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‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers
(JTA) — In the hit show “The Sopranos,” veteran actor Jerry Adler plays mob-adjacent Jewish businessman Hesh Rabkin, who made a fortune in the music business decades earlier. In a first season episode, Hesh is confronted by a rapper seeking “reparations” for a late Black musician who he says Rabkin didn’t pay fairly for a hit record.
When Hesh responds by bragging that he wrote the hit songs he worked on back in the day, Tony Soprano corrects him: “A couple of Black kids wrote that record, you gave yourself co-writing credit because you owned the label.”
The greedy Jewish music mogul has been a common trope, from the acclaimed work of Spike Lee to the rants of Kanye West. “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” a 2003 parody of music biopics, made fun of the trope itself by making the record executives into Hasidic Jews, led by Harold Ramis. (They were depicted as friendly and not so greedy, and the film’s writers, Judd Apatow and director Jake Kasdan, are both Jewish.)
The new movie “Spinning Gold,” which opened in theaters last week, tells the real-life story of Neil Bogart, the founder of Casablanca Records and a top music executive of the 1970s. It breaks from the mold of most other music biopics in a couple of key ways: The protagonist is a music executive, not an artist or a group, and the music mogul character — in this case, another Jewish one — is not treated as a villain.
The Jewish Brooklyn native whose given name was Neil Scott Bogatz helped promote bubblegum pop and early disco, signing artists such as Donna Summer, Gladys Knight, Cher and the Village People. A notable rock signing was Kiss. In one scene of “Spinning Gold,” the Bogart character (played by Jewish actor Jeremy Jordan, who starred in the Broadway hit “Rock of Ages”) implies to Kiss’ Gene Simmons that he signed the band, in part, because Simmons’ and guitarist Paul Stanley’s real names are Chaim Witz and Stanley Eisen. He relates to them, the film argues, as fellow Jewish guys who hailed from the outer boroughs of New York City. Bogart died of cancer in 1982.
The movie covers a long span in Bogart’s life and career, and it shows him struggling for many years before striking gold by shepherding Donna Summer’s single “Love to Love You Baby” to hit status. Timothy Scott Bogart, the mogul’s son and the film’s director, did not want to depict Bogart as an unambiguous hero. In the story, the elder Bogart is shown cheating on his first wife with the woman who would become his second, and the film also makes clear that his record label was heavily in debt for many years. It does sometimes show him at odds with the talent, such as when the members of Kiss complain to him that their career hasn’t taken under Bogart’s tutelage.
“I don’t know that I looked at it as protagonist or antagonist, I think he was a bit of both,” Timothy Scott Bogart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“But I do think the character of the executive, in general, has been a much-maligned character… certainly in the music biopic world,” he added. “And that’s not who Neil Bogart was.”
He added that the personal relationships between his father and the label’s artists were always valued. He remembers his family going on vacation with Donna Summer, and Gladys Knight and members of Kiss being at his home.
The younger Bogart, who previously produced the 2019 Vietnam War drama “The Last Full Measure,” said that rather than relying on any book or article, he constructed the film based on interviews he did with his artists, executives and others involved in the story over several years.
Jews have been part of the business side of the American music industry for most of its existence, in part because of the way they were shut out of many professions in the first half of the 20th century. Music executive Seymour Stein, who passed away this week after a long career of working with the likes of Madonna and The Ramones, said in a 2013 interview that “music is something Jews were good at and they could do. All immigrants into America tried their hand at show-business.”
Some executives in the early days of the music industry — Jewish and non-Jewish — did exploit their artists, doing everything from underpaying Black artists to denying them songwriting credits or royalties. Moguls of the past with reputations for doing so included Herman Lubinsky of Savoy Records. Others, like the recently deceased Stein and Milt Gabler of Commodore Records, had better reputations. Historians have differing opinions on specific individuals.
Neil Bogart is shown with The Isley Brothers in June 1969. (Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
“There is a scholarly controversy between those who look at the moguls and say that they exploited the [Black] musicians and those who say that they encouraged and made possible Black success in music,” said Jonathan Sarna, the professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “Both use the same data, but some point to the money Jews made and others point to the musicians that Jews discovered and promoted.”
