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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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BDS, Pro-Terror, and Anti-Israel Activism Are Still Happening at US Colleges and Universities
A pro-BDS demonstration. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Universities remain under pressure from market forces as well as the Trump administration regarding DEI, antisemitism, and funding. Polls also indicate that public trust in higher education continues to decline. The continued closure of smaller institutions such as Hampshire College and the elimination of courses and majors deemed unproductive point to the continuing consolidation of the higher education industrial complex across the US.
Foreign student enrollment has been reduced by US scrutiny of visa applicants, and the administration has proposed steep cuts to US research funding. A new report on academia’s narrowing donor base, where some 2% of donors provided 89% of the $78 billion given in FY 2024-2025, suggests another crisis. Despite these crises, analytical and anecdotal evidence indicate that universities have retained most DEI programs and staff under different labels.
Surprisingly, a report by Yale University faculty attributed plummeting public trust in higher education to institutions themselves, citing rising costs and lowering standards. Harvard president Alan Garber obliquely expanded this critique by noting the combination of student ignorance and arrogance regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Another tacit recognition that protests have damaged both campus safety and public image may be continuing restrictions on student commencement speakers, some of whom particularly in New York City area universities have excoriated Israel and the universities themselves since October 7th.
Amidst these structural changes Jewish students have continued to migrate to southern and southwestern institutions such as Vanderbilt and Clemson which are regarded as safer and more supportive. Active campaigns aimed at Jewish students by other institutions such as American University have touted safety.
Recent studies have suggested that institutions such as Yale and Harvard have deliberately reduced their Jewish populations to post- World War II quota levels as a function of both embracing DEI and globalization. As colleges seek to increase more Arabic and Muslim enrollment, it is undeniably clear that anti-Jewish sentiment has increased on campus. It’s fair to ask questions about whether there is a direct correlation — but critics try to stifle any attempt at an actual conversation or debate with charges of anti-Muslim prejudice.
Finally, reports indicate that the Qatar Foundation has hired two Washington, D.C. public relations firms to provide crisis communications regarding that country’s massive funding to American universities. The move came after a US House committee released emails it had subpoenaed from Northwestern University showing foundation executives consulting university officials regarding PR issues that arose immediately after October 7th.
Faculty misrepresentation of Middle Eastern affairs on campus — and in the press — continues to be a major problem. This was exemplified by an op-ed in The New York Times authored by University of California Berkeley faculty member Ussama Makdisi, in which he attacked Israel over its policy in Lebanon. Makdisi has a long record of troubling anti-Israel hatred. Makdissi’s appointment as the chair of a newly established program in “Palestinian and Arab Studies” at Berkeley institutionalizes and further legitimizes Palestinian grievance and antisemitism.
In a sign of European academic attitudes towards Israel, three Belgian universities conveyed honorary degrees on the deeply antisemitic and relentlessly hostile to Israel United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who remains under US sanctions.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters and their allies continue to disrupt pro-Israel events across the country, including at Ohio State, the University of Connecticut, SUNY Buffalo, Florida State, the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon, Stanford University, Rutgers University, and the University of Washington. SJP protestors also disrupted a trustees meeting at Bryn Mawr College. A pro-Hamas encampment was also created at Occidental College.
BDS resolutions and referendums continue to be considered by student governments. At Ohio University, a divestment referendum approved by the student government in March was overwhelmingly approved by students. Similar resolutions were passed at Colorado State, the University of Wisconsin, and San Diego State University. New divestment campaigns have also been launched at Rutgers University and other schools.
Student groups continue to showcase actual Palestinian terrorists in events. In one recent case the Berkeley SJP featured Israa Jabaris, convicted of attempting a car bombing outside Jerusalem in 2015. She was released from prison in exchange for Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Jabaris thanked students for their “solidarity.”
In another case at the University of Washington, Students United for Palestinian Equality & Return at UW (SUPER UW) co-hosted a fundraiser to support the “Lebanese resistance.” The university banned the group after a building takeover which caused several million dollars in damage. Reports now indicate the group is under investigation by the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice.
