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Disney+ series ‘A Small Light’ tells the Anne Frank story from the perspective of the woman who hid her
(JTA) — The short life of Anne Frank has inspired generations of filmmakers and television producers. The list of past productions range from “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), whose director George Stevens witnessed Nazi occupation as a U.S. army officer, to the Academy Award-winning documentary “Anne Frank Remembered” — featuring the only known footage of Anne — to the Emmy Award-winning dramatized miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” (2001).
On Monday night, viewers will get another TV version. But “A Small Light,” an eight-episode series premiering on National Geographic and streaming Tuesday on Disney+, tells the story from a new perspective: through the eyes of the woman who hid the Frank family.
Miep Gies was an independent 24-year-old with a busy social calendar and a dance club membership when she began working for Anne Frank’s father Otto in 1933 at Opekta, his successful jam business in Amsterdam. As Jews were rounded up and deported from the Netherlands in 1942, her Jewish boss asked if she would be willing to hide his family in an annex above the office, and she did not hesitate.
“A Small Light” stars Bel Powley as Gies, Joe Cole as her husband Jan Gies and Liev Schreiber as Otto Frank. It’s named for a quote from the real Gies, who once said that she did not like to be called a hero because “even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
That metaphor had literal meaning for the Frank family and four others in the secret annex, who spent two years in a dark 450-square-foot space behind a hinged bookcase. Gies, her husband and four other employees of Otto Frank secretly kept eight Jews alive while running his business downstairs. Gies brought them food and library books, using black market ration cards and visiting several different grocers to avoid suspicion. Anne Frank said in her diary, “Miep is just like a pack mule, she fetches and carries so much.”
In the series, the “dark room” is seen less than Gies’ frenzied bicycle trips across Amsterdam, as she tries to sustain the appearance of a normal life. Her secret pushes her away from friends and family, while her marriage strains under the weight of ever-looming disaster. The creators of “A Small Light” sought to recreate a hero as a modern, flawed, at times even annoying person.
“She’s not some kind of saint,” executive producer Joan Rater told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “She had moods, she had a new marriage, she wanted to hang out with friends. She wanted to take a day off and she couldn’t.”
“I think everyone can relate to Miep,” said Powley, an English-Jewish actress known for starring in several British shows and in American films such as “The King of Staten Island.” “She was just an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.”
Although “A Small Light” is rife with tense scenes and suspense, the producers fashioned it with young audiences in mind. The show conspicuously avoids the explicit violence and horror typically expected of its subject matter, leaving out concentration camps and murders. Rater and co-creator Tony Phelan wanted children like their own to watch the series. While they were writing it, their daughter was the same age as Anne was when she was writing her diary.
Some young viewers have seen Anne’s story being swept up in literary purges across U.S. school districts, as part of the debate over what should be taught in American classrooms. Earlier this month, a Florida high school removed an illustrated adaptation of her diary after determining that references to her sexuality were “not age appropriate.” The same edition was previously yanked from a Texas school district, although it was reinstituted after public outcry. Meanwhile, a Tennessee school board banned “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about his father’s experience in the Holocaust, after objections over curse words and nudity last year.
The name “Anne Frank” has long been synonymous with Holocaust education as her diary remains one of the world’s most-read books, with translations in over 70 languages. But the “relatable” rescuer presents another appealing way to teach children about one of the most wretched chapters in human history, said Brad Prager, a professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri.
“It is the message that people like to hear,” Prager told the JTA. “If you ask a fourth-grader why we watch TV and movies — well, this is so that you can learn to do the right things, or you can learn that in certain circumstances anyone can be a hero.”
Liev Schreiber plays Otto Frank and Amira Casar plays Edith Frank in “A Small Light.” (National Geographic for Disney/Dusan Martincek)
A broader lens on the Netherlands during World War II is less palatable. The Germans and their Dutch collaborators implemented a highly effective system of persecution: Between 1942 and 1944, about 107,000 Dutch Jews were deported primarily to Auschwitz and Sobibor, then murdered. Only 5,200 of them survived.
Although Gies did everything she could to save the Jews in her care, the unwritten ending to Anne’s diary is well-known. Three days after her last entry in August 1944, Dutch police officers led by SS officer Karl Josef Silberbauer raided the annex. Gies escaped arrest by observing that she and Silberbauer shared a hometown.
“My luck was that the police officer in charge came from Vienna, the same town where I was born,” she said in a 1997 interview with Scholastic. “I noticed this from his accent. So, when he came to interrogate me, I jumped up and said, as cheerfully as I could, ‘You are from Vienna? I am from Vienna too.’ And, although he got very angry initially, it made him obviously decide not to arrest me.”
In a valiant last-ditch effort, Gies walked into the German police office the next day and attempted to buy her friends’ freedom. She was unsuccessful.
Gies found Anne’s notebooks and papers strewn on the annex floor. Without reading them, she gathered and tucked the writings into a drawer, hoping to return them to their owner. Germany had all but lost the war already, with Allied troops less than 250 miles from Amsterdam.
