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Amazon Prime doc details the wild life of Jewish gangster Myron Sugerman
(New York Jewish Week) — Mafia movies will have you believe that wise guys aren’t born, they’re made. But that wasn’t the case for Myron Sugerman, a second-generation Jewish gangster who is the subject of the new documentary, “Last Man Standing: The Chronicles of Myron Sugerman.”
Sugerman — who made his mark (and his money) by becoming, as he says in the film, the “godfather of the illegal slot machine business” — took up the mantle from his father, Barney “Sugie” Sugerman, who kept company with and served as a partner in the New Jersey Jewish mob alongside the likes of Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Joe “Doc” Stacher and Abe Green.
In his heyday, Sugie cavorted with the legendary mobster Meyer Lansky, as well as some other bold-faced names who made their money a little more honestly, like singers Perry Como and Tony Bennett.
“Our lives were basically in Newark and Manhattan,” Sugerman, 85, says in the documentary. “Tenth Avenue on the west side was Jukebox Row. From 42nd Street all the way up to 45th, 46th Street were all jukebox operators. I would go into the city in the afternoon after school, and on Friday nights we used to go to Madison Square Garden with all the fellas who worked for my father.”
Per Sugerman, his father “missed nothing” — he had his hand in everything from “bootlegging, boxing, fixing fights, thievery” to “jukeboxes, vending machines, pinball machines, slot machines,” all of which were either illegal or could be used as fronts in money laundering schemes.
But these Jewish mobsters could be called upon for nobler pursuits as well. In 1939, Newark was home to both large Jewish and German populations — Fritz Kuhn, leader of the American Nazi party, included. As Sugerman tells it, Kuhn and his cronies would follow their meetings and rallies with trips into Jewish neighborhoods where they would terrorize their residents. Together with the Jewish prize fighter Nat Arno, Sugie’s associate Longy Zwillman formed an association called The Minutemen, named after the New Englanders who took up arms against the British.
The Newark Minutemen would throw stink bombs into the halls where Nazis met. “As the Nazis came running out, our guys were like a gauntlet. They’re standing there with the monkey wrenches and baseball bats and brass knuckles. And they beat the s*** out of these Nazis,” as Sugerman tells it.
Sugerman’s version of these stories might be lost to time if it weren’t for director Jonny Caplan and his production company Tech Talk Media. Released last January — and now available to stream on Amazon Prime — Caplan’s film features extensive interviews with Sugerman himself, a character who might remind you of your own Jewish grandfather — and also the guy who keeps putting the fix on the temple’s bingo game.
In a recent Zoom interview, Caplan told the New York Jewish Week that he was “kind of blown away” when he first heard Sugerman’s story, courtesy of a colleague who was helping Sugerman with his 2019 memoir, “The Chronicles of The Last Jewish Gangster: From Meyer to Myron.”
Later Caplan watched Sugerman’s interviews online. “He’s just such an amazing character that I fell in love with,” Caplan said. Although Tech Talk mostly covers the world of innovation — previous productions include documentaries about flying taxis and “robots that look after the elderly” — Caplan said they couldn’t resist bringing Sugerman’s story to life.
Born in 1938, Sugerman took up the family business at the age of 21, following his graduation from Bucknell University. Fluent in six languages (seven, if you count profanity, as Sugerman says in the documentary), he was given $3,000 in travelers checks by his father and sent off to Europe to start an “export business.” Sugerman hit a number of countries on the Continent, all while building his reputation and ability to sell pinball machines, slot machines and arcade equipment.
Eventually, Sugerman’s specialty would become Bally Bingo pinball machines, an addictive, “dynamite” arcade game that attracted gamblers and operators who handed out prizes. After its interstate shipment was banned in the United States in 1963, Sugerman would buy parts from all over the country in order to get the machines assembled. “I was the biggest contrabandist and bootlegger of Bally Bingo machines across the states,” he recalls in the documentary. Those efforts got him named in three state cases and three federal cases for illegal gambling and organized crime. And yes, he did serve jail time.
In a highlight of the documentary, Sugmeran is eventually connected with the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, Sugerman happened to find himself in Vienna. Feeling galvanized by the successful hunt for the man who drew up the plans for the Holocaust, Sugerman knocked on Wiesenthal’s door and asked how he could be of service. The answer, like so many other things in life, was money.
