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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.”
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‘Blood and Soil’: Harvard Conservative Group Publishes Hitleresque Essay Amid Rise in Right-Wing Antisemitism
April 20, 2025, Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University and Harvard Square scenes with students and pedestrians. Photo: Kenneth Martin/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect.
A conservative student magazine at Harvard University has been suspended by its board of directors following publication of an article that echoed the words of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, escalating concerns about rising interest in Nazism, white nationalism, and illiberal political theories in the “new right” conservative movement.
The Harvard Salient published an opinion piece in September which bore likeness to key tenets of Nazi doctrine, as first articulated in 1925 in Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, and later in a blitzkrieg of speeches he delivered throughout the Nazi era to justify his genocide of European Jews.
Written by David F.X. Army, the article chillingly echoed a January 1939 Reichstag speech in which Hitler portended mass killings of Jews as the outcome of Germany’s inexorable march toward war with France and Great Britain. Whereas Hitler said, “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans,” Army wrote, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.”
Army also called for the adoption of notions of “blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own” in response to concerns over large-scale migration of Muslims into Europe.
In Nazi ideology, “blood and soil,” or Blut und Boden, encapsulated the party’s belief in eugenics and racial purity; the German “Aryans’” right to expand into Eastern Europe to amass new Lebensraum, or “living space”; and the transformation of the German peasantry into an agricultural class which stood in contrasts to Jews, many of whom lived in cities.
The Salient maintains that Army has not consumed Nazi literature and that no one who reviewed his contribution recognized its Nazi tropes. Denouncing scrutiny of the Salient as a political conspiracy on a campus in which students say promoting conservative viewpoints is a social crime, magazine editor Richard Y. Rodgers said The Harvard Crimson, the main campus newspaper, converted the “resemblance” into a “headline.”
“Our clarification, that neither the author nor the editors had recognized the resemblance and that the phrase long predates the Third Reich, was mentioned but immediately minimized. The insinuation stuck,” Rodgers continued. “The coverage forms a coherent script. The conservative scholar becomes the reactionary theorist. The traditionalist student becomes the bigot. The publication that prints their ideas becomes the threat. ‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponized cliche, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the university. To be labeled ‘authoritarian,’ ‘integralist,’ or Nazi-adjacent is to be rendered abominable.”
The Salient‘s alumni board announced on Sunday that the magazine would temporarily halt its operations pending an investigation.
“The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning … material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands,” it said. “The board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization. It is our fiduciary responsibility to investigate these matters fully and take appropriate action to address them. We are therefore pausing operations of the magazine, effective immediately, pending our review.”
Rodgers announced on Tuesday that the conservative student magazine would remain active despite the suspension.
“This action was taken without notice to or consent from the duly appointed leadership of the organization and in direct violation of the bylaws governing The Harvard Salient,” Rodgers wrote. “The Harvard Salient continues to operate under its legitimate editorial leadership until further notice.”
The suspension comes amid a broader national debate over what defines “conservative principles” in a Republican Party divided between Reaganites — intellectual descendants of former US President Ronald Reagan who support limited government, American stewardship of global security, and the existence of the State of Israel — and populists who combine protectionism and isolationist foreign policy doctrines with far-right views on race, nationalism, and, in some cases, the Jewish people, the last of which is increasingly present in the rhetoric of social media influencers such as Ian Carroll, Nicholas Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens.
President Donald Trump, a Republican whose rise to power was largely fueled by the new populists, has attempted to hold the two factions together with a domestic and foreign policy agenda that appeals to both — for example, imposing harsh sanctions on elite higher education institutions, outlawing racial preferences and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and succeeding in geopolitical contests which project American strength in strategic areas — but that has not prevented their clashing over the rise of antisemitism and white nationalism on the right.
Just this week, Tucker Carlson, a former prime-time Fox News host, featured Fuentes on his podcast, a move that appeared to be a direct challenge to the right’s taboo on cavorting with antisemites.
Fuentes — who has referred to African Americans as “n—gs” and called for dissolving the American government and replacing it with a theocracy based on his interpretation of the Catholic religion — has said “I love Hitler” and that rape is “not so big a deal.” Following the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Fuentes, addressing Jews and minorities, said on Facebook, “You can call us racists, white supremacists, Nazis & bigots. You can disavow us on social media from your cushy Campus Reform job. But you will not replace us.” In 2021, he called for “discussing Jewish power,” a topic that he continues to cultivate daily, drawing on Holocaust revisionist literatures and centuries of antisemitic tropes.