The Franks were packed on the last train ever to leave the Westerbork transit camp for the Auschwitz extermination camp. Otto was separated from his wife Edith and daughters Anne and Margot on the Auschwitz platform. In October, the girls were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and Edith succumbed to starvation in January 1945. Her daughters died of typhus a month later, when Anne was 15 years old.
Some studies have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is diminishing. In 2020, the Claims Conference found that 63% of Millenial and Gen Z Americans (ages 18-39) did not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. More than 10% did not recall ever hearing about the Holocaust, while 11% believed that Jews caused it. Another Claims Conference survey reported that despite living in the country where Anne hid from the Nazis, a majority of Dutch people did not know the Holocaust took place there.
“In a time that antisemitism is on the rise and there are more displaced people in the world than there ever have been before, it couldn’t be a better time to re-explore this part of history, but through the lens of this ordinary young woman,” said Powley.
While “A Small Light” celebrates the power of the individual, the fate of Anne Frank also represents the failure of the whole world, said Prager. By centering Gies’ perspective, he said, the series risks making Anne a peripheral character in her own brutally aborted story.
“When you decenter Anne Frank, one thing is that you lose the Jewish perspective on the persecution,” he said.
Otto Frank, the sole survivor from the annex, appeared at Jan and Miep Gies’ doorstep after the war and ended up living with them for over seven years. In July 1945, Gies watched as he received the notice that his children were dead.
“He took it in his hands and suddenly he became eerily quiet,” Gies said in an interview for the Anne Frank House. “You cannot explain it, it was a silence that speaks. I looked up. He was white as a sheet. And he handed me the letter.”
Gies read the piece of paper, stood up and opened her desk drawer. “I took all the diaries, with all the separate sheets and everything and handed them over to Mr. Frank,” she said.
She told him, “This is your daughter Anne’s legacy.”
In 2010, Gies died at 100 years old. Every year on Aug. 4 — the day the Franks were arrested — she stayed at home, drew her curtains and did not answer the phone or doorbell.
Powley believes the show’s angle gives a fresh perspective on “your mom’s dusty copy of Anne Frank’s diary.” She approached the role of Gies with a heavy sense of responsibility.
“I feel a deeper connection to this story than I have with other projects,” she said. “This offer came to me on Holocaust Memorial Day and it immediately had that special feeling to it. My grandma, the Jewish matriarch of my family, died during COVID. I feel that she would be proud.”
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Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why
I walked into Jerusalem Chicken restaurant because someone told me it served the best maqluba this side of Jerusalem — all within a few minutes of LAX.
Outside, the well-lit sign said, “Palestinian Chicken Eatery,” which, because I’d seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm “Palestinian Chicken” episode about a dozen times, already had me smiling. Then I stepped inside.
Across from a deli counter filled with platters of rice and roasted vegetables was a cardboard sign: “End US Funding of Israel. Defend Palestine. End the Cycle of Genocide.”
This was 2022. Genocide seemed like an especially scurrilous charge, but it was their restaurant. I could yell, scream, protest, vandalize the place or call for a boycott. The young man behind the counter served me a leg and a thigh roasted dark, fragrant with sumac, clove and cinnamon. I ate.
Call me crazy but that’s what I demand of restaurants: Good food, clean kitchens and kind service. But, it seems, when it comes to Israeli restaurants, a different standard applies.
Somewhere toward the end of her long New York magazine feature on Middle Eastern food in New York City, Madeleine Leung Coleman points out that Israeli restaurants are increasingly labeling themselves as Middle Eastern or Levantine rather than Israeli.
“There could be many reasons why,” she writes. “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted. Or they’re second-guessing if they should call their food ‘Israeli’ at all.”
I’m going to offer a third choice: Perhaps it’s because of articles like hers.
The disappearing ‘Israeli’ restaurant
Coleman understates the actual violence against Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants (and, oddly, against Palestinian restaurants). She implies that Israeli restaurants serve food that is somehow stolen from Arab cultures. She blurs the distinction between Israeli restaurateurs and the actions of a government 7,000 miles away. In short, she reinforces the stigma she purports to describe. It’s a case study in journalism-as-activism, for which innocent restaurateurs and diners will pay the bill.
Her piece, “When Eating Out Is Political,” charts the evolution of Middle Eastern food in the city from turn-of-the-century market stalls, falafel stands and halal carts to its current incarnation in high-end, often Michelin-starred chef-driven restaurants.
The core argument is that Israeli restaurants became trendy by appropriating Palestinian, Mizrachi and North African dishes while Arab, Iranian and North African restaurants languished as cheap, “outer-borough” places, and especially post-9/11 hid their identities behind a vague “Mediterranean” label.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, and growing protest against Israel, the stigma has reversed. Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian restaurants have flourished with cheffy food, and owning their particularist labels, while Israeli restaurants have had to hide their identity.
