‘Jaws’ has been secretly Jewish for half a century

Jaws, who resembles the great white shark in this photo, is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. Photo by istock

By PJ Grisar July 10, 2025

On an underappreciated level, Jaws is a story about headwear.

Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody, watching the waves for the Great White menace, spies what he first thinks is a fin, only for it to be revealed as a dark swimcap. When the man in the cap emerges from the sea, taking a seat near Brody, he pokes fun at the non-islander’s aversion to the water. Brody’s response: “That’s some bad hat, Harry.”

In 2018, Stephen King’s son, the novelist Joe Hill, theorized that the victim of a cold case murder on Martha’s Vineyard was an extra in Jaws based largely on her blue bandana.

But while Steven Spielberg’s film remains a cultural juggernaut, the first blockbuster and a text examined closely by devotees, little to nothing has been made about a conspicuous head covering in an early crowd scene, where a man in a beige polo and checked shorts is wearing a blue kippah.

I spotted the detail while watching Jaws @ 50, National Geographic’s new documentary about the creature feature’s turbulent production. This background player appears during a discussion of the production’s almost exclusive use of Martha’s Vineyard residents, and is himself proof that Jews were a feature on the New England island well before Alan Dershowitz and Larry David were seen spatting at a convenience store.

But that’s just skimming the surface of the film’s Yiddishkeit.

Take, for example, the many working titles novelist Peter Benchley had for his 1974 novel. Among them were what Benchley’s widow Wendy calls “pretentious” ones, like Leviathan Rising, a nod to the biblical sea behemoth. There were also the ridiculous ones, including Benchley’s father’s suggestion: “Who Dat Noshin’ on my Laig?”

While it seems that Massachusetts-born Nathaniel Benchley, an author himself, was paying homage to a uniquely New England accent, and a corruption of the word “nashing,” it could be that his time in New York rubbed off, giving the surprised swimmer some Yiddish. (Benchley fils certainly had some, referring to the oceanographer character Matt Hooper, as written in the screenplay, as “an insufferable, pedantic little schmuck.”)

Benchley wrote the script with Carl Gottlieb (both appear in small roles), who punched up the screenplay with humor. Pulitzer Prize winner Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope) provided an outline and suggested a motivation for Robert Shaw’s surly shark hunter, Quint, making him a survivor of the USS Indianapolis.

John Milius, who would go on to direct Red Dawn and Conan the Barbarian, took a first crack at Quint’s Indianapolis monologue, which Shaw rewrote himself. (Spielberg trusted the actor, he says in the documentary, as Shaw had written the acclaimed play The Man in the Glass Booth, based on his novel, inspired by the Adolf Eichmann trial.)

The friction between Shaw and a young Richard Dreyfuss, whose oceanographer Matt Hooper can be read as heimish (homey) by implication of casting, is elaborated on here. Shaw’s son Ian, who wrote and starred in The Shark is Broken, a play about the filming of Jaws in which Dreyfuss accuses Shaw of antisemitism, says in the doc that his father did recognize Dreyfuss’ talent, even as he deplored the way he complained about filming on the open water.

There was, to be sure, much to kvetch about. The shark — named for Spielberg’s co-religionist attorney Bruce Ramer — constantly malfunctioned. The choice to shoot on the water, rather than in a tank on some backlot, was the cause of immeasurable tsuris for a 27-year-old Spielberg, who admits to director Laurent Bouzereau that he often called his mom, essentially to say, “Mommy, this is impossible. Help!”

What the documentary drives home is just how close the world came to missing Jaws, and by extension Spielberg.

At any moment the backers might have cut their losses by cutting bait on the unwieldy project with a mostly unproven director. Instead, the film became an unprecedented success, guaranteeing Spielberg final cut for life.

And we live in the world Jaws created. Filmmakers Jordan Peele, Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron all cite it as an influence — Peele, interestingly, doesn’t mention Nope, despite that film being a kind of spiritual remake. Oceanographers and marine biologists lament that the film inspired a rise in shark hunting, but also credit it with contributing to a greater interest in their field.

Spielberg says he suffered PTSD from the project, and after it wrapped he would retreat to the Orca’s new home at Universal to cry in its leatherette booth. But it changed his life and the culture for the better. In the opening minutes, he recalls driving with critic Janet Maslin and Albert Brooks to see the long, “blockbusting” lines outside the Rivoli Theater and thinking, “who are the lucky people that made this movie?”

Thankfully, it was Spielberg, the right director at the right time to usher in a world where you can now purchase a Jaws-themed kippah. Baruch Ha-Shark.