In 2022, Fuentes attended dinner with then-former President Trump, whom Israeli leaders have described as the most pro-Israel chief executive in US history, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Fuentes was reportedly brought to the property, unannounced, by rapper Kanye West, who was invited to dinner with Trump despite being in the middle of a multi-year episode in which he promoted antisemitism and white nationalism.
Trump, whose eldest daughter is a Jewish convert, later downplayed the incident.
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-lago,” Trump said in a statement addressing the public relations conflagration the dinner set off. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
Prominent conservative leaders have said recently, responding to the revelation of a “Young Republicans” group chat in which party workers exchanged racist and antisemitic messages, that growing antisemitism on the right must be acknowledged and fought.
“Listen, about a decade ago, antisemitism began rising on the left, and the Democrat Party did nothing,” US Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, said on Oct. 22. “But the danger that I want to highlight to you tonight is not antisemitism on the left, it is antisemitism on the right. And I’m here to tell you that in the last six months, I have seen antisemitism rising on the right in a way I have never seen it in my entire life.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Feminist vs. Jewish: These women say NYC’s mayoral election is forcing a painful choice
(New York Jewish Week) — Tracey Wells didn’t necessarily want to see Andrew Cuomo resign in disgrace as New York’s governor in 2021.
“But I firmly believe that you believe women,” Wells, the owner of a recruitment firm, said, noting at the time, New York’s attorney general had substantiated sexual harassment claims from 11 women. That number that would later rise to 13 following a federal Department of Justice investigation.
Nonetheless, Wells, who is Jewish, surprised herself by deciding to vote for Cuomo to become mayor of New York City. She made the decision in part because she sharply disagrees with Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani’s critical views on Israel.
“He’s not my favorite, but he’s better than the alternative options,” Wells said about Cuomo, rationalizing that the allegations against him could have been more egregious. “He’s obviously been in trouble before. I’m a woman, a feminist, and I do think that the things that he got in trouble for, 10 or 15 years ago, would have never been an issue.”
Wells’ thinking reflects the complicated calculus facing many Jewish women in New York City this week. Mamdani, the frontrunner, has divided Jewish voters with his vociferous criticism of Israel, and many of those who are spurning him over that see Cuomo, who is polling a distant second, as the best chance to keep him out of Gracie Mansion. But Cuomo has his own baggage: a track record of sexual harassment allegations — which he denies — that derailed his last stint in public office, and remains a turnoff for many voters.
“As somebody who identifies as a feminist, I really wish there was a better option,” said a Lower Manhattan 28-year-old woman who works in influencer marketing. She declined to share her name, citing concerns about publicizing her voting record.
“Every other election that I voted in, I’ve been very sure in my decision, and I’ve been excited to cast my vote and use my voice,” the woman said. “In this election, it feels like I’m voting more against something than for something that I’m excited about.”
Usually, she casts a ballot on the first day of early voting. But this year, she waffled until Wednesday, when she voted for Cuomo — not to support him, but to count against Mamdani.
“As the candidate who won the Democratic primary, I normally would just go for it,” she said. “But I think just because so much of his platform has been around that [anti-Zionism], I struggle, I fear, that that would energize that super anti-Israel base more. And anti-Zionism often bleeds into antisemitism.”
A fevered push among many Jewish leaders to get out the vote against Mamdani has largely sidestepped Cuomo’s history with women. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, in a Shabbat sermon urging New Yorkers to back Cuomo, said only that Cuomo, “like any politician, comes with both personal and professional baggage.”
A letter quoting Cosgrove’s sermon has now been signed by more than 1,150 rabbis across the country, including hundreds of women.
Tracy Kaplowitz, a rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side, was among them. Asked about how Jewish women should weigh the allegations against Cuomo as they vote, Kaplan said, “Judaism believes in the dignity of every human being. People need to make their decisions honoring the dignity of every human being. We are not endorsing any candidate. We’re not encouraging people to vote in a particular way that’s not our role or our place, and we recognize people will come to different conclusions.”
The writer Emily Tamkin lives in Washington, D.C., and cannot vote in the election. Still, as she wrote in The Forward, the pro-Cuomo push among prominent Jews feels unnerving.
“The failure of so many Jewish leaders to meaningfully engage with what Cuomo’s election might mean for women has deeply alarmed me,” Tamkin wrote.
“The idea that I, or any woman, has to pretend that the normalization of sexual harassment in politics is somehow irrelevant to our day-to-day safety — because our commitment to Jewish peoplehood comes first — seems to me to be an extremely limited understanding of Jewish safety,” she continued.