Support for those with terror ties was also expressed by the Georgetown SJP chapter, which held a letter writing campaign for “Palestinian prisoners” including those convicted in the Holy Land Foundation case and other “comrades caged by the US empire” including several convicted of arson and assault.
Student governments also remain in the lead in limiting other Jewish and Israeli events. The appearance of former Gaza hostage Omer Shem Tov at UCLA was condemned by the student government as the “selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of state violence” which shows a “troubling disregard for Palestinian life and contributes to a campus climate in which Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students are further marginalized, silenced, and harmed.” The university condemned the statement as did trustee Jay Sures who stated he was “disgusted and appalled” by the decision. Conversely, the student government at Stanford awarded the Muslim Student Union $175,000, more than all Christian groups combined or the marching band.
Finally, the role of teachers unions as key drivers of left wing politics inside and outside of classrooms was highlighted by a report that noted that since 2015 unions have contributed more that $1 billion to political activism and advocacy. Causes include “human rights” — which often means anti-Israel activism.
In a convenient illustration of teachers union attitudes towards Israel, New York City delegates of the United Federation of Teachers approved a resolution condemning Israel and demanding a US arms embargo. The measure will be voted on by members in May.
Alex Joffe is the Editor of SPME’s BDS Monitor and director of Strategic Affairs for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). A completely different version of this article was originally published by SPME.
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How to Defeat Iran’s Strait Strategy
FILE PHOTO: Birds fly near a boat in the Strait of Hormuz amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, as seen from Musandam, Oman, March 2, 2026.REUTERS/Amr Alfiky/File Photo
Iran’s strategy to close the Strait of Hormuz has been well known for years. As long ago as 1993, Iran’s parliament passed a law giving itself the right — in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — to close the Strait. This position was reiterated during the 12-Day War of June 2025, when the Iranian parliament voted to close the Strait — though at that time, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) held off from doing so.
Iran has two navies, the regular navy (IRIN) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN). The IRIN is part of the Artesh (Iran’s regular military). Prior to the current conflict, the IRIN consisted of larger surface ships like frigates and corvettes, a few submarines, and a drone carrier. It is the older of the two maritime services, rebuilt after World War II and greatly expanded under the Shah, with ambitions that reached beyond the Gulf into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Early in the Iran-Iraq War, the IRIN was able to establish sea control and strike Iraqi oil infrastructure. It is associated with the more traditional “fleet side” of Iranian sea power.
The IRGCN, on the other hand, is Iran’s specialized asymmetric naval force. Rather than functioning like a conventional blue-water navy, it is designed specifically for fighting in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, where geography, cluttered littoral waters, and short engagement ranges help offset US and allied technological superiority. The IRGCN is the “guerrilla warfare” side of Iran’s maritime services.
The IRGCN is built around shore-based anti-ship cruise missiles, naval mines, small agile boats called FAC/FIAC (fast attack craft and fast inland attack craft), and drones. The shore-based missiles are located in “missile cities” up to 500m (1,640 feet) underground and some sections are underwater, making US strikes difficult.
Iran planned to use both naval arms, the IRIN and the IRGCN, to attrit US naval forces until Washington tired of the conflict. From Tehran’s perspective, the logic was sound. The Strait of Hormuz is narrow, crowded, economically vital, and tactically favorable to a defender employing sea denial tactics such as mines and shore-launched anti-ship missiles. This plan also reflected the broader Iranian belief that the United States tends to lose interest in foreign conflicts when costs rise and victory is not clearly in sight.
The United States has been aware of Iran’s plans for the Strait for decades. In fact, Tehran’s deterrent logic depended on that awareness. Washington had to know the threat existed for it to influence American decision-making about whether to go to war with Iran in the first place.
In the opening days of the conflict, America’s plan to address this threat was revealed. Washington and Jerusalem opened the war at the theater level with decapitation strikes, the destruction of command and control, and the suppression of Iranian air defenses. Once Iran’s air defense network and command structure were sufficiently degraded, the United States could strike Iranian naval forces, missile infrastructure, drone facilities, logistics nodes, and other supporting assets with stand-off weapons and aircraft rather than send major surface combatants directly into the Strait. Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs), carrier aviation, land-based aircraft, submarine-fired torpedoes, and even long-range artillery were then brought to bear against Iranian targets without US forces entering the Strait.
