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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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His kippah was a symbol of coexistence. Israeli police officers seized and destroyed it.
(JTA) — Alex Sinclair had no idea what would follow when he posted a picture of his mutilated kippah to Facebook on Thursday.
Sinclair, who lives in central Israel, described being detained by police officers who told him that his kippah, which had both the Israeli and Palestinian flags woven in, was illegal. When he was released from their custody, he was allowed to take his kippah home — but only after the Palestinian flag was cut out, leaving him with roughly half a head-covering.
To Sinclair, a British-born writer and educator whose books include “Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism,” the situation was galling, and not just because he had been accused of breaking a law that does not exist.
“She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” he wrote about the officer who returned his kippah. He added, “That was it. I walked home, shaken, angry, depressed.”
A day after publishing his account of the encounter, eliciting hundreds of almost universally supportive comments, Sinclair said he had not heard from anyone in the government about his Facebook post or the complaint he filed on the Israel Police website.
But he had gotten offers of legal aid; calls from left-wing politicians, including Yair Golan; and even Shabbat flowers from a prominent liberal activist. His phone had been ringing off the hook with calls from journalists, and someone he barely knows was planning a rally for outside the police station in Modiin where he was detained.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Sinclair said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday afternoon.
The Israel Police has acknowledged the incident, saying publicly that a man had been detained after they were contacted about his kippah and had been released “following a clarification process.” They said the official complaint about the incident prevented further comment.
Sinclair said he thought the image of the defiled kippah was resonant for Jews who instinctively associated it with centuries of antisemitism. But he said he wondered whether the depth of the response reflected something else, too.
After the ceasefire in the Iran war, Israelis were “beginning to be able to breathe a little bit and look above the parapet and just sort of see, OK, maybe we can start to think about the future in a way that we really weren’t able to as a society for the past couple of years,” he said. Now, the thought for many is: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?”
The incident comes amid a broad crackdown on Palestinian symbols in public spaces, and allegations that police, who have come under the control of a far-right minister, are increasingly intimidating liberal activists.
Soon after being named national security minister in January 2023, Itamar Ben-Gvir told Israeli police officers to exercise wide latitude in removing Palestinian national flags from public places in order to preserve public order. He characterized the flag as a terrorist symbol, even though it is legal in Israel.
“It cannot be that lawbreakers wave terrorist flags, incite and encourage terrorism, so I ordered the removal of flags supporting terrorism from the public space and to stop the incitement against Israel,” he said at the time. Following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel later that year, the crackdown intensified even more.
During the same period, the police have been accused of using inappropriate force against people protesting against the right-wing government. Sinclair said he was concerned about the threats to liberal values in his chosen country.
“The job as a police officer is not to police people’s political opinions,” he said. “That happens in other countries that we don’t want to become.”
Among the hundreds of people responding to Sinclair’s Facebook post were many who echoed that sentiment — even while saying they did not share his appreciation for the Palestinian flag. (Elsewhere in Israel and online, Sinclair drew more scorn.)
“While I don’t agree with your choice of kippa, I do agree you have every right to wear it,” wrote one commenter. “This is awful and I’m sorry you experienced it. And I hate that this is where we are now, that someone could be detained for something like this.”
Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, said in a statement that there was “systemic madness” within the Israel Police and that he believed a criminal investigation and civil lawsuit would be appropriate. He also called for introspection.
“If police officers had cut off a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, there would have been an uproar here in Israel,” Kariv wrote.
Sinclair said the kippah that was destroyed was not his first with the same design. After the wind blew away the first one, which he had custom-made by a popular Jerusalem vendor nearly 20 years ago, he ordered a replacement — that’s how motivated he was to wear his values on his head.
“I’m a Zionist, and I believe in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in this part of their historic homeland. And I also think that the Palestinians are also people who have a right to self-determination in part of this place, which is also their historic homeland,” Sinclair said.
“By the ironies of history, the same chunk of land ended up being a place where two peoples have a legitimate connection, and we have to figure that out,” he continued. “People from both sides who want to delegitimize or erase the other side forget about whether they’re being nice or nasty; they’re just not being true to history.”
