(JTA) — About halfway through “Michael,” the new blockbuster biopic of Michael Jackson, there is a scene in which Jackson (played by his nephew Jafaar) and his lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller), are sitting with the president of his record label. It’s early in Jackson’s “Thriller” album cycle, as “Billie Jean” has been released as a single, and the “Thriller” video has been filmed, setting the scene sometime in 1983.

Seated in front of several gold records, CBS Records’ head honcho Walter Yetnikoff (played under heavy makeup by Mike Myers) congratulates Jackson on his breakout moment and asks what he can do for him. Jackson and Branca tell Yetnikoff they want just one thing: for Jackson to be featured on MTV, then a brand-new station broadcasting music videos.

Yetnikoff tells them that it’s “not possible” because MTV rarely plays Black artists. Jackson retorts that he is a “proud Black artist” who makes his music for everyone, and that he “won’t be shoved to the back of any bus by MTV or anyone.”

Yetnikoff says he has tried, and Jackson tells him, “Please try harder.” So Yetnikoff asks his secretary to get MTV founder and executive Bob Pittman on the phone.

The executive is then heard on the phone threatening, in colorfully profane terms, to pull all of CBS’s artists from the network unless Pittman agrees to run “Billie Jean” in the next 10 minutes and, subsequently, put the music video in heavy rotation.

In the next scene, it’s clear that the threat worked. Jackson would remain an MTV staple for many years after that.

So who was Walter Yetnikoff? And did things really go down the way “Michael” says they did?

Yetnikoff was one of the music industry’s most colorful figures. Born into a Jewish family in New York in 1933, Yetnikoff became president and CEO of CBS Records in 1975, after spending the first half of the 1970s running CBS’s international division.

Running CBS during a pivotal time for the music business, he shepherded artists such as Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan, in addition to Jackson, with whom he began working at the start of his solo career in the late 1970s. Yetnikoff wasn’t known for having a great ear for music, but he excelled at the business side of the music industry and at advocating for his artists.

Yetnikoff was the subject of two well-known books: Frederic Dannen’s “Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music,” published in 1990, and his 2004 memoir, “Howling at the Moon: The True Story of the Mad Genius of the Music World,” written with David Ritz. Also, a 1980 movie called “One Trick Pony,” which starred Paul Simon, had actor Rip Torn playing a fictionalized version of Yetnikoff named “Walter Fox.”

The “Michael” version of Yetnicoff is heard calling the MTV executive “that schmuck” — a Yiddish term in keeping with what both books about Yetnikoff make clear: his Jewish identity was front and center.

“The heart of Yetnikoff’s persona was his Brooklyn Jewishness. An outsized number of label bosses were Jews from Brooklyn, but Walter wore his ethnicity like a gabardine,” Dannen wrote in “Hit Men.”

Later, Dannen wrote, “He would stay late into the night, banging away at the phone, screaming in Yiddish. He shattered glassware, spewed a mixture of Yiddish and barnyard epithets, and had people physically ejected from the building.”

A profile in New York magazine in 1990, after Yetnikoff had fallen out of favor in the music world and given up the hard drinking that had caused him problems at home and at work, cited an array of Jewish antecedents to paint his picture.

“To cut an appropriate figure in the loud-and-dirty rock world, the shy Brooklyn Jew fashioned an indelible caricature for himself — the Orchard Street discounter as music-biz superman, a little Mel Brooks mixed with a lot of Jackie Mason, and dashes of Meir Kahane and Captain Lou Albano,” said the profile, by Eric Pooley. “He could be a mensch — warm, caring, generous — but he could also be a monster.”

So, did Yetnikoff really bring this famous rage to breaking the race barrier at MTV? And did it happen the way the movie “Michael” depicts?

By Yetnikoff’s own account, the answer is yes.

In “Howling at the Moon,” he wrote that “I screamed bloody murder when MTV refused to air [Michael Jackson’s] videos. They argued that their format, white rock, excluded Michael’s music. I argued they were racist assholes — and I’d trumpet it to the world if they didn’t relent.”

