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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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Most Jewish voters backed El-Sayed, but many Michigan Democrats crossed party lines, early exit poll shows
Nearly one in four Jewish voters in Michigan who supported Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024 crossed party lines to vote for Republican Mike Rogers instead of Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed this year, according to an exit poll of early voters. The findings highlight El-Sayed’s struggle to win over Jewish Democrats amid concerns about his views on Israel and his association with an influencer accused of antisemitism.
The Mercury Public Affairs survey of 482 Jewish voters who cast ballots before Election Day found that El-Sayed received 60% of the early Jewish vote in the Senate race, compared with 79% for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson. Rogers received 36% and another 5% of respondents said they left the Senate race blank.
The poll sponsored by The Jewish Majority, an advocacy group led by AIPAC veteran Jonathan Schulman, was conducted from Oct. 25 through Oct. 31 via text and had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Among Jewish voters who said they backed Slotkin in 2024, 23% voted for Rogers this time, and among those who voted for Kamala Harris in the presidential election, 18% crossed over to Rogers, while another 11% voted for someone else or skipped the Senate race.
More than 2.3 million voters cast ballots by Monday morning, including 743,450 in person and nearly 1.57 million by mail, according to the Michigan Secretary of State. Jewish voters make up an estimated 1.4% of Michigan’s electorate, but both parties viewed them as an important voting bloc in the closely contested Senate race. Slotkin defeated Rogers by fewer than 20,000 votes in 2024.
The election followed months of tension between El-Sayed and Jewish Democrats, who voted for his primary rival, Rep. Haley Stevens. His outspoken opposition to Israel, ties to left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitism, and his initial response to the March attack on Temple Israel upset some Jewish voters. El-Sayed apologized for his remarks about the attack and sent mailers to Jewish households promising to fight antisemitism, but did not moderate his positions on Israel. He even doubled down on his criticism of the Jewish state.
The Republican Jewish Coalition spent $2 million targeting about 50,000 Jewish voters, primarily in Oakland County, hoping to persuade Democrats frustrated with El-Sayed to cross party lines.
The findings suggest that El-Sayed’s struggles were not the result of a broader shift toward Republicans. Among Jewish voters who voted for Rogers, 61% said they voted mainly against El-Sayed rather than for the Republican. Another 23% said both factors mattered equally. And 88% of those who did not vote for El-Sayed said they would have been very likely to vote for a different Democratic nominee.
Almost all of them — 92% — cited El-Sayed’s positions on Israel and concerns about antisemitism as a main reason for their decision, while just 22% said they wanted to send a message to the Democratic Party.
The survey may not reflect last-minute developments. It was completed before Stevens endorsed Rogers on Sunday, in a rare break with her party. Later that day, leaders of Nonnegotiable, a group of Jewish Democrats opposed to El-Sayed, urged voters who could not support either candidate to write in Emma Lazarus, the Jewish author whose poem appears on the Statue of Liberty, instead of leaving the Senate race blank.
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Georgia voters decide the future of Jon Ossoff, a Jewish Democrat who increasingly criticizes Israel
(JTA) — Jewish voters in Georgia went to the polls on Tuesday to choose between Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who has increasingly criticized Israel, and Republican Rep. Mike Collins, his pro-Israel challenger with ties to white nationalists.
Ossoff, who is Jewish, called Collins a “notorious bigot, antisemite, and extremist” during the bitterly fought election. Collins said that Ossoff “caved to the radicals” by voting to halt certain arms shipments to Israel.
Ossoff’s voting record on Israel has captured a shift in the Democratic party. While he has supported measures to boost Israeli defense systems, he also became one of the first Senate Democrats to vote for blocking offensive weapons sales to Israel in 2024, as the country’s military conduct in Gaza drove mounting opposition.
In contrast, Collins has pledged continued military support for Israel and described the country as “a frontline partner against Iran and their partners in terror” in the Atlanta Jewish Times. A self-described “born again Christian,” Collins added that he supports Israel because “my faith tells me to and because it is the right policy for America.”
Collins’ campaign was mired in controversies surrounding his associates. One of his former staffers posted images of a swastika and a Ku Klux Klan robe online, while another partook in a group chat with prominent white nationalists that aimed to help an accused Holocaust denier. Collins’ son-in-law is a social media influencer who has promoted conspiracy theories that “Jews control our government” and called to deport all Muslims.
Ossoff took aim at those associations during the candidates’ two debates, saying that Collins “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office” and was “unable to stop someone under your own roof from disseminating neo-Nazi propaganda while you run for the Senate.” Collins has said that he condemns antisemitism and does not support his son-in-law’s views.
Meanwhile, Ossoff’s vote against offensive weapons for Israel in November 2024 divided Georgia’s Jews. In an open letter, a coalition including Georgia synagogues, the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, the local Anti-Defamation League chapter and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee told Ossoff they were “deeply disappointed” and the vote demonstrated that his “commitment to Israel’s security is not ironclad.”
