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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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Free Speech Advocacy Group Walks Back Condemnation of Israeli Comedian’s Shows Being Abruptly Canceled
The Israeli national flag flutters as apartments are seen in the background in the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the West Bank, Aug. 16, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
An organization dedicated to protecting free speech has withdrawn a statement in which it condemned the last-minute cancellations of two performances by Israeli comedian Guy Hochman, after he faced backlash over his support for Israel.
Two venues, in New York and California, canceled Hochman’s scheduled performances last month.
Hochman’s show in New York City was canceled by its venue due to safety concerns after anti-Israel protesters picketed outside of the establishment.
The Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, California, then called off Hochman’s gig after receiving pressure from anti-Israel activists, including threats of violence. The theater said it made the decision also after Hochman declined the venue’s demands to publicly condemn his home country of Israel for the alleged “genocide, rape, starvation, and torture of Palestinian civilians.”
PEN America initially condemned the cancellations of Hochman’s shows in a statement shared on its website on Jan. 29. At the time, Jonathan Friedman, the managing director of US free expression programs at PEN America, said, “It is a profound violation of free expression to demand artists, writers, or comedians agree to ideological litmus tests as a condition to appear on a stage.”
“People have every right to protest his events, but those who wish to hear from Hochman also have a right to do so,” Friedman added. The statement accused Hochman of “dehumanizing social media posts about Palestinians” but also noted that “shutting down cultural events is not the solution.”
On Tuesday, however, PEN America removed the message from its website and replaced it with another statement explaining the move: “On further consideration, PEN America has decided to withdraw this statement. We remain committed to open and respectful dialogue about the divisions that arise in the course of defending free expression.” A spokesperson for PEN America did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment to further explain the organization’s change of heart.
In 2024, a campaign was launched to boycott PEN America after the group was accused of being apologetic to the alleged “genocide” of Palestinians and “apartheid” in Israel, as well as of “normalizing Zionism.”
Members of PEN America include novelists, journalists, nonfiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, and other writing professionals, according to its website. The organization has a page on its website dedicated to information about “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which begins by claiming that the “Israeli government has cracked down on free expression of writers and public intellectuals in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.” The webpage is highly critical of the Jewish state and its military actions in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, which started in response to the deadly rampage orchestrated by the US-designated terror organization across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The same webpage highlights a list of “individual cases” of Palestinian activists and writers that Israel has allegedly detained, arrested, or convicted, but there are no specific details shared about their offenses. The list includes Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, who was convicted of incitement to terrorism for a poem she wrote and comments she made on social media during a wave of Palestinian attacks against Jews.
The list also includes Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, but the provided description about Tamimi does not mention that she was convicted on four counts of assaulting an IDF officer and soldier, incitement, and interference with IDF forces in March 2018.
A third writer on the list is Mosab Abu Toha, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist who tried to justify Hamas’s abduction of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
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Faith in Judaism Demands Grappling With Sacred Words
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Reformation firebrand Martin Luther was not a gentle soul. He was brilliant, courageous, and historically transformative, but he was also volatile, cruel, and spectacularly foul-mouthed. When Luther disliked someone, he didn’t merely disagree with them – he eviscerated them.
His pamphlets dripped with bile, his language was obscene, and when it came to Jews, his writings were vicious, laying the groundwork for some of the darkest chapters of later European history. None of this, to be clear, negates the fact that Luther correctly identified real corruption and hypocrisy within the Catholic Church of his day.
Luther’s stock response to his critics within the Church was deceptively simple: prove me wrong from the text of the Bible. If it wasn’t written explicitly in Scripture, he dismissed it as human invention, manmade directives masquerading as divine command.
He had no time for tradition, accumulated wisdom, or interpretation; everything was suspect unless it could be nailed down to “chapter and verse,” as he liked to put it. Luther’s position appeared principled and even pious, but it placed enormous – and ultimately destructive – weight on the written word alone.
Of course, as is often the case with sweeping theological positions, consistency proved difficult. At one point, Luther came up against a short New Testament text that stubbornly refused to cooperate with his theology. The Epistle of James insists that faith without works is dead, a line that clashed directly with Luther’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone.
