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The real Jewish history behind Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ and the WWII rescue mission that inspired it
(JTA) — While the United States swung its door shut to most refugees during World War II, a young American in France saved thousands, including some of the 20th century’s defining artists and thinkers — such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt — from the Nazis.
The rescue mission of Varian Fry, which went largely unrecognized during his life, is the subject of Netflix’s new drama “Transatlantic,” launching Friday from “Unorthodox” creator Anna Winger.
Starring Cory Michael Smith as Fry, the seven-episode “Transatlantic” aims to recreate his operation in Marseille after the Nazis defeated France and before the United States entered the war. Winger has injected several imagined romances, war efforts and characters into the fictionalized series, including one posed as Fry’s lover, named Thomas Lovegrove (played by Israeli Amit Rahav). Although Fry’s son has said that he was a “closeted homosexual,” no such person is known to have existed.
Winger believes these inventions will invite Netflix viewers to learn more about the true story.
“The people who lived through these stories are dying out,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My job is to bring this to a wide audience, to people who don’t know anything about it.”
The story behind the series
The real Varian Fry, a 32-year-old journalist and suit-clad Harvard graduate, showed up in Marseille with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names in August 1940.
After France surrendered to Germany, Fry was among 200 Americans — including journalists, artists, museum curators, university presidents and Jewish refugees — to create the Emergency Rescue Committee at the Hotel Commodore in New York. This group was concerned with Article 19 in France’s armistice with Germany, which required French authorities to surrender any individuals demanded by the Germans.
The private relief organization drew up frenzied lists of anti-Nazi intellectuals who were trapped in France. With the help of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the ERC obtained some emergency visas and sent Fry to lead the rescue efforts in Marseille, a port city in the southern, unoccupied part of France.
What he found there was impossible to manage alone. His mission began in his room at the Hotel Splendide, where long lines of refugees waited in the morning before he woke up and at night after he went to bed. They sometimes walked straight into his bedroom without knocking, Fry wrote in a letter to his wife shortly after he arrived.
Gathering a small devoted staff, including Frenchmen, refugees and American expatriates, Fry moved his office to Rue Grignan and later Boulevard Garibaldi. Outside of Marseille he rented the Villa Air-Bel — colorfully recreated in “Transatlantic” — to house eminent writers and eccentric Surrealist artists waiting for visas.
The group developed legal and illegal branches, with the cover organization offering humanitarian relief while a behind-the-scenes operation flouted the law to help refugees escape. Using Marseille’s lively black market, the staff found hiding places, forged documents and bribed officials. Bil Spira, a Jewish Austrian-born cartoonist, forged passports for the ERC. (He was caught and deported to Auschwitz, but survived.) Resistance fighters Hans and Lisa Fittko devised an escape route to Spain, guiding refugees across the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
By the time he was forced out in October 1941, Fry’s shoestring operation had enabled 2,000 Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees to flee Europe, including such towering artists as Chagall, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and intellects such as Arendt, Heinrich Mann and André Breton. It has been estimated that 20,000 refugees made contact with the rescue center in Marseille.
Fry’s illegal efforts made him plenty of enemies from his own country, who accused him of interfering with American neutrality in the war. He angered the state department, officials at the American consulate in Marseille and ERC members in New York. In August 1941, he was arrested by Vichy police and sent back to New York.
Fry died in 1967 at the age of 59. Only a few months earlier, he had received the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration of merit — and the only official recognition in his lifetime. In 1994, he became the first American honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and history authority, as Righteous Among the Nations.
The Emergency Rescue Committee merged with another relief organization and became the International Rescue Committee in 1942. It is still in operation today and currently led by a Jewish CEO, former British politician David Miliband.
