As their relationship begins to sour, he says things like “Jew motherf*****,” and threatens to “take a piece out of your Jew ass.” “I gotta make sure no one f***s around with the golden Jew,” Nicky says at one point. The topic is mentioned, however, by Pesci’s character, in a somewhat pejorative way. In the film, the viewer never hears Rothstein himself address his Jewishness or what it means to him, and he appears to lead a largely secular life. However, Ace sees his work running the casino as having a certain degree of above-board legitimacy and is constantly worried that his longtime friend Nicky (Joe Pesci), a fully “made” mobster, is ruining that reputation with his loose cannon antics. Like Henry Hill, the protagonist of “Goodfellas, ” Rothstein can’t ever be a “made guy” because he’s not fully Sicilian. Rothstein, as depicted in the film, is sort of a gangster, and sort of not he is with the mafia, but not of the mafia, because of his ethnic identity. While the film is somewhat fictionalized, Rosenthal really did pioneer the idea of sports books in casinos, really did survive an assassination attempt by car bomb and really did have his license denied by a state gaming commission, which was led in real life by Harry Reid, before he was a senator. The character is based on Frank Rosenthal, a real Jewish gambling expert from Chicago who had ties to the Chicago Outfit and eventually headed to Vegas to run casinos for them.

Rothstein is depicted as a Jewish associate of the Chicago Outfit, an expert bookmaker and sports handicapper who is sent to Vegas to run the Tangiers, one of the largest casinos on the Strip. That was Sam “Ace” Rothstein, the character played in the film by Scorsese mainstay Robert De Niro.

It also may be the best crime film with a Jewish protagonist at its center. But the three-hour epic remains one of Scorsese’s most ambitious and gorgeously realized films.

It may be a tick below “Goodfellas,” which came out just five years earlier, in terms of its reputation in the eyes of film historians. ( JTA) - “Casino,” Martin Scorsese’s examination of the mob’s control of Las Vegas in the 1960s and 70s, debuted in theaters on Nov.

Martin scorsese's 1995 film casino.