He goes on to say that, “with added pressure from Quincy Jones, they caved in, and in doing so, the MTV color line came crashing down.” (While Jones, the famed producer, appears elsewhere in “Michael,” he’s not part of the scene in which Yetnikoff calls MTV.)

Elsewhere in the book, Yetnikoff quotes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was trying to get him to write his book with her at Doubleday, as calling him “the guy who got MTV to break the color barrier and play videos by Black artists.”

“Don’t really know if Walter was bragging or accurate,” David Ritz, his co-author on “Howling at the Moon,” told JTA. “I have a feeling he was being accurate, but I can’t prove it.”

The Jackson family and estate, it’s clear, give Yetnikoff credit for getting Jackson’s music on MTV.

“It is difficult today to imagine the level of cultural apartheid at the music channels in 1983 when MTV refused to play Michael Jackson’s short film ‘Billie Jean.’ But Yetnikoff was ferocious on Michael’s behalf and didn’t hesitate to play corporate chicken with the powerful music channel,” the Jackson estate said in a media statement after Yetnikoff’s death at age 87 in 2021.

“In short order, ‘Billie Jean’ was added to MTV in heavy rotation, opening the floodgates for Michael’s extraordinary success and also for a whole generation of black artists. Walter forced that to happen, and with that decision, the wall came tumbling down.”

The family and estate were heavily involved in the movie’s production. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for the exact circumstances of the scene in the movie — Yetnikoff making that phone call to MTV, with Jackson and Branca sitting in his office in New York.

Dannen told JTA in an interview that, as told in the movie, “the story sounds fishy to me,” although he did remember an incident — included in “Howling at the Moon” — when Yetnikoff “had to coerce Jann Wenner into putting Jackson on the cover” of Rolling Stone, another music industry institution that hadn’t always given fair weight to Black artists.

Some on the MTV side have disputed the account. “It never happened,” Les Garland, then an MTV executive, has said, according to The New York Times. “Folklore, man, folklore.”

Garland, in a 2017 letter to Digital Music News, stated that “No, MTV did NOT refuse to air black musicians.” And indeed, the network had played a handful of Black artists, though not prominently, in its early years. But Jackson was not the only artist to push for more racial inclusion on MTV.

“Superfreak” singer Rick James had been pushing for videos by Black artists, declaring in an early-’80s interview, “MTV don’t play Rick James, they don’t play Michael Jackson, they don’t play the Commodores, they don’t play Earth, Wind, and Fire, they don’t play Stevie Wonder,” going on to even use the same “back of the bus” metaphor that Jackson used in the movie.

David Bowie famously called out MTV, live on its air, over the same issue, also in 1983 — yielding an unconvincing response from Mark Goodman, a Jewish VJ, about how the network was trying to “do what we think not only New York or Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or some town in the Midwest that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re playing, or a string of other Black faces and Black music. We have to play the music that we think an entire country is going to like.”

Bob Pittman, the then-MTV executive named in the movie as the recipient of Yetnikoff’s phone call, did not respond to an email from JTA requesting comment.

Arts industries are filled with historical examples of Jewish executives and creators going to bat for Black inclusion. George Gershwin, for example, insisted that the characters in “Porgy and Bess” be played by Black actors rather than white actors in blackface, while the Jewish sitcom creator Norman Lear was responsible for one of the first shows to focus on a Black family, “The Jeffersons.” Both men tied their advocacy to their experiences and values as Jews.

If Yetnikoff was motivated by his Jewish identity or a sense of justice to crusade for Jackson, the books about him, including his own, don’t say so. Dannen noted that Yetnikoff strongly pushed for all of his artists, including Jackson.

“At the Grammys, when Jackson won the Grammy for… Album of the Year, he took Yetnikoff up on stage with him, which was a big deal.” Dannen told JTA. Yetnikoff’s Guardian obituary noted that at those Grammys, Jackson had called the label boss “the best president of any record company.”

Jackson went on to work with other Jewish producers and executives throughout his career. He performed in Israel during the “Dangerous” tour in 1993, visiting an Israeli army base and even donning an IDF uniform.

