There’s a new thriller coming in the fall, and it’s the true story of a team of Nazi-hunting Israelis.

A new heart-pounding trailer introduces us to Operation Finale, a film about the 1960 extradition (OK, illegal kidnapping) of Adolf Eichmann, the Third Reich official who was a key figure in implementing the Final Solution. Its director is Chris Weitz, whose previous credits include producing American Pie, directing a Twilight movie, and co-writing Rogue One— so a bit of a weird pedigree. But if you’re uneasy, know that the cast is top-notch:

First of all, Oscar Isaac both is both a producer of the film, and its star—as Peter Malkin, a Mossad agent on the group that captured Eichmann. Isaac recently backed out of plans to play the Mortara father in a Spielberg film about the kidnapping of an Italian Jewish child by the Catholic Church, so if you had your heart set on him playing a historical Jewish figure, you can still scratch that itch.

Nick Kroll (yep, that Nick Kroll) plays Rafi Eitan, who led the operation… OK. Listen, Kroll is a perfectly capable actor who can do both comedy and drama. But does anyone else feel they’ve been Pavlovian-ly conditioned to laugh any time they see him? Admit it—you snickered when he showed up in Loving.

Mélanie Laurent is also in the film, because can you really go Nazi-hunting without her? Israeli actors in the cast include Lior Raz of Fauda.

And the villain of the piece? Ben Kingsley is uncanny as Eichmann, not only because of the prosthetics to make him look younger in flashbacks (trigger warning: the trailer features Eichmann ordering the mass shooting of a group of Jews), but because of the evenness of his appearance as an old man laying low in Argentina years after the war.

The trailer emphasizes the pressure put on the team to bring Eichmann to justice, though—spoiler alert if you missed history—Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem, was the only person on whom the Israeli government has carried out capital punishment.

The film is out on September 21st, and in the meantime, check out the trailer for Operation Finale yourself below:

Image via YouTube

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• Someone stole a rabbi’s car and made off with a $30,000 torah scroll (the vehicle and the scroll were found). [NYDN]

• The definitive guide to the Jewish band from Hoboken, Yo La Tengo. [BuzzFeed]

• Alec Baldwin does everything short of blackmailing Lena Dunham to get a part on her HBO show, Girls. [WNYC]

• Don’t take Joan Rivers to court, because you will lose. [THR]

• More about Network Jew extraordinaire Nick Kroll. [Splitsider]

• Billy on the Street, our favorite new show not starring Nick Kroll, debuts the Julia Roberts Obstacle Course. [Vulture]

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• Jerry Seinfeld’s wife Jessica apparently hates his white tennis sneakers. “I think a man of your dignified age and elegance could maybe go with a dark grey or black. Or the New Balance.” [The Cut]

• Jewcy contributor Alex Aciman matches famous musicians with their iconic style items. [Time]

• It’s officially Oscar season! Rachel Weisz and Christoph Waltz reflect on winning their first Oscars. [NYT]

• There’s a new crowd-sourced Jewish-English lexicon online, and it looks pretty awesome. [Tablet]

• More magic from Comedy Central’s upcoming series, The Kroll Show, featuring real-life Network Jew Nick Kroll. [Vulture]

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• Gwyneth Paltrow, total mom dancer. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Narcissism is IN, courtesy of people like Lena Dunham. [Esquire]

• Nick Kroll might be surpassing Schmidt as our favorite Network Jew. Here’s a clip from his upcoming Comedy Central series, the Nick Kroll Show. [Vulture]

• Harold Bloom is God, says Tablet Magazine. [Tablet]

• The New York Times finally realizes Julie Klausner and her How Was Your Week podcast is awesome (we’ve been saying that for years.) [NYT]

• Drew Barrymore would hate going to Florida, and Billy Eichner knows it. [Funny or Die]

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• Landmarked Lower East Side synagogue Beth Hamedrash Hagadol is seeking permission to demolish the structure and rebuild as a mixed-use building with a synagogue on the ground floor. [Curbed]

• Our friends at the Gefilteria get some love from the New Yorker. [New Yorker]

• Are the Apatows line cutters? [Grub Street]

• Delia Ephron vs. J.Crew, round 2. [WWD]

• Jack’s Wife Freda, the South-African and Israeli-inspired SoHo brunch hotspot, has applied for a liquor license. [Grub Street]

• Nick Kroll, last seen as Network Jew all-star Ruxin from The League, has his own sketch comedy show airing on Comedy Central early next year. [Interview]

Here’s Kroll’s favorite Hanukkah memory, via Funny or Die:

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• Behold: Allen Ginsberg’s borscht recipe. [Brain Pickings]

• Looks like bacon isn’t going away anytime soon. [TIME]

• A look at Jeremy Piven as Mr. Selfridge. [Esquire]

• Scroll man Adam Chandler revisits his teenage days, where troublemaking Jewish Texans literally stole Baby Jesuses from front lawns. [Tablet]

• Larry King survived a Twitter death hoax. [Twitter]

• Nick Kroll, aka Ruxin from The League, is one half of PubLIZity, our favorite new fake reality show. The other half? Jenny Slate.

