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Holocaust scholars in India debate ‘Bawaal,’ controversial new Bollywood movie about couple visiting Auschwitz
(JTA) – Mehak Burza is the first to admit that the state of Holocaust awareness in India is abysmal.
“You will not get a very positive response on this,” she said with a laugh.
Indian schoolchildren are taught next to nothing about the events of the Holocaust, and what does make it to textbooks does not mention Jews, Burza said. Public opinion on Hitler ranges from neutral to positive, with politicians, TV characters, and businesses having adopted his name and dress as aspirational symbols over the past few years.
“They always see the Holocaust as an alien event,” Burza, who teaches English literature at several universities in New Delhi, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
All of that, Burza said, is why — despite some serious reservations — she is pleased with the new Bollywood movie “Bawaal,” which follows a conceited history teacher as he learns about the events of the Holocaust while trying to repair his strained relationship with his wife. The movie, which debuted on Amazon Prime two weeks ago, tracks its protagonists Ajay and Nisha as they visit European World War II sites of note, including the beaches of Normandy, Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and the Auschwitz death camps.
“Bawaal” has been heavily criticized both by people who happened to tune into the movie and also by Jewish groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which objects to the characters in the film’s climax imagining themselves as Jewish prisoners of the camp. The film is rife with historical inaccuracies and barely mentions Jews; it also has lines of dialogue that Burza admits are deeply offensive and off-putting. In the most egregious example, one actor playing an Auschwitz survivor tells the protagonists, “Every relationship has its own Auschwitz.”
When Burza heard that line, “I had to pause the movie and go and get a breath of fresh air,” she said. “You’re trivializing Auschwitz with your marriage!”
Yet Burza, who is also the head of Holocaust studies at the Global Center for Religious Research, still thinks “Bawaal” is a positive start to the subject that will encourage many Indians to do further research into the Holocaust.
“Being the first Bollywood movie to take up this issue is very, very challenging, and a very big step for an Indian audience,” she said. “As a Holocaust scholar, I can point out hundreds of mistakes in the movie. But as a first-time audience, I see, OK, it’s a welcome step to those who don’t even know anything at all.
“The only disappointing thing that quite irritated me throughout the movie,” she added with a laugh, “was the pronunciation of ‘Auschwitz.’” (In the movie, the characters make it sound like “office.”)
Born and educated in the capital of New Delhi, Burza came to the subject of Holocaust scholarship while studying to become a medical doctor, after an interest in trauma narratives kept drawing her to memoirs by survivors. Switching her studies to English literature, she focused her thesis on the breakdown of gender in Holocaust memoirs and found that while “Mein Kampf” has been translated into most of India’s 22 official languages, very few Jewish authors of Holocaust books had found anything approaching a similar reach. Burza’s students had read Anne Frank’s diary, she said, but were under the impression it was a novel.
India’s lack of awareness of the Holocaust can be partially attributed to its own history from the time period. Only two years after the British helped liberate the Nazi death camps, its dissolving empire hastily divided India and Pakistan into Hindu- and Muslim-majority nations, which led to the killing of more than 1 million people in sectarian violence and displacement of an estimated 15 million more. The devastating legacy of partition has led many Indians today to refer to the event as the “Indian Holocaust.”
India’s current Hindu-nationalist government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has sought to capitalize on that painful history by passing discriminatory laws and stoking ethnic resentment toward its Muslim minority, which Hindu nationalists believe has no claim to the nation. On Monday, Modi faced a no-confidence vote in his country’s parliament over his lack of response to an upswing in violent attacks on Muslim and Christian minority populations in the state of Manipur. A small Jewish community in the area has also been caught up in the ethnic violence.
Efforts to spread Hindu nationalist sentiment have extended to the country’s extraordinarily popular and globally influential film industry, as Bollywood filmmakers are under increasing pressure to mount historically dubious productions painting India’s Hindu population as heroes and Muslims as villains. Recently, Israel’s ambassador to India apologized after the acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, serving as a juror on an Indian film festival, sharply criticized one of the films in competition for what he said was Islamophobic propaganda.
Navras Aafreedi, left, and Mehak Burza have differing views on the new Bollywood movie “Bawaal.” (Screenshot via YouTube; courtesy Mehak Burza)
In this context, the decision by “Bawaal” director and co-writer Nitesh Tiwari to make his film about the history of WWII and the Holocaust rather than a world event that directly involved India was a bold one, Burza said. Tiwari recently told Indian media he chose his subject matter because the events were less familiar to Indian audiences who could go on the same journey of understanding as the protagonists. He and stars Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor also dismissed critics of the film, with the director saying he was “disappointed” they had not “comprehended it” in the manner in which it was intended. The film’s production team, Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment, did not return a JTA request for comment.
