It’s also the perfect time to revisit the surprising Jewish angles woven into “Jaws.” You see, the Jewish identities of director Steven Spielberg and star Richard Dreyfuss have sparked a cottage industry of critics and scholars trying to decode the film’s deeper meaning. Over the decades, they’ve found everything from Old Testament symbolism to echoes of the Jewish immigrant experience lurking beneath the waves.
What follows is an attempt to distill 50 years of analysis into 500 words—all before the Hi-Pointe Theatre’s 50th-anniversary screening on Saturday, May 24.
Behind the camera
In 2015, marking the 40th anniversary of “Jaws,” Nathan Abrams, writing for The Jewish Chronicle, explored how director Spielberg brought his own sense of “outsider-hood” to the project.
“As a Jewish kid, Spielberg faced bullying and antisemitic taunts, even admitting that he sometimes felt more like the shark than the townspeople of Amity,” Abrams wrote. “Richard Dreyfuss, who played marine biologist Matt Hooper, has called himself Spielberg’s ‘alter ego,’ adding a personal layer to the film’s themes of alienation and survival.”
The script
As Abrams also notes, Jewish writer Howard Sackler, a former classmate of Stanley Kubrick, contributed to the screenplay—albeit without formal credit. His input, Abrams suggests, added moral complexity and a certain outsider’s tension to the film. And then there’s Bruce, the mechanical shark, famously named by Spielberg after his Jewish attorney, Bruce Ramer, who would later serve as president of the American Jewish Committee.
Biblical currents beneath the surface
I had to spend some time with this next one. The original analysis reads like a doctoral dissertation, but here are the main points for movie fans: In 2023, a website called Tactical Faith took a deep dive into “Jaws,” exploring the film’s often-overlooked biblical imagery.
Amity—meaning “friendship”—evokes the Hebrew concept of shalom, a town of peace that’s soon shattered by a Leviathan-like force from the sea. The piece links the shark directly to the chaos described in Job 41: “Who can open the doors of his face? Around his teeth is terror.” The shark, then, becomes more than a monster—it’s a metaphor for the unmaking of order itself.
The article also applies a Jewish ethical lens to the film’s central trio: Brody (character), Hooper (knowledge) and Quint (wisdom). According to Tactical Faith, true peace—shalom—can only be restored when these three traits work together, echoing values found in Jewish wisdom tradition.
The shark as outsider
Abrams goes further, suggesting that the shark itself can be seen as a stand-in for the Jewish immigrant—an outsider disrupting a world of white picket fences and Main Street values.
Outsider triumph
In the end, Abrams surmises on why it’s Dreyfuss’ Hooper—the intellectual, rational outsider—who survives. “He’s the diaspora Jew who proves his toughness and resilience, outlasting not only the shark but also the old antisemitic joke that ‘there’s no bigger schmuck on this earth than a Jew with a boat,’” as Jackie Mason once quipped.
Final Word
You can give all this your own personal smell test by catching the 50th-anniversary screening at the Hi-Pointe Theatre on Saturday, May 24. There are two showings, at 1:00 and 3:45 p.m. Just watch out for fins lurking in the aisle.
| RELATED: How the Book of Jonah got a St. Louis kid hooked on sharks
