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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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‘The Jewish Spirit’: Holocaust Survivors, Freed Israeli Hostages Gather at Auschwitz for ‘March of the Living’
Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz for the annual March of the Living on April 24, 2025. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Oswiecim, Poland — Holocaust survivors, relatives of Israeli hostages, and survivors of Hamas captivity marched together at Auschwitz, the infamous former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, for the first time on Thursday, joining Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the annual March of the Living.
The march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II — took place on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day and included 80 Holocaust survivors, many of whom were also death march survivors, to mark 80 years since the liberation of the camps.
March of the Living president Phyllis Greenberg Heideman addressed the survivors, who were seated next to the gate bearing the notorious inscription, “Work sets you free.”
“It’s a strange thing to say, but we welcome you to Auschwitz,” she said. “You are the true heroes. We will treasure your legacy forever.”
Almog Meir Jan and his mother Orit. Almog was rescued by the IDF on June 5 during the Arnon Mission. Photo: Chen Schimmel
Standing outside the crematoria and gas chambers at Auschwitz I, recently released hostage Eli Sharabi said, “The Holocaust was unlike anything else — we will never forget and never forgive.”
“But our presence here is the triumph of the Jewish spirit. The Jewish people sanctify life, not death. I endured horrors in enemy captivity, but I chose life. That gives me hope to get up each morning and begin rebuilding,” he added.
Sharabi, whose wife and daughters were murdered during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, was released in February after nearly 500 days in captivity. His emaciated appearance as he was paraded through Gaza on his release led to comparisons with concentration camp survivors.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran broke down after seeing Sharabi. The two embraced for several minutes. “Seeing him in real life, in this place, just made it all suddenly seem very close. This is no longer something that happened 80 years ago; it’s continuing until this day,” Shukran told The Algemeiner.
Pro-Israel influencer Shiraz Shukran embracing former hostage Eli Sharabi. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In remarks to reporters prior to the march, Herzog called the return of the hostages a “universal human imperative.”
“With a broken heart, I remind us all that although after the Holocaust we vowed, ‘Never again,’ today, even as we stand here, the souls of dozens of Jews again ‘yearn within a cage,’ ‘thirsting for water and for freedom,’ as 59 of our brothers and sisters are held by terrorist murderers in Gaza, in a horrific crime against humanity,” Herzog said, referring to the hostages kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion who remain in captivity.
His Polish counterpart, President Andrzej Duda, said the march was “a dramatic call of ‘never again.’ No more hatred, no more discrimination, no more antisemitism.”
He called for “all wars in the Middle East to end,” and for a two-state solution, which he said was the “most rational solution [to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] that gives hope for achieving stable and lasting peace.”
The two leaders signed the visitors’ book and laid a wreath at Auschwitz’s Black Wall, where the Nazis executed prisoners.
At the march’s opening ceremony, the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, lit one of six candles — representing the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis — and addressed rising antisemitism in the world.
“Jews all over the world fear walking streets with a kippah and it’s unacceptable. College students are being attacked verbally and physically,” he told The Algemeiner.
He praised US President Donald Trump for “combating this scourge.”
“There’s a new sheriff in town. It’s my hope the rest of the world can look to him to see how to support and defend the Jewish community against these vile attacks,” he said.
Matt Brooks, chief executive officer of the Republican Jewish Coalition, with Malcolm Hoenlein, vice chairman emeritus of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
In Block 5, where thousands of victims’ eyeglasses are displayed behind glass, Laly Dery told a delegation of Israeli teenagers from the national civil service about her son, Sgt. First Class (res.) Saadia, who fell in battle in Gaza in June.
“Just like my son, who served the country with every fiber of his being, you have earned the enormous privilege of serving the state of Israel,” Dery said.
Derai’s words resonated with Sara Bisan, the only member of the national service delegation not wearing an Israeli flag. Instead, Bisan wore the distinctive multi-colored flag of the Druze community to which she belongs.
“I feel her pain, and it hurts,” Bisan said, reflecting on the death of her own friend from the northern Druze village of Kfar Yarka, who was also killed in Gaza.