What’s in the show, and why some are against it
Some of Fry’s colleagues are fictionalized in “Transatlantic,” including the Jewish Berliner Albert Hirschman (Lucas Englander), who would become an economist in the United States; the Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs); and the Jewish Austro-Hungarian activist Lisa Fittko (Deleila Piasko). American diplomat Hiram Bigham, who gave Fry crucial help and even hid writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his home, is also a character in the show.
Throughout the seven episodes, rescue missions swirl around a series of fictional love affairs. In addition to Fry’s relationship, a triangle unfolds between Hirschman, Gold and the fictional American Consul Graham Patterson. (There is no evidence that Gold romanced either with her comrade or with any American consul in Marseille.) Lisa Fittko has an affair with the fictional character Paul Kandjo, who organizes armed resistance to Vichy.
Gillian Jacobs as heiress Mary Jayne Gold. (Anika Molnar/Netflix)
Several wartime plot points are also invented, including a prison break at Camp de Mille and Gold’s collaboration with British intelligence.
The degree of fictionalization has angered some people close to the real history. Pierre Sauvage, president of the Varian Fry Institute, called the show’s trailer “shocking.” Born in 1944, Sauvage survived the end of the Holocaust in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, although his Jewish parents were turned down by Fry’s overwhelmed committee. He became close friends with some of Fry’s fellow rescuers in their later years, including the late Gold, Hirschman and Fittko.
“Are there any red lines?” he said. “Can one fictionalize at will, with no concern for the reality of the story, for the false impression that people will get — and for the way it affects the private lives of the families of people portrayed?”
Sheila Isenberg, who documented Fry’s operation in her book “A Hero of Our Own,” has described the series as a “travesty.” Thomas Fischer Weiss, a child survivor who attempted Fry’s escape route through the Pyrenees at 5 years old, also said the historical events needed no embellishment.
“I think you should tell it straight,” he told the JTA.
The legacy of the ‘troublemakers’
Sauvage believes that if Fry and his associates were alive today, they would like to be remembered for their convictions.
“These were people who were sort of in your face,” he said. “People who knew clearly what they felt and expressed it. They would often describe themselves as troublemakers. Mary Jayne [Gold] said about Varian that he was an ‘ornery cuss’ — it took orneriness to stick to your guns.”
That orneriness was critical at a time when many Americans were apathetic to the plight of European Jews — a 1938 poll in Fortune magazine found that fewer than 5% believed the United States should raise its immigration quotas for refugees. By the summer of 1941, it was too late to open the doors. The German policy of expelling Jews had changed into extermination.
According to Sauvage, America’s refusal to accept more refugees had something to do with that shift.
“The Nazis could legitimately come to the conclusion that the world wouldn’t do anything about the murders and wouldn’t really care all that much,” he said. “What the Varian Fry mission symbolizes is people who cared.”
Varian Fry with Miriam Davenport in the first offices of the Centre Américain de Secours in Marseille in 1940. Davenport, a friend of Mary Jayne Gold, also worked in the rescue effort but is omitted from “Transatlantic.” (Varian Fry Institute)
After their year in Marseille, the rescuers settled into more ordinary lives. Hirschman became an economist with appointments at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Lisa Fittko ended up in Chicago, where she worked hard in import-export, translation and clerical jobs to earn money, eventually joining protests against the Vietnam War. Gold divided her time between New York City and a villa on the French Riviera.
They all remembered the rescue mission as their finest hour. Speaking with Sauvage, Gold called that year “the only one in her life that really mattered.”
A refugee story for troubled times
Fry’s rescue mission inspired Julie Orringer to write “The Flight Portfolio,” a 2019 novel that became the basis for “Transatlantic.” Orringer was captivated by the image of a young man arriving in Marseille, idealistic and unprepared for the depth of anguish he would find.
“The task was way too big,” she told the JTA. “He realized quite early on that he was going to ask for help, that he was going to have to turn to others who had deeper experience. And in collecting this group of incredible individuals around him, he assembled a kind of collective mind that really could make a difference under the very difficult circumstances that he faced.”
