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A Jewish producer of ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ sees his family history in the Oscar-nominated Netflix film
(JTA) — The film producer Daniel Dreifuss has only one surviving photo of a distant relative: his grandfather’s cousin, who fought for Germany in World War I and died in combat two days before the war’s end.
He has a few more photos of his grandfather, who also wore the German uniform in WWI — only to be rounded up by the Nazis two decades later during Kristallnacht and thrown into a concentration camp, as even the Jews who had fought for their country were not safe from its campaign of race extermination.
Dreifuss, who was raised in Brazil after his surviving ancestors fled the war to Uruguay, held up these weathered black-and-white photos to his Zoom camera as he spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his home in Los Angeles. One shows his grandfather’s cousin in his military uniform, the other shows his grandparents posing together, between the wars.
“Twenty years later, your country, that you just gave your health for and your cousin for and your family for, sends you to a camp,” he said. “It’s a lot of trauma to have to go through in one lifetime.”
These family stories echoed through Dreifuss’ mind when he first read the script for a proposed modern take on “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the classic 1928 novel about the German army’s hellish experiences during World War I. Nearly a century later, author Erich Maria Remarque’s descriptions of trench warfare and of the utter lack of heroism, valor or patriotism felt by its soldier protagonists resonated with Dreifuss.
“I said, ‘I know these people,’” he recalled. “Not because they are some distant relatives that I’ve heard of, but because I am the grandson of one of those kids who were in the film.”
Dreifuss’ parents met at a Jewish youth group in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. “My father was my mother’s madrich,” he recalled, using the Hebrew word for a youth group counselor. After they were later married, they moved to Israel partially to avoid Brazil’s military dictatorship and became left-wing political activists. They left Israel just before the Yom Kippur War and relocated to Scotland, where Dreifuss was born, before returning to Brazil to raise him.
Dreifuss had his bar mitzvah in the city of Belo Horizonte before later moving to Rio, which has a much larger Jewish community. “My family was never at all religious, but culturally Jewish,” he said, recalling Passover celebrations and gefilte fish recipes. He did not have many Jewish friends growing up, but his Brazilian friends were interested in Judaism and would attend his family’s Jewish events.
Daniel Dreifuss, a producer of Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” holds up a photo of his grandfather Max Dreifuss from 1919, recovering from his German military service in WWI. Max was sent to a concentration camp once the Nazis took power. (Courtesy of Daniel Dreifuss)
This global upbringing is reflected in Dreifuss’ interest in international film. It took a decade for him to mount his remake of “All Quiet,” which was eventually set up with a German production company and released by Netflix this past fall amid another endless military conflict in Europe. No one, he said, wanted to fund a resolutely anti-war film that refused to glorify its combatants, a film that was “never a hero’s journey, not the story of someone who came, you know, beat 1,000 people with their bare hands, triumphs and looks down on top of a hill at the end with some sweeping score.”
But that journey has been validated by the film’s impressive Oscar total, which surprised industry observers. At the nomination ceremony last month, “All Quiet” received nine total nods, the second most of any film this year, including for best picture — which the novel’s original 1930 Hollywood adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker Lewis Milestone, won. (This year’s Academy Awards will be held March 12.)
Considering the Nazis had once led a campaign of book burning against the source material and terrorized German movie theaters that showed the original movie adaptation, accusing it of being a “Judenfilm,” Dreifuss sees the new film’s success as a historical victory, too. “I love that my name will be associated with a story that was deemed degenerate by that regime,” he said.
When he was first presented with an early draft of the new “All Quiet” script, in 2013, Dreifuss was coming off of the success of another international historical film he had produced. “No,” a 1980s-set Chilean political drama, starred Gael Garcia Bernal as an ad executive tasked with convincing his country to vote the dictator Augusto Pinochet out of office. The film netted Chile’s first-ever Oscar nomination for international feature film, although Dreifuss himself is not Chilean.