In 1995, he drew allegations of antisemitism after releasing the song “They Don’t Care About Us,” which included the lyrics “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” Under fire, he denied any antisemitism and agreed to change the lyrics. He also partook in the early 2000s fad of non-Jewish celebrities embracing Kabbalah, even sporting a red string during his 2005 criminal trial.

Yetnikoff, too, had a spiritual side. In his biography, he frequently wrote about God, whom he referred to as “Heshie.” Why?

“I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because Heshie is a familiar Jewish name that I could easily say,” he wrote. ‘‘When a rabbi pointed out to me that perhaps I wanted to say Hashem, I wondered whether my unconscious was playing games with me. Either way, I was trying to connect.’’

The biography was meant as a bit of a mea culpa after a career characterized by the kind of rage shown in that scene in “Michael.” And indeed, Yetnikoff made enemies along the way. But Dannen said the movie’s depiction, which shattered worldwide box-office records for a music biopic during its opening weekend, pointed to a quieter impact as well.

He noted that Jackson’s first solo album, “Off the Wall,” was nominated for an award in the R&B category, despite not really being an R&B record — a dynamic he said “shows sort of the residual racism of the music business” that assumed any Black artist was making traditionally Black music. But by the time “Thriller” came out, Jackson was being ranked in the pop category.

“I would like to believe that Yetnikoff exerted some influence in that area,” Dannon said. Indeed, in the “Michael” scene, Yetnikoff says that “Thriller” is dominating the charts — both R&B and pop.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) — As anti-LGBTQ legislation proliferated across the United States in late 2024, leaders at two Jewish nonprofits began discussing the mounting crisis for LGBTQ Americans who no longer felt safe in their home states but lacked the financial means to leave.

Now, some of those individuals are receiving interest-free loans to help finance their moves through “Move to Thrive,” an unusual joint initiative launched by the national LGBTQ Jewish advocacy group Keshet and the New York-based Hebrew Free Loan Society in March 2025.

The initiative has drawn more than 400 inquiries, according to Jaimie Krass, the president and CEO of Keshet. So far, 29 applications have been approved, representing 56 people across households in 12 states, and $274,500 in loans have been disbursed.

“It is devastating that this is even necessary, and I think we can draw strength from what has been made possible by this resource, which is that dozens of households have been able to relocate to safer states, have been able to live more fully and openly as their authentic selves,” Krass told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

According to a 2024 survey by the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth crisis support nonprofit, nearly two in five LGBTQ+ people aged 13 to 24 said that they had considered moving to a different state, and 4% actually moved due to LGBTQ+-related politics or laws.

The collaboration between Keshet and the Hebrew Free Loan Society began in late 2024, when Idit Klein, then Keshet’s leader, approached Rabbi David Rosenn, the president and CEO of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, with the idea.

Rosenn initially told Klein it was not feasible, explaining that the Hebrew Free Loan Society serves individuals in the New York area and generally does not operate nationally.

But then came what Krass called a “dizzying onslaught of attacks” on LGBTQ+ rights following President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the first weeks of his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders targeting transgender Americans, including measures recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and another that aimed to outlaw gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Lawmakers in red states picked up the pace of their legislation.

As the months went by, Rosenn said “it was clear that things were getting more aggressive in terms of the approach of legislatures in certain states,” so he went to his board to appeal for an exception.

“We concluded that if we did not do this, it would not get done, and we saw this as a matter of people’s personal safety and well-being,” Rosenn said. “People were expressing that they felt like they were at real risk, and we wanted there to be a way for them to make these moves to places where they would feel safe and welcome.”

The initial grant funds for the program came from the Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network, but Rosenn said that after more people learned about the program there had been a “spontaneous outpouring of support from people who heard that this was going on and wanted to be a part.”

So far, the program, which is open to both Jewish and non-Jewish applicants, has distributed loans of up to $10,000 to applicants leaving states including Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa. The recipients, which included single transgender women and men and over a dozen couples and families, have used the loans to move to states, such as Massachusetts, Illinois and Oregon, with a more welcoming policy environment.

James Glick, who used a Move to Thrive loan to relocate from Texas to Minnesota with his wife, told JTA that the loan had brought him “life changing relief” after he watched anti-trans policies intensify at the Dallas school where he taught.