“But our people, the Druze and the Jews, share a lot, including a love of Israel. I also feel that serving the state of Israel is a privilege,” she added.
Sara Bisan. Photo: Debbie Weiss / The Algemeiner
Twelve thousand participants marched the 1.7 miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau for the main ceremony, which was cut short this year due to heavy rain.
As thunder echoed overhead, released hostage Agam Berger played the theme from “Schindler’s List” on a 150-year-old violin rescued during the Holocaust. Daniel Weiss, a survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri whose father was murdered on Oct. 7 and whose mother was abducted and later killed in Gaza, performed a musical rendition of the psalm Shir Lamaalot alongside her.
“The Lord will guard you from all evil; He will guard your soul,” Weiss sang, his voice quavering.
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French Far-Left Party Calls for Ban on Israeli Pop Star Eyal Golan’s Paris Concert
Eyal Golan. Photo: Screenshot
France’s leading far-left party has called for the cancellation of Israeli pop star Eyal Golan’s upcoming concert in Paris, describing him as “a true mouthpiece for supporters of genocide” in Gaza.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the La France Insoumise party (LFI — “France Unbowed”), led by leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, urged the National Assembly — the lower house of the French Parliament — to ban Golan’s upcoming concert, claiming that he “should not come to sing the praises of genocide in Paris.”
“We call for a broad mobilization to prevent this event from taking place,” LFI lawmakers wrote in the statement, referring to Golan’s concert scheduled for May 20. “We ask the prefect to ban it immediately.”
“No one should come to Paris to sing hymns to the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the statement continued.
According to the party, the 54-year-old singer called for “the extermination of the Palestinian people” in a social media post the day after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which he wrote, “Leave no soul alive.”
LFI also said that Golan “repeated the statement a week later, before receiving support from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir,” who serves as Israel’s national security minister.
In their statement, LFI lawmakers claimed that Golan’s concert, expected to gather more than 4,500 people, “constitutes a real voice for genocide supporters.”
“France cannot tolerate such an unnecessary insult to the thousands of Gaza victims and their loved ones,” the statement read.
In response to these accusations, Liam Productions, the event organizer, denounced the push to cancel Golan’s concert as antisemitic and expressed their eagerness to meet the Jewish community in France, promising a “unifying and special evening.”
“On Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we remember the consequences of staying silent in the face of hate, far-left parties in France seek to boycott an Israeli artist simply because he is Israeli,” the statement read.
“This is not freedom of expression — it is antisemitism disguised as morality. The people of Israel will not be silent, will not apologize, and will not stop singing.”
Mélenchon and his party have a long history of pushing anti-Israel policies and, according to Jewish leaders, of making antisemitic comments — such as suggesting that Jews killed Jesus, echoing a false claim that was used to justify antisemitic violence and discrimination throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.
The French diplomat has been criticized by French Jews as a threat to their community, as well as to those who support Israel.
Mélenchon has previously described the French Jewish community as “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest.” He has also urged the French government to recognize a “Palestinian state.”
In the wake of the Hamas onslaught on Israel, Mélenchon and his party issued a statement calling the attacks “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” in response to the ongoing Israeli “occupation.”
Last year, Mélenchon openly expressed support for Hezbollah on social media, as the Iran-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon continued to clash with Israel.
“Mass killing in Lebanon by Netanyahu’s invading army,” Melenchon wrote in a post on X, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The toll is getting worse by the hour. Full support for the national resistance of the Lebanese.”
France has experienced a disturbing surge in antisemitic incidents since the Oct. 7 atrocities, with 1,570 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded last year.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) — the main representative body of French Jews.
“LFI has given antisemitism a political endorsement,” CRIF president Yonathan Arfi told the French publication Le Point last year. “We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent in France, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
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Trump Signs Seismic Executive Order on Foreign Funding in Higher Education
US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon shakes hands with Annette Albright next to US President Donald Trump during an event to sign executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, April 23, 2025. Photo: Leah Millis via Reuters Connect.
US President Donald Trump has signed a seismic executive order to strengthen federal law which colleges and universities have long circumvented to avoid reporting donations they receive from illiberal foreign governments and individuals.
