I met Bergstein at a screening of Dirty Dancing, the seminal coming-of-age film that is actually much, much more than that, organized by the website Jezebel to benefit the New York Abortion Access Fund, which drew a packed house at a downtown movie theater. An illegal abortion (and its botched, back-alley consequences) shape much of the plot, making the 1987 film about summer in 1963 far ahead of its time. Bergstein, in a pre-screening discussion with Jezebel’s Irin Carmon (who last year wrote the definitive piece on Dirty Dancing, and who posted video of last week’s event), said she was adamant as a producer that the abortion remain in the film, since, she had presciently argued, the battle for reproductive rights still hadn’t been won.

Calling Dirty Dancing “a very American film,” Bergstein described it as the story of a young girl who took her life in her hands and ran with it, no matter what it cost her. (As Carmon helpfully contextualized long before the screening, “The daughter of the first generation of American Jews to read widespread upper-middle class prosperity, if not elite cultural acceptance, she is swathed in a pre-Kennedy assassination liberalism.”) I counted enough male attendees to abandon my tally of how many might actually show up as the lights went down and the instantly recognizable opening notes of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” filtered through the sound system.

For those of you unfamiliar (shame, shame), the film centers around Frances Houseman, a 17-year-old (Jewish) New Yorker whom everyone calls Baby, who is spending the summer with her family in the Catskills at Kellerman’s resort. Heading to Mount Holyoke in the fall to study economics of underdeveloped countries, the idealistic Baby—portrayed perfectly by a pre-plastic surgery Jennifer Grey—intervenes to help get Penny, a dance instructor at the resort, the money she needs for an abortion. Sheltered enough to not realize exactly how dangerously makeshift that procedure might be, but insistent on helping and convinced she can, Baby also fills in for Penny and dances with Johnny, the male dance instructor played by the delightfully swoon-worthy Patrick Swayze, for the pair’s annual gig at the nearby Sheldrake resort.

Returning to find Penny in alarmingly bad shape after the primitive, unsanitary abortion, Baby calls upon her father, a doctor, for help. Jerry Orbach saves the day, as usual, though he is horrified at what his daughter has become a party to. Though Dr. Houseman expressly forbids Baby from seeing Johnny, mistakenly believing he is responsible for what is euphemistically referred to throughout the film only as getting Penny in trouble, she sneaks out to see him for, as Carmon convincingly argues, “the greatest love scene of all time.” Class tensions and scheduled activities resume, while Baby is forced to deal with her changing relationship both to Johnny and her father, challenging each man with her resolute determination (and, dare I say, complete stubbornness).

The film is hugely Jewish, capturing a 1960s Jewish family and their open-minded but still guarded sensibilities. Referring back to Carmon’s description of Baby in the artificial environment at Kellerman’s,

Told her whole life that she could do anything and change the world, she’s faced with the hypocrisy of a long-shunned minority enacting its own unexamined exclusion, this time on class grounds. The guests at Kellerman’s look comfortable, but they were raised in the Depression and traumatized by World War II.

After the screening, I sat on the sticky movie theater steps with the energetic and eccentric Bergstein, who told me how grateful she felt seeing young people who so clearly love the film, and said it had been years since she’d seen it in a theater. I, for one, was certain I never noticed how insanely skinny the female leads were. Or, I suppose, how Jewish some of them were. Did I mention they’re coming out with a remake?

How To Say “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner” in German [Jezebel]
Eleanor Bergstein, Screenwriter, Talks Dirty Dancing [Village Voice]
Dirty Dancing is the Greatest Movie of All Time [Jezebel]
Do ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Thelma and Louise’ Still Matter? [WSJ]

Lee told the Los Angeles Jewish Journal that the idea for the movie came about when he met an eagerly self-promotional Tiber at a talk show both were appearing on. Remembering the impact Woodstock made on him as a 14-year-old in repressive Taiwan, and eager to make a comedy after a string of depressing films (Brokeback Mountain; Lust, Caution), he took on the project. But did the director, known for his skill in capturing the feel of diverse times and places, find it a challenge to capture the feel of the waning Jewish world of the Catskills? Not really, he told the Journal, as everyone he works with, including writing partner James Schamus, is Jewish.