Myron Sugerman, right, meets with famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in New York City in an undated photograph. Sugerman says he “sent very generous amounts of money” to help Wiesenthal hunt down war criminals. (Myron Sugerman/Impossible Media LLC)
“I was religious every week — we sent very generous amounts of money to Wiesenthal,” Sugerman says in the film. The pair struck up a friendship, and with each trip Wiesenthal took to New York City, Sugerman says Wiesenthal’s first call was to him. Eventually, prior to one of Sugerman’s trips to Asuncion, Paraguay, Wiesenthal asked the contrabandist to get him information regarding the whereabouts of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who was rumored to have decamped there. I don’t want to give too much away, but if you enjoyed seeing Nazis killed in the film “Inglourious Basterds,” you might like how this story ends.
Sugerman provides details of his life, confessional style, as he leads the camera crew to local haunts in Little Italy and Brooklyn’s Kings Highway. Along the way, he meets friends who help him tell his tales of the old days, like “Baby John” Delutro, also known as “The Cannoli King,” and Johnny Chinatown, who points out a Chinatown landmark seen in “The Godfather.” Both are 20-plus years Sugerman’s junior, but still have ties to the Mafia life he knows and loves. (Those old days might be gone, but the incredible nicknames persist.)
At Grill Point, a now-shuttered kosher restaurant in Brooklyn, we see Sugerman chatting with Moishe Peretz, a retired mob boss who calmly recalls getting shot in the chest in 2016.
Though the mob plays a central role in Sugerman’s identity, his Jewish bona fides are just as significant. “The Jewish gangster really had a need, a psychological need, to show that the Jews could be just as tough as any other ethnicity, because they were going to break with the 2,000 years of our heads down, living in the ghetto, living fearful,” he says in the film. “There was definitely no identity crisis. These Jews were tough and ready to prove it.”
These days, Sugerman lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife, Clara. Though his life may be quieter now, his sense of humor and joie de vivre endure, and now as much as ever he’s committed to the work of defending the Jewish people. “Most guys at 85 years of age, if they’re lucky to be alive, are sitting in front of a lawn of grass, watching the grass grow,” he told the New York Jewish Week. “But I’m not comfortable — I’m not comfortable when the hair on the head of a Jew is moved out of place by an antisemite.”
To that end, Sugerman is putting together an organization with the goal of promoting Jewish pride — and he encourages all those interested in joining to reach out via his website.
More than anything, the toughness and tenacity of the Jewish people is a message that Sugerman wants to continue to send today. “That the era of bending your head, that the era of dismissing antisemitism as a mosquito on the tuchus of an elephant is over with,” he said.
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The post Amazon Prime doc details the wild life of Jewish gangster Myron Sugerman appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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At White House Hanukkah party, Trump says Congress ‘is becoming antisemitic’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump said Congress “is becoming antisemitic” and warned about what he said was the fading influence of the “Jewish lobby” and “Israeli lobby” in an address to his Jewish supporters at a White House celebration marking the third night of Hanukkah.
During his remarks, the president also honored the victims of the recent Hanukkah terrorist attack in Australia and joked with his largest Jewish benefactor about her bankrolling a third presidential run prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
“My father would tell me, the most powerful lobby that there is in this country is the Jewish lobby. It is the Israeli lobby,” Trump mused. “It is not that way anymore. You have a lot of people in your way. They don’t want to help Israel.”
Trump celebrated his own Israel policies, including a recent ceasefire agreement brokered with Hamas that returned Israeli hostages from Gaza but has not ended violence in the region. He has vowed to move the ceasefire into its second phase, accounting for Gaza’s postwar governance, in early 2026.
He also warned the room, “You have a Congress in particular which is becoming antisemitic.” He singled out “AOC plus three” — a reference to the progressive House “Squad” led by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and Rep. Ilhan Omar, whom Trump says “hates Jewish people.”
Trump also blamed universities for inculcating anti-Israel sentiment, and predicted that Harvard, with which his administration has been embroiled in lengthy settlement talks over antisemitism-related fines, “will pay a lot of money.”