Some rabbis have in fact called attention to Cuomo’s history as a reason to find the election challenging for Jewish voters. “When we are considering whom to elect as leaders, a candidate who has been morally compromised should not easily collect our votes,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Reform movement, wrote in an essay. “As I have questioned what Mamdani might do based on his statements, so too I question what Andrew Cuomo might do in light of past findings of his pattern of harassment.”
Rachel Gildiner, executive director of SRE Network, a group that helps Jewish organizations achieve gender equity and create inclusive workplaces, said the election is doubly challenging for many Jewish women.
“Today, many Jewish women are feeling pressure from all sides and wondering if their own safety and belonging are being fully seen and understood,” Gildiner said in a statement. “At SRE, we are focused on helping the organizations we work with support women who are experiencing the double threat of antisemitism and misogyny in this moment. To all the women struggling: we see you and you are not alone.”
Some Jewish women say they feel no need to reconcile themselves to supporting a candidate with a record of allegations against him — because they prefer Mamdani anyway.
“I’m really happy with Zohran,” said Jaime Berman, a 33-year-old attorney and one of two Democratic state committee members for the 76th Assembly district, representing the Upper East Side. “And also Cuomo is literally the most evil person in New York, and is a sexual harasser.”
But for many Jewish women, the decision is proving to be fraught to the election’s very last days. Alisha Outridge, a tech entrepreneur in her late 30s living in Manhattan, said she sees advantages and disadvantages to both leading candidates. For her, the allegations against Cuomo aren’t weighing heavily.
“I think it’s bad, but I wouldn’t make decisions based on who our mayor is on that,” she said, noting that she is leaning toward Mamdani. “Local policy is really what I think is most impactful.”
Blima Marcus, an Orthodox nurse in Brooklyn, wrote on Facebook that she had abandoned an earlier promise not to vote at all and would cast a ballot for Cuomo if she can make it to the polls.
“A sexual predator is a red line for me, but I must say that after watching Zohran Mamdani carefully and listening to what he does and does not say I don’t want him in office and I don’t want it on my conscience that I sat this election out,” she wrote.
For Wells in Williamsburg, her vote for Cuomo is coming with hope that the mistakes of the past are not soon repeated.
“Obviously, he made a few bad calls,” Wells said. “I would like him to not make any bad calls as the mayor of the city.”
The post Feminist vs. Jewish: These women say NYC’s mayoral election is forcing a painful choice appeared first on The Forward.
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Hundreds of thousands of haredi Jews protest in Jerusalem against Israeli military draft
(JTA) — Hundreds of thousands of haredi Orthodox Jewish men joined a mass protest in Jerusalem on Thursday to rail against the Israeli government’s efforts to enlist yeshiva students into the military.
The mass prayer demonstration, called the “Million Man March,” was organized by the leaders of Israel’s different ultra-Orthodox groups in response to a spate of arrests of yeshiva students who had dodged the Israeli draft.
“The debate over the law is still ongoing, and it belongs in the Knesset,” one organizer told Haaretz. “If that were the only issue, we wouldn’t hold a rally. But following the arrests of yeshiva students and the persecution against us, it was decided to protest nonetheless.”
The protest comes one year after the Israeli Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Israel must draft haredi Orthodox Jews into its army, a decision welcomed by many Israelis who believe the haredi sector was not bearing its share of the burden of the war in Gaza. The ruling renewed demonstrations from haredi groups who have long argued that they should be exempt for religious reasons.
Earlier this month, upwards of 10,000 haredi Orthodox Jewish men staged another protest in New York City to oppose the draft.
At the demonstration Thursday, two ultra-Orthodox soldiers, a police officer and several journalists were attacked by protesters, including Channel 12 News reporter Inbar Twizer who had objects thrown at her during her broadcast.
Throughout the day, hundreds of protesters were seen entering construction sites, scaling roofs and climbing cranes. One 15-year-old boy died after falling from the 20th floor of a high-rise construction site.
One group of protesters were also seen carrying a banner from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which read, “Bringing back the hostages, bringing back hope.” The group has previously pursued legal action against a yeshiva that appropriating symbols for the hostages to rally for the release of jailed yeshiva students.
After the protests’ organizers called for an end to the demonstration on Thursday evening, some protesters remained near the entrance of Jerusalem and clashed with Israeli border police, according to the Times of Israel.
The post Hundreds of thousands of haredi Jews protest in Jerusalem against Israeli military draft appeared first on The Forward.