“I feel that Jewish people know Chinese people very well,” he said in the interview. “James, for example, understood me well even before I spoke fluent English; he would write my scripts as early as The Wedding Banquet, reading Chinese poetry, philosophy and literature as background, and then try to write the dialogue, and I would ask, ‘What is that?’ And out of frustration, he would give up and just write the characters like Jews, and I would say, ‘Oh, that’s very Chinese.’”

Ang Lee’s Catskills Culture Clash [Jewish Journal]

In Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America, Richard Zoglin, a reporter for Time magazine, argues that a generation of comics should also be considered essential to that cultural revolution. His story begins with Lenny Bruce, ends with Jerry Seinfeld, and includes yeshiva dropout David Steinberg and pioneer comedienne Elayne Boosler.

Zoglin speaks with Nextbook about how Bruce and others made the leap from Borscht Belt shtick to a new, raw, and convention-flouting form of stand-up.

Lenny Bruce, Robert Klein, and Elayne Boosler

Lenny Bruce and Robert Klein: Photofest. Elayne Boosler courtesy of Elayne Boosler.

Here were a couple of good Jewish kids who met during college in Boston, got married at 21, and started raising a family not long after that in suburban Chicago. They knew nothing of Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury. They joined the throngs at a few Vietnam War protests but could hardly be called radicals. My father never smoked marijuana, and the one time my mother tried it, she was so nervous about getting in trouble that she didn’t properly inhale. “On the ‘hip’ level,” she told me recently, “we were probably down in the negative range.”

But some things were, perhaps, unavoidable then, like inane news about Lindsay Lohan is today. By the time I was born in 1975, our house was punctuated with little emblems of the era; these shone for me like beacons. Despite my parents’ heavy Neil Diamond predilection, for instance, some Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel albums seemed to have fallen from a planet of fairies into our living room. My parents had chunky macramé plant hangers and trippy Marimekko hangings on the wall. And on their bookshelf was an oversized red volume called The Jewish Catalog.

The Jewish Catalog, a 320-page tome first published in 1973, was not necessarily a hippie artifact. But it had a profound effect on me growing up that I associated with hippie culture, subtly signaling that Judaism, like life, was a sort of groovy pursuit to be embarked upon however you wished.

The Jewish Catalog was a kind of choose-your-own-adventure book, inviting you to open to any page and follow your whims. Not meant for chronological reading, it was split into four esoterically titled sections—“Space,” “Time,” “Word” and “Man/Woman”—each of which contained subsections hewed to an aspect of Jewish life, ranging from the practical to the abstract. Did you want to learn how to travel cheaply in Israel? Turn to page 87. How to make cholent? A recipe on page 25 produces enough to feed “ten normal people or two Hungarians.” Want to bring the Messiah? There are 10 suggestions on page 250, ranging from “plant a tree” to “listen inward, inward to your own heart.”

Leafing through its pages, the pictures appeared like filmy images from a dream. There were long-haired kids wearing yarmulkes and peace-sign shirts, holding hands and dancing barefoot in the grass, or sitting low to the ground inside a breezy sukkah, mellow smiles on their faces. There were grainy old photographs of Lower East Side pushcart salesmen and square-jawed balabostas wearing kerchiefs.

There were lots and lots of pictures of Hasidim, walking around with shtreimels atop their heads or sitting at wedding banquets. Interspersed throughout the book were swirly, woozy little pen-and-ink drawings, as if the manuscript had been handed over to an illustrator on acid who was asked to decorate the margins.

The catalog was inspired, according to its editors, by the Whole Earth Catalog, the iconic late 1960s resource that encapsulated that era’s radical experimentalism, back-to-the-land practicality, and general counterculture vibe. First published in 1968, the oversized Whole Earth Catalog appeared twice a year until 1972, and was also divided into broad, esoterically titled sections like “Nomadics” and “Understanding Whole Systems.” Within was a comprehensive guide to just about everything, from where to buy a one-man sawmill, to the theories of Buckminster Fuller and Carl Jung, to how to form a community credit union. In the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog, information begot liberation, and everything was knowable, if not within the pages of the catalog itself, then in books it directed you to or pamphlets it encouraged you to send away for with a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Similarly, The Jewish Catalog was about getting equipped with the means to simply do it yourself. Within its pages lay step-by-step instructions for making your own paraffin Shabbat candles, crocheted yarmulkes, needlepoint challah covers, traditional Purim gragers, mezuzahs out of soft clay or walnut shells, and Sabbath feasts for 35, to say nothing of the precious directions for making your own shofar out of the horn of a ram, antelope, gazelle, or Rocky Mountain goat. “STEP 1: Boil the shofar in water for at least two hours and probably as long as five…. The cartilage can be pulled out with the aid of a pick. If the horns are small, the cartilage can be removed in about half an hour.”

