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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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New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life
(JTA) — The New York Times has hired Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg to launch a national beat covering Jewish American life, bringing a widely known journalist on antisemitism and Jewish affairs to a newspaper whose coverage of Israel and the Jewish community has been under unusually intense scrutiny since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
The appointment, announced Monday by National Editor Nestor Ramos, creates a dedicated beat focused on American Jews at a moment when questions of antisemitism, Israel, religious identity and political polarization have moved to the center of public debate.
It is the first time that the newspaper, published in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population, has a beat dedicated to Jews.
“Over the course of 15 years chronicling Jewish life in America and abroad, Yair has taken on the biggest, thorniest stories on the beat,” Ramos wrote in a memo to staff. “Now, Yair will bring that boundless energy and deep expertise to a new religion beat on National focused on Jewish American life, chronicling a period of extraordinary tension but also possibility and reinvention.”
The move brings Rosenberg to a publication that he has occasionally criticized for its coverage of Jewish affairs, but without echoing some critics’ charges of institutional bias.
For the past five years Rosenberg has written The Atlantic’s “Deep Shtetl” newsletter, blending coverage of antisemitism, American politics and Jewish culture with essays on history, religion and popular culture. Before joining The Atlantic in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Tablet, a magazine of Jewish affairs.
Over the years, Rosenberg has broken or advanced reporting on online extremism and antisemitism while also becoming known for explaining Jewish issues to a broad audience. His work has ranged from investigations into antisemitic disinformation networks to historical features. He has written about antisemitism on the far left and on the Republican right.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, an Anti-Defamation League study found Rosenberg was among the Jewish journalists most frequently targeted with antisemitic abuse on Twitter. Rosenberg became known for responding publicly to trolls and for developing technological tools — including an “Impostor Buster” bot — designed to expose white supremacists posing online as minorities in order to inflame social tensions. The effort drew widespread attention before Twitter eventually suspended the tool.
He later described those experiences in a New York Times guest essay titled “Confessions of a Digital Nazi Hunter,” and has remained a frequent public speaker on combating online hate while preserving free expression.
Ramos’s announcement emphasized that Rosenberg’s beat would extend beyond antisemitism.
“Yair knows better than most that these fraught moments are not all that define Jewish life today—not even close,” Ramos wrote, citing stories on Hanukkah traditions, Jewish representation in popular culture and other facets of American Jewish life.
The Times, through a spokesman, declined to comment beyond Monday’s announcement. Rosenberg did not respond to a request for an interview by press time.
The hire comes as The New York Times continues to navigate a complicated relationship with many Jewish readers.
For decades the newspaper has occupied an outsized place in American Jewish public life, employing prominent Jewish reporters and editors while producing influential coverage of religion, Israel and antisemitism. Yet the newspaper has also faced sustained criticism from parts of the Jewish community over its Israel coverage, criticism that intensified after Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Media watchdog organizations, some Jewish communal leaders and a number of current and former journalists have accused the Times of factual errors, headline framing and insufficient skepticism toward claims made by Hamas officials in some early coverage of the conflict.
A May 2026 column by Nicholas Kristof, alleging systemic sexual violence by Israeli authorities against Palestinian detainees, was widely criticized for amplifying unverified claims and platforming biased sources. The Times stood by Kristof’s column in an editorial note.
Defenders of the Times argue that accusations of institutional anti-Israel bias often conflate disagreement over editorial judgments with evidence of systemic prejudice.
At Tablet and The Atlantic, Rosenberg occasionally criticized aspects of the Times’ reporting on both Israel and antisemitism. In a 2018 Tablet article he criticized The New York Times Book Review for offering a platform for the novelist Alice Walker to recommend a book by the English author David Icke that was heavily saturated in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The next year he called out the Times for a profile of former CIA officer and would-be congressional candidate Valerie Plame that failed to mention her history of tweets sharing antisemitic theories. He has also regretted that the Times in 1937 dropped its subscription to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency syndication service because of the perception at the time that JTA’s coverage of Nazi Europe was alarmist.
