I don’t want to derail the thread about Enemy at the Gates, so I’ll just start a new one. I’ll quote what I said there:
This article sort of touches on what I’m getting at here.
I’m trying to think of movies that have a Jewish hero or other Jewish character who is tough, strong, brave, or otherwise “badass,” and not a nebbish, nerd, or neurotic (even if he’s supposed to be a sympathetic character, those traits would disqualify him.)
I’m not looking for characters that are a joke. No Zohan, no Hebrew Hammer.
Robert Shaw’s “David Kabakov” in Black Sunday (1977). He saves the President and the Super Bowl from a devastating terrorist attack. His American hosts, by comparison, are actually pretty inept and clueless.
Good answers. I’m wondering if there’s anything more recent, though. Munich is a good example. Also Vin Diesel’s character in Knockaround Guys, who had a giant Star of David tattoo.
The Thing, of Fantastic Four fame, may or may not be Jewish, depending on what sources you go by, and you don’t get much more tough-guy than him. But his religion (whatever it is) isn’t a very big part of his character.
If we can expand to TV, Commander Susan Ivanova of Babylon 5 is Jewish, but that might just re-enforce the OP’s point of tough Jewish males specifically being scarce.
Yes, in the original origin story Erik Magnus was a concentration camp survivor. His crusade to make the world safe for mutants grew out of his experiences with the Nazis (ironically, while in Magnus’s mind the “normal” humans played the part of the Nazis, in practice, it was the mutants who he considered a “master race”). What the retconned origin is now, I don’t know. Marvel has a habit of scooching their characters’ origins upward in time, so the concentration camp survivor thing may be obsolete.
Jewish Comic book superheroes from the Religion of Comic Book Heroes webpage. The better known serious heroes were Ben Grimm, The Atom (Ray Palmer, though not practicing), several members of the Legion of Superheroes, and Reuben Flagg of American Flagg!.
Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky films was something of a hardass as a boxing trainer (with the implication he was that way all his life) and was revealed to be Jewish after his death (something that evoked waves of derision from critics, since nothing previously indicated it).
Any number of gangster films are full of Jewish “tough guys”. Once Upon a Time in America and Bugsy are just two examples that come to mind; I’m sure there are many more.
And, in the “hero” category, is there any to match Ben-Hur ?
I’m starting to detect a trend here - namely that with the exception of Munich, current movies don’t really have any Jewish heroes or tough guys. That’s too bad.
In the Simpsons episode ‘Lisa’s Substitute’ (7F19), the title character Mr. Bergstrom (voiced by Dustin Hoffman) asserts in his lesson on frontier Texas that there were “a few Jewish cowboys: big guys, who were great shots, and spent money freely”.