In researching “No,” Dreifuss said, the film’s team had trouble finding Chileans who would admit to having cast their real-life vote in Pinochet’s favor — even though 40% of the population did so. “We couldn’t find one single person who supported him,” he recalled. “At some point, years later, no one wanted to say, ‘I supported it, I voted, I was on that side.’” He saw a parallel to the history of geopolitics in the run-up to WWII, when many Western countries — including his family’s adopted homeland of Brazil — were initially sympathetic to the Nazis.
When Hollywood studios turned down the proposed remake of “All Quiet,” forcing Dreifuss to turn to European financing, he saw an opportunity to mount the first-ever German adaptation of the property, which would allow the film to open up a “historical perspective” on how the aftermath of WWI led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust.
German filmmaker Edward Berger, who also helmed several episodes of the espionage miniseries “Deutschland 83,” stepped into the director’s chair, and he also has a co-writing credit. German star Daniel Brühl, who has played many historical villains to the Jewish people in films ranging from “7 Days in Entebbe” to “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” took a key supporting role as the lead negotiator for the armistice agreements — the sole figure in the movie trying to find a peaceful resolution for his country. (The historical figure Brühl portrays, Matthias Erzberger, was vilified as a traitor by the German right and assassinated in 1921 by antisemitic nationalist radicals who were precursors to the Nazis.)
Though there are no explicitly Jewish characters in the film, Dreifuss believes it still speaks to the fate that would soon await Europe’s Jews.
“We know what followed in the decade in Germany,” he said. “So we could bring that to the film in subtle ways.”
He pointed to the armistice plotline that foreshadows how the Treaty of Versailles left Germany in a deeply disadvantaged position, creating an opportunity for Hitler’s brand of national populism. There are also scenes in which thoughtless German generals, driven by nationalistic fervor and wounded pride, send entire squadrons to their deaths mere minutes before the armistice is set to take effect. In one sequence, the film’s lead, the soldier Paul (Felix Kammerer), steals a goose from a French farming family of non-combatants and says: “It’s a hatred of the other, of not understanding, of being raised to have an enemy.”
Dreifuss is dipping into a different chapter of world Jewish history with his next project: a Showtime miniseries produced with the co-creators of the Israeli Netflix series “Fauda” that explores CIA operations in the Middle East and is partially set during the Lebanon War in which Israel had a heavy, and oft-criticized, military presence. The series will air this summer.
He has also been pitched a host of WWI and WWII-related projects in the wake of the success of “All Quiet.” But, he joked, “I would love for people to not only think of me as the war guy, or as the dictator guy.”
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The post A Jewish producer of ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ sees his family history in the Oscar-nominated Netflix film appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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They told Willy Loman he was everything; ’twas a great American lie
The great innovation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is that its patriarch has no sons. This problem — Lear has a vast estate, and only daughters to inherit it — marks the onset of a disaster. Because the king has no obvious heir, he is able to remake his world as he sees fit. But his choice to split his kingdom between his three daughters, based on the degree of fealty they express toward him, is catastrophic. It can be argued that Lear suffers from an excess of liberty. Without a rulebook to follow, he wreaks destruction on the country he had hoped to preserve in his image.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a kind of American Lear. In the midcentury United States, every man can be his own king, leaving Willy Loman suffering from a version of Lear’s affliction. Willy has arrived at a time in life at which he is keen to secure his own legacy. Unlike Lear, he has only sons, and is painfully committed to having his first-born take on his mantle. But in the land of the free, he has perversely and perhaps unconsciously spent his life glorying in his ability to make the wrong choices.
Spoilers: Willy’s choice of how to bequeath his kingdom, such as it is, will work out almost as tragically as Lear’s.
A new Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, starring an excellent Nathan Lane as the archetypal failed American father, leans into the quasi-Biblical nature of this story. It is a tale for Americans to pray over: May we become wiser and stronger as a people by learning from our forefather’s mistakes. And it is a tale to atone over, as well. Just shy of eight decades since the play’s debut in 1949, there is a great and ever-mounting body of evidence to suggest we have done very little learning at all.