By now, the IRIN is largely combat-ineffective if not sunk. The IRIN was meant to provide the IRGCN with conventional naval support. Its frigates, auxiliaries, and submarines provided sensors such as radar and sonar, support fire with missiles and guns, and extended operational reach through drones and helicopters, and it broadened Iran’s maritime presence beyond the Strait’s immediate approaches in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. In a Strait contingency, the IRIN was intended to support the IRGCN’s resistance.
The US sidelined the Strait at the outset of the conflict, but the Iranian naval threat must now be addressed. While it poses a less complicated problem today than it did before the outbreak of hostilities because of the elimination of the IRIN and the degradation of Iran’s missiles and drones, the IRGCN’s continued presence in the Strait remains a significant challenge.
On March 2, Israel and the US began targeting IRGCN forces. American A-10 Warthog airplanes and AH-64 Apache helicopters began eliminating close-range elements of the IRGCN’s sea-denial network, especially its small craft, swarm staging areas, and coastal launch points. Air-dropped bunker-busting munitions were used against hardened missile sites, tunnel complexes, and buried support infrastructure along the Iranian coast. A US Navy littoral combat ship, the USS Santa Barbara, was used to launch multiple LUCAS one-way attack drones; this was not part of the ship’s original design, but the improvisation was surprisingly successful.
On March 10, the United States reported that it had “eliminated” 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels near Hormuz. There remains some ambiguity as to whether the IRGC actually mined the Strait. In an abundance of caution, the US is actively hunting for mines that may have been laid. (Mine hunting is the process of locating and identifying individual mines for destruction, while mine sweeping clears an area more broadly. Hunting takes longer, but it offers greater confidence that an area has been cleared.)
The US Navy has four Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships in the region and two littoral combat ships: the aforementioned USS Santa Barbara and the USS Tulsa, which have been augmented with counter-mine capabilities. These forces have some of the Navy’s most advanced mine-countermeasure resources, including unmanned undersea systems, helicopters, and divers. The MH-60S Seahawk, for example, can employ the Airborne Laser Mine Detection System to locate mines from the air and then help neutralize them. At the same time, the Knifefish unmanned undersea vehicle can hunt mines below the surface while keeping its mothership out of danger.
But these capabilities are not enough. The IRGCN, though significantly degraded, still retains enough capability — including FACs, FIACs, and shore-based missile systems — to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait. For this reason, the United States is taking additional measures in parallel with operations in the Strait.
There is little doubt that the US could engage in direct military action to secure the Strait, but this would require significant land forces in addition to further air and maritime operations. There would be a cost in both American blood and treasure, and if the action did not end quickly, it could become a political liability. For these reasons, the Trump administration is actively pursuing alternative means to the direct military option to achieve the desired end state, including making diplomatic overtures.
One indirect measure has been to attempt to compel Tehran to reopen the Strait by striking vital targets, with a threat to strike even more. These attacks are aimed at the regime’s capacity to continue the confrontation. Targets include leadership, command and control, missile infrastructure, naval forces, air defenses, logistics nodes, and key elements of the regime’s economic base. The purpose is to impose cumulative strategic costs, degrade Iran’s coercive tools, and convince Tehran that keeping the Strait closed will cause the regime greater harm than reopening it.
The US has also embarked on an economic pressure campaign against Iran called Operation Economic Fury. This operation is centered on fully enforced oil sanctions, action against sanctions-evasion networks, and pressure on the shipping and financial channels that keep Iranian exports moving. The US Treasury has sanctioned 29 new targets, including three individuals, 17 companies, and nine vessels tied to Iranian oil smuggling and associated financing networks as part of the broader economic pressure campaign.
The most visible portion of Operation Economic Fury is a maritime blockade, a clear demonstration of economic coercion bolstered by the credible use of force to compel compliance. This tactic echoes the naval blockade the US employed to weaken Venezuela before Maduro’s ouster. That blockade brought the Venezuelan economy to the brink of collapse by strangling the nation’s oil revenues.