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A confession: I have a crush on Ruxin. There, I said it. Yes, Rodney Ruxin (Nick Kroll), the Jewish products-liability attorney on The League, is an insufferable jerk. Yes, he seems willing to go to great lengths to humiliate and sabotage his friends. Yes, his morals seem, well, flexible. (In one episode, Ruxin defends a paint company whose cans explode by arguing that anyone buying such a cheap item should have “a reasonable expectation that that product will explode in your face.” “And, morally, you’re good with this?” asks his friend, Pete. “There was just one word in there that I am not familiar with,” Ruxin responds.)

So, yes, I know that I should be embarrassed about my crush. “I can’t even unpack that,” one friend responded when I told her about my attraction. Well, I can. Maybe what’s attractive about Ruxin is that he’s part of a rebranding of the Jewish man: not the nerdy, nervous nebbish of yesteryear but a cocky, self-assured asshole.

Ruxin’s loutishness sometimes plays off his Jewishness. In one memorable episode, he hosts a Sukkot party in an attempt to butter up the Jewish preschool teacher to improve his son’s chances of being accepted. “Wonderful news to fill your pathetic social calendars,” Ruxin warmly says by way of announcing the party to his friends. “Since when does Sofia allow you to celebrate Judaism in your house?” one buddy asks, referring to Ruxin’s decidedly non-Jewish wife. “Forget Sofia, since when do you allow Judaism in your own house?” asks another. Well, ever since baby Geoffrey needed to get into a good preschool, of course. Ruxin warns his friends not to park in his driveway, which has a pothole; when he hears that the city will expedite cleanup on racially insensitive graffiti, he spray-paints a swastika on his own driveway. In poor taste, sure, but the man knows how to get things done, even if it means, you know, appropriating a Nazi symbol.

That’s what’s liberating—and appealing—about Ruxin: his brazen boorishness isn’t bound up with his Jewishness. Unlike Jewish putzes of the past—slimy lawyers like The Wire’s Maurice Levy or cripplingly analytical men in the Alvy Singer mold—Ruxin’s bad behavior exists independently of his Jewishness. He knows it, too: “If I did look inward, which I won’t,” he says, “I think we would find that my Judaism would be the least objectionable thing about me.” You have to like a guy who doesn’t engage in the kind of endless introspection typically characteristic of Jews in popular culture, or one who doesn’t view his Jewishness as a burden or a mark of Cain, forever setting him apart. See what assimilation has wrought—a man can just be a jerk like everyone else.

But Ruxin isn’t without some ancestral anxiety. He is, in some ways, a product of his people. In a fit of cold feet before he marries the Catholic, Hispanic Sofia, Ruxin blurts out, “I’m worried that her family full of conquistadors is going to round up my whole family and stick us in a basement and put yellow stars on us.” Even here, it’s clear that Ruxin’s Jewishness is nominal at best; mixing a touch of Inquisition-era worries with a healthy dollop of Holocaust neurosis, Ruxin’s sense of Jewish history is a jumble of victimization across time and geography. Being Jewish, for Ruxin, is merely being subject to the occasional moment of deep-rooted paranoia—but not so deeply rooted that it can’t be soothed, in this case, by the reassurance of knowing that he is marrying a very attractive woman. Sexy, right? A man who coasts through life on his assimilated rudeness but maintains some iota of his people’s historical dread is, after all, every girl’s dream.

Jewish jerks aren’t new. And they’re generally not attractive—no one swoons over Shylock. But Ruxin’s different; his Jewishness is refreshingly tangential to his coarseness, one of many facts about Ruxin instead of his defining fact. Also, when he thinks he’s home alone, he sings about eating crackers and jelly in the goofiest voice imaginable. It’s kind of adorable.

Previously on Network Jews:

Tommy Pickles, the heroic cartoon baby on Rugrats.

Willow Rosenberg, the lesbian witch on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Andrea Zuckerman, the brainy girl on Beverly Hills, 90210

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