Spike Lee drew fire for his depiction of fictional Jewish music executives Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John and Nicholas Turturro) in his 1990 movie “Mo’ Better Blues.”
“In the history of American music, there have not been Jewish people exploiting black musicians?” Spike Lee said in his defense to New York Magazine in 2006. “In the history of music? How is that being stereotypical?”
Other “bad guy” examples include Paul Giamatti’s Jerry Heller in 2015’s “Straight Outta Compton” and David Krumholtz’s Milt Shaw in 2004’s “Ray.” “Cadillac Records,” from 2008, starred Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the Jewish founder of the legendary Chess Records who, the film implied, gave his mostly Black artists Cadillacs, but not always the money they were owed. “Get On Up,” the 2014 biopic of James Brown that starred the late Chadwick Boseman, cast Fred Melamed as famed Cincinnati mogul Syd Nathan (a mentor to Seymour Stein); journalist RJ Smith criticized the film for depicting Nathan as a “bumptious racist.”
Actor Seth Rogen discussed the trope in his 2021 memoir “Yearbook.” He tells the story of running into comedian Eddie Griffin, who at a late point in his career had been struggling to get movie roles. Griffin told Rogen to “tell your Jews to let other people make some movies!”
Rogen called this “insane because he’s really ignoring the fact that if there’s one thing that Jewish people are NOT above, it’s making money producing things that are fronted by Black people. Anyone who’s ever seen a biopic of any Black musician knows the character I’m talking about, and he’s usually very appropriately played by my dear friend David Krumholtz.” (Krumholtz played one of the Hasidic producers in “Walk Hard.”)
“It’s certainly true that, in the post-war U.S. music industry, Jews were more likely to be producers and impresarios than performers. And, given the importance of African-Americans in the post-war U.S. music industry, that inevitably created a particular kind of relationship with certain Jews in the music industry,” sociologist and music critic Keith Kahn-Harris told JTA.
“That relationship starts to be put under scrutiny and under strain from the late 1960s, as the civil rights coalition started to fall apart and people of color began to assert their agency,” he added. “It’s also true that the post-war music industry was an unregulated space with an almost-normative pattern of exploitation of performers. Put all that together and you have all the ingredients for significant African-American-Jewish tension. Plus, the rapacious Jewish impresario sits easily with ingrained antisemitic stereotypes.”
“Spinning Gold” isn’t the only counterexample to the trend in film. In last year’s Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” the Jewish label honcho character, Clive Davis (played by Stanley Tucci), is treated as a benevolent guiding light. In that case, Davis was among the producers of the movie.
“Jewish promoters, like all music promoters, were and are first and foremost business people selling a product. Their goal: promote a performer to reap income. The performers have obviously a different stake in the transaction, although both depend on the other,” said Hasia Diner, an American Jewish history professor at New York University.
“If the hero of the film is the performer then her/his perspective is the focus and almost by definition the promoter’s perspective has to reflect the antagonist encounter. Does that merit being called antisemitism? Not in my estimation. By doing so it undermines real antisemitism. It also ignores the inherent business transaction involved,” Diner said.
How can filmmakers navigate this?
“With great care,” Kahn-Harris said. “It does mean paying attention to how such a portrayal can be accurate and not feeding on deeper antisemitic stereotypes. There’s no one way of doing this. It requires care and attention to the historical record.”
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The post ‘Spinning Gold’ movie departs from Hollywood stereotypes about Jewish music producers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Hamas Says Body of Israeli Soldier Hostage Found in Gaza, Will Be Handed Over
Hamas terrorists search for the bodies of deceased hostages, kidnapped by Hamas during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Haseeb Alwazeer
The armed wing of Hamas said on Tuesday it had found the body of an Israeli soldier who had been held hostage by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, and that it would hand over the body at 8 pm (1800 GMT).
Hamas said the body was found in Shejaia, an eastern suburb of Gaza City in an area still occupied by Israeli forces, after Israel granted access to the location for teams from Hamas and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Under a ceasefire deal that took effect on Oct. 10, Hamas turned over all 20 living hostages held in Gaza in return for nearly 2,000 Palestinian convicts and wartime detainees held in Israel. Hamas also promised to turn over the remains of deceased hostages but says Gaza‘s war devastation has made locating bodies difficult. Israel accuses Hamas of stalling.
