Uncategorized
Disney+ series ‘A Small Light’ tells the Anne Frank story from the perspective of the woman who hid her
(JTA) — The short life of Anne Frank has inspired generations of filmmakers and television producers. The list of past productions range from “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), whose director George Stevens witnessed Nazi occupation as a U.S. army officer, to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Anne Frank Remembered” — featuring the only known footage of Anne — to the Emmy Award-winning dramatized miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” (2001).
On Monday night, viewers will get another TV version. But “A Small Light,” an eight-episode series premiering on National Geographic and streaming Tuesday on Disney+, tells the story from a new perspective: through the eyes of the woman who hid the Frank family.
Miep Gies was an independent 24-year-old with a busy social calendar and a dance club membership when she began working for Anne Frank’s father Otto in 1933 at Opekta, his successful jam business in Amsterdam. As Jews were rounded up and deported from the Netherlands in 1942, her Jewish boss asked if she would be willing to hide his family in an annex above the office, and she did not hesitate.
“A Small Light” stars Bel Powley as Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan Gies and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. It’s named for a quote from the real Gies, who once said that she did not like to be called a hero because “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
That metaphor had literal meaning for the Frank family and four others in the secret annex, who spent two years in a dark 450-square-foot space behind a hinged bookcase. Gies, her husband and four other employees of Otto Frank secretly kept eight Jews alive while running his business downstairs. Gies brought them food and library books, using black market ration cards and visiting several different grocers to avoid suspicion. Anne Frank said in her diary, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much.”
In the series, the “dark room” is seen less than Gies’ frenzied bicycle trips across Amsterdam, as she tries to sustain the appearance of a normal life. Her secret pushes her away from friends and family, while her marriage strains under the weight of ever-looming disaster. The creators of “A Small Light” sought to recreate a hero as a modern, flawed, at times even annoying person.
“She’s not some kind of saint,” executive producer Joan Rater told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “She had moods, she had a new marriage, she wanted to hang out with friends. She wanted to take a day off and she couldn’t.”
“I think everyone can relate to Miep,” said Powley, an English-Jewish actress known for starring in several British shows and in American films such as “The King of Staten Island.” “She was just an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.”
Although “A Small Light” is rife with tense scenes and suspense, the producers fashioned it with young audiences in mind. The show conspicuously avoids the explicit violence and horror typically expected of its subject matter, leaving out concentration camps and murders. Rater and co-creator Tony Phelan wanted children like their own to watch the series. While they were writing it, their daughter was the same age as Anne was when she was writing her diary.
Some young viewers have seen Anne’s story being swept up in literary purges across U.S. school districts, as part of the debate over what should be taught in American classrooms. Earlier this month, a Florida high school removed an illustrated adaptation of her diary after determining that references to her sexuality were “not age appropriate.” The same edition was previously yanked from a Texas school district, although it was reinstituted after public outcry. Meanwhile, a Tennessee school board banned “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, after objections over curse words and nudity last year.
The name “Anne Frank” has long been synonymous with Holocaust education as her diary remains one of the world’s most-read books, with translations in over 70 languages. But the “relatable” rescuer presents another appealing way to teach children about one of the most wretched chapters in human history, said Brad Prager, a professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri.
“It is the message that people like to hear,” Prager told the JTA. “If you ask a fourth-grader why we watch TV and movies — well, this is so that you can learn to do the right things, or you can learn that in certain circumstances anyone can be a hero.”
Liev Schreiber plays Otto Frank and Amira Casar plays Edith Frank in “A Small Light.” (National Geographic for Disney/Dusan Martincek)
A broader lens on the Netherlands during World War II is less palatable. The Germans and their Dutch collaborators implemented a highly effective system of persecution: Between 1942 and 1944, about 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported primarily to Auschwitz and Sobibor, then murdered. Only 5,200 of them survived.
Although Gies did everything she could to save the Jews in her care, the unwritten ending to Anne’s diary is well-known. Three days after her last entry in August 1944, Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer raided the annex. Gies escaped arrest by observing that she and Silberbauer shared a hometown.
