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Spielberg’s ‘Fabelmans’ earns 7 Oscar nods, WWII epic with anti-Nazi past gets 9
(JTA) – “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama about his Jewish upbringing, had an expected strong haul of Oscar nominations, picking up seven nods Tuesday morning.
A remake of a movie once targeted by the Nazis, a blockbuster embroiled in a lawsuit with an Israeli family and a documentary by the program director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival also got recognized in a list jam-packed with Jewish characters, stories and artists.
Spielberg’s movie overcame an anemic box office showing to score nominations in the major categories of best picture, director and screenplay, for Spielberg and celebrated Jewish playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner. The directing nomination brings Spielberg’s total nominations in the category to nine, tying him with Martin Scorsese for the second-most directing nominations in Oscar history.
The film also scored acting nods for Judd Hirsch, who is Jewish, and Michelle Williams, who recently said she is planning to raise her two children with Judaism.
“The Fabelmans” was the best picture nominee with the strongest Jewish themes, but it wasn’t the only one. The psychological drama “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as a problematic conductor, picked up six nominations, including for picture, actress and director; the film weaves Jewish mysticism into its storytelling.
“All Quiet On The Western Front,” Netflix’s new German-language adaptation of the classic 1929 novel about the horrors experienced by German soldiers during World War I, was also nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture, international feature and adapted screenplay. The film’s source material was once banned and burned by the ascending Nazi Party, which believed its anti-war stance made the German military look weak and constituted a threat to their plans for world domination.
When the book’s initial 1930 film adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker Lewis Milestone, was released in Germany, Nazis led by Joseph Goebbels set off stink bombs, released mice into the theaters and called the movie a “Judenfilm” (or “Jewish film”). Germany and Austria banned the film from being shown in their countries, and the public censorship campaign led the novel’s author, Erich Maria Remarque, to renounce his German citizenship (Nazis were erroneously labeling him as a Jew).
In response, Jewish studio head Carl Laemmle Sr., agreed to heavily edit the movie and remove material deemed objectionable to the Nazis in order to improve its commercial prospects in Germany. One possible silver lining for the remake’s producers: The 1930 film went on to win best picture that year.
Tom Cruise at a “Top Gun: Maverick” premier at Leicester Square in London, May 19, 2022. (Neil Mockford/FilmMagic via Getty Images)
Back to this year’s Oscars: “Top Gun: Maverick,” the action blockbuster sequel, picked up four nominations, including for best picture. The film’s distributor, Paramount, is currently embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with the family of Israeli journalist Ehud Yonay, whose magazine article about a Navy fighter pilot school was the basis for the original “Top Gun” in 1986. In November, a judge dismissed Paramount’s attempts to throw out the suit and ruled the Yonay family could proceed with their claims.
The writer, director and actress Sarah Polley also scored a nomination for best adapted screenplay for her drama “Women Talking,” about a group of abused women in an isolated Mennonite community, which was also nominated for best picture. Polley has a Jewish biological father, whose secret parentage she explored in her 2013 documentary “Stories We Tell.”
The Jewish film producer Gail Berman also scored her first Oscar nomination for producing best picture nominee “Elvis,” while Jewish producing partners Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel scored their own best picture nomination for “The Whale.” The movie, which Aronofsky directed, stars Brendan Fraser (also nominated) as a morbidly obese English professor.
In the performing categories, one actor was nominated for playing a real-life Jewish convert: Ana de Armas received a best actress nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in Netflix’s “Blonde.” Monroe converted to Judaism in the 1950s and remained devoted to the religion even after divorcing her husband, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller.
Also, veteran actress Jamie Lee Curtis — whose father, Golden Age Hollywood actor Tony Curtis, was Jewish — picked up her first-ever Oscar nomination for her supporting role as a sinister tax officer in the multiverse sci-fi comedy “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
Curtis is nominated in the category alongside her co-star Stephanie Hsu, who is also known to fans of the very Jewish TV series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as Mei Lin, a Chinese restaurant owner who gets together with co-lead Joel Maisel. Early buzz on the upcoming fifth season of “Maisel” says that Hsu’s character will convert to Judaism.
