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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 real Holocaust history behind ‘Papillon,’ the Oscar-nominated short about a star Jewish swimmer
(JTA) — At first glance, “Papillon” (Butterfly), the 15-minute Oscar-nominated animated short by veteran French filmmaker Florence Miailhe, may appear like a meditative journey through water and memory. An elderly man swims in a hand-painted sea, flashing back to childhood memories of being bullied and a loving mother who makes it all right.
As he cuts through the water and moves through time, the fuller context emerges: The sun-soaked beaches appear to be North Africa, the boy becomes a champion swimmer, a swastika tells you that he is competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the soundtrack echoes with taunts of “Jew” and “kike.”
The film is based on the extraordinary real life of Alfred Nakache, a Jewish athlete whose story of resilience under Nazi persecution has previously been told in two French documentaries but is seldom remembered today.
Born in 1915 in French Algiers (his family immigrated from Iraq), Artem “Alfred” Nakache became one of France’s most celebrated swimmers in the 1930s, specializing in the butterfly stroke — a full-bodied lunge that looks like a bird, or butterfly, in flight. His success brought him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he competed under the shadow of rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany (and was part of a freestyle relay team that didn’t medal, but finished ahead of the Germans).
Under Vichy, the Nazi puppet regime, Nakache was stripped of his French nationality and forced out of Paris. He joined the resistance underground while still competing for Vichy. On Nov. 20, 1943, Nakache and his wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo, and the family was separated at Auschwitz. Only Alfred survived. He later endured the death march to Buchenwald before liberation.
Despite these unimaginable losses, Nakache returned to swimming after the war, competing at the 1948 London Olympics. (He, gymnast Agnes Keleti and weightlifter Ben Helfgott are the only known Jewish survivors to have competed in the Olympics after the war.)
Nakache remained a swimmer the rest of his life, and died of a heart attack after a swim in the sea near the Spanish-French border in 1983.
Miailhe, a 70-year-old animator known for her labor-intensive oil and pastel on glass technique, has a personal connection to Nakache’s legacy. As a child, she took swim lessons with his younger brother Bernard and heard stories of his triumphs long before she understood their full historical weight. The end credits explain that her father also knew Alfred, whom he met in the resistance during the war.
“I hope people will be moved by Alfred Nakache’s story and rediscover it, because it’s not well-known in France,” Miailhe said in an interview with Deadline. “Also, we are living in some very troubled times in a world where racism and antisemitism are back.”
Produced by Oscar-winning animator Ron Dyens alongside Luc Camilli for Sacrebleu Productions and XBO Films, Papillon took roughly 100 days to animate — a testament to the craftsmanship that makes every frame an essay on the various qualities of water. The film has earned a César nomination (the French Academy Award) and a nomination at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and won the International Competition for best animated film at the Grand Prix at Stuttgart.
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the animated short also depicts the camaraderie among the athletes who swam — and stood — by Nakache’s side before and after the war.
“Some people denounced the Nakache family [to the Gestapo], but others saved Alfred when he returned from the camps,” Dyen told Deadline. “The whole tragedy of human duality is ultimately reflected in Nakache’s story.”
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Laura Loomer and other Jewish conservatives sound alarm over Tucker Carlson’s White House access
(JTA) — Jewish figures on the far right are increasingly expressing concerns about President Donald Trump’s handling of an antisemitism rift among the Republican party, after its instigator Tucker Carlson reportedly visited the White House for the third time in weeks on Monday.
The visit, reported by Punchbowl News journalist Jake Sherman, came days after his combative interview with Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, ignited antisemitism allegations and a diplomatic row with Arab leaders.
After the interview Carlson also appeared on Saudi state-owned TV, during which he called Israel’s Gaza war a “land grab” and repeated his past claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “evil and destructive.” Carlson has ties with both Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where he has said he intends to buy property and has hosted high-profile events.
Laura Loomer, a far-right Jewish activist, has staked out a warpath against Carlson’s continued welcome in the Trump administration.
“It seems like a suicide mission for any Christian or Jew who doesn’t idolize Hitler to keep donating to the GOP,” Loomer tweeted late Monday. In a follow-up, she wrote, “It’s like I woke up one day and 90% of the people I’ve come to know on the right over the last 10 years have morphed into different people.”
Loomer’s explosion of anger and angst is significant because she has boasted of close ties to Trump and has appeared to hold some sway over White House hiring. In the past, when she has targeted administration staffers or potential hires, many have been spiked quickly. Now, as she raises alarms about Carlson and antisemitism on the right, the White House has remained silent.
“It’s shocking that I have to say this, but the GOP has a major identity crisis right now, the GOP has a growing Jew hate and foreign influence problem, and the party seems to be in a struggle session with Neo Nazis who they aren’t explicitly rejecting,” Loomer tweeted. “My advice is for people to not donate at this time till we get clarity from the party on what the party’s position is on these issues.”
Other Jewish figures on the far right, including radio host Mark Levin and pro-Israel activist Sloan Rachmuth, sided with Loomer against Carlson.
“He should be condemned by the White House, not invited to it,” Levin tweeted.
