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A Jewish producer of ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ sees his family history in the Oscar-nominated Netflix film
(JTA) — The film producer Daniel Dreifuss has only one surviving photo of a distant relative: his grandfather’s cousin, who fought for Germany in World War I and died in combat two days before the war’s end.
He has a few more photos of his grandfather, who also wore the German uniform in WWI — only to be rounded up by the Nazis two decades later during Kristallnacht and thrown into a concentration camp, as even the Jews who had fought for their country were not safe from its campaign of race extermination.
Dreifuss, who was raised in Brazil after his surviving ancestors fled the war to Uruguay, held up these weathered black-and-white photos to his Zoom camera as he spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his home in Los Angeles. One shows his grandfather’s cousin in his military uniform, the other shows his grandparents posing together, between the wars.
“Twenty years later, your country, that you just gave your health for and your cousin for and your family for, sends you to a camp,” he said. “It’s a lot of trauma to have to go through in one lifetime.”
These family stories echoed through Dreifuss’ mind when he first read the script for a proposed modern take on “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the classic 1928 novel about the German army’s hellish experiences during World War I. Nearly a century later, author Erich Maria Remarque’s descriptions of trench warfare and of the utter lack of heroism, valor or patriotism felt by its soldier protagonists resonated with Dreifuss.
“I said, ‘I know these people,’” he recalled. “Not because they are some distant relatives that I’ve heard of, but because I am the grandson of one of those kids who were in the film.”
Dreifuss’ parents met at a Jewish youth group in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. “My father was my mother’s madrich,” he recalled, using the Hebrew word for a youth group counselor. After they were later married, they moved to Israel partially to avoid Brazil’s military dictatorship and became left-wing political activists. They left Israel just before the Yom Kippur War and relocated to Scotland, where Dreifuss was born, before returning to Brazil to raise him.
Dreifuss had his bar mitzvah in the city of Belo Horizonte before later moving to Rio, which has a much larger Jewish community. “My family was never at all religious, but culturally Jewish,” he said, recalling Passover celebrations and gefilte fish recipes. He did not have many Jewish friends growing up, but his Brazilian friends were interested in Judaism and would attend his family’s Jewish events.
Daniel Dreifuss, a producer of Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” holds up a photo of his grandfather Max Dreifuss from 1919, recovering from his German military service in WWI. Max was sent to a concentration camp once the Nazis took power. (Courtesy of Daniel Dreifuss)
This global upbringing is reflected in Dreifuss’ interest in international film. It took a decade for him to mount his remake of “All Quiet,” which was eventually set up with a German production company and released by Netflix this past fall amid another endless military conflict in Europe. No one, he said, wanted to fund a resolutely anti-war film that refused to glorify its combatants, a film that was “never a hero’s journey, not the story of someone who came, you know, beat 1,000 people with their bare hands, triumphs and looks down on top of a hill at the end with some sweeping score.”
But that journey has been validated by the film’s impressive Oscar total, which surprised industry observers. At the nomination ceremony last month, “All Quiet” received nine total nods, the second most of any film this year, including for best picture — which the novel’s original 1930 Hollywood adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker Lewis Milestone, won. (This year’s Academy Awards will be held March 12.)
Considering the Nazis had once led a campaign of book burning against the source material and terrorized German movie theaters that showed the original movie adaptation, accusing it of being a “Judenfilm,” Dreifuss sees the new film’s success as a historical victory, too. “I love that my name will be associated with a story that was deemed degenerate by that regime,” he said.
When he was first presented with an early draft of the new “All Quiet” script, in 2013, Dreifuss was coming off of the success of another international historical film he had produced. “No,” a 1980s-set Chilean political drama, starred Gael Garcia Bernal as an ad executive tasked with convincing his country to vote the dictator Augusto Pinochet out of office. The film netted Chile’s first-ever Oscar nomination for international feature film, although Dreifuss himself is not Chilean.
