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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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Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.
This phrase has been invoked by political pundits and leaders, including the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, over the past few days as the world was plunged into Donald Trump’s fever dream of the conquest of Greenland. Yet what they neglected to mention is the quotation’s source and context in which it was uttered.
But both are crucial if we are to fully appreciate the troubling relevance of the phrase and the somber light the German-Jewish thinker Leo Strauss cast on it.
The phrase first crops up in the History of the Peloponnesian War, the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of one of the most consequential events in the history of the West. In the midst of their war against Sparta, an Athenian fleet lands on the small island of Melos, which they have been ordered to annex or annihilate. The dialogue that follows is entirely the creation of Thucydides, who strips away what he believed were the pleasant fictions we tell to blind ourselves to the reality of human nature.
Despite the Melian delegation’s appeals, the Athenian commanders are unmoved. “Nature always compels men to rule over anyone they can control,” they tell the Melians.“We did not make this law…but we will take it as we found it and leave it to posterity forever, because we know that you would do the same if you had our power as would anyone else.”
Yet the Athenians are tragically blind to the corollary: Human beings will always resist and rebel against those who try to invade them. When the Melians refused to submit, the Athenians were as good as their word; upon breaching the city walls, they slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Shortly later, full of their conviction that might makes right, the Athenians decide to invade Sicily — an act of hubris which leads to a catastrophic defeat and a fate like the one they meted out to the Melians.
These world-altering events bring us to Leo Strauss, the man who Harold Bloom once described as a “political philosopher and Hebraic sage.” Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1899, by the 1930’s Strauss had won the reputation as a brilliant and not always orthodox political theorist. With the rise of Nazism, Bloom had the means and foresight to quit his native country in 1937. He became something of an itinerant intellectual, finding a series of academic appointments at Columbia University, University of Chicago, and the New School while writing many of his best-known books, including Natural Right and History and Thoughts on Machiavelli.
Over time, Strauss also became known as the éminence grise of neo-conservatism, the hawkish postwar ideology that viewed foreign policy through the harsh lens of political realism and has been credited with influencing the Bush Administration’s cataclysmic decision to invade Iraq. For his critics, it hardly helped that Strauss was influenced by the writings of the Nazi-adjacent and antisemitic legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who favored strong executive authority and believed that the politics of a nation and policies of the state must respond to the distinction between friend and enemy.
An advocate of “reading between the lines,” Strauss basically sets the traditional interpretation of Thucydides and the significance of the Melian dialogue on its head. Most students of Thucydides believe he sides with Pericles, the Athenian leader who, in his famous funeral oration, declares his city as the school for all of Greece. And why not? Thanks to its openness to ideas and debate, Athens excelled in the arts and sciences. No less important, thanks to its sense of civic responsibility, the city’s citizen army excelled in military prowess and power.
That this shining example of democracy should, at the end of a two-decade war, have been defeated and occupied by brutish if not barbaric Sparta marks one of history’s great tragedies. And yet, Strauss suggests we misunderstand the nature of the tragedy. The Periclean vision is inspiring, he allows, but it was also the reason why Athens lost the war. Strauss claims that Thucydides knew this as well. Just like his contemporary Plato, the ancient historian instead thought the best of all models was the closed society of Sparta rather than the open society of Athens.
By “best,” what Strauss meant is that cities like Sparta are best positioned to maintain the endurance and stability of the state and those who look to it for their security. In turn, this requires such states to embrace what he called the “Athenian thesis” which boils down to the claim made by the Athenian commander at Melos: The strong, indifferent to justice or moderation, do what they can while the weak suffer what is meted out to them. After all, Athens was itself an expanding empire that absorbed other cities into its alliance whether they wished to join or not.
Of course, we have no idea what Strauss would have thought about Donald Trump’s efforts to slap tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins and annex other islands inhabited by people who have made clear they have no desire to become American. But I suspect that Strauss would remind us that the relentless pursuit of power and property is not unique to narcissistic sociopaths. Instead, states are almost always and necessarily driven by the will to expand. And therein lies the true tragedy.
The post Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher appeared first on The Forward.
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120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief”
מזל־טובֿ! דעם 20סטן יאַנואַר 2026 איז געוואָרן 120 יאָר זינט דער גרינדונג פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“ — דער עצות־רובריק פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס. די רובריק איז פֿאַרלייגט געוואָרן פֿונעם גרינדער און לאַנגיאָריקן שעף־רעדאַקטאָר אַב קאַהאַן אין 1906.
כּדי אָפּצומערקן דעם יום־טובֿ ברענגען מיר אײַך צוויי זאַכן:
• ערשטנס, אַן אַרטיקל וועגן אַ טשיקאַווען בריוו וואָס איז אָנגעקומען אין דער פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקציע אין יאַנואַר 1949, פֿון אַ לייענער וועמעס זון האָט חתונה געהאַט מיט אַ קריסטלעכער פֿרוי
• צווייטנס, אַ פֿאָרווערטס־ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“, מיטן געוועזענעם פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלער און דער פֿאָרווערטס־אַרכיוויסטקע חנה פּאָלאַק.
The post 120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief” appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Khamenei Moved to Underground Bunker in Tehran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Amid tense expectation of US strike on key assets of the Islamic regime, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was moved into a special underground bunker in Tehran, the Iran International website reported on Saturday.
The report further added that the supreme leader’s third son Masoud Khamenei has taken over day-to-day management of the leader’s office, functioning as the de facto main channel for coordination vis-à-vis the executive branches of the government and the security forces.
The report describes Khamenei’s hideout as a “fortified site with interconnected tunnels.”
On Thursday US President Donald Trump said that a “massive” naval force was heading toward Iran.
“We have a lot of ships going that direction just in case. We have a big flotilla going in that direction. And we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters.
“We have an armada. We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it. We’ll see,” Trump added.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, along with three destroyers, was spotted making its way to the Middle East from Asia, according to ship-tracking data.