An opposing letter from over 100 Atlanta Jewish leaders, including rabbis and heads of liberal organizations, thanked Ossoff for his vote. They said his position represented “a growing portion of the American Jewish community that believes that the US-Israel relationship should be grounded in our laws, national security interests and shared values.”
AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, attacked Ossoff and other senators who supported the bill in an advertising blitz. But Ossoff was backed by J Street, a liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, which spent $3 million on ads attacking Collins and other AIPAC-supported Republicans.
Ossoff subsequently voted for further measures in 2025 and 2026 to block sales of rifles, bulldozers and 1,000-pound bombs to Israel. Collins repeatedly attacked Ossoff for those votes, accusing the senator of giving in to “radicals” in the Democratic party who were “pushing the anti-Israel agenda.”
Ossoff has walked a tightrope between criticizing Israel and distancing himself from his party’s staunchest left flank. In his Oct. 8 debate with Collins, he was asked whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza, a charge made by a growing chorus of progressives. Ossoff cited Israeli war crimes while deferring to international courts.
“The question of genocide is a question of whether a government has the specific intent to destroy a national or ethnic group, and that is a question for the International Criminal Court,” Ossoff said. “There is no doubt in my mind that Israeli forces prosecuting the war in Gaza violated the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law.”
Ossoff has also excoriated Trump’s decision to join Israel in a war with Iran. Like other Democratic candidates across the country, Ossoff accuses Trump of “lying a nation into war” and sending “prices soaring with his warmongering in the Middle East.”
Ossoff’s rising popularity has spurred speculation about his potential future as a 2028 presidential contender, though he said he has “zero interest in running for president.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Why Nick Fuentes endorsed Democrats in the midterms
Nick Fuentes is a devoted conservative, open antisemite and far-right agitator. On his Rumble show, one of the most viewed on the streaming platform, he regularly calls for mass deportations, labels women the biggest threat to America, praises Hitler, slanders Black people as illiterate and blames Jews for a host of societal ills.
So why, on the morning of the 2026 midterm elections, did he post, “Get out and vote Democrat today?”
It sounds like a joke, which wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the shockjock humor the far-right influencer employs. Fuentes paraded with MAGA flags on Boston University’s liberal campus when he was briefly enrolled there. He went to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He had dinner with the then-former president Trump alongside Kanye West. He celebrated the president’s win in 2024.
But Fuentes was not kidding. In his streams on Rumble, where he runs his podcast, America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes, he has been telling his followers, often called Groypers, to vote blue no matter who. He has done the same on X, where his once-banned account was reinstated when Musk bought the platform.
What changed his mind? Well, in large part, Israel.
Fuentes has been complaining for nearly a year now about Trump, for myriad reasons. On X, Fuentes harshly criticized Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files and his failure to deport millions. He slammed the war with Iran. And, as ever, the streamer known for his antisemitism has speculated about Jewish influence on rightwing politicians and causes.
On a stream urging his followers once again to vote for Democratic politicians in congressional races, he said that Trump had failed to end the “genocide in Gaza” and had instead broken his promises not to start any new wars — and done so at Netanyahu’s bidding no less. Angrily, he pointed out that Trump had come into office with control of both the House and the Senate, and with the support of some of the most-desired demographics of American voters: young men.
“For the first time in like a quarter of a century, it was hip to be Republican. It was cool,” Fuentes said, recalling Trump’s win in 2024. But then, he argued, the Republican leadership blew it: “You lost the comedians, you lost the podcast bros, you lost the normies! Normies don’t like war with Iran. Normies don’t like 3.7% inflation!”
But don’t take Fuentes’ endorsement of Democrats as proof that the worst antisemitism now lies with the left; the influencer has been clear that he reviles the Democratic party and is still a right-winger. Not only is he an avowed white nationalist and antisemite, he is a devout traditionalist Catholic who does not believe women should be allowed to vote. However much he dislikes anything to do with Jews, he is not truly interested in uniting with anti-Zionist progressive candidates just because they criticize Israel. (He is, however, happy to endorse Amy Action, a blonde white Democrat, over the Indian Vivek Ramaswamy, who Fuentes called an “anchor baby.”)
Instead, he has said his Democratic endorsement is a tactical one, a way to steer and influence the Republican party to come closer to his Christian nationalist, antisemitic, closed borders ideology.
“James Talarico is a Satanic wicked disgusting figure. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed in Michigan is a lying scumbag. He’s trying to maintain this facade that he’s Woke 2.0, patriotic, just wants healthcare — he’s a Muslim socialist. Pure contempt for America and whites,” Fuentes said on a stream about the midterms. “These are some of the worst Democrats ever! But maybe that is the wake up call we are going to need as the anti-left opposition to put up some legitimately good candidates.”
If there is a blue wave on Tuesday night, as Fuentes predicts, he believes the Republican party will blame him for it — and he’s ready to accept responsibility. He did, after all, urge his followers to vote Democratic. But don’t be fooled; he won’t be pushing the Democrats to become groypers. Most likely, he’ll present himself and his followers as the natural successors to lead the Republican party in 2028.
The post Why Nick Fuentes endorsed Democrats in the midterms appeared first on The Forward.