She believed that Fry left an example for the inexperienced. “If you‘re the kind of person who wants to take action on behalf of refugees, but doesn’t know how to do it, ask for help,” she said.
Winger, a Jewish Massachusetts native who has lived in Berlin for two decades, conceived of making a series about Fry in 2015. Germany saw an influx of more than a million migrants that year, most of them fleeing Syria’s horrific civil war. She optioned Orringer’s book in 2020.
“I thought a lot about the fact that people like us — artists, Jews, both — had to leave Berlin as refugees, but now there were so many people coming to Berlin as refugees,” said Winger.
Then, just as she started filming “Transatlantic” on location in Marseille, a new war broke out in Europe.
“The war in Ukraine started three days into the production and there was a whole other wave of refugees coming to Berlin,” she said. “Suddenly we were making it in another refugee crisis.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit close to the show, whose cast and crew hail from across the continent. Winger’s cinematographer is married to a Ukrainian woman. In Berlin, she saw thousands of refugees crowding into the central train station, some without shoes, food or plans for shelter.
“I think it gave us all a strong sense of purpose,” said Winger.
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I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken
I’ve heard Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” hundreds of times. But one recent Friday afternoon, returning from the grocery store with food for Shabbat dinner, was the first time I truly listened to the words.
“There’s battle lines being drawn,” Springfield sang. “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong / Young people speaking their minds / Are getting so much resistance from behind.”
Six decades later, those lines felt less like a period artifact than a live transmission.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working in and around Atlanta’s Jewish community, including six years on staff at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, leading community engagement and guest programming. So when the Israeli Consulate General to the Southeastern United States pulled its sponsorship of AJFF mid-festival last month — publicly rebuking the organization over its engagement with a Muslim Morehouse College student who had made social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza — I felt it the way you feel a fracture in your own family.
What followed was even more painful to witness. This juror, by multiple accounts, was thoughtful, respectful, and described his role with the festival as an honor. The naming and public shaming he has been subject to in the past few weeks, as Jewish organizations issued statements of condemnation, have likely undone any understanding and bridge-building that had taken place over the course of his engagement with AJFF.
And AJFF, one of the largest Jewish film festivals in the world, found itself at the center of a communal firestorm — not for screening a controversial film, but for engaging with a young man of a different faith and perspective as part of a three-person jury evaluating human rights documentaries.
Reflecting on this now that this year’s festival has concluded, I’m troubled by what this incident shows about just how far the “battle lines” Springfield mentioned have extended — and how dangerous they are. Sometime between the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 and today, something troubling took hold in parts of our community: the conflation of Jewish identity with unquestioning political loyalty to the current Israeli government.
The Talmud records that the rabbis preserved minority opinions precisely because truth is not always with the majority, and because a dissenting voice might one day be vindicated by circumstance. We are a people who have, for millennia, argued with God. Are we now going to stop arguing respectfully with each other?
And what does it mean for Atlanta — a city that styles itself the cradle of the civil rights movement — when its Jewish community responds to disagreement in this close-minded manner?
AJFF was built to advance a different set of goals. The festival’s mission has always rested on the belief that film is uniquely powerful as a vehicle for human connection — that sitting in the dark together, watching stories unfold, can open us to perspectives we might otherwise never encounter.
AJFF does not screen films as endorsements, nor does it require audiences to agree with what they see. Many screenings are followed by panel discussions designed to surface complexity, not resolve it. The festival’s explicit commitment to “foster intergroup understanding among Atlanta’s diverse cultural, ethnic and religious populations” is not a political statement — it is a pedagogical one.
Art doesn’t ask us to capitulate to another point of view. It asks us to be present with it long enough to recognize our shared humanity. As Robert Redford, honored during Sunday’s Academy Award in memoriam tribute, once said: “The glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it.”
Inviting a young Muslim student to evaluate films about human rights is not a provocation. It is that mission — AJFF’s mission — made real.