Unlike some Jewish media watchdog groups, however, Rosenberg has not argued that the Times is institutionally or inherently biased against Israel or Jews. Against that backdrop, Rosenberg’s hiring is likely to be watched closely by Jewish readers across the political spectrum.
According to Ramos, Rosenberg will begin work July 20 and will be based in New York while traveling nationally for the beat.
The post New York Times hires Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg to cover Jewish American life appeared first on The Forward.
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Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders
(JTA) — After weeks of backlash from Jewish groups and leaders, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights this weekend opened its exhibit on the Nakba, the narrative of Palestinian defeat and displacement upon Israel’s founding.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, exhibit is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” and features photography, poetry and everyday objects that document the experience of Palestinian-Canadians impacted by the Nakba. Palestinians use the term, meaning “catastrophe,” to describe their mass displacement upon Israel’s establishment.
The exhibit has drawn fierce condemnation from some Jewish groups, including the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
“Materials that are one-sided and driven by a political agenda can contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the group wrote in a post on X last week. “The federal government must hold the CMHR’s leadership accountable for this egregious mishandling.”
The museum’s only Jewish board member, Mark Berlin, was upset enough by the exhibit to resign.
“Because the museum chooses to proceed with this exhibit in its present form despite repeated concerns raised by myself and members of the mainstream Jewish community and others seeking a more balanced and historically complete presentation, I can no longer, in good conscience continue to serve as a Trustee,” Berlin wrote in a resignation letter dated June 22.
In the letter, Berlin argues that the exhibit omits the context that “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands” were also displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“A story detached from the surrounding factual details is not the truth, it is just a story,” Berlin continued. “The museum has a statutory and moral obligation to tell the full truth, not to sacrifice it at the altar of politics.”
The museum has vigorously defended the exhibit. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Isha Khan, the CEO of the museum, said that “focusing in this one exhibit on the human violations faced by of Palestinian Canadians does not negate the human rights violations faced by Jewish people.”
“Sharing the stories of one community in no way minimizes the experiences of another,” Khan continued.
Khan added that the exhibit had drawn “both criticism and support from Jewish Canadians.”
Several progressive Jewish groups in Canada, including Independent Jewish Voices, the Jewish Faculty Network, and United Jewish Peoples’ Order, defended the exhibit in a joint statement Thursday, writing that it was the “result of dedication, persistence, care and advocacy, especially from the Palestinian Canadian community.”
“We are proud to celebrate a Canadian institution that has remained steadfast in the face of unfounded criticism and pressure and chose to move forward with integrity,” the statement continued. “We hope this historic opening, and the ongoing inclusion of the exhibition in the Museum, encourages learning, reflection and action.”
The dispute over the exhibit comes as Jews in Canada have faced a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent months, including in March, when shots were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues. In 2025, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents in Canada, marking a 9% rise from 2024, according to B’nai Brith’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents.
The post Canadian Museum for Human Rights opens ‘Nakba’ exhibit amid pushback from Jewish leaders appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish, LGBTQ and progressive groups denounce Pride harassment of Jewish politician Scott Wiener
(JTA) — A growing number of Jewish, Democratic and LGBTQ figures are condemning the harassment of Jewish congressional candidate Scott Wiener by anti-Zionists at the San Francisco Trans March on Friday.
Wiener’s political opponent, meanwhile, did not condemn the incident directly when asked, instead disavowing “threats of violence and hate speech” more generally.
Wiener had been filmed at the march while several activists, including the man filming him, surrounded him and yelled at him about Gaza and Israel; he ultimately left the scene. The incident followed another at which Wiener was accused of supporting genocide while at a sports bar, and preceded a filmed anti-Zionist harassment of another local Jewish LGBTQ politician at a San Francisco Pride march.
The incidents have retriggered discourse about Jewish inclusion in LGBTQ and other left-wing spaces as anti-Zionist activists become more numerous and strident.
