Actor Richard Roundtree died last week at the age of 81. He was best known for his portrayal of detective John Shaft in the movie Shaft as well as two sequels, Shaft’s Big Score! and Shaft in Africa, after which he played the same character in seven made-for-TV movies. The Shaft movies and TV films grew out of the publication of the novel Shaft in 1970, written by author Ernest Tidyman. Tidyman wrote six more Shaft novels, the second of which was titled Shaft Among the Jews. The book was very well received but was never made into a movie. Tidyman based this novel on a real-life story that he had read in the New York Times. What was the news story that inspired Tidyman to write Shaft Among the Jews?
A. The 1968 news story was about three separate murders of New York diamond merchants in New York City within a 3-month period. The story inspired Tidyman to write Shaft Among the Jews about a group of seven Chassidic diamond merchants who reach out to Shaft to help solve some murders as well as a crime where crooked diamond merchants are making synthetic diamonds and passing them off as real.
B. Tidyman read an article in the New York Times about Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose aim was to protect Jews against antisemitism through faith and force (this was before Kahane’s move to Israel where he pursued a racist anti-Arab agenda). In the novel Shaft Among the Jews, John Shaft teams up with the so-called Jewish Safety League to protect Jewish merchants in Brooklyn. It is because of Kahane’s subsequent behavior in Israel that the novel was not turned into a movie.
C. Tidyman read a 1970 article in the New York Times about Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, who had fled to Israel to avoid arrest on tax evasion charges. The plot of Shaft Among the Jews features a Jewish mobster based on Meyer Lansky, and Shaft’s efforts to fight both the Italian Mafia and the Jewish Mafia in order to bring the Lansky-like figure to justice.
D. Tidyman read an article about the 1964 murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner as they worked across the South to promote desegregation and an end to discriminatory practices against Black citizens. Tidyman was struck by the fact that Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish, and wrote Shaft Among the Jews, which features detective John Shaft working together with the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Anti-Defamation League to bring white supremacists in Mississippi to justice.
E. Tidyman read a review in the New York Times of the 1971 Fiddler on the Roof movie, starring Topol as Tevye. He then went to see the movie, and as a result wrote Shaft Among the Jews. In the novel, Golde learns from the priest that their daughter Chava has run off with a Russian Orthodox Christian named Fyedka. Tevye hires Shaft to find them and bring Chava back home, but when Shaft finds them he learns that they are in love, so he tells Tevye that he will not bring her home. Sadly, the film version of this novel never came to fruition, despite the theme song that Tidyman wrote, including the lines, “They say this cat Shaft is a nudnik/(Shut your mouth)/He’s a complicated mensch/But no one understands him but his bubbie.”
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Mark Zimmerman is the author of a series of Jewish trivia books, under the title RASHI, RAMBAM and RAMALAMADINGDONG: A Quizbook of Jewish Trivia Facts & Fun.