Another “Everything Everywhere” co-star, Jewish actress Jenny Slate, helped a different film score an Oscar nomination in the best animated feature category: the stop-motion mockumentary “Marcel The Shell With Shoes On.” Slate co-wrote the feature with her ex-husband Dean Fleischer-Camp, who directs; Slate also voices the lead role of Marcel. However, she is not one of the nominated producers on the film.
“All The Beauty And The Bloodshed,” a portrait of the outsider artist Nan Goldin and her years-long activism campaign against opioid manufacturers the Sackler family, was nominated in the best documentary feature category and is favored to win. The film documents how Goldin was born to Jewish parents but had an emotionally abusive family life and left home in her teens. The Sacklers are also Jewish.
The documentary short category saw the second nomination in a row for Jewish filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose documentary “How Do You Measure A Year” chronicles many years of his daughter Ella’s birthdays. Rosenblatt is the program director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski was also nominated in the international feature category for his drama “EO,” told from the perspective of a donkey. Skolimowski’s father was a member of the Polish Resistance and his mother hid a Jewish family in their house during World War II.
Jewish composer Justin Hurwitz, who won an Oscar for his work on “La La Land,” was nominated again for the score for “Babylon,” a follow-up production with that film’s director, Damien Chazelle.
And in the original song category, Jewish songwriter Diane Warren extended her nomination streak to 14 for the number “Applause,” from the feminist documentary “Tell It Like A Woman.” Warren has never won a competitive Oscar but did receive an honorary Academy Award last year.
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More Troubling Anti-Israel Activity Occurs at North Carolina Colleges, Possibly Violating State Law
North Carolina State University. Photo: Wiki Commons.
Twenty professors currently working at public universities in North Carolina have pledged to promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel “in the classroom and on campus.”
The pledge characterized Israel as a “settler colonial state.”
All 20 are employed by the University of North Carolina (UNC) System, which is required by State law and the UNC equality policy to be institutionally neutral “on the political controversies of the day.” All 20 signed the BDS pledge using their UNC System credentials.
As reported last week, one of these professors, Kristen Alff, is currently teaching the “History of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict” at NC State University (NCSU).
Alff is the only professor currently teaching at NCSU who signed the BDS pledge. Nevertheless, she was chosen to teach the course on Israel, which suggests to the community that the university has an anti-Israel agenda.
Dr. Stanley Robboy, Professor Emeritus of Pathology at Duke University, wrote to UNC System President Peter Hans and other officials about Alff’s course: “Is it not curious that NC State has chosen the one historian among its ranks who openly calls Israel a colonial settler state and publicly supports the BDS movement to teach its course on Israel?”
A local professional wrote to university officials, “As a recipient of federal funding, the university [NCSU] is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which obligates institutions to address conduct that may create a hostile environment for Jewish students, including antisemitism related to shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”
A parent of two NCSU graduates wrote to Dean Deanna Dannels: “University leadership needs to step up and stop this biased teaching against Israel … This is teaching Jew Hatred.”
The UNC System appears dismissive of such concerns. The Vice President for Communications told me: “Faculty have wide latitude in how they teach about controversial issues. Expectations of neutrality do not apply to individual scholars in the same way that they do to institutional leaders.”
I contacted most of the 20 professors who signed the pledge. One wrote back that he doesn’t “advocate” for any political cause in the classroom, but refused to remove himself from the list. Besides one other vague response I got, the rest of the professors refused to comment.
Due to space constraints, I will highlight just two more of the 20 UNC System professors who pledged to advance BDS “in the classroom and on campus.”
In 2023, I attended an infamous UNC event, in which one of the invited speakers called Oct. 7 a “beautiful day” and spoke with pride and admiration for Hamas.
Sara Smith, who signed the BDS pledge using her UNC-Chapel Hill credentials, served as moderator and host of the event.
From what I observed, it didn’t appear to me that one person in the room — including Smith — appeared troubled by the enthusiastic endorsement of Hamas.
