“Yiddishkayt LA was one of the few forces stitching its Yiddish community together.” Now that it will no longer be a separate institution, he’s worried that the “already fragile cohesion” might suffer even more.
The question is: If Yiddishkayt LA becomes absorbed into New Lehrhaus’s broader educational framework, what will happen to LA’s uniquely local Yiddish culture — the concerts, neighborhood pop-ups, cross-art collaborations, and street-level programming? They may not easily transplant into a text-centered institution.
But Adler Peckerar isn’t worried, noting that, in recent years, newer groups like Der Nister and Kultur Mercado have already begun organizing on-the-ground Yiddish programming. Yiddishkayt LA, on the other hand, had moved away from local, place-based events toward livestreamed programs, online archives, virtual learning and broader national audiences who would never attend in-person Los Angeles events.
To understand the stakes, it’s important to understand who these two merging organizations are.
Two genealogies, one experiment
Yiddishkayt LA, founded by Paley in the 1990s, helped define a distinct West Coast model of Yiddish culture: contemporary, experimental and rooted in doikayt — “being present” in one’s milieu. Its Helix Fellowship shaped young artists who saw Jewish culture not as nostalgia, but as creative raw material.
New Lehrhaus, launched in 2021 by Rachel and David Biale, has different roots: In the early 20th century, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig founded an informal educational institution in Frankfurt, Germany, called Lehrhaus, that brought assimilated German Jews into engaging Judaic study without demanding any background knowledge or religious observance.
In the new incarnation, based in the Bay Area, the New Lehrhaus became a home for Jews seeking text and dialogue across denominations and backgrounds.
Last year, after Rachel Biale stepped down as director of the New Lehrhaus, the incoming director, Adler Peckerar, saw the joining of forces as a natural evolution. “Merging two strong organizations isn’t about defeat or one absorbing the other,” he said. “It’s strategic thinking about how to build something that can weather today’s volatile nonprofit landscape.”
But that innovation also sharpens Castillo-White’s concern: What disappears when two distinct ecosystems become one?
Diverging visions of the merger’s impact
Castillo-White described Yiddishkayt as “one of the only cultural bridges” in Los Angeles. He worries that a merger, even one made in good faith, could dilute that hyper-local energy.
Adler Peckerar disagrees. Unlike Castillo-White, he argued the merger will expand — not shrink — opportunities for Yiddish. “We’re broadening the ecosystem,” he said.
Biale framed the merger around a larger question facing Jewish institutions: How do they stay relevant without losing depth? She believes that the merger could bring Yiddishkayt LA fans into a much larger orbit of learning, featuring sessions with scholars like the University of Toronto professor Naomi Seidman who writes about the relationship between Judaism, literature, gender studies, translation studies and sexuality.
The new organization plans to dive into an eclectic range of fields in contemporary culture — physics, poetry, Leonard Cohen — as a doorway into Jewish texts. Adler Peckerar believes this approach could make Jewish learning feel relevant for Jews who may otherwise have little or no connection to Jewish learning.
They’re also planning intimate reading circles on radical Jewish thinkers such as Isaac Deutscher, Rosa Luxemburg and Gustav Landauer; classes on endangered Jewish languages and Hasidic history and experimental Yiddish theater and new one-act plays.
What remains to be seen is how the new Lehrhaus-Yiddishkayt will balance its broadened reach with the local energies that shaped each institution. Many in the community will be watching to see which parts of the old ecosystems endure, and what new forms of Yiddish culture might emerge.
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At long last, a TV show captures the experience of multi-racial Jewish families like mine
The new CBS television series Boston Blue has achieved what I long thought impossible — something close to an accurate portrayal of a multi-racial Jewish-American family.
The show, which quietly debuted last month as a spinoff of the hit series Blue Bloods, centers around the Silver family — a clan of police officers and elected officials helping to maintain safety and order across Beantown. They include siblings Lena, who is Black, Sarah, who is white, and Jonah, who is bi-racial.
“We’re just one big happy kinda confusing family,” Lena declares in the pilot episode, as she explains that her mother married Sarah’s father — with Jonah arriving shortly thereafter. And by establishing the Silver family tree so early on, Boston Blue softens the audience up for its real wild-card: The Silvers are all loudly, proudly and unapologetically Jewish.
Their family reminds me of my own. And I think the show got just about everything about our experience right.
