Mark Feuerstein plays Rabbi Mo Zaltzman, a gun skeptic who learns to trust his trigger finger, in ‘Guns & Moses.’ Courtesy of Salvador Litvak
By Louis Keene
July 17, 2025
The following contains light spoilers for Guns & Moses.
There’s a moment early in Guns & Moses, a new Western-style thriller from writer-director Salvador Litvak, when a neo-Nazi teen making trouble outside an Orthodox synagogue is neutralized by the rabbi’s homemade dessert.
“He ate the brownie,” Rabbi Mo Zaltzman says later.
Zaltzman (played convincingly by Mark Feuerstein) is the founder of the fictional High Desert Jewish Center, a Chabad-like synagogue whose expansion hopes are dashed when the lead donor is shot and killed at the shul gala. The obvious suspect is Gibbons, whose Nazi-tagged Volkswagen was spotted at the scene. But Zaltzman refuses to believe that the boy who accepted his chocolate peace offering weeks earlier could be the culprit. Ever the tzaddik, Zaltzman spends the remaining screentime unraveling a conspiracy in order free him.
But as Guns & Moses throws more danger at Zaltzman and his flock, confections do not win the day. Instead, it’s guns, of ever-increasing caliber. The movie’s tagline, a play on the Priestly Blessing, is “May God and your Glock protect you.” By the end of the movie — which releases Friday in select theaters — the rebbetzin is peering through a rifle’s scope.
With shades of Chinatown and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — but not their emotional depth — Litvak’s detective story takes viewers far away from the familiar geography of traditional Judaism. There are no shots of Crown Heights, the Upper West Side or Pico-Robertson, and a pivotal scene is shot on location at a solar field in the Mojave desert. Litvak told me none of Hollywood’s classic Jewish geezers wanted to play the Auschwitz survivor; Christopher Lloyd makes a glorious cameo instead.
Yet for a glimpse of Orthodox culture today and a sense of where it’s headed, viewers could do worse than to watch Guns & Moses, where threats come from all directions and whose principals turn to firearms as an answer. It places at its center the do-it-all rabbi, a figure not only the default in Chabad but also de rigeur in the post-Covid era of Orthodox startup shuls. We see Zaltzman the prison chaplain, fundraiser, detective, commando and father. We do not see much of Zaltzman the spiritual leader, and never see him ministering before a congregation.
Litvak, who is Orthodox and described himself as “Chabad-adjacent”, said the movie was inspired by the 2019 mass shooting at Chabad of Poway, when a 19-year-old carrying an assault rifle walked into the San Diego-area synagogue on the last day of Passover and opened fire, killing a congregant, Lori Gilbert Kaye, and injuring three others, including the synagogue’s rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein. Litvak drove from Los Angeles to Poway for Kaye’s funeral; upon his return, the longtime gun skeptic started learning how to shoot.
He is now one of scores of Orthodox Angelenos who have completed weapons training through the local volunteer security group Magen Am, which was founded by a Chabad rabbi to teach situational awareness and promote responsible gun ownership to Orthodox men and women. The Magen Am ethos is embodied in the movie by Brenda, a Latina security guard who presses Zaltzman to strap up. The rabbi does not put up much of an argument.
Viewers of Guns & Moses should not expect a reenactment of the Chabad of Poway attack or a recapitulation of its messy aftermath, when Goldstein pleaded guilty to orchestrating an unrelated multimillion-dollar tax fraud scheme that involved several congregants. (Goldstein did time before rejoining the synagogue, now run by his father, as a congregant about a year ago.) Really, apart from the film’s setting at a Jewish in a remote Southern California town, most of the details that recall Poway invert what happened there.
The most notable example of this (other than the rabbi himself) is the redemption arc given to the teenage extremist character. John Earnest, the Chabad of Poway shooter now serving a life sentence in federal prison, was a right-wing evangelical churchgoer whose manifesto blamed the Jews for killing Jesus. The film’s Gibbons (Jackson Dunn) is not identifiably Christian, and is humanized as a depressed, bullied kid. Litvak told me that every whodunit needs a red herring. He also said Christians and political conservatives make up most of the movie’s intended audience.
American Jews — and especially Orthodox Jews — have good reason for concern about antisemitic violence. They are visible targets in a world with lots of resentment toward Jews and a country with more privately owned firearms than people. And they have been attacked both in semi-remote places like Poway and population centers like Pico-Robertson, where in 2023 a man who believed Covid was a Persian Jewish conspiracy shot two Jews leaving weekday prayer services.
The maverick rabbi should be catnip for those who think arming more good guys — rabbis in synagogues, teachers in schools — is the path to safety. Yet the movie’s (perhaps overly) intricate plot also delivers a plain case against guns: They are behind virtually all of the harm. There is no consideration, meanwhile, of what an instrument of murder does to the person carrying it. Litvak, who has a concealed-carry license and brings his gun to shul, told me that he’s now conditioned to scan his surroundings for threats. “You gotta believe me,” he said, “I wish it weren’t so.”
Zaltzman never kills anyone who isn’t holding a gun, but he does kill — an awful, core-shaking thing for a person to do, whether they are wearing a police uniform, fatigues, street clothes or a kapoteh. Yet our hero — a vessel of Torah, a man who empathized with a Nazi teen — displays no grief or struggle or even plain shock. If there is a Jewish conversation to be had about the implications of morally justified killing — a topic of some pertinence these days — this film isn’t starting it.
“I think he’ll have a trauma in the future,” Litvak said. “But by then, the movie’s over.”