In researching “No,” Dreifuss said, the film’s team had trouble finding Chileans who would admit to having cast their real-life vote in Pinochet’s favor — even though 40% of the population did so. “We couldn’t find one single person who supported him,” he recalled. “At some point, years later, no one wanted to say, ‘I supported it, I voted, I was on that side.’” He saw a parallel to the history of geopolitics in the run-up to WWII, when many Western countries — including his family’s adopted homeland of Brazil — were initially sympathetic to the Nazis.
When Hollywood studios turned down the proposed remake of “All Quiet,” forcing Dreifuss to turn to European financing, he saw an opportunity to mount the first-ever German adaptation of the property, which would allow the film to open up a “historical perspective” on how the aftermath of WWI led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust.
German filmmaker Edward Berger, who also helmed several episodes of the espionage miniseries “Deutschland 83,” stepped into the director’s chair, and he also has a co-writing credit. German star Daniel Brühl, who has played many historical villains to the Jewish people in films ranging from “7 Days in Entebbe” to “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” took a key supporting role as the lead negotiator for the armistice agreements — the sole figure in the movie trying to find a peaceful resolution for his country. (The historical figure Brühl portrays, Matthias Erzberger, was vilified as a traitor by the German right and assassinated in 1921 by antisemitic nationalist radicals who were precursors to the Nazis.)
Though there are no explicitly Jewish characters in the film, Dreifuss believes it still speaks to the fate that would soon await Europe’s Jews.
“We know what followed in the decade in Germany,” he said. “So we could bring that to the film in subtle ways.”
He pointed to the armistice plotline that foreshadows how the Treaty of Versailles left Germany in a deeply disadvantaged position, creating an opportunity for Hitler’s brand of national populism. There are also scenes in which thoughtless German generals, driven by nationalistic fervor and wounded pride, send entire squadrons to their deaths mere minutes before the armistice is set to take effect. In one sequence, the film’s lead, the soldier Paul (Felix Kammerer), steals a goose from a French farming family of non-combatants and says: “It’s a hatred of the other, of not understanding, of being raised to have an enemy.”
Dreifuss is dipping into a different chapter of world Jewish history with his next project: a Showtime miniseries produced with the co-creators of the Israeli Netflix series “Fauda” that explores CIA operations in the Middle East and is partially set during the Lebanon War in which Israel had a heavy, and oft-criticized, military presence. The series will air this summer.
He has also been pitched a host of WWI and WWII-related projects in the wake of the success of “All Quiet.” But, he joked, “I would love for people to not only think of me as the war guy, or as the dictator guy.”
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Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop votes to boycott Israeli products
(JTA) — Two-thirds of the famed worker-owned grocery store in Brooklyn’s Park Slope voted Tuesday night in favor of a boycott of Israeli products. The vote came after a years-long battle that divided coop members and the Park Slope community.
Of the 6,772 votes cast at a meeting that lasted for hours, 67% voted in favor of the boycott, 31% voted against, and 2% abstained, according to immediate results of the vote viewed by JTA.
Nearly 7,000 out of the 16,000 members of the Park Slope Food Coop signed on to participate in the vote, where two ballot questions decided the fate of under a dozen Israeli products sold at the neighborhood spot. Now, those Israeli products will be removed from the shelves.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions effort has been a hot issue at the Park Slope Food Coop for more than a decade. But since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel and the ensuing Gaza war, the coop’s stance on the sale of Israeli goods has become a flashpoint among its 16,000 members. Tuesday’s vote was so contentious that coop coordinators increased security measures around the coop itself and decided to hold the vote remotely.
Coop members first voted on a resolution lowering the required threshold to pass a boycott from a 75% supermajority of members to a simple majority of 51%. This vote passed 68% to 31%, with 1% abstaining.
Only after that passed did the group consider a resolution to boycott the sale of Israeli products. That resolution declared that, “Until Israel complies with international law, including by ceasing unlawful discriminatory practices in its treatment of Palestinians, the Coop will not sell goods produced in Israel (pre-1967 borders) or in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
The boycott will affect nine Israeli products, including a variety of bell pepper sold only in the winter, persimmons, olive oil, sesame products, Dorot frozen herb cubes and Osem Bamba, the popular Israeli peanut-flavored snack, according to Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine.
