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From Mel Brooks to Elaine May to Ethan Coen: Producer Julian Schlossberg writes memoir about working with Jewish stars over 6 decades
(JTA) — On a couple of occasions in Julian Schlossberg’s early life, he found himself in parts of the United States where some people he talked to had never met a Jewish person. The first was a stint in the Army, the second was while selling movies to rural television stations.
But over the next six decades — once Schlossberg embarked on a long and successful career that included stops as a Hollywood studio executive with Paramount Pictures and later as a prolific distributor of movies and producer of off-Broadway and Broadway shows — he was rarely the only Jew in the room ever again.
Schlossberg tells those stories and many more in his new memoir “Try Not to Hold It Against Me: A Producer’s Life” (Beaufort Books). He writes about how he went from a child in the Bronx to an influential show business figure who mingled and worked with countless movie stars, having enjoyed a long career that shows no signs of being over at age 81.
Schlossberg was born in 1941, and grew up in what he describes as a middle class family, in a Bronx neighborhood that at the time was heavily Jewish and Irish. His father Louis played semi-pro baseball, but as Schlossberg writes in the book, turned down the chance to play for a team in Kansas City in part because “there were almost no Jews in baseball.” Instead, Louis spent most of his professional life working in Manhattan’s Garment District.
The family lived near the Kingsbridge Armory, then likely the largest of its kind in the world, which hosted conventions, car shows and rodeos that came through the city at the time. Those rodeos, in fact, were Schlossberg’s introduction to showbiz.
“I would go as a kid and just revel in the fact that I was meeting these incredible stars,” he said.
Schlossberg with Jewish star Michael Douglas. (Courtesy of Julian Schlossberg)
Meeting stars would eventually become commonplace. Before and after his time in the Army in the early 1960s, Schlossberg worked as a cab driver, a busboy, a waiter, a counselor, a typist and more while taking college classes at night. He got a job at the ABC in 1964 and worked his way up the company’s ranks.
“I had decided, as a very young man, that since I didn’t have a law degree or a dental degree or a medical degree, I was going to learn every aspect of show business that I could,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was going to do, but I knew that knowledge was power, and that if I had knowledge, maybe I’d get some power.”
He would live out that goal, working in just about every area of entertainment, from radio to movie distribution to theater producing. (He goes back and forth on which one he likes best.)
In the 1970s, he hosted an AM radio show called “Movie Talk,” for which he interviewed hundreds of movie stars. WMCA station executives wanted Schlossberg to use a different stage name, to sound less Jewish.
“They didn’t want it to be ‘a Jewish name,’ and I said ‘Wait a second — if I’m going to be on the air in New York City, I can’t be a Jew?’ So they gave in, and I kept my name,” he said. “You kind of want to remember the times you did stand up, I guess. Not that it was a giant standing up, but I would have not done the show if they had asked me to change my name, because it made no sense to me.”
Speaking of Jews, Schlossberg has worked with a virtual who’s-who of famous Jewish entertainers over the years, from Neil Simon to Lillian Hellman to Sid Caesar to Mike Nichols to Peter Falk to Ethan Coen. And the ones he didn’t work with, he hung out with socially. Barbra Streisand invited him to a famous birthday party (that ended up taking place at Liza Minnelli’s house), and Mel Brooks has always greeted him as “Schloss Berg,” as if his name were two words.
Schlossberg with Barbra Streisand, right, and Merryn Jose. (Courtesy of Julian Schlossberg)
Schlossberg’s film production credits range from the 1994 British mystery “Widows’ Peak,” starring Natasha Richardson and Mia Farrow; to the 1980 “No Nukes” documentary that filmed an anti-nuclear weapons concert with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne; to a revival of the long-buried version of Orson Welles’ “Othello.”
In 1995, Schlossberg worked with three prominent Jews on one off-Broadway production: a set of one-act plays performed together each night, called “Death Defying Acts,” written by Woody Allen, David Mamet and Elaine May. Schlossberg later produced the Broadway adaptation of Allen’s movie “Bullets Over Broadway,” while May, whom Schlossberg likens to a sister, contributed the forward to his book.
“Elaine is, as I’ve written, the smartest person I’ve ever met, and probably one of the most talented if not the most talented, because there is nothing that she cannot do,” Schlossberg said of the now 90-year-old Oscar, Tony and Grammy winner. “She’s a great actress, she’s a great writer, and she’s a great director. And she’s a hell of a friend.”