“My luck was that the police officer in charge came from Vienna, the same town where I was born,” she said in a 1997 interview with Scholastic. “I noticed this from his accent. So, when he came to interrogate me, I jumped up and said, as cheerfully as I could, ‘You are from Vienna? I am from Vienna too.’ And, although he got very angry initially, it made him obviously decide not to arrest me.”
In a valiant last-ditch effort, Gies walked into the German police office the next day and attempted to buy her friends’ freedom. She was unsuccessful.
Gies found Anne’s notebooks and papers strewn on the annex floor. Without reading them, she gathered and tucked the writings into a drawer, hoping to return them to their owner. Germany had all but lost the war already, with Allied troops less than 250 miles from Amsterdam.
The Franks were packed on the last train ever to leave the Westerbork transit camp for the Auschwitz extermination camp. Otto was separated from his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot on the Auschwitz platform. In October, the girls were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and Edith succumbed to starvation in January 1945. Her daughters died of typhus a month later, when Anne was 15 years old.
Some studies have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing. In 2020, the Claims Conference found that 63% of Millenial and Gen Z Americans (ages 18-39) did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. More than 10% did not recall ever hearing about the Holocaust, while 11% believed that Jews caused it. Another Claims Conference survey reported that despite living in the country where Anne hid from the Nazis, a majority of Dutch people did not know the Holocaust took place there.
“In a time that antisemitism is on the rise and there are more displaced people in the world than there ever have been before, it couldn’t be a better time to re-explore this part of history, but through the lens of this ordinary young woman,” said Powley.
While “A Small Light” celebrates the power of the individual, the fate of Anne Frank also represents the failure of the whole world, said Prager. By centering Gies’ perspective, he said, the series risks making Anne a peripheral character in her own brutally aborted story.
“When you decenter Anne Frank, one thing is that you lose the Jewish perspective on the persecution,” he said.
Otto Frank, the sole survivor from the annex, appeared at Jan and Miep Gies’ doorstep after the war and ended up living with them for over seven years. In July 1945, Gies watched as he received the notice that his children were dead.
“He took it in his hands and suddenly he became eerily quiet,” Gies said in an interview for the Anne Frank House. “You cannot explain it, it was a silence that speaks. I looked up. He was white as a sheet. And he handed me the letter.”
Gies read the piece of paper, stood up and opened her desk drawer. “I took all the diaries, with all the separate sheets and everything and handed them over to Mr. Frank,” she said.
She told him, “This is your daughter Anne’s legacy.”
In 2010, Gies died at 100 years old. Every year on Aug. 4 — the day the Franks were arrested — she stayed at home, drew her curtains and did not answer the phone or doorbell.
Powley believes the show’s angle gives a fresh perspective on “your mom’s dusty copy of Anne Frank’s diary.” She approached the role of Gies with a heavy sense of responsibility.
“I feel a deeper connection to this story than I have with other projects,” she said. “This offer came to me on Holocaust Memorial Day and it immediately had that special feeling to it. My grandma, the Jewish matriarch of my family, died during COVID. I feel that she would be proud.”
—
The post Disney+ series ‘A Small Light’ tells the Anne Frank story from the perspective of the woman who hid her appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
For the Sake of the US-Crafted Ceasefire in Gaza, Israel Should Fortify the Yellow Line Immediately
A Red Cross vehicle, escorted by a van driven by a Hamas terrorist, moves in an area within the so-called “yellow line” to which Israeli troops withdrew under the ceasefire, as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages seized during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in Gaza City, Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alk
The Gaza ceasefire buckled last weekend. A Palestinian terrorist crossed the “Yellow Line” — which demarcates Israeli-held Gaza from territory held by Hamas — and fired at Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops from a humanitarian access road.
Israel eliminated five senior Hamas figures in response, and the strikes were fully backed by the United States. The violence highlighted a key vulnerability for Israel: its exposed positions along Gaza’s Yellow Line.
To minimize the violence — and the chance of the ceasefire blowing up at the hands of Hamas terrorists — Israel needs to provide its soldiers with protection in the form of a strong barrier along that line.
The line was designed to serve as a temporary withdrawal point for the IDF, while Hamas released all remaining living and deceased hostages, according to President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. The terrorist group still holds the remains of one hostage, weeks after the 72-hour deadline set in the ceasefire terms.