Assigned Media, a popular trans news outlet, denounced the Trans March harassment of Wiener led by local activist Dimitry Yakoushkin as “left antisemitism.”
“We need to reckon with the fact that Yakoushkin was able to incite an outpouring of rage against a Jewish man by mentioning Gaza,” the author, Evan Urquhart, wrote on Monday. “The only explanation for that is antisemitism. Enough attendees at the Trans Pride March were open to seeing a Jewish man as a proxy for Israel that Yakoushkin was able to whip them into a frenzy for his own purposes.”
Donations have also poured into Wiener’s campaign following the incident, with his campaign telling the San Francisco Standard that he received his highest single-day donation numbers afterward. Yet the harassment has raised questions about the viability of Jewish candidates like Wiener, who has said Israel committed genocide in Gaza while still seeking to maintaining a liberal Zionist identity.
Wiener, who is gay and is running for the seat being vacated by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wrote in a lengthy statement that he had been chased out of the annual Trans March event while on his way to a Pride Shabbat. It was, he said, the first time he had been unable to participate in the event since it launched 22 years ago.
“They were so physically and verbally aggressive that it was impossible for me to safely remain in the park,” Wiener said in his statement, noting the protesters had “made statements about my ‘Israeli handlers,’ among many other inaccurate, extreme, and vile statements.”
The California Senate’s Democratic statehouse caucus condemned the harassment as “unacceptable,” calling Wiener “a fearless champion for the LGBTQ+ community even when it was not politically popular.” The caucus did not mention Israel or antisemitism in its statement.
“We are saddened and appalled that Senator Scott Wiener experienced antisemitic invectives, harassment, and physical intimidation while attempting to join the Trans March,” Jaimie Krass, president of the LGBTQ Jewish organization Keshet, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
San Francisco’s Jewish mayor Daniel Lurie, the local Jewish Community Relations Council, and The Nexus Project, a national antisemitism watchdog group that is more forgiving of anti-Zionist critiques than the Anti-Defamation League, all called Wiener’s harassment antisemitic.
At a Pride breakfast Sunday morning hosted by a historic San Francisco LGBTQ Democratic group, other local and national leaders expressed support for Wiener.
“Hate has no place in our community,” Imani Rupert-Gordon, president of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told Wiener at the breakfast, according to the Bay Area Reporter, a local LGBTQ news site. “Scott, you were treated horribly.”
San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelson, who is gay and Jewish, said that what happened to Wiener “happens to gay Jewish electeds far too often. It is about Jew hatred. It is wrong.” Wiener himself did not mention either of his harassment incidents in his speech at the breakfast, according to the Reporter.
A spokesperson for Wiener did not respond to a JTA request for further comment. A request for comment to the Trans March was also unreturned; the march has released a statement on a separate incident, in which several participants were arrested following an altercation with police.
The targeting of Wiener was especially notable given that he has been celebrated locally for years as a lawmaker with a strong record on trans rights — something acknowledged by Yakoushkin, who in a video he filmed and posted, yells, “I think your policy on the genocide in Gaza is terrible,” as others yell expletives at the state senator.
“It’s sad because while he’s written some good legislation for queers, hes [sic] ultimately a genocidal-supporting center right shill,” Yakoushkin wrote on social media in a post accompanying his video of himself harassing Wiener. On Instagram, Yakoushkin called Wiener a “Yimby zionist,” using a shorthand for activists who push for more housing.
A JTA request to Yakoushkin for comment was not returned. A life coach, Yakoushkin told one critic on X, “i[f] he was great on Gaza I’d still roast his ass.”
Wiener had said during his primary campaign earlier in the month, in which he came in first, that he believed Israel had committed genocide in Gaza — a shift that came after pressure from the left and one that cost him a leadership role in the statehouse’s Jewish caucus and led to backlash from the Bay Area Jewish community.
Local anti-Zionist activists have continued to target him. The Trans March incident was the second such harassment Wiener faced in the past week. Days earlier, a local artist filmed himself confronting the candidate at a sports bar, shouting, “Wiener, you gotta get the f-ck up out my hood, bro,” and “It’s free Palestine here, you already know what it is — we against the genocide.”
