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



synagogue spotlight
Congregation Or Ami Remains the
Heart of Jewish Lafayette Hill
Jarrad Saff ren | Staff Writer
Courtesy of Mark Wolfh eimer
Courtesy of Rabbi Glenn Ettman
T he
new sanctuary
at Congregation Or Ami in
Lafayette Hill does not look big.

It’s half of a room, with a sanctuary
on one side, a divider in the middle
and a social hall on the other side. The
individual seats, which replaced the
pews during a renovation last year,
and the lowered stage, which also
was a part of that project, make the
sanctuary look more like a community
meeting room than a worship space.

It’s a more intimate sanctuary befi tting
a synagogue that has lost more than
100 members over the past six years.

But if you look closely, and especially
if you count the chairs, you can see
that Or Ami remains a sizable congre-
gation. The seats add up to almost
200. The membership list still includes
between 200 and 225 families. And
unlike in pre-COVID times, when
that list included people who were
no longer shul regulars, it is fi lled
with residents who walk through the
doors off Ridge Pike and participate in
synagogue life.

Or Ami describes itself on its website
as “the center of Jewish life in the
Lafayette Hill area.” In a recent conver-
sation, Rabbi Glenn Ettman updated
the line.

“We’re the heart of the Jewish
community here in Lafayette Hill,”
he said.

Ettman, 46, arrived at Or Ami in July
2016 with an interim label. But he had
that tag dropped in February 2017 and
has called Lafayette Hill home ever
since. He makes it his mission not so
much to grow the community but to
deepen it. He reaches out to members
on their birthdays and calls them at
least twice a year.

“My goal is to get to know every-
body,” he said.

“All of those things help to keep
people connected,” added Scott Allen,
A fun event at Congregation Or Ami in Lafayette Hill
A Chanukah gathering at Congregation Or Ami
the synagogue’s executive director.

And people are connected.

A group called the Mitzvah Core
helps congregants deal with diffi cult
situations. During Passover, a member
called the synagogue “needing
substantial help getting Passover
food,” Allen said. Within four hours,
another member volunteered to buy
food and deliver it to the woman. It was
delivered the following day.

Once a month, and sometimes
once a week, congregants volunteer
at the Norristown Food Bank. Allen
said younger families in particular
are taking to this activity. And when
someone from Or Ami dies, members
mobilize to help the family set up the
shiva, buy the food and clean up.

“We view our community as a family,”
Rabbi Ettman said.

That must be part of the reason why
young families are joining. Or Ami’s
Early Childhood Education Center
enrollment is 93 kids. Its religious
school student body consists of 86
children and teenagers.

Allison Russell, 36, joined four
years ago with her husband and
young daughter because she wanted
to send her daughter to a Jewish
preschool. The family lived in neigh-
boring Conshohocken, so Or Ami was
the closest option. Russell met with
Michelle Ruder, the director of the ECE
Center, and “felt right at home,” she
said. The feeling hasn’t gone away.

Russell’s older daughter is now in
kindergarten and her younger one is
in nursery school.

“They both love going into the build-
ing,” she said.

Jessica Roomberg, 35, grew up at Or
Ami and attended preschool and had
a bat mitzvah. She rejoined with her
family in 2017 because she had heard
from friends with older kids that the
shul still had a great ECE Center.

“As a parent, you want your kids to
feel taken care of and safe and loved.

I’ve defi nitely felt that,” she said.

The Roombergs have two kids, son
Liam and daughter Meadow, in school
at Or Ami. But their oldest, a daughter
named Mila, died in 2019 due to a rare
vascular manifestation of a genetic
disorder, Neurofibromatosis Type
1. Every year on Mila’s yahrzeit, the
family attends a service at Or Ami, and
Ettman tries to include something in
honor of her, like a song. Mila’s Magical
Garden now sits by the playground
in the backyard of the synagogue’s
property. Children use it to learn
about nature.

Roomberg “wasn’t much of a believer
in God” after her daughter died. Today,
“God and I are working on things,”
she said. She questions, but she tries
to keep the faith. Her faith in the
synagogue, though, is unwavering.

“The community was there as
much as they could be. It did feel
like a safe place,” Roomberg said.

“The rabbi always keeps Mila in mind.

He defi nitely keeps the congregants’
needs in mind.” ■
jsaff ren@midatlanticmedia.com
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