BEN DIAMOND, known as the Butcher, a suntanned sociopath, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage. He orders sable by the pool and in passing conversation mentions the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.


Diamond, a gangster played by Danny Huston, inhabits the colorful, debauched and very Jewish world of late-1950s Miami Beach in which Starz’s newest series, “Magic City,” takes place.


The period drama, beginning Friday, follows the early days of the Miramar Playa hotel, a fictional composite of the giant Jewish-owned hotels that sprung up in South Florida in the 1950s. Rather than glance over its main characters’ religion, the drama intersperses Jewish culture heavily throughout the series, departing from the nebbish neurotics popularized in sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” The series follows hunky power players in dark suits (and sometimes yarmulkes), more Tony Soprano than Larry David.


While covering up a murder, the sleek hotelier Isaac Evans, called Ike, the protagonist played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, plans his daughter’s bat mitzvah, an affair that includes the 13-year-old drifting down a winding staircase engulfed in pink dry-ice fumes. A gold Star of David stands out against the tanned chest of Stevie Evans, Ike’s oversexed son. And late at night Ike asks Stevie to help him protect a friend from Ben Diamond’s wrath. “Now?” Stevie asks. “No, next Shavuot,” Ike says, sarcastically referring to the Jewish holiday.


In television and in reality the corrupt, swaggering Jewish mobster type has countered the notion of the weakling Jew, said Vincent Brook, author of “Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the ‘Jewish’ Sitcom.” He pointed to gangsters like Arnold Rothstein and Bugsy Siegel. “There’s a whole parallel history of these mobsters who in their own way were reacting to stereotypes,” Mr. Brook said. That led to another, tougher stereotype in movies and television.


Based on his experiences growing up in Miami Beach, the executive producer Mitch Glazer first pitched “Magic City,” set in 1959, in 2007, before AMC’s “Mad Men” thrust the period into the popular consciousness. CBS commissioned a pilot script but rejected the project.


On Starz “Magic City,” the channel’s biggest investment yet, will join a lineup that includes the bloody, stylized “Spartacus” and “Boss,” about a Chicago mayor.


“I wanted to recreate the Jewish story in Miami Beach exactly as I remembered it,” Mr. Glazer said. His father worked as an electrical engineer at the Fontainebleau Hotel, opened on South Beach in 1954 by the Jewish hotelier Ben Novack. Mr. Glazer recalls the Cuban revolution, a Meyer Lansky sighting and the Rat Pack roaming the marble lobby in iridescent suits. “If you went just over the causeway to Miami, you were aware you were a minority. But on the beach it was a world unto itself.”


Although the Jews in “Magic City” live like kings, they still run across the occasional anti-Semite. The Holocaust is a fresh memory, and Jews cling to the safety of tight-knit communities. Like the sexism on “Mad Men” these details —a country club that bans Jews, a sly reference to “you people”— are intended by Mr. Glazer to be viewed cringingly through the prism of contemporary culture.


Jewish characters have long graced the small screen. On radio and later TV “The Goldbergs” broached topics like anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. In a 1939 episode someone threw a rock in the window as the Goldbergs prepared the Seder.


In the late 1950s and 1960s, as television became a high-stakes game, networks played it safe. Ethnic families gave way to white-bread families in sitcoms like “Father Knows Best” and “My Three Sons.”


By the 1970s viewers rebelled “against a hermetically sealed television environment they had grown up with,” said David Bushman, curator of television at the Paley Center for Media. In recent years Jews have become common staples on television, from Josh Lyman on “The West Wing” to Fran Fine on “The Nanny” and the power agent Ari Gold on “Entourage.”