The artist, Jesus “Frisco Lens” Coba, did not return a JTA request for comment. In his statement, Wiener said that Coba had in 2023 “stalked me on a plane and in an airport, shouting at me about my ‘tainted bloodline.’”
San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who is running against Wiener in the November congressional runoff, did not directly address Wiener’s harassment in a statement she sent after JTA requested comment.
“As an elected leader, and a candidate running for office, I have experienced the rough and tumble of San Francisco politics including folks who disagree with us publicly and sometimes vehemently,” she said. “And I accept and understand this responsibility. And as someone who has been a target of hate and threats of violence, I stand firm against threats of violence and hate speech. There is no place for hate and violence in our City.”
Chan had also attended the Trans March and was feted there, including by some of the activists who harassed Wiener on camera. Asked by JTA if the harassment of Wiener was antisemitic, a Chan spokesperson responded, “In this moment, what matters is how State Senator Scott Wiener felt and feels about the interactions. We must stand in solidarity against hate whenever someone tells us they are experiencing hate.”
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents a different Bay Area district, called the harassment of Wiener “simply wrong.” In the same statement, he promoted legislation to end the sale of military weapons to Israel.
“There is no place for harrasment [sic] or physical violence in our democracy,” Khanna, among the House’s fiercest Israel critics, wrote on X. “Let’s focus on passing @RepThomasMassie amendment to zero aid to Israel. Hold elected officials accountable. But do so in the spirit of building a politics of conviction and dignity, not insult and aggression.” A representative for Khanna did not return a JTA request for further comment.
Also over the weekend, an anti-Zionist activist filmed themselves harassing Manny Yekutiel, a local Jewish restaurateur running for San Francisco’s board of supervisors, while Yekutiel marched in a Pride event. The activist criticized Yekutiel, who is also queer, over having hosted Hen Mazzig, an LGBTQ pro-Israel activist, at his restaurant, because Mazzig served in the Israel Defense Forces.
Yekutiel’s campaign did not return a JTA request for comment; Yekutiel’s restaurant, Manny’s, has been targeted multiple times by anti-Zionists in the past.
“The person that you’re talking about, he was Israeli. I didn’t know that he was an IDF soldier,” he told the activist who confronted him in video from the march. The activist responded, “Well, maybe having Israelis at the cafe isn’t a good idea because it’s an apartheid state committing a genocide.”
Some local politicians jointly condemned the harassment of both Wiener and Yekutiel, linking their identities as Jews.
“The harassment campaign against Jewish candidates @Scott_Wiener + Manny Yekutiel is gross and unacceptable,” Trevor Chandler, a member of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee, wrote on X. Chandler added that the local Democratic group “condemns antisemitism.”
The day after Wiener’s harassment, two different groups of LGBTQ Jews had contrasting receptions at a New York Pride march.
One, Jewish Queer Youth, experienced a largely peaceful march; a second, fronted by Zioness, a more explicitly Zionist group, faced harassment. Another prominent Pride event, the NYC Dyke March, was staged on Saturday without many of its longtime Jewish participants, the Forward reported, after organizers stated for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism was a core value of the event; many Jewish former Dyke March organizers split away to form their own group.
Some Jewish LGBTQ leaders say the majority of such spaces remain welcoming. Krass, the Keshet president, said in her statement to JTA that “nearly every instance” of the “nearly 100 Pride events Keshet has organized this year” were “met almost entirely with celebration.”
In a newsletter on Monday, Krass told Keshet’s followers that she was “appalled” by some of the reactions to Wiener’s harassment.
“Some people are refusing to acknowledge that antisemitism played any role. Others are using this incident as an opportunity to project false, harmful generalizations onto the entire trans community,” Krass wrote. “I have even seen fellow Jews call for the Jewish community to abandon the LGBTQ+ community and our shared fight for equality. This is not the way.”
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