Even within the microscopic cohort of India’s Holocaust and Jewish Studies scholars, there is deep division on “Bawaal.” Navras Aafreedi, a history professor at Presidency University in Kolkata who studies Jewish communities of India and orchestrated the country’s first Holocaust film series, believes the movie is just another example of the Indian tendency to trivialize the Holocaust. He told JTA the film’s treatment of its subject matter is “deeply disturbing but certainly not surprising.”
“Just as Hitler has come to be used as a metaphor for any authoritarian figure in India, often with admiration,” Aafreedi wrote in an email, “the makers of the film ‘Bawaal’ see it appropriate to refer to Auschwitz as a metaphor for marital quarrels.”
Outside observers, including genocide scholar Gregory Stanton — who developed the theory of the “Ten Stages of Genocide” in part by researching the Holocaust — have warned that India may be headed toward a genocide of its own within a few years; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has expressed similar concerns, with its data researchers recently determining the country is one of the most at risk for a new mass killing. Last year the museum published an interview about the region with human rights attorney Waris Husain, who asserted that under Modi, “exclusionary ideology — a known mass atrocity risk factor — has escalated.”
Both Burza and Aafreedi are Muslim, which, Burza says, lends an air of urgency to her push to improve Holocaust education in India.
That context, Burza said, may help explain one of the movie’s more head-scratching moments, in which the teacher’s wife, Nisha, muses that “we’re all a little like Hitler” because “we are not satisfied with what we have.” That line, she said, could be understood as a subversive political statement directed at the broad swaths of Indian society who admire Hitler without understanding the danger he posed.
“The present government is compared with Hitler,” she pointed out, noting that Stanton and others have drawn a link between “what [Modi is] doing to the Muslims and what Hitler did to the Jews.”
Regardless of whether or not Indian audiences think about such issues while watching “Bawaal,” Burza believes it’s inevitable the movie will lead to an increased interest in Holocaust education in her country — not to mention an uptick in Indian visitors to Auschwitz.
“In India, whatever the male lead and the female lead does in the movies, that becomes a trend,” she said. “Mark my words: You’ll see Indians at these sites.”
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Pledges of Unity in Beijing Mask Deep Skepticism Among Iran, China, Russia
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands as they meet, in Beijing, China, Sept. 2, 2025. Photo: Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian traveled to Beijing on Tuesday, joining Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin as the three nations aim to project a united front against the West, even as the stability of their partnership remains uncertain.
Iranian and Russian officials, along with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, will attend Beijing’s military parade this week to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
The high-profile gathering comes after Pezeshkian and Putin held talks in China on Monday on the sidelines of the 25th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin.
During a joint press conference, the Iranian president hailed Tehran’s cooperation with Moscow as “highly valuable,” adding that continued implementation of their 20-year treaty signed earlier this year would further strengthen ties and expand collaboration.
Putin also noted that the relationship between the two countries is “growing increasingly friendly and expanding” amid mounting pressure and sanctions from Western countries.
However, these remarks come after an Iranian official accused Russia without evidence of providing intelligence to Israel during the 12-day Middle Eastern war in June which allegedly helped the Jewish state target and destroy Iran’s air defense systems.
Mohammad Sadr, a member of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council and close adviser to former President Mohammad Khatami, claimed Israel’s precise strikes on Iranian air defense systems were suspicious.
He noted Russia’s refusal to support Iran during the war, saying that Moscow had shown a “bias in favor of Israel” and that the recent conflict demonstrated the “strategic agreement with Russia is nonsense.”
“This war proved that the strategic alliance with Moscow is worthless,” Sadr said during an interview with BBC Persian, referring to the 12-day war between Iran and Israel.
“We must not think that Russia will come to Iran’s aid when the time comes,” he continued.
Earlier this year, Moscow and Tehran signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement, further strengthening military ties between the two countries.
According to Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Iran views all partnerships with deep suspicion, and its relationship with Russia is no exception.
“Tehran has long accused Moscow of enabling Israeli strikes against its assets in Syria — well before Assad’s collapse — by deliberately switching off its S-400 systems,” Sayeh told The Algemeiner, referring to recently deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian air defense systems.