In a telling moment, Luther remarked, “We should throw the Epistle of James out of this school, for it doesn’t amount to much.” Instead of wrestling with the verse or considering how generations of Christians had understood it, he dismissed the book altogether. And that was that. If it didn’t fit, it didn’t count.
The episode is almost comic, but it exposes the fatal fault line in Luther’s entire approach. A theology that insists on absolute fidelity to the text grants enormous power to the reader. When interpretation is denied, selection takes its place.
From a Jewish perspective, there is something eerily familiar about this obsession with textual literalism. The Second Temple–era Sadducees rejected ancient traditions and rabbinic interpretation in favor of the bare biblical text.
Centuries later, the Karaites would do the same, insisting that anything not spelled out explicitly in the Torah was illegitimate. Their position was internally consistent – and completely unworkable. A faith that forbids interpretation does not preserve religious observance; it paralyzes it.
The Torah reveals its intention regarding the centrality of interpretation at the very moment of revelation in Parshat Yitro. When God speaks at Sinai, He does not present the Jewish people with a comprehensive legal code, nor does He offer an exhaustively detailed constitution. Instead, He presents ten short statements – majestic and memorable, but remarkably sparse.
Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not commit adultery. Honor your parents. These are not radical moral breakthroughs. Any functioning society would struggle to survive without them.
Even the commandments that sound more overtly theological – belief in God, rejection of idolatry, observing Shabbat – are delivered with little definition or elaboration. What does it mean to believe? What counts as idolatry? What does remembering Shabbat actually require? The text does not say.
That silence is no oversight. If the Torah had intended to function as a closed book, the Ten Commandments as they are presented would be inexplicably inadequate. They contain no legal thresholds, no procedural detail, and no guidance for variation or complexity.
“Do not steal” tells us nothing about business partnerships, contracts, fraud, or intellectual property. “Do not murder” offers no framework for intent, self-defense, negligence, or the rules of war. “Remember the Sabbath day” may be stirring rhetoric, but as law, it is unusable. What, precisely, are we supposed to remember? And what are the practical applications?
The answer, of course, is that the Torah itself never expected these questions to be answered by the text alone. The Ten Commandments were never meant to stand by themselves. They are headline principles – foundational truths that demand explanation, expansion, and application.
And the Torah provides that expansion not in footnotes or appendices, but through an interpretive process that unfolds across generations. The law was not frozen at the moment of revelation; it was activated by it.
This is where Judaism parts ways decisively with Luther’s instinctive literalism. At Sinai, God makes clear that the written word is sacred – but it is not sufficient. Meaning is not trapped inside the text; it emerges only through engagement with it. So how does the Torah move from lofty principle to lived law?
The answer Judaism gives is Torah Shebaal Peh, the Oral Law. This is not a later workaround or a rabbinic ploy to fill in gaps, but an interpretive framework indicated by the way the text itself was given. The written Torah is the text God gave us at Sinai; the Oral Law is the method He gave us to understand it.
That method is neither whimsical nor arbitrary. It is disciplined, structured, and demanding. The Talmudic sage Rabbi Yishmael articulated thirteen interpretive principles – rules for extracting meaning from text through literary association, contextual reading, and logical deduction.
Verses illuminate one another. Words echo elsewhere. Broad principles generate specific applications. Law emerges not because it is spelled out, but because it is derived.
And then there is another category altogether: traditions that do not emerge from textual analysis at all. The Torah commands us to bind tefillin – but never tells us their shape, their color, or even how many compartments they should contain. These, too, are traditions transmitted through the Oral Law.
The Torah prohibits “work” on the seventh day but offers no definition of what work means – until the Oral Law teaches that the categories of creative labor are learned from the acts required to build the Tabernacle.
This is why the demand to “prove everything from the text” is not piety but misunderstanding. The Torah does not operate like a legal statute book, and it never pretended to be one.
Seen this way, the Ten Commandments are not deficient because they lack detail. They are magnificent precisely because they force us beyond the page. They announce that God speaks – and then expect human beings to listen, interpret, and take responsibility for what those words will mean in the real world.
Martin Luther believed that unless an idea could be anchored explicitly in the biblical text, it was suspect and therefore expendable. In theory, that sounds like reverence. In practice, it collapses the moment the text refuses to cooperate. Judaism chose a different path.