Several panelists openly agreed with the vile, pro Hamas comments. At no point did Smith or any other UNC faculty member or participant challenge this public support of Hamas or say to the students in attendance, “There was nothing beautiful about Hamas’ murder and rapes that day.” Audience questions were not permitted, which meant that the pro-Hamas comments went completely unchallenged.
Within a week of my event report, UNC-Chapel Hill’s provost at the time wrote a blistering letter of concern to faculty and officials, saying, “One thing is clear: from the outside, the academy appears to be fostering a banal kind of evil.”
UNC apologized repeatedly for this event.
Nadia Yaqub also signed the BDS pledge using her UNC-Chapel Hill credentials. In 2024, I attended a UNC event that Yaqub moderated and hosted. From what I observed, it seemed she was in charge.
As I reported at the time, all five panelists were anti-Israel radicals. Four panelists had signed the BDS pledge and the fifth had signed an anti-Israel statement. Students and the community were provided a one-sided demonization of Israel that ignored the legal requirement of institutional neutrality without including a single pro-Israel or even neutral voice to challenge the biased panel and the two hours of Israel-bashing speeches.
About 55 seconds into her opening remarks, Yaqub told the audience that Israel is fighting “Palestinian resistance groups.” Not a single panelist spoke up to disagree, and to let the audience know that the United States and many other countries had designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.
That same year, Yaqub spoke at a UNC Faculty Council meeting to oppose a resolution titled “Condemning Antisemitism on Campus.”
Yaqub and Smith were each contacted for this column and did not respond.
The UNC System and the North Carolina legislature must initiate comprehensive investigations to ascertain whether any professors are fulfilling their pledges to utilize taxpayer-funded public classrooms and campuses for the purpose of boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Israel. The US Department of Education also needs to launch an investigation to determine if Jewish and pro-Israel students and scholars are being discriminated against in North Carolina public universities.
Peter Reitzes writes about antisemitism in North Carolina and beyond.
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Israeli President, Jewish Leaders Meet to Discuss Diaspora Strengthening Support for Judaism, Israel
Senior leadership members of the Aish organization met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Haim Zach/GPO
Senior leaders of the Jewish educational organization Aish met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog at his residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday to discuss Jews in the diaspora and their engagement with Israel following the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in the country on Oct. 7, 2023.
The discussion focused on the increase of Jews seeking connection, education, and a sense of community with their Jewish peers and Israel in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack. The term “Oct. 8 Jews” was coined to describe Jews who had the desire to strengthen their Jewish identity and/or relationship to Israel after the 2023 massacre. However, Aish and other Jewish organizations have noticed that has time has passed, maintaining that sense of connection to Judaism and Israel has become difficult.
“The wave is there; we need to bring our efforts together across the Jewish world to sustain the newfound sense of Judaism and Zionism and strengthen it,” Aish CEO Rabbi Burg told Herzog during Wednesday’s meeting.
“After Oct. 7, we witnessed something remarkable,” he added. “Oct. 7 shattered our sense of security, but it also awakened something profound in the Jewish soul. Jews who had never felt connected to their heritage searched for meaning. Students on college campuses who once stayed silent became the defenders of both Judaism and the State of Israel. Families began observing Shabbat, and Jews began expressing their faith and connection to Israel in a myriad of ways, showing who we truly are as a people. At Aish, we’ve built our entire mission around this movement, creating pathways for every Jew to discover the depth, wisdom, and beauty of our tradition.”
Burg and other Aish leaders presented Herzog with the organization’s plan to combat this challenge through the use of technological and educational initiatives. The strategy includes using learning tools driven by artificial intelligence that can, for example, provide personalized Jewish education, long and short-form content to reach Jewish social media users, and conversational platforms that can answer questions about Jewish law, history, and philosophy.
“Aish recognized that waiting for Jews to seek out educational institutions may no longer be sufficient in an era when much of Jewish identity formation happens through screens, and we pivoted accordingly,” Burg said.
During Wednesday’s meeting, Aish leaders and Israel’s president also discussed the antisemitism that Jewish students have faced on university campuses following the Oct. 7 attack, and Aish shared the resources they need to support students who are targeted.