Carlson’s reported White House visit was one of several he has made since increasingly using his show to lean into friendly interviews with conspiracy theorists and white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes. Seen as a bellwether of conservative influence with close ties to Vice President JD Vance, Carlson’s broadsides against Israel and increasing embrace of antisemitic talking points have paralleled a similar rise in such sentiments among younger GOP voters, and caused serious concern among many Jewish conservatives.
Huckabee himself, in damage control following his comments in the interview, has publicly urged the Trump administration to cut ties with his former Fox News colleague.
“I hope they quit letting him into the White House because, quite frankly, this is a person who is doing serious, significant damage to President Trump and to the administration,” the ambassador told the Christian Broadcasting Network, hours before Carlson was spotted at the White House.
At least one other Trump appointee has also spoken out to defend Huckabee and condemn Carlson.
“Am I the ONLY member of the Trump’s [sic] Administration defending AND supporting Ambassador Huckabee?” Leo Terrell, chair of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, tweeted Monday.
Following the Huckabee interview, the influential Israeli-American conservative activist Yoram Hazony said Carlson’s earlier visits to the White House had come at the invitation of Trump, who Carlson said was worried that the burgeoning antisemitism rift would drive voters to the Democrats in the midterm elections this fall.
Hazony, whom Carlson mentioned in the video of his Huckabee interview, said Carlson had asked him for help mending fences but that he had come away unconvinced that Carlson wanted to make any changes.
“I explained to him that I can’t do much to help him, because just about every Jew I know believes he’s been waging a savage campaign against Jews, Judaism, and Israel for the past 18 months — and that most think his aim is to drive Jews and Zionist Christians out of the Trump coalition and out of the Republican party,” Hazony wrote on X.
Carlson requested Hazony set up a meeting with Netanyahu, Hazony claimed; he declined to do so. While at first Hazony said he was open to conversing with Carlson in the name of “building coalitions,” he has changed his mind.
“In Tucker’s case, the private person turns out to be exactly who we’ve been seeing in public,” he wrote. “Whatever his motives for turning his podcast into what seems to be a circus of anti-Jewish messaging, right now that project is clearly more important to him than helping the administration keep its coalition together so it can govern effectively and win elections in 2026 and 2028.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Carlson and praised Huckabee on Monday. He had previously said Carlson should not be invited to the White House.
“Tucker Carlson has a long history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and lies about Jews and the Jewish state,” Greenblatt tweeted. “His recent interviews continue to amplify hate and launder falsehoods. None of this is new. It’s just pathetic. I appreciate Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee’s effort to engage in good faith and set the record straight. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised at the outcome.”
Some non-Jewish GOP lawmakers have started to join their Jewish colleagues on the right in condemning Carlson, or antisemitism more forcefully.
“I used to respect Tucker Carlson but after watching his interview of @GovMikeHuckabee I am appalled,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana wrote on X. “Tucker gave ample platform and time to Nick Fuentes to share his anti-Semitic vitriol, but constantly interrupted, was impatient, disingenuous, argumentative and disrespectful to Huckabee.”
Stutzman added, “Carlson suggesting all ‘Jews’ do a DNA test in order to live in Israel is repulsive and smacks of ignorance regarding the oldest faith practice in the world combined with the worst kind of exclusionary prejudice and elitism.”
In a slightly more coded message, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt tweeted Monday, “We must continue to call out and condemn antisemitism at every turn. Proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters at home and abroad.” Britt did not mention Carlson or Huckabee by name. By contrast, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, an established foe of Carlson’s who was also on the receiving end of a tough interview over Israel, has retweeted several pro-Huckabee and anti-Carlson posts following the interview.
The Trump administration has not commented publicly on the interview or its backlash. Trump staffers have reportedly been working behind the scenes to assure Arab leaders that Huckabee’s comments during the interview, in which he suggested Israel has a divine right to much of the Middle East, do not represent official administration policy.
The drama has raised a range of issues beyond the antisemitism rift, including the fact that Carlson’s son works for Vance and about Carlson’s relationships with Saudi Arabia and Russia, both of which are promoting interviews on state media about Carlson’s criticism of the Trump administration.
Carlson is keeping up his streak elevating fringe GOP figures amid the controversy, posting a new interview Monday with outsider Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn.
“We have a Christian form of government, but we have elected people that are not following that custom and religion in Christianity,” Lahn told Carlson in the interview. “And so you’re going to have a constitutional crisis. You’re going to have fraud all over the place.”
For Loomer, the moment is existential for right wing-Jews. “The GOP has made it very clear over the last few years that Jewish voters on the right are not welcome, we are not appreciated, and we will not be given basic respect,” she tweeted.
“There’s some elected officials in the GOP who would be ok with seeing Jews mass murdered,” Loomer continued, without naming names. “As a lifelong Republican, this is very alarming to me.”
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Documentary about Jews killed by their Polish neighbors after the Holocaust could be banned in Poland
(JTA) — A documentary about the murder of five Jews in a Polish town is being threatened with a ban in Poland — not because they were killed in the Holocaust, but because they weren’t.