That was once a relatively widely held view among Israelis and Jews around the world. But decades of failed peace efforts, violent attacks on Israelis from Palestinian terrorists, and increasing extremism among both Jews and Arabs have caused a two-state solution to fall sharply out of favor during that period.
Sinclair says he sees himself as a peace activist, though he called the term “grandiose” and said, “I’ve got a lot of respect for people whose life is much more about the activism than mine.”
What he is, he says, is a Jew who loves Israel and is scared for its future. His next book, out this fall, will tackle what he believes is “a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people,” a topic on which he has suddenly become an unwilling case study.
On one side, he said, are far-right extremists, including Ben-Gvir, who “want a kind of Judaism and an Israel which doesn’t have a place for all kinds of things that feel very important to me,” including egalitarianism, Palestinians and left-leaning politics. (That side, he noted, is currently advancing legislation that would ban egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall.) On the other, he said, are those who promote an Israel that “is open and pluralist,” one in which people tolerate people who practice Judaism in ways they would not and hold values they do not.
“We’re in a struggle between these two versions of Judaism and versions of Zionism,” Sinclair said. “I very much hope that we’ll win the struggle. I think it’s not too late to win that struggle. … But it’s not a slam-dunk. And we, the Jewish people, are in real trouble if we lose.”
Sinclair believes his book could help turn that lofty vision into a how-to guide for Israeli liberals. But he also has more practical concerns, like where to get another kippah. He isn’t sure the vendor who made it before will be willing to do so again. And this time, it’s not just him but many of his friends who say they are interested in getting their hands on one.
“Some bright lefty entrepreneur,” he joked, “has got a big money-making opportunity there.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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DOJ’s indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center recalls Jewish groups’ use of informants to fight extremism
(JTA) — Jewish social justice organizations are sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s decision to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center, framing the move as part of a broader campaign against civil society groups that monitor extremism.
The Department of Justice alleges that SPLC engaged in bank and wire fraud and conspired to commit money laundering, arguing that its use of paid informants to monitor extremist groups amounted to a funding mechanism for those same groups. SPLC has not yet issued a detailed public response to the charges.
For many observers, the clash also echoes an earlier and lesser-known chapter in American Jewish history — one in which Jewish organizations themselves used covert methods, including paid informants, to track and expose white supremacist movements, often with little support from the federal government.
Coincidentally, the indictment came down nearly simultaneously with the publication of “The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy,” by historian Steven J. Ross. The book, which is being released next week, documents how groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee infiltrated neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan organizations in the decades before and after World War II, passing intelligence to law enforcement agencies that were often reluctant to act.
The historical parallel is not exact, but it is striking: Tactics once employed by Jewish groups to counter violent extremism are now at the center of a federal prosecution against one of the country’s most prominent civil rights watchdogs.
The Union for Reform Judaism said it was “watching with concern” the Department of Justice’s action, noting SPLC’s long record of combating hate, including antisemitism.
“SPLC is a long-time ally in the civil rights space and has a record of more than five decades of combating hate, including antisemitism,” the group said in a statement. “While no one is above the law, this DOJ has pursued multiple cases over the last 14 months whose political motivations have been questioned and even rejected by juries and judges. For this reason, we are concerned that this, too, is a case motivated by politics, rather than fact.”
Leaders at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs were more forceful, casting the indictment as a direct threat to organizations that track hate groups and protect vulnerable communities.
“Civil society is under attack as the administration weaponizes the federal government against those with whom they disagree, while normalizing extremism and gutting the very programs we have to counter it — and it puts Jewish and so many other communities at risk of violence,” said CEO Amy Spitalnick.
“As today’s attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center shows, groups that protect civil rights and counter violent extremism are being criminalized by this Administration,” she added. “None of us can afford to be silent.”
The liberal Jewish advocacy group Bend the Arc similarly argued that the indictment reflects an effort to undermine democratic institutions.
“Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) make this nation safer for American Jews and all Americans — which is why the Trump regime’s DOJ is targeting them,” the organization said. “Americans and American Jews will keep showing up to defend our democracy, from our elections to all of our liberties.”