“I congratulate Aish on their impressive and impactful work in the field of Jewish education in Israel and around the world,” Herzog said in a released statement. “Since Oct. 7, Aish’s broad-ranging efforts to engage Jews with authentic educational experiences and meaningful online Jewish content have become more important than ever. May Aish continue to go from strength to strength.”
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Israel to Honor Charlie Kirk at Antisemitism Conference
Senior Advancement Director at Turning Point USA Stacy Sheridan speaks next to a portrait of slain conservative commentator Charlie Kirk during his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, US, Sept. 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin O’Hara
The State of Israel will posthumously give Charlie Kirk an award for his efforts to combat antisemitism at the 2026 International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced on Wednesday.
The honor comes amid an effort by the so-called “new” political right, including voices such as podcaster Candace Owens, to rewrite the history of Kirk’s conservative activism and rebrand him as someone preparing to turn against Israel in the days before his assassination on the campus of Utah Valley University in September.
Their revisionism, however, obscures the fact that Kirk was an ardent supporter of Israel throughout his career, taking on activists of both the far left and far right who promoted rising antisemitism and sought to undermine the US-Israel alliance.
“There’s a dark Jew hate out there, and I see it,” Kirk told a student during a podcast episode which aired in 2025. “Don’t get yourself involved in that. I’m telling you it will rot your brain. It’s bad for your soul. It’s bad. It’s evil. I think it’s demonic.”
Following Kirk’s death Netanyahu issued a statement which praised the US activist for “speaking truth and defending freedom” and noted that the two had set tentative plans for him to visit Israel.
“A lion-hearted fiend of Israel, he fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization,” the Israeli premier said. “We lost an incredible human being. His boundless pride in America and his valiant belief in free speech will leave a lasting impact.”
Born on Oct. 14, 1993, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, Kirk formally entered the political arena in 2012, five months before the reelection of former US President Barack Obama, to found Turning Point USA (TPUSA) — which served as a bellwether of declining youth support for the progressive consensus on race, free speech, and economics that took hold in American college campuses in the 1960s.
TPUSA grew rapidly, challenging campus primacy of the College Republicans organization and exuding confidence in conservative ideas at a moment when political scientists and other experts speculated that the Republican Party would decline to the point that the Democratic Party would achieve long-standing majorities in local and federal government.
Far-right activists have attempted to distort Kirk’s legacy, with figures such as Tucker Carlson implying that he was murdered by “guys sitting around eating hummus” in Jerusalem and Owens suggesting Israel was behind his death.
There has been so evidence to support such claims. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged for murdering Kirk and potentially faces the death penalty. He was romantically involved with his transgender roommate, and prosecutors have reportedly argued that Kirk’s anti-trans rhetoric was a key factor that allegedly led him to shoot the Turning Point USA founder.
Experts have argued that far-right efforts to distort Kirk’s stance on Israel and antisemitism are part of an effort to undermine not only the US-Israel alliance but Washington’s leadership in the world more broadly.
“It’s antisemitism for the purpose of undermining Americans’ confidence in ourselves and in our post- World War II role in the world,” Hudson Institute scholar Rebeccah Heinrichs said during a conference on antisemitism held in Washington, DC in December. “That is very dangerous because we can’t come to consensus on anything else we need from a grand strategy perspective if American scapegoat our problems to the Jews and if they believe that Israel is no longer an ally but it never was, and in fact that we were on the wrong side of World War II, which is now the narrative being pushed.”
Meanwhile, antisemitism is surging across the US.
This past weekend, a 19-year-old suspect, Stephen Pittman, was arrested for allegedly igniting a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. According to court filings, he told US federal investigators that he targeted the building over its “Jewish ties.”
“This latest deplorable crime against a Jewish institution reminds us that the same hatred that motivated the KKK to attack Beth Israel in 1967 is alive today,” the Florida Holocaust Museum said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner following news of Pittman’s arrest. “Antisemitism is still trying to intimidate Jews, drive them out of public life, and make houses of worship targets of violence instead of place of safety and community.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, providing statistical proof of what has been described as an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly 50 years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The FBI disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this rise in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.