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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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Sen. Markey, a progressive critic of Israel, projected to win Massachusetts Democratic primary in a landslide
(JTA) — Massachusetts progressive Sen. Ed Markey, a sharp critic of Israel, is projected to beat the more moderate Rep. Seth Moulton by a wide margin on Tuesday, securing the Democratic nomination for the upcoming U.S. Senate race.
The Associated Press called the race just a half hour after polls closed, at 8:31pm, when Markey had secured 75.9% of votes to Moulton’s 24.1%, with 3% of ballots tallied.
“Tonight is a testament to the power of the progressive movement,” Markey said on Tuesday night. “It is a progressive movement fueled by young people demanding more from their leaders.”
Noting that he spoke to Moulton prior to taking the stage, Markey added that he looks forward to working together “to build a better future for everyone.”
Moulton, meanwhile, told his supporters that he had “called Sen. Markey to congratulate him on his victory tonight.” He conveyed his “full support” for his opponent as the Democratic nominee, stressing that they “must stand united this November to protect our democracy and defeat Donald Trump.”
Markey, 80, began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives 50 years ago and remained there until he was elected to fill the Senate seat of John Kerry, who was appointed U.S. Secretary of State in 2013. During Markey’s time in the House, he was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and in the Senate, he has supported multiple resolutions aimed at cutting military aid and munitions sales to Israel.
Moulton, 47, was born two years after Markey arrived on Capitol Hill. He has been serving in the U.S. House since 2015 and has opposed both the Democratic socialist agenda and the aging establishment, instead calling for “new energy, new ideas and leaders willing to put people over politics.”
“We ran a race that stood on principle, that wasn’t just about politics as usual, and that elevated the voices of Massachusetts citizens who have been left behind by the status quo in Washington,” Moulton said on Tuesday. “Challenging the establishment and calling for a new generation of leadership isn’t easy, but it is necessary,” he added.
But many political analysts have suggested that Moulton’s predominant focus on his youth and his opponent’s age may have been his primary downfall. Although in the weeks leading up the primary, polls had projected Markey’s win, the two candidates had been running neck-and-neck in the preceding months.
A New York Times piece recently described Moulton as a “rebel without a cause” who drifted with “the political winds” and focused on platforms he was fighting against rather than those he was supporting. In a case relevant to the American Jews, he declared in October that he was “returning AIPAC donations” and refusing new funds from the pro-Israel lobby.
“In recent years AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton posted at the time. “I’m a friend of Israel, but not of its current government.”
Track AIPAC, a group that documents political spending by pro-Israel lobbies, reported that such PACs have spent about $101,500 on Moulton over his career — a relatively modest amount for a six-term congressman.
“It is clearly the safe thing to do, if you are running for a nomination in the Democratic Party, to aggressively distance yourself from Israel,” Jeff Robbins, a Boston-based attorney and former Senate investigative counsel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Robbins, who also served as delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission under President Bill Clinton, described the shift as “reflective of the reality that we have seen play out in spades over the last year.”
That situation involves Democratic candidates “running for the hills about AIPAC and treating it as a boogeyman,” added Robbins, who began organizing pro-Israel rallies in in 2012, while chairing the New England Board of the Anti-Defamation League.
“If you want to have a prayer of being elected in a Democratic primary in this country, you had better be able to say, ‘I don’t take money from AIPAC. In fact, I never heard of it before,’” he added.
On Tuesday night, however, neither candidate referred directly to AIPAC. Moulton spoke only briefly, while Markey primarily focused on domestic issues but did quickly mention the Middle East.
“We need to end the war in Iran, and stop the bombing in Gaza,” Markey said. “We need to slash the Pentagon budget.”
The senator stressed the need to protect the LGBTQ+ community and to prioritize affordability goals, such as achieving “a future with no copays, no surprise bills, no premiums, no deductibles, a future with Medicare for all.”