Trump’s audience included Jewish Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Chabad-Lubavitch leader Rabbi Levi Shemtov, Holocaust survivors, and conservative pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson. He brought Adelson to the podium with him, calling her his “number one” financial supporter.
Adelson, in turn, implied that she and pro-Israel legal scholar Alan Dershowitz believed there would be a way to keep Trump in power beyond his two-term limit.
“I met Alan Dershovitz, and he said, ‘The legal thing, about four more years,’ and I said, ‘Alan, I agree with you.’ So, we can do it. Think about it,” Adelson told a smiling Trump as attendees chanted, “Four more years!”
“She said, ‘Think about it, I’ll give you another $250 million,’” Trump quipped.
Early in his remarks, Trump turned to the Bondi Beach massacre at a Chabad-hosted menorah lighting. “Let me take a moment to send the love and prayers to the entire nation, to the people, of Australia and especially all those affected by the horrific and antisemitic terrorist attack — and that is exactly what it is, antisemitic — that took place on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney,” he said. “What a terrible thing. We don’t learn.”
He also reflected on the meaning of the holiday.
“Against overwhelming odds, a small band of Jewish fighters rose up to defend the Jewish people’s right to worship freely,” Trump said. “The miracle of Hanukkah has reminded us of God’s love for the Jewish people, as well as their enduring resilience and faith in the face of centuries of persecution, centuries. And it continues.”
Absent from the Hanukkah party was the White House’s own, first menorah, added to its collection in 2022 under President Biden.
The post At White House Hanukkah party, Trump says Congress ‘is becoming antisemitic’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Australia’s Yiddish community is thriving, not reviving
As a professional translator of Yiddish literature, I was surprised by the characterization of the Australian Jewish community’s connection to the Yiddish language in the recent Forward piece “Australia’s Jewish community is defined by Holocaust survivors, Yiddishkeit and immigrants.”
Australia’s Jewish community has indeed been shaped by the Yiddish language. This is why, when I was a Yiddish Book Center translation fellow, I used the small travel stipend that came with the fellowship to visit Melbourne, the center of Australian Yiddishkayt.
What I was surprised by in the Forward‘s article, (which cites a Vice article from 2019 as its source) was the characterization of Yiddishkayt in Australia as a “revival,” with “young people who view it as a ‘language of protest’ leading the charge.”
What is remarkable about the Melbourne Jewish community’s connection to the Yiddish language is not that it has been revived, but rather that it has been sustained, for over a hundred years, thanks in large part to the role the Jewish Labor Bund has played in shaping the Jewish community of Melbourne. The Kadimah Jewish Cultural Center and Yiddish Library has a name that literally means “forward” in Yiddish and Hebrew. They have been leading the charge for 110 years. The particular young people mentioned in the Forward‘s article are new arrivals.
One might think, reading this piece, that teaching Yiddish as a subject at Sholem Aleichem College was a recent development, rather than the central reason for the founding of the school over 40 years ago, with earlier Bundist-modeled Yiddish-language Sunday schools preceding it.
In addition to Sholem Aleichem college, there is also the SKIF youth group, which Melbournian Bundist families have been sending their children to since 1950. When I visited Melbourne in 2019, I attended SKIF’s annual Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Commemoration, which featured children and teenagers reciting poetry and texts from the Warsaw Ghetto in the original Yiddish, a sharp contrast to the recent Yiddish learners profiled in the Vice article the Forward piece linked to, one of whom had only recently learned that bagel was a Yiddish word.
This is not to shame newer learners of Yiddish. We all have to start somewhere. I welcome everyone, Jewish and not, who decides to learn, but Yiddish is not only a language of protest. It is first and foremost a language of life, one that I hope will continue to be sustained in Australia following this horrific attack.
The post Australia’s Yiddish community is thriving, not reviving appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Must Increase Its Advocacy — and Jews Must Continue Speaking Up
Trucks carrying aid move, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri
When will Israel answer the decades-long smear campaign against it? How can a nation known for breakthroughs in medicine, science, and agriculture — and home to the most ethical military and the Middle East’s only democracy — struggle with self-advocacy?
