In his prime, the 1940s to the 1960s, Kirk Douglas only made a couple of films that would have tipped his fans that he was born Issur Herschelevitch Danielovitch, and that among the things his name-change brushed over was his Jewishness.

By the time he made “Cast a Giant Shadow” in 1966, American anti-Semitism was on the wane, and Israel — whose founding was the subject of that film — was an accepted reality to much of the world.

But in 1953, box office star that he was, making a movie in Israel, playing a disturbed Holocaust survivor on the lam from the Israeli police in the still-new Middle Eastern state had to be risky, or at least raise eyebrows.

“The Juggler” was a production of Stanley Kramer, a filmmaker whose movies about political and social hot button subjects made him the conscience of Hollywood. The Jewish producer who would touch on the debate over creationism (“Inherit the Wind”), race (“The Defiant Ones,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) and the horrible toll of a nuclear war (“On the Beach”) would only approach the Holocaust indirectly. But he made three films that referenced it and used it as a plot point — the later “Judgement at Nuremburg” and “Ship of Fools,” and 1953’s “The Juggler.”

That first film is both conventional in its structure, and an odditity. It was, according to many accounts, eagerly-embraced and backed by the still-new Jewish state for its potential propoganda value. Currying American favor and maintaining U.S. support (a big subtext of “Cast a Giant Shadow”) was vital.

It’s filled with wholesome images of tough but compassionate Israelis, many of them living there since well before World War II, running an efficient infrastructure for processing and relocating Jewish refugees from Europe and their adorable moppet children.

Characters sometimes speak in that stereotypical shticky Hollywood version of Jewish English, practiced since the early talkies and kvetched through “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

“Cows we haven’t got. But maybe soon?”

“We need a juggler like a hole in the head. What can you do besides throwing things up in the air and catching them?

Douglas has a role he turns out to be wonderfully suited for — a formerly famous entertainer who survived the camps with his gregarious gift for entertaining children intact, even if he’s vowed to never juggle again.

“I haven’t thrown anything thrown anything up but a bad meal in ten years!”

We soon learn the reason for that. Hans confuses a local woman for his wife and her child for his daughter. A friend from the ship has to shake him and remind him that they died and were “burned in the ovens.” He later confesses that he was sure they’d be fine in Germany. He was famous — “The Wonderful Hans” — and beloved after all. It’s implied that he “juggled” the decision to leave, and waited too late.

And now, in this new place that is to be his home, he is — as we say these days — triggered by all sorts of things, especially cops.

“Israel is a land of POLICE. You’re all NAZIS!”

Fleeing a policeman (Richard Benedict) who wants to see his papers, he is cornered and gravely injures the man to escape. Hans Muller, German Jew who speaks no Hebrew, is on the run in a somewhat friendly country that is still a desert, a war zone and few people’s idea of a “Promised Hand.”

Douglas does a good job with the juggling that we know he’ll inevitably perform, and a great job with the clowning Hans does to entertain children. The emotional scars of this “dangerous” fugitive have all the subtlety Douglas was often associated with — over-the-top, eyes-bulging, bellowing and spitting with emotion — hammy.

An orphaned boy (Joseph Walsh) offers to guide Hans and translate for him. A kibbutz maiden (Milly Vitale) falls for him and urges him to make his home with her in a commune where Jewish folk dances by the bonfire are a regular thing.

“A home is a place you lose,” he says. “A half a heart doesn’t make a full love.”

“The Juggler” depicts an Israel swept up in community and Israeli enterprise, a new nation filled with optimism, with the young woman Ya’el remarking on her mission to visit an “abandoned” (over-run and emptied during the 1948 founding war) to “see if it’s habitable.”

So yes, the “propoganda film” label still fits.

Orson Welles’ pal and Mercury Theatre regular Paul Stewart (born Paul Sternberg) plays a police detective determined to get his man and “get him some (psychiatric) help.” Veteran character actor Charles Lane (born Charles Gerstle Levison) also signed on to a movie that may have had the feeling of a “cause” at the time the company set off for Haifa, its primary filming location.

The soon-to-be-celebrated Kramer entrusted the film to the Ukranian-American (not Jewish) director of the anti-Semitic hate crime thriller “Crossfire,” Edward Dmytryk and director of Kramer’s WWII drama “Eight Iron Men” to handle the shoot, and would bring Dmytryk back to film Kramer’s celebrated adaptation of “The Caine Mutiny” a year or so later.

Keen-eyed viewers will recognize the eyewitness to the assault on the policeman, a Dutch “tourist” played by John Banner, who says everything but “I saw NOTH-ink!” in an effort to get out of helping the police. “Hogan’s Heroes” was still a decade away at this point.

“The Juggler” isn’t one of the great films of Kramer or even of its era. But Douglas’s magnetic performance and the mere fact that this ground-breaking, well-intentioned thriller exists makes it a classic, a peek at an uncomplicated moment in time when Israel could be considered an embattled underdog state set up to right a great wrong and provide a homeland for people hounded throughout history and murdered by the millions as Hitler’s scapegoats.

The messy business of working out whose “abandoned villages” they were helping empty would only come later.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Milly Vitale, Joseph Walsh, Richard Benedict, Jay Adler, John Banner and Paul Stewart.

Credits: Directed by Edward Dmytryk, scripted by Michael Blankfort, based on his novel. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:26