“Donald Trump is attacking the futures, the dreams, of every boy and every girl on every porch all across this country, cutting education, cutting healthcare, cutting protections against discrimination,” the senator said. “We are not backing down in Massachusetts: not now, not ever.”
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Queen Esther would want Jews to save humanity at their own expense, said Michigan’s attorney general. Would she?
Queen Esther has been name-checked not once, but twice in the last week by sitting politicians in New York and Michigan in addresses to Jewish constituents. The first reference passed largely without notice. The second caused a national Jewish uproar.
Promising better protections for the Jews of New York, Governor Kathy Hochul said Friday night during Shabbat services at Central Synagogue that she was willing to “be your Esther, every time you need me.” A bit ironic as Hochul, who is Catholic, invoked the story of a Jew in disguise, but the metaphor tracked: a leader going to bat for a vulnerable Jewish community. Central had been the site of an attack on a congregant and security guard two weeks prior.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel took a different tack — and paid a price. Nessel, who is Jewish, has voiced concerns about antisemitism in her party. But in a speech Sunday to Jewish Democrats, Nessel suggested they follow Esther’s path and “sacrifice the comfort, safety and security and even the very future of our own people in exchange for the opportunity to save the rest of humanity.”
“What good is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist,” Nessel reportedly said, “if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?”
What followed was a borderline Ahaseurus-ian backlash as Jews around the country decried Nessel’s interpretation of the Megillah. Writing in the conservative publication Commentary, Seth Mandel said Nessel had “counseled servitude and suicidality.” Ron Halber, chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called Nessel “an embarrassment.”
The comparison came as Michigan’s Jewish Democrats, including Nessel, navigate a tenuous political reality in the swing state following the party’s nomination of Abdul El-Sayed, a vocal critic of Israel, for Senate. Nessel had hoped both to reassure Jewish voters and rally their support in a meeting where El-Sayed also apologized for earlier comments about an attack on a Michigan synagogue.
Nessel made waves earlier last month when she said she would skip the state’s Democratic convention out of concern for her safety. Her comments Saturday seemed to cast those remarks in a new light: to many who read them, Nessel seemed to be saying that Jewish people should learn to hide, rather than rise to the occasion. (Nessel’s office did not respond to an inquiry Tuesday.)
That’s certainly not the story of the Megillah. For the uninitiated (or just forgetful): With the Jewish people in imminent danger, Queen Esther boldly (but carefully) reveals to the king her identity as a Jew, underscoring that the viceroy’s known genocidal plotting in fact affected her. As she does so, Esther repeatedly imperils herself — a standard some were eager to point out Nessel herself missed by sitting out the convention.
It’s easy to point to Nessel’s reading as an inversion of a story that seems to insist on a particularist reading. Or one could admire an ambitious attempt at universalizing the text: Maybe Nessel was saying that Esther put the needs of a nation — the Jewish nation — above her own safety, knowing that she could have lived the rest of her life in secret. The United States is the Jewish people in this analogy; Jewish Democrats, by subjugating their immediate security, are Esther. (Haman, the story’s villain, is the spectre of Republican control.)
Or maybe the Purim lesson Nessel was trying to invoke was even simpler: With great power — as Michigan’s Jewish Democrats may have in a close race — comes great responsibility. That’s Spiderman, but also Esther’s relative Mordechai, who famously helps her work up the nerve by suggesting her ability to intervene could be the very reason she was chosen for royalty in the first place.
Esther is often the subject of pop-culture fascination: 17th-century Dutch painters were obsessed, for example, including non-Jewish ones. Contemporary Christian playwrights seem to be, too, as do red-state school curriculums. Evangelicals once compared Trump to Esther — a fearless hero who would dismantle the deep state — and former Vice President Kamala Harris invoked Esther on the campaign trail in 2024.
The common thread in this history, more than anything else, is Esther’s reinvention to suit a self-serving political narrative. For the Dutch — at the time newly liberated from Spanish empire — Esther represented resilience in the face of persecution; for the Christian right, she is a flawed but valorous normie who fulfills a holy mission. For Hochul and Harris (and maybe Nessel, too), she’s a woman who meets the moment.