On November 22, Qatar urged the “full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza” — but Israel is not required to do so until Hamas has taken further steps toward peace, including disarming. An International Stabilization Force (ISF) is also supposed to be ready to take Israel’s place in Gaza, operating under a temporary Board of Peace, which would govern the Strip.
Instead, Hamas rejected the UN-endorsed plan.
In a statement on November 17, the terrorist group claimed that “assigning the international force with tasks and roles inside the Gaza Strip … strips it of its neutrality, and turns it into a party to the conflict in favor of [Israel].”
Hamas has also made it clear that the group likely will not agree to full disarmament, as stipulated by the Trump administration’s plan.
Instances of Palestinian terrorists firing across the Yellow Line at IDF troops have become a near-daily occurrence since the ceasefire’s inception on October 10. Palestinians have violated Phase One of the truce at least 32 times, according to IDF data, with a majority of those violations occurring when militants cross into Israeli-controlled areas east of the Yellow Line.
Despite some concerns about the potential for a permanent IDF presence in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel wants to “pass [Gaza] to a civilian governance that is not Hamas,” and doesn’t seek to “keep” Gaza long term.
For now, the situation leaves the IDF encamped in elevated positions along the Yellow Line. The border between those positions and the hornet’s nest of Hamas’ remaining forces in Gaza is marked with yellow cement blocks, while the IDF sits several hundred yards back from the line in positions dotted with large sand berms, supported by tanks and some electrical and water infrastructure. This is not like the high-tech border “Iron Wall” that separated Israel and Gaza before the October 7, 2023, attacks. Of course, even that was easily breached. But without something similar, the region is just one successful Hamas assault away from a return to war.
For the sake of the ceasefire, especially since Hamas continues to violate its terms, Israel should strengthen the Yellow Line: not to establish a permanent presence, but to provide cover for its troops in the near term, the ISF’s troops in the medium-to-long term, and to avoid the ceasefire’s collapse.
Israel’s reinforced border with Lebanon could serve as an example. The IDF could easily install concrete barriers along the Israeli side of the Yellow Line to reduce terrorist infiltration, while establishing checkpoints to lower troop exposure and allow Gazan residents to return to rebuilt homes in the future, in line with the Trump administration’s reconstruction plan for the areas of the enclave not under Hamas control.
The border could also isolate Hamas, piling diplomatic pressure on the terror group from mediators like Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, to comply with the ceasefire to get Israel out of Gaza as soon as possible, per Doha’s demands. The border would protect troops from other nations involved in a future ISF, should it materialize. These nations have made it clear that they don’t want to volunteer soldiers to fight in armed engagements with Palestinians, and a fortified border may provide the necessary solution.
Aaron Goren is a research analyst and editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Uncategorized
Hostage’s remains returned to Israel, as Trump says Gaza ceasefire’s next phase is ‘going to happen pretty soon’
(JTA) — Israel has identified the remains handed over Wednesday by Hamas as belonging to Sudthisak Rinthalak, a Thai agricultural worker murdered on Oct. 7, 2023.
Rinthalak had been working in Israel for years, sending money home to his family in Thailand, but had only been at Kibbutz Beeri for a few months on Oct. 7, when it became one of the hardest-hit communities during the Hamas massacre, with about 100 residents killed.
The release means there is just one Israeli hostage remaining in Gaza of the roughly 250 taken on Oct. 7: Ran Gvili, a police officer killed while defending Kibbutz Alumim.
Gvili’s family and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum has announced that the mass Saturday night demonstrations on behalf of the hostages, which began soon after Oct. 7, would shift to smaller gatherings on Friday afternoons.
The changes come as pressure mounts for Israel and Hamas to move into the second phase of the ceasefire plan that U.S. President Donald Trump brokered in October. Under the terms of the ceasefire, all living and dead hostages would be released before a second phase focused on Gaza’s postwar governance would be negotiated.
Trump insisted on Wednesday that the next phase was imminent, even as skirmishes continue in Gaza. Israel recently killed two children who crossed the “yellow line” separating Israel- and Hamas-controlled portions of the enclave, while gunmen emerging from the network of tunnels built by Hamas attacked and severely wounded Israeli soldiers in Rafah on Wednesday.