Organizations and individuals who are willing to engage in thoughtful, open-hearted dialogue with those whose experiences differ from their own — who resist the pull toward insularity and choose engagement instead — are doing some of the most important work in American civic life. That willingness, that courage, has the capacity to create lasting change for the better.
These are not radical ideas. They are deeply Jewish ones.
Hamas’s terror on October 7, 2023, was a cataclysmic rupture — a massacre that has legitimately shaken every Jewish person I know, including those who hold the most progressive views on Israeli policy. The grief and fear are real. The trauma is real. And antisemitism — actual antisemitism, not mere criticism of a government — is real and rising, and must be confronted without equivocation.
Just last week, a gunman rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in suburban Detroit in what the FBI called a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. It is a reminder, as if we needed one, that the threats facing Jews in America are not hypothetical — they are physical, present, and demand our clear-eyed vigilance.
But vigilance and exclusion are not the same. Nor does the latter reflect the truth of the American Jewish community.
A recent poll from the Jewish Federations of North America found that while 88% of respondents affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state, only 37% identify as Zionists. These numbers do not reflect a collapse of Jewish values. They reflect a community grappling honestly and painfully with a situation that resists easy answers — which is exactly what Jewish communities are supposed to do.
That’s also what Judaism is about, at least the version I was raised in.
That Judaism tells us to welcome the stranger because we were once strangers ourselves. It instructs us that the most important commandment is to love your neighbor. It has, in my experience, made the Atlanta Jewish community one of the most generous, creative and genuinely pluralistic in the country.
The cancellation of individuals and organizations, the public shaming, the erosion of communal institutions that took decades to build — these are not expressions of Jewish strength. They are symptoms of fear. And fear, historically, has never served us well.
I do not have all the answers. My own views on Israel and Gaza have evolved, and I expect they will continue to. What I hold with confidence is this: if we retreat into camps of “Good Jew” and “Bad Jew,” defined not by ethical conduct or spiritual practice but by the volume of one’s political allegiance, we will lose something irreplaceable.
“Young people speaking their minds,” to quote Springfield, are already showing signs of disengagement from Jewish institutional life. They will not be won back by litmus tests and boycotts. They will be won back, if at all, by communities that demonstrate the capacity to hold complexity without cruelty.
The post I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken appeared first on The Forward.
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German antisemitism commissioner quits far‑left party over anti-Israel resolution
(JTA) — BERLIN – The antisemitism commissioner for the German state of Brandenburg has resigned from his far-left party over a resolution passed Sunday condemning Israel.
After 11 years in Die Linke (The Left), Andreas Büttner has quit its ranks over the position taken by members in Lower Saxony, in former West Germany. But it’s also personal: Büttner said he’s had enough of what he has described as harassment from within his party.
“It’s no longer possible. And I can’t go on … without betraying my own convictions,” Büttner wrote in a statement to party leaders. The letter was shared with the dpa, the German press association.
Die Linke is the successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling communist party of former East Germany, and has a platform that is critical of capitalism and of NATO. Die Linke notched a better-than-expected finish in last year’s national elections, drawing 9% of the vote despite internal tensions over Israel and Germany’s handling of antisemitism.
According to news reports about Büttner’s resignation, Brandenburg’s party leaders expressed “great regret and respect,” and promised to continue fighting antisemitism with him.
“This is not a question of party affiliation,” wrote Stefan Wollenberg, the party’s managing director in Brandenburg.
The trigger for Büttner’s move was a resolution condemning current forms of Zionism, put forward by the party’s youth delegation in Lower Saxony. They insisted that the resolution — passed at their convention in Hanover last weekend — was not against Zionism per se, only against “existing political manifestations of Zionism.”
But Büttner, who has long stood up for Israel in defiance to his party, and has openly criticized antisemitism from all corners, said the message was unmistakable.