The current US blockade, originally framed as targeting the Strait, is more accurately described as a blockade against ships calling at and departing from Iranian ports and terminals. A few vessels carrying crude from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Iraq – not Iran – have successfully exited the Persian Gulf. US Central Command (CENTCOM) clarified that as part of the blockade, “all Iranian vessels, vessels with active Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions, and vessels suspected of carrying contraband (weapon parts, nuclear components, precursors, etc.), are subject to belligerent right to visit and search.”
Through all of this, Washington is leaving open a diplomatic off-ramp. If Iran accepts American red lines, especially with respect to its nuclear weapons program, and reopening the Strait is folded into a broader agreement, Washington could end the war and provide some measure of sanctions relief. In this sense, diplomacy is not separate from coercion but part of the same strategy. Military pressure, economic coercion, and diplomatic opportunities are being applied together to persuade Tehran that compliance is less costly than continued resistance.
In the end, Iran’s long-prepared Strait strategy failed. Rather than rush major naval forces into a confined battlespace built for attrition, Washington and Jerusalem widened the fight, dismantled key elements of Iran’s military system, and then combined limited operations in and around the Strait with economic coercion and diplomatic pressure. The remaining challenge is real, as the IRGCN can still threaten shipping in the Strait. However, Tehran has lost whatever influence it had on the initiative or direction of the campaign.
David Levy is a retired US Navy Commander and Foreign Area Officer. He was the Director for Theater Security Cooperation for US Naval Forces Central Command located in Bahrain and was the US Air and Navy Attaché in Tunis. He served in several campaigns, including Iraqi Freedom and Inherent Resolve. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
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Support for Iran war among ‘connected’ US Jews falls again, poll finds
(JTA) — In the early days of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, 68% of “connected” American Jews — those with ties to American Jewish institutions — supported the war, according to a poll taken by an Israeli public affairs institute.
That proportion fell weeks into the war and fell further to 60% just after President Donald Trump unilaterally announced a ceasefire on April 8, the same survey found, according to results released by the Jewish People Policy Institute last week and publicized on Sunday.
The decline was sharpest among those who identified as “leaning liberal,” 42% of whom are supportive of the war, down from 57% in early March.
At the same time, opposition among “connected” Jews has risen sharply, with about a third saying they oppose the war, up from 26% just after the war’s start. And only 14% of respondents said they believed the war had achieved “major success.”
The survey of 806 American Jews, taken April 15-19, drew from a panel that JPPI maintains and surveys regularly. The institute says its polls reflect the sentiments of “connected” Jews because its panel includes fewer intermarried Jews, more Jews who are affiliated with denominations and more Jews who have lived in Israel than demographic data suggests is representative of U.S. Jewry overall.
Two polls taken weeks into the war, before the ceasefire, found that most American Jews overall opposed the U.S. military campaign against Iran.
The latest results arrive as the future of the war and its dividends so far remain uncertain. Facing widespread public disapproval on Iran and pressure over oil prices, Trump has repeatedly extended the ceasefire despite failing to extract the major concessions from the Iranians that he has called for. This weekend, he said he was unsatisfied with their latest offer and said he remained torn between wanting to keep pressing for a diplomatic agreement or choosing to “go and just blast the hell out of them and finish them forever.”
Speaking at an event in Florida, Trump said. “Frankly, maybe we’re better off not making a deal at all. Do you want to know the truth? Because we can’t let this thing go on. Been going on too long.”
Iranian officials have reportedly said they expect a return to fighting, and the Israelis also have said they remain at a high level of military readiness.
A key sticking point is the future of Iran’s nuclear program, which Trump vowed to eliminate. The Iranians have offered to halt nuclear enrichment for up to five years, but Trump has rejected that offer and is pushing for a 20-year pause — longer than the 15-year hiatus in the agreement President Barack Obama in 2015 struck that Trump exited in 2018. Following the collapse of that deal, the Iranians are understood to have embarked on an enrichment spree, giving the regime the most nuclear material it has ever possessed. Much of that material remains buried but extractible under facilities Trump bombed last year.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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