Before Tuesday, Hamas had returned 20 of the 28 bodies of hostages that had been buried in Gaza. In return, Israel handed over 270 bodies of Palestinians it had killed since the war began in October 2023, Hamas-controlled Gaza health authorities said.
Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in their cross-border attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military capabilities and political rule in neighboring Gaza.
The US-brokered ceasefire has broadly held through repeated incidents of violence.
Israel says three of its soldiers have been killed and it has targeted scores of terrorists it says have approached lines behind which Israeli troops have withdrawn under the truce.
Palestinian health authorities say Israeli forces have killed 239 people in strikes since the truce took effect, although experts have cast doubt on the reliability of such figures, which have been shown to be riddled with inaccuracies and do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
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She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true?
Hitler and My Mother-in-Law
By Terese Svoboda
O/R Books, 416 pages, $23.00
Patricia Hartwell had many stories from her time as a correspondent for the US Office of War Information. Once, she said, she took a picture with Adolf Hitler’s ashes so American citizens would see that the war was over. It’s a thrilling tale, but nobody knows if it’s true.
The mystery surrounding this photo — where it is, if the ashes were actually Hitler’s, whether there even was a picture — takes center stage in Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, a lengthy memoir by author Terese Svoboda.
As a correspondent for the US Office of War Information during World War II, Hartwell was the first female reporter to arrive at Dachau and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. She also pocketed several of Hermann Goering’s medals. Well-researched, engaging, and occasionally cringe-inducing in its depiction of awkward interactions between Svoboda and Hartwell, the book paints Hartwell as a woman who was both morally dubious and undeniably impressive.
Svoboda, author of the novels Cannibal and Dog on Fire, has plenty of reasons not to believe her mother-in-law, who died in 1998 at age 82. She lied in an oral history of Hawaii’s State Foundation on Culture and the Arts about being accepted into Harvard Law School in 1936, even though women weren’t admitted there until 1950. She claimed several times to have been close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and that she was invited to stay in the White House on occasion. No records of such a relationship with the former-First Lady exist.
While Svoboda doesn’t hold back her criticisms of her mother-in-law — and she has plenty — the memoir does not demonize her. Instead, Svoboda attempts to understand her mother-in-law’s penchant for embellishment in the context of the patriarchal society in which she lived, one that forced impressive women to be quiet about their achievements. Maybe struggling so long for recognition led Hartwell to feel the need to exaggerate her life story.
The book does not just explore the lies Hartwell told others but also the ones she told herself, such as refusing to believe that her second husband, Dickson Hartwell, a World War II veteran and fellow journalist, beat her children.
And yet among all the falsehoods, there are known facts about Hartwell’s life that seem stranger than the ones she invented. During the Allied occupation of Germany, Hartwell served briefly as the mayor of Berchtesgaden, a resort town where Hitler and other Nazi leaders vacationed. She got to see a collection of looted art recovered from Goering — and picked out a painting to take home. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for members of the American press and military to take souvenirs, no matter how heinous their origin story.
The piece, one of Lucas Cranach’s many versions of “Cupid Complaining to Venus,” was one of Hitler’s favorites. Nearly two decades after Hartwell brought it back to New York, Dickson sold the painting, apparently without her permission, to E. A. Silberman Galleries in order to purchase a small newspaper in Arizona. The Jewish-owned art firm then sold the painting to the National Gallery of London for over a hundred times more than what they bought it for.
Hartwell also claimed to have danced with Goering at a party that the American soldiers held the night of his arrest. According to some reports, rather than punishing Goering, the military fraternized with him. Based on her own archival research, Svoboda determines this claim to be plausible.
Why, Svoboda wonders, would Hartwell “want to boast of not only meeting the second most evil Nazi, but dancing with him?” If it’s a lie, it’s one that seems to work against its teller. If it’s the truth, it’s one most people would probably like to keep hidden. To some, whether it’s fiction or not may not be important. But Svoboda contends that to those who want to understand the type of person Hartwell was, the truth behind this story is crucial.
