Remembering Patrick Swayze in a Jewish Film

By Maxine Springer

In Moment‘s article about great Jewish films, author Lester Friedman picks Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze, as one of his favorite Jewish films. He says,

“This is one of the few films set around a Jewish-American woman and centers on her maturation during a summer when she is vacationing with her family at a resort in the Catskills. In a reverse of traditional morality, the non-Jewish male lead is in some ways the moral center of the film.”