“Phase two is moving along. It’s going to happen pretty soon,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, even as he acknowledged that Israel’s bombing response to the attack on the soldiers represented “a problem.”
Still, he said, “We have peace in the Middle East. People don’t realize it.”
Both Israel and Hamas would lose authority in Gaza during the next phase of Trump’s plan, which would establish a “Board of Peace” helmed by Trump to make decisions about Gaza’s future. It is expected that the Palestinian Authority will play a role in the board, which Israeli officials have said they oppose, and Hamas will face renewed pressure to disarm, which it does not want to do.
In a sign of how contentious each development is likely to be, Israel announced on Wednesday that it would reopen the Rafah crossing with Egypt — but only to Gazans leaving the enclave. Egypt, meanwhile, said it would not open the crossing on its side unless Israel accepts Gazans who seek to return.
The post Hostage’s remains returned to Israel, as Trump says Gaza ceasefire’s next phase is ‘going to happen pretty soon’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
NYC synagogue protest leads to a new bill, and a rally by Jewish groups outside Park East shul
(JTA) — A demonstration outside Park East Synagogue two weeks ago, during which protesters shouted chants like “Death to the IDF” and “Globalize the Intifada,” has spurred major Jewish groups and lawmakers into action.
A coalition of Jewish groups are organizing a solidarity gathering on Manhattan’s Upper East Side Thursday night, outside the same synagogue where pro-Palestinian groups protested an event promoting immigration to Israel — a scene that NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch later referred to as “turmoil.”
The rally “will bring our community together in that same sacred space to celebrate and defend our community’s values and support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland,” according to a press release from UJA-Federation of New York.
UJA is partnering on the rally with Park East Synagogue itself, as well as the Jewish Community Relations Council, the New York Board of Rabbis, and local branches of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.
They’ve also listed dozens of Jewish organizations, schools and congregations as partners. Schools and synagogues around the city were sharing information with families about how to commute to the rally.
The gathering will feature live performances, community leaders and elected officials, according to UJA’s release, though it did not specify who would be present.
The rally is set to take place on the heels of newly introduced legislation, brought forward on Wednesday by a pair of Jewish lawmakers — Assembly member Micah Lasher and State Sen. Sam Sutton — that proposes banning protests within 25 feet of houses of worship.
“New York must always be a place where people can both exercise free speech and express their religious identity without fear or intimidation, and that balance broke down outside Park East Synagogue,” said Micah Lasher, who is running for Congress in New York’s 12th district, which includes Park East.
The bill was co-sponsored by fellow Jewish lawmakers Nily Rozic, a Democratic Assembly member, and Sen. Liz Krueger, who endorsed mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the general election.
Many Jewish groups were disappointed with the initial response to the incident by Mamdani’s spokesperson, who said that while Mamdani would “discourage the language used” at the protest, “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” The second clause was a reference to complaints that the synagogue event’s organizers facilitate immigration to the West Bank, which most countries consider illegally occupied by Israel under international law.
Critics said Mamdani’s statement drew an unfair comparison between menacing protesters and a synagogue exercising its commitment to Jewish communities in what the ADL referred to as their “ancestral homeland,” and that the protest made no distinction between immigration to Israel and the West Bank.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, who has been a harsh critic of Mamdani and is the son of Park East’s senior rabbi, said on WABC that he’s had multiple phone calls with the mayor-elect about legislation like the bill proposed by Lasher and Sutton.
Schneier said Mamdani was receptive to the idea during their discussions, and a Mamdani spokesperson told The New York Times that the mayor-elect “expressed his interest in hearing more details about the Schneier pitch.”
Jewish leaders say they are looking to Thursday as an opportunity to counter the rhetoric used outside Park East.
Chaim Steinmetz, a critic of Mamdani and the senior rabbi of a different Orthodox synagogue on the Upper East Side, shared a post about Thursday’s rally, calling it an opportunity to “stand up as proud Jews.”
“And now, with a new city administration about to take office, it is more important than ever that we bring our pride into the streets,” he wrote.
The post NYC synagogue protest leads to a new bill, and a rally by Jewish groups outside Park East shul appeared first on The Forward.