In the pilot episode, Detective Danny Reagan (Blue Bloods veteran Donny Wahlberg) arrives in Boston to care for his injured son — who happens to be Jonah Silver’s partner — and is invited by family matriarch, District Attorney Mae Silver, to the type of “family dinner” made famous by Reagan’s own family on Blue Bloods.
Which is how Reagan unexpectedly finds himself at a Shabbat dinner.
When Mae married Sarah’s father — District Judge Ben Silver — she and Lena converted to Judaism, Reagan learns. Jonah was raised in the faith. But Judge Silver was killed a year earlier, leaving Mae’s father, Rev. Edwin Peters, as the de-factor paterfamilias — a Black pastor at one of Boston’s oldest Black churches, kippah-clad and leading a family of Jews as they light Shabbat candles and recite traditional prayers.
It might all seem a bit far-fetched. Unless you know my own family.
We have white Jews, Black pastors, Asian uncles, Latino ex-husbands and mixed-race Jewish twins — that would be my sister and I. Separated on both coasts, it’s been awhile since we all came together for Shabbat like the Silvers. But if we did, our gathering would look a lot like theirs — minus the mansion on Beacon Hill.
This is what makes Boston Blue so refreshing and unexpected. The Silvers’ Jewishness never feels confrontational or contrived.
There are close to 1 million “Jews-of-color” in the United States today, but Boston Blue accurately understands that the family would still be an enigma to most American viewers. But rather than dwell on this potential narrative hiccup, the show’s writers cannily deployed it as a narrative device instead. These are folks who understand they must often explain their unique family dynamics, but ultimately have nothing to prove. They are both confident and casual in their faith.
As a Jew whom many other Jews often fail to recognize as one of their own, I’ve too often felt I’m not allowed to just be Jewish. So it thrills me to see the Silvers so matter-of-fact and well-adjusted in their Judaism — even if it’s only onscreen.
Two years after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war with Hamas in Gaza, I went into Boston Blue worried about how Israel, antisemitism, Zionism and anti-Zionism might unfold within the show. Owing to the burdens of identity politics and intersectionality, Jews of color are often tasked with bridge-building amid these fractious and conflicted arenas.
Would they be forced to do the same on TV?
Former Law and Order star Ari’el Stachel — whose Israeli father is of Yemenite heritage — speaks of this duty in his new one-man show Other, now playing in New York. Stachel’s parents are both Jewish. But owing to his darker skin, he possesses a fluency in the optics of ethnicity that often sees him forced to field questions about cross-cultural discourse — even when, like me, he so often wishes the askers would just leave him alone.
I think Stachel would be satisfied by Boston Blue, whose showrunners aptly decided to keep war and hate away from the Shabbat table. Rather than try to shoe-horn the current political climate into the narrative, they avoided it all together. I, for one, was relieved: it’s a gift to see a family like mine onscreen, just being together, without being forced to try and solve all our myriad cultural problems at the same time.
I’ve always been leery of the entire concept of “Jews of color”; I worry it can impede us from understanding that all Jews are equally Jewish. So I was nervous heading into Boston Blue. For so long, so many in Hollywood have gotten our stories wrong at best, and been downright offensive at worst. They’ve tokenized and politicized and fetishized our experiences, while failing to actually humanize families like the Silvers and my own. But Boston Blue got it right — and it’s a step, long overdue, in the right direction.
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Mamdani: Israel immigration event at NY synagogue misused ‘sacred space’
(JTA) — Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s team has responded to a protest targeting an event promoting migration to Israel at an Upper East Side synagogue on Wednesday night, suggesting that the event was an inappropriate use of a “sacred space.”
The protest was organized by a group called Palestinian Assembly for Liberation has drawn allegations of antisemitism from Jewish leaders in the city. During it, participants shouted phrases including “globalize the intifada” and “death to the IDF” as well as insults toward pro-Israel counter-protesters like “f—king Jewish pricks,” according to reports from the scene. Police separated the protesters and counter-protesters but did not halt the demonstration.
“The Mayor-elect has discouraged the language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so,” Mamdani’s press secretary, Dora Pekec, said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
She went on, “He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
Pekec did not offer further comments about whether or why Mamdani believed the event at Park East Synagogue, a prominent Orthodox congregation, violated international law.
The event was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, the nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel for North American Jews. The organization bills its open house events as a chance to “get your questions answered, learn about the process, and discover what life in Israel could look like for you and your family.”