“The Moscow–Tehran relationship is less an alliance in the traditional sense than a transactional partnership,” he continued. “At this stage, it is unclear whether either side truly benefits from the arrangement.”
With European powers now formally pursuing the reimposition of UN sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program, Sayeh explained that the Iran-Russia partnership is further complicated, as the restrictions will once again limit arms sales and nuclear-related trade with the Islamic Republic.
“This may drive the regime to lean more heavily on Beijing, and some reports suggest it already has,” Sayeh told The Algemeiner.
According to some reports, China may be helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses following the 12-day war with Israel.
“The unresolved question is whether China views Tehran as a worthwhile bet, one worth risking violations of UN sanctions for, or whether it is instead watching Iran’s overlapping crises of water shortages, power outages, and economic decline with caution, skeptical of openly extending support,” he continued.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing. The two sides also recently signed a 25-year cooperation agreement, held joint naval drills, and continued to trade Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
At the SCO summit in Tianjin earlier this week, Tehran described its ties with China as “flourishing,” pointing to a strategic pact similar to the one it signed with Russia.
“The 25-year agreement with China is under implementation and progressing. Our bilateral relations are very good and expanding. We value our relationship with China,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei said during a press conference.
According to Jack Burnham, a research analyst at FDD, China’s assistance to Iran reflects Beijing’s long-standing practice of offering support when convenient and remaining discreet when tensions escalate.
“Still set firmly on its back foot, the [Iranian] regime may be looking for any possible friend in its foxhole, but the 12-day war should have convinced Tehran that Beijing only arrives when the weather is fair and risks tolerable,” Burnham told The Algemeiner.
After European countries moved to begin the process of reimposing UN sanctions on Tehran last week, China and Russia sided with Iran in opposing the move, once again favoring cautious diplomacy over direct support for their supposed partner.
In a letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Chinese, Russian, and Iranian foreign ministers condemned Britain, France, and Germany’s attempt to restore economic sanctions under the “snapback mechanism,” calling the move “legally and procedurally flawed.”
Our joint letter with my colleagues, the Foreign Ministers of China and Russia, signed in Tianjin reflects the firm position that the European attempt to invoke “snapback” is legally baseless and politically destructive. By declaring the E3’s move null and void, we have placed on… pic.twitter.com/YC4LKNkxMX
— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) September 1, 2025
Both China and Russia are signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, along with the three European countries known as the E3.
In 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear agreement.
The US and E3 have sought to reignite talks aimed at reaching a new nuclear agreement following Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in June.
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Teachers Unions Across US Under Fire for Alleged Antisemitism
National Education Association president Becky Pringle leads hundreds of demonstrators in chants during a rally to end US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, in Washington, DC, US, on, June 9, 2025. Photo: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
Teachers unions across the United States have come under intense scrutiny from both Jewish activists and federal lawmakers for allegedly promoting antisemitic ideas and fostering a hostile environment toward their Jewish members.
The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, for example, has opened an investigation into the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union, over allegations that its policies and materials discriminate against Jewish members.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the committee’s chairman, sent a letter late last month to NEA President Becky Pringle demanding documents tied to what he described as “antisemitic content” in the union’s 2025 handbook and its decision to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) over its support for Israel.
“The NEA’s 2025 handbook … contains passages and priorities that are hostile towards the Jewish people,” Walberg wrote, citing language that he said downplays the uniquely Jewish suffering of the Holocaust and promotes lessons on the so-called Palestinian “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
In July, the NEA refused to adopt as policy a ban on the ADL voted for by the group’s Representative Assembly during an annual conference.
“The National Education Association stands firmly for every student and educator, of every race, religion, and ethnicity, and we unequivocally reject antisemitism,” the NEA told JNS in response to Walberg’s letter. “We have fought against all kinds of hate, including antisemitism, throughout our history and remain focused on ensuring the safety of Jewish students and educators.”
The congressional probe comes as teachers unions across the country face mounting criticism from Jewish educators and civil rights advocates who say the organizations are failing to protect them, and in some cases are actively fostering hostility.
In Massachusetts, the Zionist Organization of America filed a sweeping civil rights complaint last week against the Massachusetts Teachers Association, accusing the organization of creating a discriminatory environment. The filing cites union-distributed images and posters viewed as antisemitic, including one showing a dollar bill folded into the shape of a Star of David and another reading “Zionists [Expletive] Off.” Some Jewish educators say they have already left the MTA over its stance.