I certainly didn’t see my parents dipping their own Shabbat candles, carving their own mezuzah covers, or scraping the cartilage out of a Rocky Mountain goat horn for a shofar.

But they did use it, so much that the pages became dog-eared and, it appears, stained with chicken soup. My father was raised Orthodox in New York, and my mother grew up reform in New Jersey. They agreed to meet halfway in their marriage and became Conservative, which still left my mother with quite a bit to learn. “I was brought up in a home where we didn’t celebrate any holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah,” she says. “I went through years of Hebrew school, but by the time I was married, my knowledge was pretty sketchy.”

Most of their friends had copies of The Jewish Catalog, and for my mother, it was a user-friendly guide to a Jewish life she had never actually lived. Suddenly making Shabbat dinners, she mined it for recipes and information on the order of blessings. Celebrating holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah, she consulted it for instructions on how to, say, decorate a sukkah. For my yeshiva-educated father, who was well acquainted with much of the information contained in the Catalog, it was meaningful in a different way. Like many kids who grew up Orthodox in the generation following the Holocaust, he’d grown up thinking Judaism was a strict, dour affair, but the catalog was evidence to him that in fact it could be fun. Together, my parents used it to help craft an earnest, positive Jewish household. And when I discovered it on their bookshelf, The Jewish Catalog let me believe that somewhere out there beyond the cut lawns and latticework sidewalks of suburban Chicago was an even greater Jewish fantasy world where everyone really did sit around crocheting yarmulkes and sewing needlepoint challah covers, and they looked really happy doing it. Jews looking happy being Jewish. Amazing.

There are different origin stories about The Jewish Catalog. I went to the source: Richard Siegel, one of its editors, who told me that it began with a kind of revelation. “A bunch of us hardware-challenged Jews were trying to build a sukkah,” he recalled. “I said there should be a Whole Earth Catalog where you can find the information on how to build one. A light bulb went off.”

Siegel, who subsequently became prominent as the executive director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, was then a graduate student in Jewish communal service at Brandeis, and wrote his master’s thesis on the fledgling idea for the Catalog. Eventually he collaborated with Michael Strassfeld, also a Brandeis graduate student, and his wife, Sharon Strassfeld, to realize the project. They were all in their early to mid-20s and involved in Jewish counterculture, which centered locally around Havurat Shalom, an influential Boston-area Jewish community, and the alter zaydeh (old grandfather) of the idealistic havurah movement, the 1960s and 70s phenomenon of small, autonomous spiritual communities that challenged the traditionally hierarchical structure of the institutional Jewish world. (Some impulses, apparently, never change. While the havurah movement still exists, a more recent phenomenon of independent egalitarian minyans has revived much of the energy and interest that havurot did in their heyday.)

To create the Catalog, Siegel and the Strassfelds set about soliciting contributors who wrote sections on everything from scribal arts to Jewish film. The editors penned a good portion of it themselves as well. “In our minds,” Siegel says, “we were kind of writing this for our extended chevra.

We had some sense that there was a broader network, but we had no idea what the true temperament of the times was.”

They took it to the Jewish Publication Society, which printed an initial run of 10,000. That sold out quickly when the book was released in December, 1973, as did a second printing of 20,000 soon after. A story about the book in The New York Times helped boost sales, but it was largely a grassroots phenomenon.

“It was this revelatory kind of thing,” Siegel says of the astounding response. “People were searching for some access to a meaningful Jewish experience. This just opened up a world for them.”

The book’s success, says Strassfeld, now the rabbi of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York, had as much to do with its tone as it did with the information contained inside. “We weren’t saying, ‘Here are the 613 things you have to do to be a good Jew,’” he says. “We were saying, ‘We’re excited and interested in Judaism, and we’re just trying to give you access. If you really want to make candles, make candles.’”