The advocacy group PSFC Members for Palestine first proposed a boycott in 2024; Coop4Unity, the anti-BDS group, was founded in 2024 to prevent that.
Tuesday’s meeting was moved entirely online to accommodate the size of the “unprecedentedly large” guest list and also for security reasons, coop staff announced in an email days before the vote.
“Staff, presenters, Chair committee and other members have all raised explicit concerns about their safety, attending the meeting in-person,” PSFC coordinators wrote in their email. “We cannot guarantee their security even if supplemental security measures are introduced. Therefore, the safest way forward is to limit attendance to all virtual.”
The market’s fight over BDS has even entered the Democratic primary election discourse in the coop’s congressional district of NY-10, in which two Jewish candidates are facing off.
Incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman condemned the vote in a statement to the Forward last week. “Everyone is free to criticize the Israeli government — which I do not hesitate to do — but joining a movement that was founded on the principle of the elimination of Israel will have no impact on the Israeli government or the Israeli economy,” Goldman said. “Instead, it only succeeds at shifting the responsibility for the Israeli government’s actions to American Jews — which is quintessential antisemitism.”
Goldman’s opponent, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, said he is not a member of the coop but would vote against the resolution if he were.
The rhetoric at the coop over the BDS effort has escalated in recent weeks. During an April meeting, a member stated that, “Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country.”
Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger had called for an investigation into the incident. Coop4Unity has also filed a state human rights complaint, alleging antisemitic and anti-Israel harassment at the market.
Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Israel supporters rallied to stave off a boycott. The leadership of Park Slope synagogue Congregation Beth Elohim called on its more than 2,300 adult members to attend the general meeting and vote against the resolutions.
“This proxy war for the war between Israelis and Palestinians is now dividing our local community into two camps,” CBE’s Rabbi Rachel Timoner said during a sermon earlier this month. “Why is this petty, annoying fight in our neighborhood grocery store worth so much time and effort? Because it is part of something much larger. In the end, it is about antisemitism, a real and rising threat which ultimately carries existential danger both for Jews and for every society in which it takes hold.”
A group of progressive New York rabbis, however, wrote an open letter to the coop community condemning those who called the boycott “antisemitic.” The letter stated that not all the signatories endorsed the boycott.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop votes to boycott Israeli products appeared first on The Forward.
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Nearly half of young U.S. Jews want to replace Israel with binational state, poll find
Almost half of American Jews under 35 say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be solved by creating a single country in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza with a government elected by both Israelis and Palestinians, according to a poll conducted by the Jewish Voter Resource Center.
The findings signal a generational shift in U.S. support for a binational state in Israel, reflecting a core demand of anti-Zionist protests on college campuses and beyond — even as most major Jewish organizations classify calls for a single state as an expression of antisemitism.
“The growing disaffection of younger Jewish Americans from Israel is a direct consequence of the policies of Bibi Netanyahu and the way the American Jewish establishment has demanded an ‘Israel right or wrong’ loyalty,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, the liberal advocacy group. “They’re reaping the harvest of seeds they planted — this is what you get.”
Ben-Ami pointed to the destruction of Israel’s war in Gaza, in which it killed an estimated 70,000 Palestinians and destroyed more than 80% of the enclave’s infrastructure, and growing violence by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, among other actions.
The data also adds to a growing debate over what share of Jews in the United States are Zionist, The Jewish Federations of North America began circulating data earlier this year that shows that around 90% of American Jews continue to support Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, even as only 37% label themselves “Zionist.”
The Jewish Voter Resource Center poll, released on Thursday, challenges these findings. Twenty-four percent of Jewish adults polled support a one-state solution to the conflict, according to the survey, nearly double the 13% who said they preferred a binational state just two years ago. While age breakdowns were not available for the 2024 poll, an American Jewish Committee survey in 2022 found that 23% of American Jews ages 25 to 40 supported a binational state.
Half of non-Orthodox Jews under 35 — 51% — support a binational state, according to the new poll.
The Jewish Federations of North America declined to comment.
This abrupt turn comes amid a transformation in how Americans view Israel — favorability toward Israel has plummeted among almost every demographic group since 2022 — that has extended to Jews. A Washington Post poll found that 61% of Jewish adults said Israel had committed war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, while 39% said it was guilty of genocide.