At one point in his career, as he details in one chapter, Schlossberg crossed paths with another Jewish producer: Harvey Weinstein. When Weinstein was young, the now-disgraced serial sexual harasser approached Schlossberg and asked him to teach him the movie business. The two men worked together for a time, although eventually they fell out.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought he would hit the heights that he hit, or the depths that he sunk to. Never,” Schlossberg said.
Another of Schlossberg’s mentoring experiences ended on a more positive note. Mark S. Golub, a rabbi, came to Schlossberg for advice in the late 1990s on learning the theater business. Golub, who died late last month at 77, went on to become a prolific Broadway producer and the founding president of the Jewish Broadcasting Service channel.
It was a fruitful partnership: Golub learned about the industry, and Schlossberg absorbed lessons about Judaism.
“It was a very interesting combination, of somebody who certainly knew a great deal about Judaism, and myself, who was learning a lot by that time about [Judaism],” Schlossberg said. “It was interesting to me to be partners with a rabbi.”
Schlossberg had several projects set to go at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, but when the industry shut down, he wrote his memoir instead. Now he’s looking to rev up some of those projects. Next up on the docket is “Tales From the Guttenberg Bible,” an autobiographical, four-character play written by and starring the Jewish actor Steve Guttenberg. It is now set for its world premiere in April, at the George Street Playhouse in Rutherford, New Jersey.
“I think audiences will respond to it, because he’s so kind and personable and living… a nice Jewish boy,” Schlossberg said of Guttenberg.
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The post From Mel Brooks to Elaine May to Ethan Coen: Producer Julian Schlossberg writes memoir about working with Jewish stars over 6 decades appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Two plays stage three years of infighting over Israel
The last three years of Jewish life can be read as a singular drama with no last act.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 proved to be just the first bloodletting in a renewed cycle of violence and recrimination. Israel responded with its destructive campaign in Gaza. Far from the theater of war, American Jews reckoned with renewed fears of antisemitism and fractures within their own communities and families.
Before that October had even ended, about two weeks into a discourse that’s still nowhere near to disappearing, Michel Hausmann, the artistic director of Miami New Drama, reached out to playwright Jonathan Spector to create a play reacting to the moment.
The writer’s response: a categorical no.
“I was like, ‘That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard. I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole, it’s too scary and hard and complicated,’” Spector, a Tony winner for his play Eureka Day, recalled, “but you know, he was very persistent.”
“I think I wore him down,” Hausmann, a Venezuelan-born Jew, told me.
The result of this exploration is Birthright, a domestic epic that touches on international news and centuries of Jewish thought. The play, now at MCC Theatre after a 2025 debut at Miami New Drama, follows six friends, most of whom met on a Birthright trip in 2006. It opens in the pre-smartphone age and ends in the social media-saturated aftermath of Oct. 7. Overall, it covers 18 years, an intentionally Jewish number.
“I feel like so many of the ways that these kinds of arguments play out is people leap very quickly from a thing that happened yesterday to a thing that happened 80 years ago to a thing that happened 2000 years ago,” Spector said. “It’s too narrow a lens if we’re only looking at this moment.”
Spector landed on the organizing idea of a Birthright trip after conducting interviews with a diverse group of American Jews, most of whom mentioned the free journey to Israel. (Spector, raised Conservative in the DC suburbs, like his characters, didn’t participate in Birthright; he hasn’t been to Israel since he was 15.)
Hausmann, whose theater only produces world premieres and designs its season to cater to the local Cuban, Venezuelan and Jewish communities, commissioned Spector because as early as Oct. 8, he imagined the response from the cultural field would be missing complexity or morphing into activism.
In truth, theaters have been slow to respond. Seasons have featured shows about antisemitism and Israel, but for the most part, they’d been in development before these issues were on everyone’s minds and social feeds.
Joshua Harmon’s A Prayer for the French Republic moved from its 2022 off-Broadway run to a Dec. 2023 Broadway opening largely unchanged. But amid the mounting headlines, the historical irony of the central family’s ultimate choice to relocate to Israel for safety was devastating in its new theater.
Itamar Moses’ The Ally, which premiered at the Public in Feb. 2024, looked prescient in its dissection of campus activism surrounding Israel. It concerned a Berkeley professor caught between his liberal values and his Israeli parentage. Moses’ show was scheduled for the season well before Oct. 7, but debuted just after. The playwright chose not to touch the Hamas attack, but conclude right on the cusp of it.