“Protecting American educational, cultural, and national security interests requires transparency regarding foreign funds flowing to American higher education and research institutions,” Trump said in the order, which was signed in the Oval Office in the presence of the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon on Wednesday. “It is the policy of my administration to end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.”
The executive order noted that during Trump’s first term in office, the Education Department launched investigations of 19 higher education institutions suspected of concealing foreign donations and any undue influence the immense sums may have gained the country from which they originated — inquiries that led to the disclosure of $6.5 billion worth of unreported gifts. The Biden administration, he said, “undid” that work, “hindering public access to information on foreign gifts and contracts.”
The remainder of the order enumerates enforcement duties delegated to McMahon, which include reversing Biden-era policies which countenanced lax observance of the law — Section 117 of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 — updating the public on the department’s findings, and impounding federal funds appropriated to institutions that continue to shroud their foreign donations behind a veil of secrecy and corporate spin.
“Unfortunately, in the last four years, the Biden administration undermined the structures the president built to do this critical work, allowing nations like China and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to US universities with little to no oversight,” McMahon said in a statement. “This financial infiltration enabled foreign governments to steal taxpayer-funded intellectual property and reshape how our elite campuses teach about Israel and the Middle East.”
Foreign money in higher education is an issue to which scholars and nonprofit groups have called attention for years, arguing that it is an instrument of hostile powers that aim to distort US foreign policy by exposing students to propaganda or other ideas which undermine faith in liberal values such as free markets, limited government, and freedom of the press. Some of it is used to rehabilitate the reputations of authoritarian governments, a tactic which, experts argue, effectively converts the openness of American society into a force of its own self-subversion.
For example, according to the 2017 National Association of Scholars (NAS) report “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for years planted “Confucius Institutes” at universities across the US, teaching students that Taiwan is Chinese territory while censoring darker moments in the regime’s history, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre that killed thousands of Chinese citizens. The institutes, the report added, came with substantial financial benefits, such as extra funds for the University at Buffalo’s Asian studies department and “opera costumes and materials in the lobby of Binghamton University.”
At other times, the Confucius Institutes were allegedly used as bases from which to conduct espionage and theft of American research and intellectual property.
NAS president Peter Wood told The Algemeiner on Thursday that Trump’s executive order is the right move, but that higher education will “resist” complying with it.
“What is at stake here is not just compliance with a good accounting principle. What is really at stake is the contempt with which many college and university presidents regard America’s national interest,” Wood said. “Allowing our universities to become beholden to the Chinese Community Party endangers Americans. The National Association of Scholars has helped to track the theft of intellectual property, the duplicity of American researchers, and the diversion research programs all under the influence of Chinese funding. China is far from the only source of such subversive funding, but it is by far the largest source.”
He added, “President Trump’s forceful executive order will go a long way towards curing this problem. We can be under no illusion, however, that America’s colleges and universities will cheerfully comply. They have a long record of ignoring lawful requirements for such disclosure and they are now more eager than ever to demonstrate their defiance of America’s laws. In light of other executive orders against [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and other forms of academic malfeasance, dozens of prominent research universities are openly declaring that they intend to resist.”
NAS has recorded copious data on foreign funding of higher education, notably in the Foreign Donor Database it created in 2024 that led to the uncovering of vast sums the Qatari government had pumped into American universities — Cornell University received over $322 million, for example, from the Qatar National Research Fund between 2015 and 2018 — to promote pro-Hamas propaganda.
Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner that Qatar has “given billions to universities, including to share their Middle East studies program which then in turn develop and disseminate K-12 curriculums which are dramatically anti-Israel, antisemitic, and pro-Islamist.”
The donation of billions of unreported dollars to US institutions of higher education is strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a 2023 report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled, “The Corruption of the American Mind.”
From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations. The largest donor it named is Qatar, which former US President Joe Biden described in 2022 as a “major non-NATO ally.” From 2014-2019, Qatar gave American universities a striking $2.7 billion in undocumented funds.
Additionally, students attending universities that received foreign funding witnessed antisemitism “significantly more often” than those attending schools that did not.
“A lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education,” the report said. “A massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry, and free expression.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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