She’s also the title character of a helluva story — and a familiar one — which makes her as eminently useful to people today as she was to her famously insecure husband in the Megillah. If one thing seems assured, it’s that Esther will continue to feature in our own storytelling — and that she will continue to change with the times.
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She was elected the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association. Then came the hate.
When Amy-Jill Levine was elected president of the Catholic Biblical Association earlier this month, she faced vicious backlash.
Those who opposed her election couldn’t exactly point to a lack of qualifications. Levine has written dozens of books on the New Testament, taught a New Testament course at the prestigious Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, served on the editorial board of Catholic Biblical Quarterly and spoken privately with Pope Francis three times.
Instead, her critics fixated on one trait they apparently consider disqualifying: She’s Jewish.
“Your Zionist ass doesn’t belong in our religion. Keep yourself to the Talmud and keep eating babies. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM CHRISTIANITY,” someone wrote in an email to Levine, which she shared with the Forward.
Levine’s Facebook page was bombarded with so much hate that she asked her daughter to moderate the comments. Online critics called Levine “anti-Christian,” denounced her as “Zionist,” and attacked her efforts to push back against antisemitic interpretations of the Bible.
On its face, a Jew at the helm of a professional association devoted to the study of Christian scripture might seem odd. After all, the Catholic Bible Association, unlike some other academic associations for the study of scripture, promotes study of the Bible “within a context of faith,” and most of the association’s presidents in its 90-year history have been priests. Levine attends an Orthodox Jewish synagogue.
Some more even-keeled critics of Levine’s presidency focused on this argument. “At some point, we have to ask: what is the word ‘Catholic’ actually doing?” Mark Lambert, co-host of the podcast Catholic Unscripted, posted to X.
Levine, meanwhile, argues that the Catholic Biblical Association is a professional society, not a church. People of all faiths are eligible for membership, as long as they hold an advanced degree in biblical studies.
“An academic society, like a hospital, museum or university, is not the same thing as being a member of the clergy,” Levine wrote in an email to the Forward.
In fact, while Levine is the first Jewish president of the Catholic Biblical Association, she is not the first non-Catholic. Several Protestants have served in the role, according to chair of the executive board Gregory Sterling.
Levine was nominated by a committee and then ran unopposed for the presidency, Sterling said. It is an unpaid, one-year position.
“She was not elected because she is Jewish, but because she is an exceptional scholar and has played a very important role in Catholic-Jewish dialogue,” Sterling and the association’s executive director, Archie Wright, wrote in a joint statement. “The vitriol of some of the comments only reinforces the need to address the problem of Anti-Semitism.”
Several Catholic clergy also wrote letters of support for Levine amid the pushback.
Levine, for her part, said she has “no interest in undermining the Church.” The 70-year-old grew up in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a predominantly Portuguese Roman Catholic neighborhood, where she would occasionally go to Mass with her friends.
She preferred Mass to synagogue because “there were snacks, except you got the snacks in the church during the service, and you got the snacks in synagogue after the service,” she joked in an August interview on Nashville Public Radio.
Levine recalled that when she was 7 years old, a classmate told her she had killed Jesus — an accusation the elementary schooler had picked up from her priest. Levine, confused, went to her mother, who assured her that “God was doing just fine.”
That incident inspired Levine to attend Catholic catechism classes as a child, in addition to Hebrew School.
She went on to get a PhD in religion from Duke University and teach at Vanderbilt University as a professor of both the New Testament and Jewish Studies. Much of her scholarly work revolves around the Jewish context of Jesus and dispelling what she sees as antisemitic misinterpretations of the Bible.
“We do not need to make Judaism look bad in order to make Jesus look good,” Levine posted on Facebook after she was elected.
