arts & culture
I Stephen Silver | JTA.org
n 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 fi rst
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 Chasidic Jews, led by Harold Ramis.

(They were depicted as friendly and not
so greedy, and the fi lm’s writers, Judd
Apatow and director Jake Kasdan, are
both Jewish.)
The new movie “Spinning Gold,”
which recently opened in theaters, 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
30 APRIL 20, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
Jeremy Jordan as Neil Bogart in “Spinning Gold”
(played by Jewish actor Jeremy Jordan)
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 fi lm
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 fi lm’s
director, did not want to depict Bogart
as an unambiguous hero. In the story,
the elder Bogart is shown cheating on
his fi rst wife with the woman who would
become his second, and the fi lm 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
said. “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.”
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 fi rst 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 songwrit-
ing 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 diff ering
opinions on specifi c individuals.

“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 fi re for his depiction
of fi ctional Jewish music executives
Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John
and Nicholas Turturro) in his 1990 movie
“Mo’ Better Blues.”
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 fi lm 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;
journalist RJ Smith criticized the fi lm
for depicting Nathan as a “bumptious
racist.” “Spinning Gold” isn’t the only counter-
example to the trend in fi lm. 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 fi rst and
foremost business people selling
a product. Their goal: promote a
performer to reap income. The perform-
ers have obviously a diff erent stake in
the transaction, although both depend
on the other,” said Hasia Diner, an
American Jewish history professor at
New York University. ■
Hero Entertainment Group via JTA.org
‘Spinning Gold’ Movie
Departs From Hollywood Stereotypes
About Jewish Music Producers