The Jews at the heart of “Among Neighbors,” from California-based filmmaker Yoav Potash, died six months after the end of Nazi occupation. They were among a handful of survivors from Gniewoszów, a town where about 1,500 Jews made up half the population before World War II. When they returned home in 1945, they were killed by their Polish neighbors.
Since premiering at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival in November 2024, “Among Neighbors” has been screened in six countries and qualified for Academy Award consideration. But its release on TVP, the Polish public broadcaster, has prompted uproar from right-wing politicians and a national investigation.
Potash stumbled into making “Among Neighbors” on a 2014 trip to Gniewoszów, where he planned to document a modest rededication ceremony for the Jewish cemetery. As he began talking with the oldest residents, one woman, who has since died, told him that Jews were killed there well after the war.
“That just really struck me as a very different kind of story, because it was not the Germans doing the killing, it was the Poles,” said Potash. “It was not during the war, it was well after, when it should have been a time of peace.”
When “Among Neighbors” appeared on televisions across Poland in November 2025, it was hit with backlash from the office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who led nationalist efforts to rewrite Poland’s Holocaust history. His Law and Justice party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023, promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk now leads the Polish government with a centrist coalition, but Nawrocki has been a counterweight to Tusk since he was elected last year.
Six days after “Among Neighbors” aired on TVP, Agnieszka Jędrzak, a minister in Nawrocki’s office, attacked the broadcaster on X. Calling the documentary “historical anti-Polish manipulation,” she said “a television station that has ‘Polish’ in its name should not be broadcasting it.”
Jędrzak oversees state awards and Polish diaspora relations. Before joining the president’s office, she spent 15 years working at the Institute of National Remembrance — previously headed by Nawrocki — which gained a reputation for advancing nationalist narratives about the Holocaust. According to Jędrzak’s government profile, she led the IPN as it “responded to defamatory statements which damaged the reputation of Poland and the Polish nation.”
A probe into “Among Neighbors” launched after the Ordo Iuris Institute, a far-right Catholic think tank, filed a complaint with the National Broadcasting Council, comparable to the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.
“The narrative presented in the documentary film ‘Among Neighbors’ clearly undermines values important to Poles, such as historical truth,” the institute said in November. “Above all, the film creates a false image of Poles as a nation co-responsible for the German genocide of Jews during World War II. What is particularly outrageous is the fact that the production was released by Polish Television.”
The National Broadcasting Council responded by opening an investigation into the film.
“Among Neighbors” was made over the course of a decade that largely spanned the Law and Justice regime. In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes. The infraction has since been downgraded from a crime punishable with prison time to a civil offense, but the law remains in effect.
For Potash, reactions to the film from right-wing nationalist officials were “not surprising at all.”
“They have adopted this mindset where there’s an almost sacred sense that Poles during World War II were either victims or heroes,” he said. “Any story that anyone tells that contradicts that, or that adds that some Poles were perpetrators, is anathema to that.”
TVP has stood by the film and continues to air it. The network has been backed by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose representatives sent a letter of support to the TVP Program Council’s chair, Barbara Bilińska.
“Among Neighbors” unfolds around a man and a woman who grew up in Gniewoszów. In the last breaths of their lives, they seek to answer questions that have possessed them for 80 years — he as the Jewish child of Holocaust survivors who were killed in their hometown, and she as a Polish eyewitness to the murders.
In a statement, TVP said the reckonings of these two people were neither “anti-Polish” nor “a judgment of the entire Polish nation.”
“We are open to dialogue regarding historical memory and believe that even difficult topics allow society to understand the fuller context of past events,” said TVP. “As a public broadcaster, we have a duty to facilitate such conversation and not shy away from presenting those fragments of history that require reflection and civic courage.”
Beyond Gniewoszów, “Among Neighbors” touches on a wave of murders that struck Jews returning home to cities and towns across Poland after liberation from the Nazis. In the most notorious instance, 42 Jews in the southeastern town of Kielce were killed by a mob of Polish residents, soldiers and police officers in July 1946. The Kielce pogrom convinced many survivors they had no future in Poland, spurring an exodus.
A film dramatizing the Kielce pogrom drew protests from Polish Americans, and the Berlin office of its Jewish producer was destroyed by an arson in 1996, the same year the Polish government formally apologized for the pogrom.
“Among Neighbors” confronts the simultaneous intimacy and violence woven through small towns, where Poles lived and worked with Jews, where their children played with Jewish children, and where some Poles also killed their Jewish neighbors. That complex relationship still rests under the surface of skirmishes over Poland’s history.
Konstanty Gebert, a journalist interviewed in the film, compared the relationship between Poland and its Jews to the phenomenon of phantom limbs — the sensation that a body part remains attached after it has been amputated.
“Poland is still suffering from its Jewish phantom pains, and Jews are suffering from their Polish phantom pains,” said Gebert. “Until those two amputated hands can actually shake — and I don’t know how you do that to amputated limbs — but I know that if you don’t, we’ll be still standing there, swallowing painkillers for a pain that cannot be relieved, because the amputated limb is gone and it still hurts.”
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