By the time Giant, about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism, transferred from the West End to Broadway earlier this year, many online seemed to have no problem with Dahl’s blithe Holocaust inversion, accusing the play of vilifying someone who was merely an advocate for the persecuted neighbors of the Jewish state.
Birthright and S. Asher Gelman’s The Zionists: A Family Storm, which opened at Miami New Drama in April and is now playing at Barrington Stages in the Berkshires, are the first major American plays directly addressing a post-Oct. 7 Jewish world.
Gathering the storm
Gelman told me his play emerged out of what he saw as betrayal from his progressive artistic community, which immediately sought to “contextualize” Hamas’ barbarity.
“I watched complex histories become flattened and simplified for ostensibly propaganda,” said Gelman, whose previous plays include the gay polyamory play Afterglow. He was floored by the views of some people in his circle who labeled him, as an American-born Israel citizen who lived in Tel Aviv from 2006 to 2016, a “white colonizer.”
He started taking notes, and about a year after Hamas’ invasion of Israel, began work on his play, about a wealthy and well-connected Jewish family on vacation in the Turks and Caicos. (Gelman’s parents are Jewish philanthropists, like the matriarch and patriarch in the play; one of his sisters, like the play’s youngest son, has funded pro-Palestinian groups.)
In setting up the drama, a kind of staged debate between the liberal Zionist family and the anti-Zionist wicked son and his husband, Gelman had to think of a way to keep the warring factions in the room to have the conversation.
His solution was a violent metaphor: a hurricane raging outside their deluxe bungalow.
“I think that the beauty of The Zionists is that you have to sit down through it, you have to hear a point of view, wherever you stand,” said Hausmann. Perhaps because of the play’s title, he said, members of Jewish Voice for Peace picketed the production in Miami. In one performance, an audience member shouted back as one character made his case for anti-Zionism.
“All extremes are upset at us, and so I think that we’re doing something right,” Hausmann said.
The yelling matches in the play tip into the tedious at times, and the grievance-laden backstory given to the anti-Zionist Aaron — he’s a recovering drug addict whose IDF donor brother outed him as gay when they were kids — seems to support a familiar claim made against Jewish critics of Israel: They are acting out against their upbringing rather than out of a real conviction.
While the show pays lip service to the Jewish value of questioning, it often seems disinterested in the anti-Zionist perspective, privileging the gradient spectrum of liberal Zionism in a queer, multiracial modern family with at least one convert and two descendants of refugees.
Gelman, 42, says he thinks anti-Zionist Jews of a younger generation (the Aaron character is 34) may arrive at their beliefs because they don’t remember a pre-Netanyahu Israel or Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn.
They’ve only “known one type of Israel,” he said.
The art of argument
Spector wrestled with the arguments he wanted his characters to make. The show could have easily been a back and forth about the Peel Commission or suicide bombings during the Second Intifada, but the more ideas he included, the more the play flatlined.
“It’s, like a three hour 10 minute running time and only 15 minutes of it is arguments,” Spector said, “but I probably wrote and have cut two hours worth of arguments.”
He took care to make sure the points of view were rooted in character and their evolution: The most outspoken anti-Zionist character, Izzy (Molly Bernard), evolves from working for J Street to leaving the group chat when her friends send a link to The New York Times walking back its reporting on the 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion, which rushed prematurely to blame Israel for the strike. By that point, we can glean how everything from Izzy’s fertility to her disillusionment with her work has shaped her worldview.
Spector came to realize that the question he was examining wasn’t a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis or in winning a debate (he thinks social media has gamified conversation), but a change within American Judaism.
In the second half of the 20th Century, he said, Jewish institutions made an effort to pitch a big, tolerant tent to embrace all levels of observance. “As the main dividing line within American Jewish life has shifted from your religious practice to your beliefs about Israel, there’s been a similar kind of shift away from tolerance from people on both sides of that divide,” he said.
He’s less interested in passing judgment on this development than trying to make sense of it. It’s a view expressed by the character of Izzy in his play.
“I can go up on the bimah at my parents’ shul and I can say I am married to a woman, I can say I don’t keep kosher, I can say I don’t believe in God,” she said, noting how she’d not just be accepted but welcome. “The one thing that would get me kicked off the bimah, kicked out of the shul, kicked out of my family is if I say I am an anti-Zionist.”
