Salvador Litvak on “Guns & Moses”

By Anna Selman

When I scheduled an interview with Salvador Litvak, director of the new film Guns & Moses, I realized this was probably the biggest interview I’d ever landed: a filmmaker with a cult Passover comedy under his belt, a million followers online and Christopher Lloyd in his new cast. For someone like him, he probably deserved better than a mom juggling an interview with a toddler screaming for muffins in the background.

Litvak didn’t care. Within minutes he was telling me how he talked his way into UCLA film school, made a Passover comedy the New York Times panned (and that went on to become a cult classic) and then, almost by accident, built a global following as The Accidental Talmudist. None of it was linear, but in hindsight it felt almost divinely arranged—because who else but a hustling, chutzpah-heavy accidental rabbi-influencer would wind up making a movie called “Guns & Moses”?

The premise sounds like synagogue kiddush fanfiction: an Orthodox rabbi in California’s High Desert arms himself after a congregant is killed, doubts the police investigation and starts one of his own. Part detective story, part Western, part Jewish power fantasy—the kind of film we’ve been searching for since October 7, but hadn’t found until now.

Litvak explained the inspiration for the film actually came from the 2019 Chabad of Poway shooting, when Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, fingers blown off, urged his congregation to answer hate with mitzvahs. “It’s a movie about Jews under attack,” Litvak said. “We never could have imagined October 7, but now it feels so much more timely and relevant.”

Listening to him talk about Poway, I realized it was the first time I admitted out loud that my family had bought a gun after October 7. I braced for the usual dinner-table script—gun-control talking points bouncing around like bad musical chairs. Instead, Litvak nodded. “Just because you bought a gun doesn’t mean you’re trained,” he said. “A consensus view is that people should be well trained. The danger is real—sadly, it’s real. There are bad actors in this country, and by the time the police arrive, everything has already gone down. It’s hard for people to overcome their disgust for guns, but it only takes one in a million to go crazy.”

And so there I was: a Jewish mom with a muffin-demanding toddler in the background, a gun locked up in the closet and the sudden realization that even my family had joined this conversation.

The cast is equally unexpected: Mark Feuerstein as Rabbi Mo, Neal McDonough as the town’s mayor, Alona Tal losing her Israeli accent. And then there’s Christopher Lloyd, 86 years old, as a Holocaust survivor. Litvak confessed he briefly considered leaving the Holocaust out. “So many Jewish films are about dead Jews,” he said. But the stories were inescapable—woven into his own family and the broader Jewish psyche. On the day they filmed Lloyd’s survivor monologue, everyone on set was shaken. “The hair stood up on my arms,” he remembered.

If that sounds heavy, there’s still room for surprise and delight. When I asked Litvak what genre he thought “Guns & Moses” belonged to, he quoted co-star Dermot Mulroney: “This is a movie of Jews kicking butt.” It’s not what you’d expect to hear about a Chabad rabbi in the desert, but that’s the point.

For me, it fit into the same family tree as the films I grew up watching—”The Hebrew Hammer,” “Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” My parents’ generation had “The Frisco Kid” and “Blazing Saddles.” All of these movies were, in their own way, fantasies of Jewish power—ridiculous, cathartic, loud. The difference? Rabbi Mo isn’t a caricature or secret agent. He’s a Torah-observant rabbi in a black hat, with a wife and kids, who still steps up when violence comes knocking.

That’s what makes “Guns & Moses” so unusual: it argues that Jewish tradition and Jewish strength are not opposites. You can pray in the morning, study Talmud at night and—if you must—defend your community in between. And for anyone who loved the scene in “Inglourious Basterds” when the Bear Jew steps out of the tunnel to thunderous applause, there are a few moments like that here. You’ll know them when you see them—and you’ll probably clap.

After a festival run and a modest July release, word of mouth kept building. Now Fathom Events is bringing it back nationwide September 7–11, including a local showing at Regal Deerfield in Mason. Not bad for a scrappy 20-day shoot about an Orthodox rabbi with a Glock.

When I asked Litvak what he hoped audiences would take away, he didn’t hesitate: “Never again means we take responsibility for our safety.”

As I hung up, my toddler finally got his second bag of muffins, and I thought about how surreal it was that even snack time now came with an undercurrent of Jewish safety. Guns & Moses may be fiction, but it’s also a mirror—showing what it looks like when a community decides its survival is too important to outsource.

By Anna Selman