In New York, meanwhile, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) has come under fire from its own Jewish members for their responses to antisemitic incidents in schools. The criticisms stem in part from an incident at Hillcrest High School, where a Jewish teacher was reportedly forced to lock herself in an office during an anti-Israel protest. Union critics also blasted the UFT for endorsing New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel who has been accused of antisemitism.
“How can we feel safe? When our teachers get attacked, our union says little and does nothing. When our protected rights are infringed upon, our union says little and does nothing. When they need us, they pretend we matter, and when they don’t, they ignore our concerns,” Moshe Spern, head of the United Jewish Teachers caucus, said last week at an “End Jew Hatred” rally, according to the New York Post.
Spern noted that more than 150 teachers are moving to cancel their union dues in protest.
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Iran’s Executions in August Jump 70 Percent Compared to Previous Year as Rights Groups Warn of Troubling Surge
Illustrative: A February 2023 protest in Washington, DC calling for an end to executions and human rights violations in Iran. Photo: Reuters/ Bryan Olin Dozier
The Islamic regime in Iran accelerated its execution machine last month, killing at least 152 prisoners according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.
The figure represents a surge of 70 percent compared to the 94 executions conducted in August 2024.
While Hengaw has identified 148 of those killed last month, four individuals remain unknown. Two people killed include Roozbeh Vadi, alleged to have engaged in “espionage for Israel,” and Mehdi Asgharzadeh, an alleged ISIS member. Iran executed at least five women for murder and one woman on drug charges.
According to Hengaw, two or more of the executions took place in public in Beyram and Kordkuy, cities in the country’s southern and northern provinces, respectively.
On Monday, the Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) released a report of human rights violations in Iran during August, noting that the number of executions had increased 40 percent compared to June and July, bringing the total execution count to 837 for the year. In comparison, the Islamic regime executed 930 people for the entire year of 2024.
HRANA broke down last month’s executions by charges, finding 87 drug offenses, 60 murder charges, two rapes, one for security offenses, and one person’s offenses are unknown. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, during the first half of 2025, nearly half of Iran’s executions targeted those convicted over drugs.
Iran killed one person on the charge of “corruption on earth,” which translates from the Koranic term “mofsed-e fel-arz” (مفسد فی الارض), a vague concept that Islamic judges have often applied toward political dissidents, alleged spies, or religious converts.
One tool that HRANA identifies Iran regularly deploying in its judicial system is forced confessions.
“Extracting forced confessions from political and ideological defendants, followed by broadcasting them on state television, is one of the regime’s routine practices against its opponents,” the human rights group stated. “In 2024, HRANA documented 28 cases of forced confessions. This month as well, Iran’s state television aired the forced confessions of a group of Christian converts.”
HRANA also found 73 arrests last month for citizens speaking out about their political views and beliefs; in addition, the state sentenced 27 people to 658 months in prison, 132 months of exile, and 130 lashes for speech offenses.
United Nations spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani warned last week that the human rights situation in Iran could be even worse than documented figures suggested.
“The high number of executions indicates a systematic pattern of using the death penalty as a tool of state intimidation, with disproportionate targeting of ethnic minorities and migrants,” Shamdasani said. “Public executions add an extra layer of outrage upon human dignity … not only on the dignity of the people concerned, the people who are executed, but also on all those who have to bear witness”
Shamdasani warned that “the psychological trauma of bearing witness to somebody being hanged in public, particularly for children, is unacceptable.” She argued that the death penalty “should never be imposed for conduct that is protected under international human rights law.”
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Saturday announced the capture of eight people accused of aiding Israel’s Mossad espionage agency. During Iran’s 12-day war with Israel in June, police arrested as many as 21,000 individuals.
Australia announced the expulsion of Iran’s ambassador on Aug. 26, giving the diplomat seven days to leave following the discovery that the Islamic regime had directed antisemitic terrorism against the country’s Jews.
“These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. “They were attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community.”
Mike Burgess, director general of Australia’s security agency, said “they’re just using cut-outs, including people who are criminals and members of organized crime gangs to do their bidding or direct their bidding,”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Aug. 24 that “they want Iran to be obedient to America. The Iranian nation will stand with all of its power against those who have such erroneous expectations … People who ask us not to issue slogans against the US … to have direct negotiations with the US only see appearances … This issue is unsolvable.”