Eventually, a second and third edition of the Catalog would be published, in 1979 and 1981 respectively. But nothing came close to the impact of that red-covered first edition, which has sold half a million copies and remains in print to this day. (It is the Jewish Publication Society’s second best seller, after the Bible.) Both Strassfeld and Siegel went on separately to make significant professional contributions to the Jewish community, but nearly 35 years later people still approach them, gushing with appreciation for The Jewish Catalog.

It’s easy to see why it appealed to people like my parents and vast numbers of others. The Catalog conveyed basic information on Judaism in a non-judgmental, folksy tone, as if it had been written by a patient friend. (“One can get a Jewish wall calendar from many places, especially from kosher butchers. There are also 100-year calendars which are good for those who like to plan ahead or for those who want to find out what their Hebrew birthdays were in 1953 or 1922, etc…”)

It appealed to a certain publishing ideal of the era that included not just the Whole Earth Catalog, but books like the Moosewood Cookbook and the Joy of Sex, all seeking to demystify the mysterious.

But how to explain the catalog’s continued appeal for someone like me? Surely I’m not the only one born in the 1970s who harbors nostalgia for The Jewish Catalog and its vision of groovy, do-it-yourself Judaism. I long ago commandeered my parents’ old copy with its stained pages and broken binding. When I was a teenager making zines including Mazeltov Cocktail, a kind of Jewish punk manifesto, I kept the visually chockablock Jewish Catalog on hand for graphic inspiration. It became a fixture on my bookshelf, accompanying me through nine New York apartments in 12 years. Nowadays, it sits in a cabinet with my most precious accumulated ephemera—other zines, copies of Sassy magazine, letters from old friends, and photographs from faraway lands.

In truth, I rarely use the catalog for what it was intended, and never really did. My day-school education and subsequent learning satisfied much of what I wanted to know about Jewish practice. The Internet has long since assumed the mantle of all sorts of reference books, including The Jewish Catalog, putting information about Judaism an easy Google search away.

But although I may not consult it in search of particular information, I’ve always found it good for serendipitously stumbling upon things I didn’t even know I was curious about, or renewing my inspiration around something I already know that I am. In my mind, it’s most important not as a compendium of information but for its sparkling spirit. That spirit still conjures the Jewish fantasy world that enchanted me as a child—a world of making things and being happy and sharing, a world where everyone was equal and leaders were nowhere to be seen, and a world where Jewish practice was as natural as breathing.

In 1964 Melville Shavelson set out to make a Hollywood epic about an American military man who helped establish the state of Israel. Though Cast a Giant Shadow had a generous budget, the full cooperation of the Israeli government, and a star-studded cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, and Senta Berger, it flopped. But something great came out of it: Shavelson’s hilarious, groundbreaking 1971 book about the experience, How to Make a Jewish Movie. That his friends suggested a better title would have been “How Not to Make a Jewish Movie” gives a hint of what to expect.

By the 1960s Shavelson was well-known in Hollywood as a maker of comedies. He’d received Oscar nominations for co-writing two films he also directed: the Cary Grant-Sophia Loren romance Houseboat and the Bob Hope vehicle The Seven Little Foys. His association with Hope was his entry into the entertainment biz: Shavelson began writing for him in 1938, and didn’t quit for 20 years. How to Make a Jewish Movie reads like the work of an expert comedy writer. Practically every paragraph ends with a punch line; nearly every sentence has an ironic kick. Shavelson is talented enough to make the story of creating a flop irresistible, and humble enough to accept at least some of the blame. And while the pleasure of How to Make a Jewish Movie comes from the funny stories of difficult actors and shattered $40,000 camera lenses, the book is also a milestone: quite possibly the first book by a Hollywood director devoted entirely to the making of his own movie. Lillian Ross’s Picture and John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio had already given readers vivid behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood filmmaking, but Shavelson pulled the curtain back firsthand and revealed, humorously and memorably, the industry’s machinations, long before the public became well-versed in box office figures and books like You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again shot up the best-seller list.

How to Make a Jewish Movie is primarily a chronicle of everything that can go wrong in the creation of a big-budget film, from rights acquisition to the ad campaign. But Shavelson, who was born in Brooklyn, opens with a confession: “I have never entered a synagogue of my own free will, except for the ceremonies attendant on birth, death, or marriage.”