Resolutions that condemn Israel as a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state” are “no longer acceptable to me,” he wrote in his resignation. He criticized the Lower Saxony party for coming perilously close to questioning Israel’s right to exist.
The fight against antisemitism should transcend party lines, he added. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to experience within my own party for years,” he wrote, as cited in the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Büttner, a former police officer who was elected in 2024 to his position as Brandenburg’s first commissioner for combating antisemitism, has had his differences with his party for some time over its views on Israel. Departing from his party’s official stance, Büttner supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, known as IHRA, which labels some criticism of Israel as eliminationist and thus antisemitic.
In 2025, members of his party tried and failed to have him expelled over his solidarity with Israel.
Büttner also has been targeted by unknown perpetrators, who in 2024 vandalized his car with swastikas and other Nazi symbols, and in January set fire to a building on his property, leaving a Hamas symbol as their calling card.
The new resolution, which condemns Hamas as well as Israel, characterizes terrorism as a result of “occupation, disenfranchisement, and a lack of prospects.”
It rejects “the Zionism that actually exists today” and recognizes “ethnonationalism and political Zionism as a major obstacle to a peaceful future for all people in the region.”
It says that both Israel and Hamas “harbor fantasies of annihilation” against one another.
The resolution refers to “two years of genocide” in Gaza, calls for an “end to apartheid in Israel and the occupied territories” and criticizes the alleged instrumentalization of antisemitism “to delegitimize criticism of actually existing political Zionism.” It presents a list of demands on Israel, but none on the Palestinian leadership or Hamas.
Die Linke has a long history of anti-Israel activism: In 2010, prominent party members took part in the ill-fated Gaza Freedom Flotilla, aboard the Mavi Marmara, which the Israeli military intercepted in an operation that killed 10 activists. The German politicians were among those arrested and deported home.
The post German antisemitism commissioner quits far‑left party over anti-Israel resolution appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis and Americans deserve to know why they are still at war
Israelis have once again been asked to live under the shadow of war. Sirens and missiles punctuate sleepless nights. Families sleep beside safe rooms. Children measure their days between alarms.
People will endure that, when they believe there is a purpose behind the sacrifice.
Yet three weeks into the current confrontation with Iran, Israel’s government hasn’t offered anything resembling such clarity. Nor has that of the United States. And as the costs of war accrue in both countries — with Americans worrying about forces deployed across the region, and paying the price of the conflict at the gas pump — citizens of both countries deserve something basic from their leaders: a direct, compelling explanation of what this war is supposed to achieve.
In a democracy, citizens who are sending their children to shelters and their soldiers to the front absolutely have the right to know the objectives of a war. Yes, you cannot reveal operational details that could endanger pilots, intelligence sources, or soldiers in the field.
But explaining the purpose of a war is not the same thing as revealing tactics. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump aren’t exhibiting prudence by keeping things, as the Forward‘s Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “incoherent.” Instead, they’re showing contempt for those they govern.
The hubris would be troubling even if either government in question enjoyed broad public trust. But neither Netanyahu nor Trump are leaders who command such confidence. And the arrogance that has infected even officials under them reflects a deeper pattern that has long defined both men’s leadership: an extraordinary sense of entitlement to power.
An Israel defined by hubris
Many Israelis believe that Netanyahu bends the truth routinely and will do almost anything to remain in power. Under those circumstances, demanding blind faith in this war is insulting.
Consider the extraordinary elasticity of the government’s claims. In June, after the earlier 12-day confrontation with Iran, Netanyahu declared that Israel had pushed back Iran’s missile and nuclear threats “for generations.”
If anyone made the mistake of believing him at the time, it is now obvious that he was lying. Iran still possesses missiles, which we know, because they have rained down on Israel throughout this war. If this conflict is now necessary to confront the very same dangers, the public deserves an explanation of what exactly happened to the supposed “generations” of security their leader had promised.