The group is considered a semi-governmental agency in Israel, receiving funding from the Israeli government and works closely with its ministries. It does not assign immigrants to particular communities, but has showcased West Bank settlements — which most of the world, though not Israel or the United States, considers illegal under international law — in events and on its website as possible destinations for new immigrants. (Previous protests in New York and beyond have targeted events at synagogues advertising real estate for sale in the West Bank.)
The organizing group suggested that all of the Jews who have moved to Israel with Nefesh B’Nefesh’s support are “settlers,” a term that some pro-Palestinian activists apply to all Israelis, not just those living in the West Bank.
“Nefesh b Nefesh is an affiliate of the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency for Israel, mainly responsible for the recruitment of settlers to Palestine from North America. Since 2003, they have recruited over 80,000 settlers of which over 13,000 served in the IOF,” Palestinian Assembly for Liberation said in an Instagram post advertising its demonstration, using an acronym by which anti-Israel activists refer to the Israeli army as the “Israel Occupation Forces.” It also called El Al “Genocide Settler Airlines.”
The demonstration is providing an early window into how Mamdani’s long- and deeply held pro-Palestinian views might influence his leadership of the city.
As a state Assemblyman, he sponsored legislation aimed at blocking nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank that some, including critics of the settlement movement, decried as casting an overly broad net.
During the campaign, he initially declined to condemn the protest phrase “globalize the intifada,” drawing allegations of antisemitism. He later shifted to say that he would “discourage” the phrase’s use in New York City, saying that he had learned from a rabbi that many Jews interpret it as a call to violence against them.
Now, Mamdani’s response to the Park East demonstration offers a stark contrast to two robust condemnations of antisemitism he has offered up since being elected, after a swastika was painted on a Brooklyn yeshiva and after the words “F–k Jews” were painted on a Brooklyn sidewalk. Both times, he quickly offered a full-throated denunciation on social media.
This time, even as prominent Jewish voices in the city alleged antisemitism on the part of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, Mamdani did not make a public comment himself. His office’s statement did not address allegations of antisemitism.
Mayor Eric Adams, who is in Uzbekistan after a visit to Israel this week, said in a statement that he planned to visit Park East upon his return to the city. Calling the rhetoric shouted there “desecration,” he suggested that the protest augured a grim future for the city under Mamdani.
“Today it’s a synagogue. Tomorrow it’s a church or a mosque. They come for me today and you tomorrow,” Adams tweeted. “We cannot hand this city over to radicals.”
The event came the same day that Mamdani announced that Adams’ police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, would stay on once he becomes mayor. Tisch, who is Jewish, has previously criticized the conduct of pro-Palestinian protesters in the city.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, who has been staunchly critical of Mamdani and whose father is the longtime senior rabbi at Park East Synagogue, said he was distressed by how the police allowed the confrontation to unfold.
“What I find most disturbing is that the police, who knew about this protest a day in advance, did not arrange for the protesters to be moved to either Third or Lexington Avenues,” he said. “Instead, they allowed the protesters to be right in front of the synagogue, which put members of the community at risk.”
One of the demonstrators repeatedly shouted about the Nefesh B’Nefesh event attendees, “We need to make them scared,” according to video from the scene.
“This kind of intimidation of Jewish New Yorkers is reprehensible and unacceptable,” tweeted Mark Levine, the Jewish comptroller-elect. “No house of worship, of any faith, should be subjected to this.”
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, decried the demonstration as “reprehensible.”
“It is not a violation of any law, international or otherwise, for Jews to gather in a synagogue or immigrate to Israel,” he said.
“Using violent rhetoric and hurling antisemitic insults in front of a crowded synagogue was a direct threat to our community’s safety,” he added. “JCRC-NY reached out to city officials and we have confidence that the NYPD will thoroughly investigate this serious matter. No one should ever have to fear entering or leaving their house of worship and that includes our Jewish neighbors. We stand with the Park East community and with all New Yorkers who reject hate.”
In a statement from a spokesperson, UJA-Federation New York said they were “outraged by the demonstration outside Park East Synagogue.”
“We’ve been in contact with our partners at the NYPD, and they are taking this matter very seriously,” the statement reads. “Calls to ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘death to the IDF’ are not political statements—they are incitements to violence against Jewish people. Every leader must denounce this heinous language, and the choice to target a house of worship makes it especially vile.”
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