So how does a comedy writer—especially one who says he was “ashamed” of being Jewish—wind up making an earnest biopic about the founding of Israel? At the suggestion of a friend at MGM, he reads Ted Berkman’s book Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem (MGM had just dropped its option on the book, so his friend called to say it was up for grabs), and something is awakened in him:

After reading Ted Berkman’s book I knew I had to make that movie if it killed me. . . . I literally ran to Paramount’s front office and pantingly laid this hot project on the desk of the head man. Would Paramount buy it for me? 

He was kindly, intelligent, shrewd, and went to Temple regularly every Rosh Hashonah. Who, he asked me, would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?

Since, at the moment—and ever since—I couldn’t think of an answer, I decided to buy the rights to the book myself.

The story of David “Mickey” Marcus is indeed awe-inspiring. He was a Brooklyn-born West Point graduate who served as an infantry lieutenant in the ’20s, then returned to New York City to become a gangbusting U.S. attorney and Commissioner of Correction. At the outbreak of World War II he rejoined the army. According to Shavelson’s screen treatment (which he prints in full in the book) Marcus wrote Army training manuals, made his first parachute jump into Normandy on D-Day, drafted the terms of surrender for Italy and Germany, and “was at Roosevelt’s side at Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and Yalta.” In Germany, General Patton appointed him liaison officer with liberated concentration camp survivors. He was made second-in-command in occupied Berlin, and organized the Nuremberg trials and Japanese war crimes trials. In 1947, having returned to New York to work as a lawyer, Marcus was quietly asked to guide the untrained and ill-equipped Jewish troops of Palestine in their fight for independence. He did it under an assumed name, with the secret blessing of the Pentagon. Against all odds he led Israel’s army to victory upon the nation’s birth—and was mistakenly killed by an Israeli sentry just a few hours before a truce was declared.

Shavelson’s own story of putting together Cast a Giant Shadow is heroic, too, in its way: he’s a mensch in the face of disaster. He makes the film sound like the most troubled shoot since Cleopatra, but does it in an avuncular, anecdotal way that anticipates Sidney Lumet’s 1995 book, Making Movies. Needing the involvement of a star—preferably a non-Jewish one—to make his project viable, whom does Shavelson go to first? The least Jewish man in Hollywood, John Wayne. Shavelson had co-written a movie for Wayne in the past, but they had squabbled on the set. Undeterred, he pitches Marcus’s story, ending by reading a eulogistic telegram to Marcus’s widow from David Ben Gurion. Wayne (known to all as Duke) lights a cigarette and says:

“That’s the most American story I ever heard.” 

I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly. Ben Gurion had signed that telegram—not Ben Franklin.

“Everybody’s knockin’ the United States today,” Duke said, pacing the floor and covering half an acre of carpet with each stride. “Claiming we’re sendin’ in troops all over the world to knock over some little country where we’ve got no right to be. They’ve forgotten who were are and what we’ve done. At a time like this, we need to remind them of how we helped the littlest country of all get its independence. How an American army officer gave his life to do it.”

“Mickey was Jewish,” I insisted on reminding him.

“Don’t gimme that crap,” said Duke, “Jesus Christ was Jewish, too, and he didn’t even go to West Point.”

So, in a gesture of grand patriotism, Wayne agreed to appear in the picture. Not as Marcus—that role would go to Douglas, an actual Jew—but as a Patton-like general whom Shavelson would insert into his as-yet-unwritten script. Shavelson then took his pitch to the Mirisch brothers, Harold, Walter, and Marvin, “collectively the world’s largest independent producer of films,” and a deal was made. Soon after, in a location scouting trip to Israel, Shavelson got an early warning of the difficulties to come: The army’s commander-in-chief—none other than Yitzhak Rabin—demanded script approval. And, “in the event that the script should be approved, he went on to say, all film shot in Israel would have to be reviewed by the military authorities before being shipped out of the country.”