Ross, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, describes a period in which antisemitism and white supremacist ideology were both widespread and frequently violent, with extremists targeting synagogues and Black churches and staging rallies adorned with Nazi imagery. Figures such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in 1959, and Jesse Benjamin Stoner, the racist and antisemitic politician convicted in the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, sought to build mass movements rooted in racial and religious exclusion.
At the same time, Jewish defense organizations quietly developed sophisticated intelligence operations, including the use of informants, to monitor those threats. Their efforts, Ross writes, were often met with indifference from officials such as J. Edgar Hoover, whose FBI frequently declined to take more than token action against extremist groups.
In his book, Ross argues that while movements and leaders evolve, the underlying ideas — including white supremacy and antisemitism — persist. Today, he notes, those ideologies are often expressed less through explicit antisemitism than through broader attacks on immigrants and demographic change.
Speaking to NPR’s Terry Gross on Thursday, Ross said he was skeptical about the indictment of the SPLC.
“I’m not sure if the indictment is true or not, but the idea that there are informants is not illegal,” he said. “These people are simply monitoring what was going on and whether accused of stealing records, their records were sent, I’m sure, to the government forces like the FBI, the Justice Department, because they weren’t doing their job.”
Ross also said that the groups he writes about in the book made it clear to informants and infiltrators that they couldn’t break any laws. “I’m sure the SPLC is doing the same thing because they know their informants would get in trouble otherwise, that they could be prosecuted by the government,” he said.
Another ADL operation came to light just a few years ago when political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University wrote a book detailing how the ADL’s covert operation targeting the John Birch Society helped bring down an influential far-right extremist movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s.
“The ADL also had undercover agents with code names, who were able to infiltrate the society’s headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and various chapter officers,” Dallek told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “They dug up financial and employment information about individual Birchers. And they not only used the material for their own newsletters and press releases, but they also fed information to the media.”
In the early 1990s, however, the West Coast branch of the ADL was accused in federal court of illegally spying on left-wing and pro-Arab groups, including the African National Congress, the American Indian Movement and the Association of Vietnam Veterans.
The ADL eventually settled a federal lawsuit, which charged, among other things, that the organization had sold information on anti-apartheid groups to the government of South Africa. The ADL consistently denied any improper or illegal actions, a position reiterated in the settlement.
Critics at the same accused the ADL of drifting from its founding mission — fighting antisemitism and promoting tolerance — to target legitimate criticism of Israel and advocacy of the Palestinian cause.
The Anti-Defamation League did not respond to a request for comment about the Department of Justice’s prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But for Jewish groups now rallying to SPLC’s defense, the concern is not only about a single indictment but about the potential chilling effect on organizations that track and expose extremism — work they see as essential at a time of rising antisemitism.
“At a moment of rising antisemitism and broader extremism,” Spitalnick said, “the Administration should focus on how to protect our communities from these threats, not attack the very organizations and infrastructure whose work helps keep us safe in the first place.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Inside Mamdani’s split decision on synagogue and school protests in NYC
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani vetoed on Friday a City Council bill aimed at requiring safety plans around protests near schools, while allowing a separate measure protecting houses of worship to become law.
The split decision — his first veto since taking office more than 100 days ago — drew sharp backlash from a wide swath of Jewish organizations, reinforcing concerns about his handling of antisemitism in a city with the largest Jewish population in the United States and his alignment with the pro-Palestinian protest movement.
Here’s a step-by-step explainer of what happened, why it matters and what happens next.
What’s the difference between the two bills?
The City Council passed two companion bills last month aimed at curbing disruptive demonstrations outside synagogues and schools as part of a broader package to address rising antisemitism. One focused on houses of worship, requiring the New York City Police Department to develop a plan within 45 days for managing protests around the entrances. The proposal emerged following disruptive protests in recent months outside the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan and Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills in Queens centered on events promoting immigration to and real estate in Israel.
The second bill focused on schools and educational institutions. It was broader in scope — including museums, libraries and teaching hospitals — and would have required more expansive planning for protests in those spaces. Progressive groups and labor unions opposed the schools bill, arguing it could impact their ability to organize and potentially limit pro-Palestinian demonstrations, particularly on campuses.