The shift in public opinion also drives a deeper wedge between Israeli and American Jews. While many Jews in the U.S. have been alarmed by Israel’s conduct in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, Israeli Jews have expressed a sense of increased vulnerability, and some viewed the massacre as shutting down the possibility of Israel giving up control over the Palestinian territories or granting Palestinians equal rights.
A poll from Tel Aviv University last year found that only 15% of Israeli Jews supported a two-state solution, while 29% wanted to annex the West Bank and Gaza without offering citizenship to Palestinians living there. Only 1% of Israeli Jews supported “one binational state with civil rights.”
When asked in more detail about the possibility of a one-state solution, 3% of Israeli Jews said they would support it only if Palestinians were granted equal rights while 37% said they would support it if Palestinians were not given full rights.
Jeremy Pressman, who studies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Connecticut, said that young American Jews have little experience of Israel as a vulnerable underdog, unlike older generations that witnessed the establishment of the state or its victory in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars.
Instead, they’ve largely come of age while Israel has been controlled by right-wing governments and have watched Israeli violence toward Palestinians on social media. “This creates a gap between the dominant Israeli Jewish understanding of the conflict and the center-left — or sometimes radical left — understanding of Jewish Americans,” Pressman said in an interview.
The Jewish Voter Resource Center, which is affiliated with the Jewish Democratic Council of America, polled 800 registered Jewish voters and the margin of error was +/- 3.5 percentage points and +/- 6.9 percentage points for Jews under 35.
Asher Kaplan Leba, a leader of the Massachusetts Synagogue Network on Israel/Palestine in Boston, said that many Jews had become disillusioned with a two-state solution as the Israeli government took steps that seemed to make it more difficult to implement, such as expanding West Bank settlements.
“It was my position for many years,” said Leba, 32. “But I don’t want to spend the rest of my adult life waiting for the authoritarian, ethno-nationalists in control of Israel — who I share no values with — to change.”
The post Nearly half of young U.S. Jews want to replace Israel with binational state, poll find appeared first on The Forward.
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Candidate who vowed to imprison ‘American Zionists’ loses in Texas runoff
(JTA) — Sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia won the Democratic nomination Tuesday in Texas’ 35th Congressional District, defeating opponent Maureen Galindo following a race shaped by scrutiny over Galindo’s antisemitic rhetoric.
The runoff in the San Antonio race drew national attention after Galindo, a local housing activist and therapist, came under scrutiny for comments that included vows to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists” and claims that it was her “perception that Zionist billionaires run the world.”
Following Galindo’s surprise first-place finish in the march primary, national Democratic leaders and Jewish organizations condemned her rhetoric and urged voters to reject her candidacy, including Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, who revealed to JTA earlier this month that he would not back or campaign with Galindo.
The district, which stretches between San Antonio and Austin, was heavily affected by Republican redistricting this year, one of several factors that local political observers and Democratic Party leaders said contributed to Galindo’s earlier win.
The race also attracted outside spending, with Lead Left PAC, a newly launched super PAC apparently tied to a Republican donation platform, pouring over $900,000 on ads and mailers promoting Galindo. Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a $35,000 ad buy against Galindo, an unusual step for the DCCC to take against a Democratic candidate.
“Republicans just spent weeks and almost a million dollars propping up an antisemite, and they should be ashamed and embarrassed — it was a disgrace,” the president of the Democratic Majority For Israel PAC, Brian Romick, told JTA in a statement. “Tonight is a victory for the voters of TX-35, for the Democratic Party, and for every Democrat who believes that antisemitism has no home in our coalition.”
Romick told JTA Tuesday night that he believed the results of the runoff signaled that Democratic primary voters “aren’t going to elect antisemitic candidates, and in the districts that we need to win, pro-Israel candidates are our best bet.”
Garcia will now face Republican nominee Carlos De La Cruz, who defeated opponent John Lujan, in the Nov. 3 general election.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Candidate who vowed to imprison ‘American Zionists’ loses in Texas runoff appeared first on The Forward.