Luther Adler and Kirk Douglas in Cast a Giant Shadow

In 1965 filming got under way in Tel Aviv with 125 crew members, 800 Israeli soldiers, and a thousand extras. The problems began immediately: During a shot, Israeli tanks left abruptly when the army learned that Syria had invaded; nearly all the trucks in another shot stalled when the desert temperature hit 126 degrees; the two technical advisors provided by the army clashed over key details; Israel’s Communist Party dropped leaflets from a roof into the middle of a crowd scene. Along the way, Brynner went unrecognized by Ben Gurion (“The King and I. . . which one were you?”), and Shavelson and Douglas bickered repeatedly over the script. On the last day of filming in Israel, 200 extras shot half of a scene, disappeared while the next shot was set up, and sent in a representative to proclaim that they had united as the Israel Screen Extras Guild and would not return until their salaries were tripled. After examining the footage, the Israeli Defense Forces sent a detailed critique, which included: “In Scene 327, the girl with a flowery skirt doing the Hora is completely out of step. Change this.”

When Cast a Giant Shadow was released in 1966 the question “Who would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?” loomed over the national advertising campaign, which lacked, Shavelson writes, “all mention of the nation of Israel, the War of Liberation, the Jews, or Colonel Mickey Marcus.” Relating this fact, he seems understandably peeved. What he doesn’t say (perhaps it was a sore point) is that Otto Preminger’s Exodus, which also concerned the founding of Israel, was the fourth-biggest box-office draw of 1960. Cast a Giant Shadow didn’t earn back the cost of its negative.

So, how’s the movie? Kitschy. Its dialogue sounds, not coincidentally, like the work of a comedy writer. When Marcus tells Ben Gurion (played by Luther Adler, in a ridiculous white wig that makes him look more like Martin Van Buren) that Jerusalem has no strategic value, and that trying to save it doesn’t make sense, Ben Gurion says, “Did it make sense for a fellow with a nice, steady job building pyramids to march his friends into the Red Sea?” When it’s serious, it’s worse. A didactic argument between Marcus and Wayne’s American general about Israel’s future ends with Wayne—John Wayne!—raising his glass and declaring, “L’chaim.” (He pronounces it “la kime.”) Sinatra is amusing as a New Jersey pilot who drops seltzer bottles on the Arabs when the Israelis run out of bombs. Douglas is suitably rugged, and Brynner pontificates impressively. But Shavelson himself calls it “a not-very-good movie.” Pauline Kael’s assessment was more blunt: “Even those willing to accept the hours of incoherence and banality may recoil at the obscenity of being asked to experience the horrors of Dachau as reflected in John Wayne’s bleary eyes.”

In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas still sounds disappointed when he writes of Shavelson: “Though Mel was Jewish, he was not Jewish enough. The movie needed to be done by someone with deep conviction.” If he didn’t have conviction when he started the picture, Shavelson says he did by the end. Like his film’s protagonist, he comes to find Israel’s stubborn citizens exasperating but admirable, and his months among them turn him into something of a Zionist. Halfway through the book, at a seder, he has an epiphany: “The escape had taken place, not in some mythical land with an impossible alphabet no one could ever learn, but only a few miles from here, across the desert where tanks had recently rumbled out of that same land of Egypt, only to be turned back in defeat by the descendants of those who had written the very songs the children were singing.” He’s finally proud to be Jewish, proud to have made a movie about Jewish pride. The fun of the best making-of movie books, such as Final Cut (about Heaven’s Gate) and The Devil’s Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities), often comes from schadenfreude—the pleasure of witnessing the payback for megalomania and excess. But you feel for Shavelson, because his intentions are so pure, and because he seems like such a nice guy. He also seems to have learned, as an entertainer, that the story of a nice Jewish filmmaker who finds himself while shooting a $5 million flop has more potential in the hands of a comedy writer than the story of a Jewish general who gets killed.

Shavelson continued making movies into the 1970s—comedies, mostly. In 1990, more than 50 years after he began writing for Bob Hope, they wrote a bestselling book together, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me. Now 90, Shavelson is finishing up a memoir, which he’s calling How to Succeed in Hollywood Without Really Trying—P.S., You Can’t. Asked over email about How to Make a Jewish Movie, he pooh-poohed the idea of it being a literary milestone: “I wrote it in part to counter all the negative reviews the film inspired, and to show how a bad film can be explained by circumstances, as well as lack of talent….My old friend Julius Epstein, co-writer of Casablanca, always said the Academy should stop restoring old negatives and start destroying a few. Cast A Giant Shadow might be a candidate.”

Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD. How to Make a Jewish Movie is long out of print.