The Ten Commandments stand at the center of our faith not because they tell us everything we need to know, but because they tell us so little. They are moral declarations without detail, principles without procedure – and for that very reason, they demand interpretation rather than submission.
Faith, in Judaism, is not proven by quoting sacred words, but by grappling honestly with what those words require of us.
Ultimately, this is what the revelation at Sinai teaches us about Judaism. God gives us a text — but also a task. He entrusts human beings with the responsibility to interpret, apply, and live His word in a world that is endlessly complex and morally demanding.
The Torah is certainly sacred, but it is not self-sufficient. It comes alive only when it is studied, debated, transmitted, and lived.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Palestinian Authority Again Admits UNRWA Is Political
A truck, marked with United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) logo, crosses into Egypt from Gaza, at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, during a temporary truce between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah, Egypt, Nov. 27, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
The Palestinian Authority has again admitted — three times in two weeks — that UNRWA is all about politics as it seeks to preserve the organization so it can keep alive the demand to flood Israel with “returning refugees.”
Last month, a column in the official PA daily defined what it views as the very mandate of UNRWA:
“The Fatah Revolutionary Council … emphasized … that all the patriots must … defend UNRWA and its mandate because it is a testimony to the Nakba (i.e., “the catastrophe,” the Palestinian term for the establishment of the State of Israel) and the sanctity of the refugees’ right of return.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 11, 2026]
This is the PA admitting, openly, that the central value of UNRWA is ideological and political. It is why the PA frames challenges to UNRWA as an Israeli plot to erase the refugee issue and the dream of “return” into Israel. In the following statement by a PA spokesman on official PA TV, the claim is taken a step further and tied directly to Israel’s sovereignty and to Jerusalem, again showing clearly that this is not actually a humanitarian issue for the PA but a political one, with the mission of UNRWA being to ultimately undo Israel through “return.”
PA Jerusalem District Spokesman Ma’arouf Al-Rifai: “Since Oct. 7, [2023], Israel has started a campaign of incitement against UNRWA to eliminate the refugee issue, to eliminate what we Palestinians are dreaming of, namely the right of return and compensation. Israel is attempting to impose full sovereignty over Jerusalem and annex it to the cities of the occupation (i.e., Israel) like any city that was occupied in 1948.”
[Official PA TV News, Jan. 20, 2026]
Note that the PA spokesman reiterated what Palestinian Media Watch has stressed many times, which is that the PA sees all of Israel as “occupied in 1948.”
A senior PLO official also made a similar admission on official PA radio several days later:
Head of the PLO Department of Jerusalem Affairs Adnan Al-Husseini: “UNRWA is an institution of the UN, but for the Palestinians, it has great significance. Its significance is the [Palestinian refugees’] right of return. The right of return is an expression that, from the perspective of the occupation (i.e., Israel), is unacceptable… [but] in Palestine the matter is not over, because people have rights, and they are waiting for the day when they will achieve their rights. UNRWA has been confirming this and strengthening it for decades.”
[The Voice of Palestine (official PA radio station), Facebook page, Jan. 26, 2026]
What makes UNRWA different?
UNRWA was created by the UN General Assembly in 1949, and its mandate has been regularly renewed ever since. Today, UNRWA itself says about 5.9 million “Palestine refugees” are eligible for its services.
A normal humanitarian system would aim to end refugee status through resettlement, integration, and permanent solutions. That is the logic of the global refugee agency, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which operates worldwide and explicitly provides lifesaving aid while pursuing durable solutions.
UNRWA, however, is different by design. It exists as a separate, exceptional framework — one that intentionally refuses to end the suffering of the 5.9 million descendants of the 750,000 refugees with the only possible solution, which is resettlement. Instead, it keeps them in their camps chained as refugees as a central political policy for generations.
Much of the international community deludes itself that UNRWA primarily is a humanitarian necessity, yet the PA consistently tells the truth on this issue by defining it as one of “return.” In other words, it is political, and that is why the PA insists that it must remain. UNRWA is not just a service provider but a vehicle for the “right of return.” The PA has no intention of ending Palestinian refugeehood. Instead, it exploits UNRWA and the suffering “refugees” for political gain.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.