“I remember when we got the confirmation email, like we both just sat and cried and hugged each other,” they said. “It was just so difficult to move across the country, but it would not have been possible without that help.”

Glick said he first learned about the program through a Facebook group for trangender men in Dallas, and initially doubted whether he and his wife, who are not Jewish, would qualify.

But after learning that the program was “for everyone,” they said the support from Jewish organizations felt especially meaningful at a time when many people around him were dismissing fears about anti-trans policies.

“To have a Jewish organization recognizing that something like this was happening to the trans community, when so many people around me were saying, ‘It’s not that big of a deal, you need to calm down, like you’re going to be fine, why are you freaking out?’ — it was like, oh, no, people do acknowledge and understand that,” Glick said.

While dozens have used “Move to Thrive” to help finance relocations, other LGBTQ Jews and families with trangender children had already begun moving to states with stronger legal protections long before it was launched.

For Krass, the relocations echoed Jewish experiences of moving in search of safety in the past.

“Many of our own families have relocated at different times throughout history to different locations because our safety was undermined, and right now, those same sort of alarm bells of our shared history, of our collective memory, are certainly ringing right now because of the vast number of LGBTQ+ individuals, including LGBTQ+ Jews, who are feeling forced to relocate to a different state for the sake of their own and their family’s safety,” Krass said.

The need for the program, Krass and Rosenn said, appears unlikely to disappear soon.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there are currently 528 anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration in states across the country, in addition to those — such as a law passed last year in Texas that defined men and women by their reproductive organs — that have already gone into effect.

“That would be a great reason to suspend this program, if nobody felt that they were at risk and they were happy and able to thrive in whatever state they’re in, but since that is not the case, I think we will absolutely try to continue to be a be a resource in this way,” Rosenn said.

He said the partnership between his organization and Keshet also served as an exciting model for collaborations he hoped to see more of in the Jewish world.

“It was also just a signal out to the world that the Jewish community sees that this is going on, cares about this issue and is moving to do something about it, that two organizations who don’t normally do things together, would figure out a way to collaborate to make this happen,” Rosenn said. “It is not just something that is to the benefit of borrowers, it’s also a message about what the Jewish community is trying to accomplish in the world.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states appeared first on The Forward.

STERLING, ILLINOIS — On Wednesday, Nik Jakobs was planting corn. On Thursday, the 41-year-old Illinois cattle farmer stood in a two-acre cornfield preparing to plant something else: a synagogue.

Around 75 people gathered on the edge of the field this week in Sterling, Illinois, a two-hour drive west of Chicago, where Jakobs and his family broke ground on a new home for Temple Sholom, the small congregation that has anchored Jewish life here for more than a century, and where his family has prayed since the 1950s.

The planned 4,000-square-foot building will also house a Holocaust museum inspired by the story of Jakobs’ grandparents, Edith and Norbert, who survived the war after Christian families in the Netherlands hid them in their homes for years. Jakobs described the future museum as a place devoted not only to Jewish history, but to teaching the dangers of hatred and division. “If you have the choice to be right or kind,” he said, repeating advice from his grandmother, “choose kind.”

A 60-foot blue ribbon — chosen by Jakobs’ wife, Katie, to match the color of the Israeli flag — stretched across the future building site. His four daughters held it alongside his parents, brothers and friends. Then Jakobs lifted oversized gold scissors and cut the ribbon as pastors, farmers, city officials and members of neighboring churches applauded.

I’m writing a book about a young Jewish farmer who is building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois using sacred objects (ark, Torah, stained glass windows) donated by closing congregations across America. Today, they held the groundbreaking. 🧑‍🌾 🌽🕍🪏 pic.twitter.com/90TynBMWHC

— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) May 8, 2026

The synagogue rising from this Illinois cornfield will house pieces of the past.

A nearby storage area holds Jewish objects Jakobs rescued from shuttered synagogues across the country: stained-glass windows, Torah arks, rabbi’s chairs, memorial plaques and wooden tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel. Many came from Temple B’nai Israel, a 113-year-old synagogue that closed down in 2025. It served generations of Jews in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, now a ghost town since the steel mills closed. Its remaining congregants donated sacred objects to Jakobs so their story could live on rather than disappear.