Death of a Salesman follows two days in the life of the Loman family, who live in Brooklyn and have, at long last, very nearly paid off their mortgage. But they have perhaps never felt more insecure. Bills are piling up. Willy’s job as a traveling salesman has stopped paying him a salary. In his 60s, he is beginning to feel his age, and as he works for scant commissions, he’s started to exhibit a faltering grasp on reality, and an increasingly vigorous drive toward self-destruction. His wife Linda — played by Laurie Metcalf, who is, as always, stellar — senses terrible possibilities just around the corner.
Meanwhile, adult sons Biff (Christopher Abbot) and Happy (Ben Ahlers, although I caught Jake Silbermann in a fine understudy performance) are in the midst of the sort of drawn-out coming-of-age crisis that each generation seems to invent anew. They don’t know who they are. They can’t see a way toward making enough money. They’re unwilling to commit to anything or anyone. They yearn for big American lives — cattle ranches, an endless stream of available women, the dream of finally pulling one over on the boss — and are only just beginning to question whether that yearning has anything to do with the big American emptiness they feel.
The pressure created by the family’s unfulfilled dreams — of financial security, a sense of purpose, a bit of rest — turns most explosive between Willy and Biff. Willy yearns for his eldest son, once a promising boy who idolized his father, to become the business bigshot he never quite managed to become himself. But, at 34, Biff no longer seems able to stand anything about his father — up to and including the flashy American brilliance Willy sees himself as bequeathing. The tension between the father with a dream, and the son who refuses to fulfill it, comes to tragedy.
In this way, Willy’s problem is an inversion of Lear’s: His obsession with his firstborn son drives him and his family to a kind of ruin. (Youngest child Happy’s story is the quietest tragedy in Death of a Salesman; he is an overgrown boy, developmentally frozen by his desire for Willy’s never-forthcoming approval, or even attention.) And as Shakespeare’s great tragedy illustrated certain formative flaws in the English national character — I cannot recommend James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear enough — so Willy’s obsession casts a damning light on the country that created him.
Willy is all-American: He loves cars, football, fantastic get-rich-quick schemes and womanizing. He sees his chosen profession as evincing great American values: “respect, and comradeship, and gratitude,” not to mention the glory of the open road.
He’s also an individualist who has abundantly reaped the costs of that posture. He has exactly one friend, a neighbor called Charley, whom he appears not to actually like. He sees himself in constant competition with his fellow man, and carries a strain of exceptionalism that borders on the delusional. His conviction that he lives in a land of boundless opportunity has poisoned him against reality. He understands, on some level, that he hasn’t completely succeeded in achieving glory, but he can’t let himself accept that understanding. As it turns out, he would rather die.
These flaws are particularly painful to encounter at this moment, when the country has less a president than a salesman-in-chief. Willy’s preoccupation with a certain kind of smoke-and-mirrors business success now seems less like a reflection of the country Miller knew than a prediction of the ways in which it would decline. The fallacy that liberty is inherently tied to financial success has warped the nation, just as it warped Willy himself.
Biff rejects the exceptionalist mindset Willy strives to instill in him: “Pop, I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” he rages in a climactic argument. But Happy buys into his father’s worldview, celebrating him as a great possessor of “the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man.” When Happy insists that he will follow in Willy’s footsteps and “beat this racket” — the obscure American system that seems to keep the common man down, despite the country’s promise — the audience can easily imagine what will follow: a lifetime of disappointed entitlement, and, in the end, a legacy as meager as his father’s.
Willy might see it as an insult for Happy, whom he’s always treated as an afterthought, to seize the title of his true heir. Like Lear, his preoccupation with the question of what he’ll leave behind, and who will treasure it, has prevented him from understanding the truth about his children and himself. Lear is too attached to the concept of his own majesty to bother with effective governance; Willy is so devoted to his false idol of success that he departs the world without knowing much about it. In both cases, the playwrights understood what their characters couldn’t: that children, like countries, learn by example.
The post They told Willy Loman he was everything; ’twas a great American lie appeared first on The Forward.
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UK Counterterrorism Police Investigate Arson at Jewish Memorial Wall
An Orthodox Jewish man walks by at a wall showing pictures of protesters killed during anti-government demonstrations in Iran, in Golders Green, London, Britain, March 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor
Police said on Tuesday they were investigating suspected arson at a memorial wall in a part of north London that is home to a large Jewish community, amid a recent spate of such incidents in the British capital.