Yet instead of engaging with tough questions from the press about why Israel engaged in this war, what its goals are, and when it will end, Netanyahu has opted to exclusively discuss the war on friendly platforms. There are social media videos produced by his team, which are pure propaganda; the rare stage-managed “news conference,” usually with the few questioners selected in advance; and a studious avoidance of interviews with the Israeli media — with the sole exception of the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14.
Incredibly, when asked by a reporter from Haaretz a few days ago what the goals of the war were — and why no explanation has been offered to the citizens of the country — Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs actually had the temerity to respond that, in his eyes, citizens don’t need to know about those goals. Some have been set, he said, but they are confidential.
This posture invites, of course, even more suspicion.
Muddled American messaging
If Netanyahu says too little, Trump, on the American side, possibly says too much.
He speaks constantly about the war, yet always seems to struggle with precision or coherence.
One day he suggests the conflict could last a long time. The next he says he thinks it may end soon. When asked about terrorism that could follow escalation, he shrugs that “some people will die.”
This is not surprising; Trump’s rhetoric on these things has always been belated, confused and focused on spectacle. Within hours of the bizarre American seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro — a reprehensible figure but still the head of a sovereign state — Trump appeared on television explaining that the U.S. needed access to Venezuelan oil.
With short-term operations like that in Venezuela, Trump’s inability to explain why the U.S. needed to engage, and outline what Americans can expect going forward, was less glaring. Now, as he waffles between demanding NATO allies come to aid the war and insisting their help isn’t needed; bizarrely declares the war will end “when I feel it in my bones”; and makes clear that the war was initiated with no strategic foresight, it’s impossible to ignore
So Americans, like Israelis, are left struggling to understand what exactly their government is trying to accomplish. And while in Israel the war is still broadly supported — so great is the anger at the Iranian regime, and so effective has been Israel’s missile defense — that is hardly the case in the U.S.
The blame game
The risks of a war defined by ever-moving goalposts and a deliberately obscure timeframe are obvious and terrifying. Just look at the war in Gaza.
That conflict dragged on for nearly two years, accompanied by repeated declarations that Hamas would soon be eliminated. Today, Hamas still exists. Yet the government has offered no serious accounting of that reality. On the way to this endgame, in which the status quo has ended up preserved but with Gaza in ruins, Netanyahu repeatedly blocked off-ramps. He was clearly indifferent to the widespread perception that he was using the continuation of the war to avoid accountability: he explicitly and shamelessly argued that spectacular breakdown on Oct. 7 could not be investigated while the war continued.
In fact, he is using the exact same playbook in this new war, arguing last week — with Trump’s support — that Israeli President Isaac Herzog should issue him a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial so that he can focus on the war.
Some Israelis now genuinely fear that prolonged emergency conditions could become politically convenient. Netanyahu’s critics openly speculate that a monumental national crisis might provide justification to delay or manipulate elections — as Netanyahu is obsessed with remaining in power and is badly behind in the polls.
In the U.S., this fumbling has opened the door to an alarming new reality: one in which Israel and its international supporters are blamed for dragging the U.S. into war. On Tuesday, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the war with a public letter making unproven allegations that Trump fell prey to an Israeli “misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform.” There is a clear risk that such rhetoric, fueled by the sense of directionlessness in this war, will increase already surging antisemitism.
The paradox of justification
Netanyahu and Trump’s failure to clearly justify the war does not mean that the Iranian regime deserves indulgence.
Tehran has brutalized its own citizens for decades and exported violence throughout the Middle East. Through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq, it has helped fuel conflicts that have cost countless lives. The regime has given the world many reasons to wish for its disappearance.
For the past month I have been arguing relentlessly that the Iranian regime has forfeited any claim to sympathy and that its actions have justified the Israeli and U.S. attack.
A long war determined to bring the regime to its knees may not be fundamentally unjustified. But requiring blind faith in the leaders prosecuting that war is.
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