These Hollywood Jews take “movie shoot” to a whole new level.
“Guns & Moses,” a new independent thriller released this month, tells the story of a Hasidic rabbi turned gunslinger as he seeks justice for a murder. The film is set in a world unfriendly to Jews, eerily similar to reality.
The central character, Rabbi Mo Zaltzman, is a fictional Chabad rabbi who leads a synagogue in Southern California’s High Desert. His life takes a dramatic turn from being a spiritual leader to taking up arms when a member of his congregation is murdered.
Director Sal Litvak, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Nina, commented on the story’s enduring relevance, noting, “A narrative about Jews facing attacks and defending themselves would always remain significant, wouldn’t it?” Their inspiration came from news in 2019 about a mass shooting at a synagogue in California.
In that incident, a gunman stormed the Chabad of Poway, killing one and injuring three – one of whom, Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, lost a finger when he heroically raised his hand trying to stop the hail of bullets.
Poway was just one of a string of deadly attacks on Jewish institutions in the late 2010s, the worst being the 2018 murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
In the wake of these attacks, thousands of American synagogues hired armed security guards and enlisted their own members to carry guns and take self-defense classes.
But after Hamas’s devastating attack on Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023, and the ensuing war in Gaza, the Jewish call to arms has never been more urgent, Litvak said.
“If we’re serious when we say, never again, well then we have to be accountable for our security and for our safety,” said Litvak.
“I mean, now you’ve got in New York a Democratic candidate who is still calling for globalizing Intifada, not distancing himself from those comments, and you’ve just got young people manipulated and lied to and buying into this stuff about colonist Israel and just nonsense.
“And there’s a kind of horseshoe effect on the far right and the far left, where the one thing they can agree on is that they hate the Jews.”
Hollywood veteran Mark Feuerstein, who plays the armed-and-dangerous Rabbi Zaltzman, said October 7th was his defining moment as a Jew.
“And I know a lot of Jews feel the same,” he said.
“If you told me that I would become not just a proud Jew act Jewish actor, but an activist, I would have been shocked. But so many of us have, because so many of us have woken up to the new reality of being Jewish in America and in the world.”
“Guns & Moses,” which hits theaters July 18th, also stars Neil McDonough, Dermot Mulroney and Christopher Lloyd in the role of a Holocaust survivor who, in a memorably dramatic sequence, schools a young neo Nazi on the value of tolerance.
Feuerstein said he’s proud to play a Jewish character who refuses to take antisemitic violence sitting down.
“I’m so proud to be that character instead of the nebbish, who, though that stereotype exists, is not a reflection of who we are as a people,” he said.
“We are strong, we are proud and we are brave.”
