Not recent but" Ben Hurr",also I believe that they had a German Jewish(refugees to the U.K.)Commando unit in "Tobruk"who were extreme hard cases.
Harrison Ford is also half Jewish, now that I remember.
ETA: Wiki :
Jason Isaacs. James Franco. Harvey Keitel. James Caan. Noah Wyle. Daniel Day-Lewis (Jewish mother.) Harry Connick Jr. (Jewish mother.) Robert Downey Jr. (only Jewish on his father’s side, but identifies as Jewish.) Joaquin and River Phoenix (Jewish mother.) Peter Coyote (born Peter Cohen.)
All handsome, talented actors who play leading man roles. None of them ever play Jews in any mainstream movies.
When they need a Jew in a movie, it seems they always call Ben Stiller or Schlomo Dorkenstein.
Crowe as Det. Richie Roberts in American Gangster.
He was something of a badass, a hardass, a hit with the ladies, had some solid principles behind his actions and was absolutely tenacious. Hell, he was so solid that he managed to get the lead ‘bad guy’ in the movie in his own corner and essentially working on his own pet project after the bad guy gets nailed to the wall, by Robers himself.
That sounds like a great character. I’ll have to check out that movie, I haven’t seen it yet.
…which doesn’t always mean Jew, of course (his wife he met in prison, for instance, was Roma)
I think it’s still current - see the last X-men movie with its bitter tattoo remark "I have been marked once, my dear,[pulls back his sleeve to reveal the Nazi concentration camp serial number tattooed on his arm] and let me assure you, no needle shall ever touch my skin again. ". There was a bit of retconning with what turned out to be a false Gypsy identity, but that’s a '90s thing.
Speaking of superheroes, woul Ben Stiller’s Mr Angry from Mystery Men qualify? Not explicitly Jewish, but c’mon - Ben Stiller!
Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Movie was cool, aggressive and masculine, though not particularly an observant Jew. Voncent D’Onofrio played him.
While Zohan is proscribed by the OP, how about Adam Sandler’s other roles (Big Daddy, 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard, et al)? Again, we don’t see him sporting a yarmulke or consulting the Talmud, but as a cool role model for Jewish kids, you could do worse.
Micheal Walsh’s novel As Time Goes By makes a good case for Richard Blaine starting out as “Yitzik Baline,” a Jewish guy from New York’s Lower East Side.
It just seems to me the OP is determined to wallow in tsuris. Cite a tough-guy Jew, and it’s either not recent enough or significant enough to overcome a Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, Hebrew Hammer or Zohan. Oy. Lighten up, boychik.
Anyway, Kirk and Michael Douglas - Jewish, though not typically portrayed as such.
Well, what do you expect? They’re Jews! They’re just in it for the money.
I think much of the problem is that writing a character as explicitly Jewish tends to detract from their ‘everyman appeal.’ I daresay that most moviegoers are not Jewish, so any attempt to distinguish a character as Jewish is going to come across as a peculiar subplot that goes nowhere. This is not a problem unique to Jews; there are very few Hollywood movie heroes who are explicitly Eastern Orthodox or Gypsy or Eskimo or Zoroastrian or Hindu either. The fact that Jewish-heavy Hollywood doesn’t make movies with Jewish heroes just means that they anticipate their audience to be mostly non-Jews.
So what is the solution? Films with plots that demand a uniquely Jewish brand of manly ass-kicking heroism. Unfortunately history doesn’t oblige us with all that many venues for such, now that the Biblical epic has largely gone out of style. However, there is an alternative in the form of Jewish folklore. What about a subgenre of horror movies that feature dread critters from Hebrew mythology, like the dybuk, or the golem, or… whatever any of the others are; I don’t have my Monster Manual handy.
But the point is, the hero would be the only guy with the guts and know-how to take on these fearsome beasties. Maybe a Special Forces guy who is also a Talmudic scholar. Maybe a Kabbalistic expert who is out for justice, and now it’s personal. Now that vampire movies are no longer popular, the field is wide open for a whole new take on supernatural horror. Surely the several thousand-year Hebrew tradition contains some legendary demons charismatic enough to compete with the Leprechaun films.
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. Jesus was a total badass in this movie.
In the first Fantastic Four movie, in the final scene, when Reed Richards proposes to Susan Storm, Sue is wearing a Star-of-David necklace. Which implies that she might be Jewish. Which implies that her brother, Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, might be Jewish.
In A Stranger Among Us, there is a Hasidic scholar who is tall, dark, and handsome, and Melanie Griffith’s character does a lot of unrequited yearning for him. (Yeah, I know, I’m reaching.)
Most of the gangsters in Once Upon a Time in America are Jewish. Long slow movie, but worth seeing.
A HARD C HERO: or, A LAMENTATION FOR ARGENT TOWERS
(to this tune for those under a certain age)
Where have all the tough Jews gone
since fighting Philistines and Amalekites?
Where’s the streetwise Samson
to set the world to rights!
Isn’t there a Sephardic knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I wrestle angels and think of what I need!
I need a hero!
I’m holding out for a hard C "c’hero from the chosen ones!
He’s gotta be cool
he’s gotta have gone to schule
and he’s gotta be more recent than TOP GUN!
I need a c’hero!
I’m holding out for a hero who the skinheads despise!
He’s gotta be buff
and he’s gotta be tough
and he’s gotta be circumsized!
Gotta be circumsized…
A Jewish boy from Larchmont
in my wildest fantasy
on spring break from Columbia
visiting Bubby in her retirement commun-ity!
Racing on the sand dunes
on the shores of Miami Beach
he’s the House of David Übermensch
with some lessons in whoop ass to teach!
I need a c’hero!
I’m holding out for a hero from the chosen ones!
He’s gotta be strong
and he’s gotta be tough
and he’s gotta be more recent at the box office than TOP GUN!
I need a c’hero!
I’m holding out for a hero who the skinheads despised!
He’s gotta be buff
and he’s gotta be tough
and he’s gotta be circumsized!
Well, Eyal from 2004’s Walk on Water is a Jewish tough guy (He’s a Mossad agent on assignment to find out if an old SS officer is still alive and, if so, kill him). He does have an existential crisis during the movie and has trouble coping with his wife’s suicide, but I don’t think that raises him to the level of neurotic.
It’s an Israeli film, though, so maybe that disqualifies it.
Robert DeNiro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein in Casino.
Adam Goldberg’s character in Saving Private Ryan.
What’s the last movie to feature a Methodist tough guy? 
Superman Returns.
How about:
Joseph Bottoms as Rudi Weiss in the mini series Holocaust.
Topol as Hans Zarkov in Flash Gordon
I think the OP is being a little unfair in automatically excluding comedies. I mean, I can understand excluding The Hebrew Hammer, because the central joke of that movie is the juxtaposition of the stereotypical Jew and the tropes of a blaxploitation movie. That is to say, it treats the idea of a bad ass Jew as a joke in and of itself. I haven’t seen Zohan, but the impression I get from it is that it’s taking the idea of a bad ass Jew at face value. The humor isn’t that he’s a Jew who’s badass, the humor is that he’s a bad ass who wants to be a hairstylist. The movie itself is a farce, but if it doesn’t treat the concept of a bad ass Jew as farcical, then it should count as much as Ben-Hur.
I know this is slightly off-topic - but how about the guy who played Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure? Isn’t he now a tough guy on the TV series “Numbers”? or are he and his brother on the show not presented as Jewish?