Spector said so far a minority of audience members have been uncomfortable with his show. (The evening I saw it, there were young people with tattoos and men in kippot; by contrast, the crowd at The Zionists, typical of my theatergoing there, looked to be almost exclusively of retirement age.) His own views have naturally evolved with the play – he’s been working on it for years, and the facts on the ground have changed.
“It’s a little bit difficult for me to separate the work on the play and the evolution of my own feelings and beliefs,” he said. “If I could sum those up in a sound bite, I wouldn’t need to write a three-and-a-half hour play.”
Hope for healing?
Birthright was the first entry in Miami New Drama’s Jewish Play Commission. Hausmann said some donors wished the piece was more “feel-good,” but said he thinks it is, ultimately, healing.
Spector doesn’t use that word.
”Midway through writing it, I was definitely like, ‘Oh my God. How am I going to find an ending to this that is not just like unrelentingly bleak and depressing,’ because that was certainly how I felt in the moment about where things were.” We black out on a scene of people coming together in a shared grief.
The Zionists ends at a moment of uncertainty amid a wrathful, Act of God weather event. For Gelman, the ambiguity and anger are the point, and point to a way forward.
“Discomfort, disagreement, it’s a feature of a great relationship, not a bug,” Gelman said. “With the privilege and luxury of actual physical safety comes the responsibility to be brave and the responsibility to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is the price we pay for community.”
The post Two plays stage three years of infighting over Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Colorado congressional race upset hinged on Israel
A democratic socialist who put condemnation of Israel front and center in her campaign defeated a long-serving member of Congress in Colorado’s congressional primary Tuesday, adding to recent upsets that are rocking the Democratic party and Jewish politics.
Melat Kiros beat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent first elected in 1996, just one week after two New York members of the Democratic Socialists of America movement defeated sitting congressmen targeted as supporters of military aid to Israel.
“Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions sent a clear message: We will not wait!” Kiros declared in her victory speech, which took aim at U.S. aid for Israel. “We will not wait to reject corporate PACs like AIPAC. No, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.”
She will face Republican Christy Peterson in the general election but is favored to win the heavily Democratic district.
Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, won the Democratic nomination to replace the term-limited Gov. Jared Polis, who also is Jewish. David Seligman, a progressive Jewish candidate for the open attorney general seat, lost in a four-way contest to Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who gained notoriety for removing Donald Trump from Colorado’s 2024 ballot.
Kiros, who was born in 1997, the year DeGette took office, used Israel as a wedge throughout the campaign — calling for an arms embargo against Israel, including a suspension of funding for defensive weapons including the Iron Dome.
She also vows to abolish the federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency and pass Medicare for all.
Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer who has been accused of trafficking in antisemitism, attended Kiros’ victory party in Denver Tuesday. She also picked up endorsements from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and a slew of leftist groups. Some Jewish Coloradans supported her, saying that her harsh criticism of Israel is necessary and warranted.
In her victory speech on Tuesday, Kiros reminded supporters that she did not flinch when her former law firm, Sidley Austin, threatened to fire her if she didn’t take down a post on Medium addressed to law firms nationally supporting anti-Israel student protesters on college campuses — and was ultimately terminated.
Kiros’ victory on Tuesday comes on the heels of the defeat of two Democratic incumbents in New York targeted specifically for their support of aid to Israel. A former Gaza war encampment leader on Columbia University’s campus, Darializa Avila Chevalier, beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, while former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander will replace Rep. Dan Goldman. Another candidate who campaigned on Israel, Claire Valdez, secured the nomination for another House seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez in New York’s 7th district.
Like Kiros, both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are DSA members. Lander, who is Jewish, left DSA after Oct. 7, 2023, when DSA promoted a pro-Palestinian Times Square rally that Avila Chevalier attended.
Like Avila Chevalier, Kiros has come under scrutiny for her repudiation of Israel and its supporters.
In the final stretch of her campaign, Kiros gained national attention for declining to declare antisemitic the 2025 firebombing of a group holding a vigil in Boulder, saying in an interview: “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed,” adding that she could not say what they believed, either: “most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
The attacker, Mohammed Soliman, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he threw molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to burn 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died of her wounds.
As a candidate, Kiros has said in interviews that weapons that defend Israeli citizens against attacks from Iran and Hezbollah “give Israel the cover” to continue policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing. (Genocide scholars have debated whether the war in Gaza rises to the level of genocide.)