London’s Metropolitan Police said the investigation was being led by Counter Terrorism Policing, though it was not being treated as a terrorist incident. They said no arrests had been made.
The incident occurred on Monday at the site of a memorial wall dedicated to people killed in Iran in a bloody crackdown after anti-government protests spread across the country in January. Police said the memorial wall had not been damaged.
“We recognize that this incident will heighten concerns in the Golders Green area, where residents have already faced a series of attacks,” Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams said in a statement.
Over the last month, counter–terrorism officers have arrested more than two dozen people as part of investigations into attacks on Jewish-linked premises, including the torching of ambulances belonging to the Jewish volunteer emergency service Hatzola in Golders Green on March 23.
Police said after an arson attack at a synagogue this month that they were investigating possible Iranian links to the incidents. A pro-Iranian government group has said it was responsible.
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Ukraine in Diplomatic Tussle With Israel Over Grain Kyiv Says ‘Stolen’ by Russia
A farmer operates a combine during the start of the wheat harvesting campaign in a field near the town of Starobilsk (Starobelsk) in the Luhansk Region, a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine, July 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
Ukraine and Israel traded diplomatic blows on Tuesday as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned what he said were grain purchases from occupied Ukrainian territory “stolen” by Russia and threatened sanctions against those attempting to profit from it.
Kyiv considers all grain produced in the four regions that Russia claims as its own since invading Ukraine in 2022 as well as Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, to be stolen and has protested over its export to other countries.
Russia calls the regions its “new territories,” but they are still internationally recognized as Ukrainian. Moscow has not commented on the legal status of grain collected in them.
“Another vessel carrying such grain has arrived at a port in Israel and is preparing to unload,” Zelenskiy said on X, adding: “This is not – and cannot be – legitimate business.”
“The Israeli authorities cannot be unaware of which ships are arriving at the country’s ports and what cargo they are carrying,” added Zelenskiy.
Ukraine on Tuesday summoned Israel‘s ambassador over what Kyiv described as Israeli inaction in allowing shipments of grain to enter the country from Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Ukraine‘s foreign ministry said in a statement it handed the ambassador a “note of protest.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said that Kyiv has not provided any evidence for its claims.
“The vessel has not entered the port and has yet to submit its documents. It’s not possible to verify the truth of the Ukrainian claims,” he told a news conference in Jerusalem.
Saar said Ukraine had not submitted any request for legal assistance and rejected what he called “Twitter diplomacy.”
“Israel is a state that abides by the rule of law. We say again to our Ukrainian friends, if you have any evidence of theft submit it through the appropriate channels,” he said.
Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi told reporters that Kyiv has provided “extensive information and proof” that the cargo was illegal before going public. The foreign ministry published a timeline of its actions and contacts with Israeli authorities.
“We will not allow any country in any geography to facilitate illegal trade with a stolen grain that finances our enemy,” Tykhyi said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Tuesday, saying Russia would not get involved. “Let the Kyiv regime deal with Israel on its own,” he said.
Traders have told Reuters that it is impossible to track the origin of wheat once it is mixed.
UKRAINE PREPARING SANCTIONS PACKAGE
Anouar El Anouni, EU foreign affairs spokesperson, said the bloc had taken note of reports that a “Russian shadow fleet vessel” carrying stolen grain had been allowed to dock at Haifa. He said the European Commission had approached Israel‘s foreign ministry on the issue.
“We condemn all actions that help fund Russia‘s illegal war effort and circumvent EU sanctions, and remain ready to target such actions by listing individuals and entities in third countries if necessary,” he said.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine was preparing a sanctions package against those transporting the grain and the individuals and legal entities attempting to profit from the scheme.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv has taken “all necessary steps through diplomatic channels,” but the ship had not been stopped.
“Russia is systematically seizing grain on temporarily occupied Ukrainian land and organizing its export through individuals linked to the occupiers,” Zelenskiy said.
“Such schemes violate the laws of the State of Israel itself,” he added.
Ukraine expected Israel to respect Ukraine and refrain from actions that undermine bilateral relations, he added.