Director Barry Levinson, who won the Political Film Society’s award for Good Morning Vietnam and nomination for last year’s Wag the Dog, can forget neither his Baltimore roots nor his Jewish parents, orthodox on one side and heterodox on he other. In Liberty Heights, his fourth effort to remind the rest of us that many Jewish Americans in the United States had to overcome prejudice and poverty, centers around the Kurtzman family in the Jewish section of northwest Baltimore, Liberty Heights, in the mid-1950s. (Levinson actually grew up in the Forest Park section, six miles from downtown, and left in 1963.) Baltimore is not the most scenic American city, and Levinson makes no effort to glamorize his home town. The father Nate (played by Joe Mantegna) runs a burlesque house and illegal numbers racket. He shields the particulars of his businesses from his wife Ada (played by Bebe Neuwirth) who is a homemaker and steadfast supporter of her husband. His two sons, Van and Ben (played by Adrien Brody and Ben Foster, respectively) are in high school, which has complied with the Supreme Court’s desegregation order of 1954 by admitting Sylvia (played by Rebekah Johnson), though a sign on the city’s country club still bars entry of “Jews, Dogs, and Coloreds” until the Kurztman boys tear it down in 1955, albeit at the end of the film. The story evolves in the manner of a situation comedy, with a blend of riotously humorous and profoundly serious elements. Among the humorous scenes, the most amusing features Van dressed in a Hitler uniform for Halloween who is banned from leaving the house by his mother and father. The serious parts of the film focus on the illegal activities of the father, who is eventually imprisoned for tax evasion, and the boys’ ill-fated efforts to court Gentile members of the opposite sex. Ben discovers that Sylvia’s father (played by James Pickens, Jr.) cannot countenance a white boy dating his black daughter, whereas Van discovers that a upscale blonde beauty named Dubbie (played by Carolyn Murphy) is actually an alcoholic teenager who is unable to cope with the fact that her father is gay. Nate, meanwhile, runs afoul of the law because he has no cash to pay off a debt to Little Melvin (played by Orlando Jones), an African American prostitution pimp and dope dealer who hit the jackpot in Nate’s numbers racket. However, what shines through the overt plot is an important message about Jewish families — how members of the family support one another so lovingly, including the rational and respectful discipline that parents provide children. For thousands of years, Jews in hostile societies have survived because of the way in which the Kurtzman family operated. However, on walking out the cinema, the film has raised a question that may perhaps be haunting director Levinson: How will the Jews of the United States, who increasingly have prospered, moved out of Jewish neighborhoods, and outmarried since the 1950s, survive as a distinct ethnic group in the context of total acceptance into the American melting pot? The integration of Jews into the mainstream of Western society has never happened before, and Jews have developed no cultural tradition to cope with such adulation other than to nurture nostalgia through stories and films. Accordingly, the film’s tagline is “You’re only young once, but you remember forever.” MH