Although Svoboda remembers seeing the photo of Hartwell with Hitler’s ashes, it never resurfaced after the woman’s death. According to Svoboda’s husband, Hartwell’s oldest son, the ashes were not Hitler’s, just a random pile picked for a posed photo to mark the end of the war. No matter who — or what — the ashes belonged to, it’s the power behind the story, one of a fallen dictatorship, that mattered. And Hartwell clearly understood the power of stories.
The post She claims she saw Hitler’s ashes and danced with Goering. But is any of it true? appeared first on The Forward.
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How ‘Spiritually Israeli’ became a slur that isn’t really about Israel
Once upon a time — which is to say, not recently — Israel had a reputation in the West as an underdog. This, combined with its gold-star management of its international image, a practice known as hasbara, led to a perception of the Jewish nation as a scrappy fighter that triumphed over its bullies, the Arab nations that flank each of its borders. Later, Israeli PR successfully marketed Tel Aviv as a gay mecca to prove its character as a progressive leader, and its success in technology to paint the country as the “Start-up Nation.”
Since Oct. 7, this has changed entirely. Now, Israel, not its Arab neighbors, is widely portrayed as the bully. And this association goes so deep that posters online have begun to bring up Israel outside of any context relating to the war, international politics or anything Jewish. In the current parlance, “spiritually Israeli” has taken hold as a catch-all pejorative.
Take, for example, the World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers — if you’re not a baseball fan, they just won the World Series — are, this year, the spendiest team in the game, known for hoarding wealth and amassing the best players. Other sports impose salary caps to try to keep the playing field relatively equal, and the games more compelling. Not baseball. (It does levy luxury taxes on teams that spend a lot — but, if you’re already paying your star player $700 million, you just pay the tax, too.)
Which means that the Dodgers’ win was not exactly widely celebrated outside of Los Angeles. “Never forget it’s fuck the Dodgers, fuck Israel and fuck ICE forever,” reads one popular tweet on the game. The Dodgers, as several posts put it, are “spiritually Israeli.” Yet another post referred to the team as the “Tel Aviv Dodgers.”
To be clear: The team has no Israelis. The posters don’t mean the team has a partnership with Tel Aviv, or that any of the players are Jewish. They partially mean the team is punching down. And they mostly mean it’s lame to support a team that seemed nearly guaranteed to win.
“Spiritually Israeli” and its ilk are far from the first anti-Israel slang to pop up in the past two years. Various pejoratives like “Isn’treal” and “Israhell” have been common for years, and gained traction after Oct. 7. Long before the “Hot Girls for Cuomo” and “Hot Girls for Zohran” battle arose in the New York City mayoral battle, there were influencers posting thirst traps captioned: “#freepalestine.” In short, Israel is becoming deeply uncool.
This is all, of course, just the internet. Israel still has the support of the vast majority of U.S. political leaders, for example, who probably don’t keep track of which influencer is posting what about Israel, much less what outfit they were wearing when they did so.
On the other hand, the internet is where much of culture is manufactured today. And however intangible they may be, language and slang do matter reveals societal currents.
Meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme says “spiritually Israeli” is used to call things “culturally empty.” It’s possible to see this as a rebrand of “rootless cosmopolitanism,” an antisemitic idea used to condemn Jews as a corrupting influence on European society. And that is part of the term’s meaning. But really, in practice, it’s used to describe things that are extremely corporate, too big to fail.
Israel is no longer seen as the underdog. And support for Israel in mainstream arenas — politics, government, some media — is why it has become increasingly, well, unsexy to support the nation. Are you excited about your bank? Or your local Safeway? Just like it’s lame for Starbucks to be your favorite coffee shop instead of somewhere local, or it’s basic to love Taylor Swift instead of a niche musician, it has become cringe to love Israel.
But only among a certain crowd; the people using “spiritually Israeli” are, generally, cultivating an aesthetic of hipsterdom. In practice, though, most people love corporate things; that’s how they got so big. At least one major TikToker built her entire brand on being excited about drinking her daily Starbucks. And Taylor Swift is, of course, one of the most successful pop singers of our time. Israel doesn’t need to be cool to thrive.
So however “spiritually Israeli” it might be, people will continue to like what they like — even if it’s the L.A. Dodgers.
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