Catholic-Jewish relations
Sixty years ago, Levine’s election “would have been an astonishing thought,” said Philip Cunningham, director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Though the Catholic church has a long history of antisemitism— including violent conversion efforts and teaching the theological belief that Jews were condemned by God — that has all changed in recent decades.
In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII took on the task of modernizing the Church, convening the Second Vatican Council to produce a theological document reconsidering many teachings and practices. The resulting document, often referred to as Vatican II, is perhaps most famous for allowing priests to host Mass in the local vernacular language of their parish instead of Latin. But it also changed Catholicism’s teachings about Jews.
Nostra Aetate, the section of Vatican II most famously concerned with Jews, shifted Catholic teachings about other religions enormously; while still maintaining that the Catholic Church is the “one true religion,” it also affirmed that other religions contain a “ray of truth,” a massive theological shift from the belief that any non-Catholic religion was false or even harmful.
Nostra Aetate spends significant time on Jews, specifically, including rejecting the belief that Jews should be held collectively responsible for killing Jesus. The document calls out antisemitism both theologically and politically.
“What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” it reads. “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”
Since Vatican II, popes have continued to advance dialogue with Jews, and with members of other religions. And the Church has forcefully rejected antisemitism, continuing to change its teachings on Judaism and Jewishness. That includes removing the term “perfidious Jews” from a Good Friday prayer, updating Catholic school classes on Judaism and even releasing statements acknowledging the legitimacy of Judaism alongside Christianity, placing Jews into a special and elevated relationship with the Church.
“The council set in motion a process of rapprochement between Jews and Catholics that took root particularly effectively in the United States, because the world’s largest Jewish diaspora community lives here and frequently alongside Catholics in cities and suburbs,” Cunningham said.
Levine, too, highlighted the importance of Nostra Aetate to her career, writing in an email that the document’s acceptance of Jews “opened the door for me to work in New Testament studies.”
But not all Catholics embraced the teachings of Vatican II. A diffuse movement often referred to as traditionalist Catholics, or tradcaths, felt that the efforts toward modernization had gone too far. Some tradcath groups simply sought to preserve the rituals of Latin Mass.
Others, however, including the recently excommunicated Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, take issue with the council’s teachings, believing that acknowledging the freedom and legitimacy of other religions takes away from the centrality of the Catholic Church’s teachings. In short, if the Catholic Church’s teachings are true, they argue, then no other religion can be legitimate.
The French-language account of SPPX posted to X, calling Levine an “objectively scandalous choice” and denouncing her “relativist interpretation of the texts condemning homosexuality,” as well as the fact that “a person who refuses to recognize Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is placed at the head of an institution that claims to be Catholic.”
Despite the newer Catholic teachings about Judaism, some tradcath groups, as well as individual Catholic influencers such as Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Carrie Prejean Boller, have been endorsing antisemitic beliefs including supersessionism and deicide, as well as conspiracy theories about Jewish devil worship or government control. Though the Vatican has chastised these figures and repudiated their stances, they have continued to spread antisemitic dogma, including the belief that Jews hate and seek to oppress Christians and that Kabbalah endorses pedophilia. Many also endorse Christian nationalism, which the Vatican opposes.
This antisemitic subgroup within Catholicism is relatively small, but extremely visible thanks to influencers like Fuentes and Owens with millions of followers, and their understanding of Catholicism spreads to people both inside and outside the church. Their antisemitic version of Catholic ideology, as well as the conspiracy theories they spread, can be seen in some of the hate emails Levine received, such as references to eating babies, a version of the age-old blood libel that Jews used Christian children’s blood to make matzo.
Still, while the antisemitic fringe of the Catholic church is loud, the institutions are stalwart in their support for Vatican II’s acceptance of Judaism.
Levine’s election is an indication “that the changes that Vatican II sought to inspire have been happening,” Cunningham said. “That does not mean that all the issues between Jews and Catholics have been resolved — but at least amongst the much of the leadership in the Catholic community, the old stereotypes and caricatures are recognized for what they are.”
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