As a Soviet Jew raised in Moscow, I saw Israel as the guardian of my identity. After millennia of persecution and the Holocaust, Israel became a beacon of freedom and safety for the Jewish people. I excused Israel’s public-relations failures as the cost of survival. Surrounded by hostility and judged by the harshest standards, Israel focused on defending land, people, and principles — not narratives. Key conflicts shaped this posture — from 1948, 1967, and 1973, to the Intifadas, wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
The deepest wound is internal: too many Jews refuse to stand together against evil. Unity and principled advocacy are imperative. After three decades in New York, I’m devastated by Zohran Mamdani’s victory; he is a Social Democrat, an anti-Zionist, and an antisemite. Yet 33% of New York’s Jewish community voted for him. I cannot comprehend voting for a mayor who is an antisemite.
Since October 7, Israel has failed to communicate why it had to wage war on Hamas and prevent Hamas’ plan to destroy Israel. The opposing side advanced a narrative, amplified by the media and anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda — casting Palestinians as victims of “Israeli colonialism” and branding Israel’s war as a genocide.
Hamas massacred 1,200 people and took 251 hostages — and vowed to repeat the massacre again and again. Israel’s goals: return the hostages and eradicate Hamas to prevent future attacks. Yet the IDF and Netanyahu are cast as murderers, and a campaign to eliminate a terrorist organization is labeled as genocide.
Israel’s story is factual and moral. Israel’s war is not genocide; it targets Hamas terrorists, not Gazans. This is legitimate self-defense under international law. The IDF’s morality is rooted in courage, justice, and protection of the weak; Hamas attacks civilians and uses civilians as human shields, while the IDF takes extensive precautions to protect civilians. Hamas embeds its terrorists among civilians, seeking their deaths to feed a media campaign. The casualty story is distorted: the IDF estimates that two civilians are killed per Hamas terrorist — among the lowest ratios in recent warfare. Civilian deaths, tragic in any war, do not constitute genocide. If Israel sought genocide, the toll would be vastly higher.
The world must know that Hamas obstructs aid — attacking workers, firing on distribution sites, and blocking aid — while the IDF strains to deliver it. These tactics sow chaos and spawn false reports blaming the IDF for deaths and famine, even as Hamas hoards fuel and medical supplies.
Israel cites extensive aid deliveries, daily pauses, secure corridors, and controlled entry to challenge famine assessments. This data gets scant media coverage. Israel hasn’t failed deliberately; it neglected to adjust to the change in political choreography.
Israel must remind its people of their history, and clarify that it fights to defends all Jews, not only Israelis. It should use the media to change the narrative about the Middle East, ground claims in data, and pair them with images of Israeli victims from October 7.
An antisemitic mob gathered outside a Manhattan synagogue, chanting “Death to the IDF,” “Death to Israel,” and “We need to make them scared,” during a Nefesh B’Nefesh event. Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani issued a perfunctory note “discouraging the language,” then effectively blamed the synagogue, claiming that houses of worship must be free from intimidation and should not promote activities that “violate international law.”
First of all, promoting the rights of Jews to live in Israel does not violate international law (unless you believe Israel shouldn’t exist, which Mamdani does). Second, what about the rights and freedom of the congregants? Mamdani’s posture is as hollow as Putin’s desire for peace. Emboldened by elected antisemitic leadership, the mobs blur protest, hate, and violence.
Yet fault also lies with us Jews: freedom is our faith’s core, and with that, comes responsibility. Instead of urging Israel to communicate the facts, too many Jews stayed passive — or boosted Zohran Mamdani, who believes Israel, not Hamas, is responsible for the massacres.
“Am Yisrael Chai!” is a Jewish cry of an uncompromising will to live — “The People of Israel live.” Rabbi Stephen S. Wise proclaimed it in 1933 in defiance of Hitler; survivors heard it after Bergen-Belsen’s liberation; Shlomo Carlebach made it the anthem of the Soviet Jewry movement. Across the years, the cry affirms Jewish resilience and frames a narrative: “The People of Israel live.” Our story starts and ends with this cry. In between, lie the facts — and without facts, history turns to fiction and democracies become dictatorships.
Anya Gillinson is an immigration lawyer and author of the new memoir, Dreaming in Russian. She lives in New York City. More at www.anyagillinson.com.