Why were there two bills?
The measures were largely similar in scope and raised comparable constitutional considerations around the rights to free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly. It was scaled back from an earlier buffer-zone proposal after objections from the mayor’s police commissioner and civil liberties groups about a one-size-fits-all rule.
The measures were split by Julie Menin, New York’s first Jewish speaker of the City Council, who was elected unanimously by the Council’s 51 members and seen by some as a counterweight to Mamdani on Jewish issues. She helped secure broader support for the synagogue-focused bill, aimed at addressing fears of intimidation for congregants entering houses of worship.
At the same time, the separation gave critics room to oppose the schools measure, which has drawn more sustained protest activity since Oct. 7, 2023 and raised sharper free speech concerns.
How did the City Council vote?
The houses of worship buffer zone bill, which was authored by Menin, passed with a 44–5 veto-proof majority in the 51-member chamber.
The schools bill, introduced by Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, passed by a narrower margin, 30-19, and could be vetoed by Mamdani.
What happened on Friday?
A day before the bills would automatically take effect, Mamdani vetoed the schools bill. At the same time, he allowed the houses of worship bill to take effect without his signature.
In a video statement, Mamdani said the distinction is legal and constitutional. He said that while he expressed reservations about the houses of worship measure, the final version of the bill was narrowed to avoid constitutional concerns and largely requires existing NYPD practices. The schools bill, he said, remained too broad and lacked a clear balance between the right to protest and other constitutional protections.
The measure could have applied to some public campuses, including City University of New York schools, depending on how policies were implemented. Private campuses — like Columbia University — would likely not be affected, since the NYPD is generally not authorized to operate on their property without coordination.
How did Jewish groups respond?
The backlash was swift and rather unified.
“This veto is a profound failure of City Hall to demonstrate to all New Yorkers that our safety is a priority,” a coalition of major Jewish organizations, including the Conference of Presidents and the Union for Reform Judaism, said in a sharp-worded statement. The New York Board of Rabbis, which has engaged with Mamdani since his election, also signed on to the statement.
Even the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive Zionist group formed in 2020 to be a voice for liberal Jews in New York, said it was “disappointed” by Mamdani’s veto and his dismissal of a “good faith effort” to lower tensions. Mamdani attended NYJA’s Hanukkah celebration and said he associates himself with their mission of “bringing people together” on critical issues. Its most recent executive director is Phylisa Wisdom, now head of the mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.
Rev. Al Sharpton, an ally of Mamdani, was also upset about the mayor’s veto of the schools bill, calling its implementation ”important” for the safety of all communities.
Mamdani’s progressive Jewish allies — Jews For Racial & Economic Justice and Bend the Arc — welcomed his veto, calling it a “victory for free speech and civil liberties in New York City.“
Why did Mamdani do it?
The move was an early signal of Mamdani’s governing style as he marks three months in office.
A strident critic of Israel who rose to power aligned with pro-Palestinian activism, Mamdani appears willing to take politically difficult positions in step with his base on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, even if it risks alienating mainstream Jewish institutions.
At the same time, he avoided a fight he was likely to lose — vetoing the synagogue bill only to have the Council override his veto — sidestepping a direct confrontation with the Jewish community, already uneasy over his responses to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.
What happens next?
The City Council could attempt to override Mamdani’s veto of the schools bill, though it would need an additional four votes. Lawmakers could also revise the bill to address legal concerns and try to pass it again, but this time with a veto-proof majority.
Meanwhile, the NYPD is expected to move forward with drafting a plan for the houses-of-worship measure and present it within 45 days.
Longer term, this moment may shape Mamdani’s relationship with the Jewish community and test whether he can broaden his coalition in a city where concerns about his policies carry significant weight.
Last week, the city’s most senior Jewish elected officials — Menin, City Comptroller Mark Levine and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal urged Mamdani to do more to address the concerns of Jewish New Yorkers directly, including acknowledging the community’s deep emotional connection to Israel and reconsidering his pledge not to visit the country. Mamdani has given no indication that he plans to follow that advice.
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