The day before the groundbreaking, the Jakobs family began opening some of the crates for the first time since they were packed away nearly a year ago. Nik’s father, Dave Jakobs, pried open one box with a hammer and crowbar while Nik loosened screws with an electric drill, the family gathered around like archaeologists opening a tomb.

Inside was a stained-glass window with images of a tallit and shofar bursting in jewel tones of blue, yellow and red. Jakobs’ mother, Margo, lifted Annie, the youngest of Nik’s daughters, so the 4-year-old could peer inside. The bright red glass matched the bow in her hair.

Nearby sat the massive wooden ark salvaged from Pennsylvania, topped with twin Lions of Judah whose carved paws once overlooked generations of worshippers.

Faith on the farmland

Temple Sholom — founded in 1910 — was once the center of Jewish life in Sterling, a town of 14,500 surrounded by flat farmland and tall grain silos. Its Jewish community once included a pharmacist, the manager of Kline’s department store and the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise.

Over time, membership dwindled. The roof sagged. The pews emptied.

Last year, the congregation sold its aging building and relocated High Holiday services to a tent on the Jakobs’ farm, where prayers mingled with the smell of manure and cattle lowing nearby.

At a moment when many small-town synagogues are closing, Temple Sholom is doing something increasingly rare: building a bigger new sanctuary from scratch. The synagogue will sit prominently along one of Sterling’s main roads — a highly visible expression of Jewish life in a region where Jews are few.

Thursday’s groundbreaking took place on the National Day of Prayer, the annual observance formalized under President Ronald Reagan, who grew up a few miles away in Dixon, Illinois. Earlier that morning, attendees gathered inside New Life Lutheran Church for a breakfast sponsored by Temple Sholom.

“I was so happy to see bagels, lox and cream cheese,” said Rev. James Keenan, a Catholic priest originally from Brooklyn. “It reminded me of home.”

Inside the church sanctuary, a large wooden cross glowed amber and blue above the dais while two giant screens displayed the National Day of Prayer logo. Jakobs, wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a powder-blue blazer, addressed the crowd.

“Tolerance is not weakness,” he said. “It is strength.”

The new synagogue will sit beside New Life Lutheran Church on land sold to Temple Sholom by farmer Dan Koster, 71, who has known the Jakobs family for three generations.

“We need more religious presence in the community,” Koster said.

For Drew Williams, New Life’s 38-year-old lead pastor, the synagogue and museum represent more than neighboring buildings. His church already hosts food-packing drives, summer meal programs and community events. He imagines future partnerships with Temple Sholom.

“I don’t think there’s any community that is immune to hate,” Williams said. “That just means it’s on us” to be on the other side “spreading peace.”

Sterling Mayor Diana Merdian, who is 41 and grew up in town with Jakobs, said the project reflects a broader desire among younger generations to preserve local history and identity. “If we don’t carry those stories, we lose them,” she said. “Once you lose that, you can’t get it back.”

During the ceremony in the cornfield, Temple Sholom’s longtime cantor, Lori Schwaber, asked those gathered to remember the congregation’s founding members and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish together. Jews and Christians stood side by side in the prairie wind as Hebrew prayers drifted across the open farmland.

Lester Weinstine, a 90-year-old congregant who was the first bar mitzvah at Temple Sholom when the shul was still housed out of a Pepsi bottling plant, looked out across the field in disbelief. “I never thought I would see this,” he said.

For Jakobs, the synagogue project has become inseparable from the lessons his grandparents’ survival taught him. “You sometimes feel on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But this community — that’s not what I’ve experienced here.”

If construction stays on schedule, the synagogue will open in fall 2027. Its first major service will not be a dedication ceremony, but the bat mitzvah of Jakobs’ oldest daughter, Taylor.

Members of the Pennsylvania congregation are planning a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion, after donating many of their sacred objects to help build Jakob’s synagogue. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.

“If a farmer can build a synagogue in a cornfield,” Jakobs said, “anybody can do it anywhere.”

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