And asked whether Israel “had it coming” on Oct. 7, Kiros told a local news channel “no, not at all — it’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happens.” She said Israel had resisted change despite decades of international frustration with its policies; her job as a member of Congress, she said, was to change those conditions.
In the gubernatorial contest, Weiser’s victory over U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet made him the likely next governor of the state. Colorado has not had a Republican governor since 2007.
Bennet’s mother, like Weiser’s, survived the Holocaust. She was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto as a child before her family immigrated to New York. But Bennet was raised Christian and does not identify as Jewish.
Estare Weiser was born in Buchenwald the day before the camp was liberated. Now 81, she was photographed celebrating with Weiser, 58, at his victory party Tuesday.
Weiser’s platform focuses on expanding the state’s universal preschool program, defending LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and countering Republican gerrymandering efforts in other states. He entered the race as an underdog, but successfully attacked Bennet for backing several Trump cabinet nominees.
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Survey: Jews in smaller communities feel less heard when raising concerns about antisemitism
(JTA) — Jews living in smaller communities are less likely than those in large communities to feel their concerns about antisemitism are taken seriously by law enforcement and would-be allies, a new survey from the Jewish Federations of North America has found.
Jews in smaller communities were “lacking a sense of allyship in the communities around them,” said Mimi Kravetz, the chief impact and growth officer for JFNA.
“Jews in small communities tell us that they feel deeply concerned that they’re looking for support, that their leadership is looking for network and resources, because it can feel like they’re on their own,” Kravetz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The JFNA survey, which was compiled from its March 2025 study of Jewish Life in North America, found that 22% of Jews live in small communities. Defined as Jewish communities with fewer than 5,000 Jews living within five miles of their zip code, small Jewish communities are also more likely to be found in the South or in rural or suburban areas.
Although the survey found no statistically significant difference in the antisemitism experienced by Jews in smaller and larger communities, it found that Jews in small communities are more likely to feel that antisemitism is invalidated or dismissed.
Among respondents, 58% of Jews in small communities reported feeling more likely to be invalidated, compared with 48% of Jews overall.
Jews in small communities were also less likely to express confidence in local law enforcement’s responses to antisemitism. Just 39% of Jews in small communities say local law enforcement takes antisemitism seriously, compared with 47% of Jews in larger communities.
Leaders of small Jewish communities also feel less physically safe in Jewish spaces than their big city counterparts: 60% of those small-community leaders said they feel safe, compared to 86% of community leaders overall.
While the survey found that 50% of Jews in smaller communities report being unengaged in Jewish life, compared to 36% of Jewish respondents overall, they were just as likely to say they wanted greater connection to Jewish life.
The survey suggested that geographic constraints and limited availability of Jewish life likely caused the disparity in engagement, even as Jews sought out Jewish connections in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
Kravetz said Jews in small communities were just as likely as Jews in big communities to crave those connections.
“What’s needed in small Jewish communities is more leadership infrastructure and support for Jewish life,” Kravetz said.
The survey was conducted before the January arson attack on Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, which drew renewed attention to the security challenges facing smaller Jewish communities.
Michele Schipper, the CEO of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit that supports Jewish communities across the South and was housed inside Beth Israel Congregation prior to the arson attack, said security remains a challenge for some smaller congregations.
“For some of those smaller communities, they may not be able to have personnel on site every time they’re open,” Schipper said. “It may be an older building. Not everyone is able to get one of the secure community grants,” she said, referring to federal and state government grants to nonprofits seen as vulnerable to attack.
Earlier this month leaders from Jewish communities across the South convened at the ISJL’s annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Schipper said they discussed strategies for keeping smaller communities safe.
“One of the things we really did share is how important it is not to isolate ourselves in these communities, but to continually build relationships with the local community, with local law enforcement, so that when, God forbid, something happens, you’re not starting to reach out or wait for somebody to contact you,” Schipper said.
Looking ahead, Schipper said her message to Jews in small communities was to “continue to build relationships in your own local community, and just continue to participate in the Jewish community and stay strong and positive.”
The study, which was conducted online by JFNA from March 5-25, 2025, surveyed 5,798 total U.S. adults, of which 1,877 identified as Jewish. The margin of error for Jewish adults was ± 2.26%, and samples were weighted to be representative of the U.S. population and Jewish community.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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