It’s true that Middle Eastern cuisines are having their moment in New York, and Coleman’s descriptions of the “delicate, hand-shaped beef dumplings” at the Syrian restaurant Huda or the wild mallow “topped with twists of fried onion and salty black olives” at the Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen in Brooklyn make it clear that these chefs, whether Palestinian, Syrian or Iranian, should be celebrated.
But the celebration is tainted with bias and ignorance when it comes to all things Israeli.
From Moshe’s Falafel to Solomonov
First, the history. By Coleman’s recounting, Israeli restaurants swooped in to success and instant “It” status sometime in the early aughts.
“We were told this was the flavor profile of this young country,” she writes, “which was so richly funded and supported by our own.”
I’m not sure what American aid to Israel has to do with the efforts of early chefs like Einat Admony and Michael Solomonov, but that sentence shows how Coleman condemns talented individual chefs for somehow being complicit in … foreign aid decisions?
She’s also wrong on the timeline. Israeli food came to America the same way Arab food did, with immigrant sweat and no guarantees of success. Moshe Mizrachi, an Israeli of Syrian origin, opened his falafel restaurant in Manhattan in 1981. It failed. He reincarnated it as a cart, and four decades later it’s an institution.
The food these Israelis brought with them wasn’t, as Coleman writes, Arab dishes or food their grandmothers made — her attempt to dismiss Israeli food as either stolen or copied.
She might have mentioned that over half of Israel’s population has origins in the greater Middle East and North Africa. Falafel, hummus, stuffed vegetables, shakshouka and all the glorious ingredients that go into them were part of their traditions too. What was a Jewish chef from Iraq supposed to cook, lox and cream cheese?
From shattah to schnitzel
Israelis also ate what Palestinians ate, and learned to cook it. This is how every culture’s foodways evolve — including that of Palestinians.
In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus brought chile peppers back from the Americas, after wreaking havoc on the native populations. Those chiles give Palestinian shattah sauce its heart and heat. The “most traditional Palestinian dish,” according to cookbook author Reem Kassis, is maftool, a pebbly couscous that likely arrived via the Berbers, whose own history of subjugation, rebellion and assimilation with the Muslim invaders is, to say the least, fraught. Schnitzel is now a popular Palestinian dish, likely adopted from Ashkenazi immigrants.
Cultures exchange food, like they do music, fashion and language. None of this is to say Israelis haven’t ignored or downplayed the Palestinian contribution to their cuisine, or used food as a political or economic weapon — most unconscionably in Gaza itself. But the Israeli chefs most associated with the New Israel Cuisine are usually the first to point all that out.
“I don’t think there’s enough understanding how deeply rooted Israeli food, as it’s cooked at the moment and seen all over the world, is actually based on Palestinian cooking,” the chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi told me in a 2022 interview.
Credit where credit is due. But the only reason to question an Israeli cook’s right to do what cooks throughout history have done is if you question Israel’s existence itself.
‘The land mass currently called Israel’
And Coleman clues us in that she leans that way.
She repeatedly refers to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide. Many genocide experts and international bodies have concluded it is. Many others, including the International Court of Justice, have not, something a fair journalist would point out.
And then there is the strange way she describes an image on the menu of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat as “a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’”
Even the progressive watchdog site Mediaite called that “bizarre.” Just as bizarre is her explanation for why chefs are less likely to publicize their connection to Israel.
“In the last few years,” she writes, “some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government’s project. This may be one reason why some are staying silent.”
Here’s a better reason:
- In February 2022, vandals sprayed “F– Jews” on the wall of Miriam’s restaurant in Brooklyn.
- In December 2023 anti-Israel protesters surrounded Goldie’s, Michael Solomonov’s falafel restaurant in Philadelphia, vandalizing it and chanting, “Long live the intifada!”
- In February 2024 a masked man took a baseball bat to the windows of Rothschild TLV on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
- In July 2025, intruders broke into a Melbourne, Australia Israeli restaurant, threw chairs and shattered windows while people were eating.
- In August 2025, intruders ransacked Manny’s restaurant in San Francisco and spray-painted “F- Manny’s” and “Die Zionist” on the walls.
There’s more, but you get the idea. It isn’t a few kids with spray cans: it’s open season on Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants. At least three Palestinian restaurants have been vandalized as well, as well as Kanaan in Berlin, which is owned by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian. If every Israeli restaurant is complicit in the worst behaviors of the Israeli government, is Jerusalem Chicken collaborating with Hamas?
Israeli restaurants aren’t Med-washing their names because they’re reckoning or apologetic. They’re hiding because the violence against them is getting worse, for patently absurd reasons. Coleman could have written that story, not one where victims did something to deserve it.
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Trump just used journalists as human shields — Jewish ethics has thoughts about that
Everyone has been talking about The Odyssey this summer. So much so that, apparently, the president of the United States felt the need to act out a famous piece of Greek mythology, namely the story of the Trojan horse. When an Iranian assassination threat in July seemed credible enough, the Secret Service spirited Trump off of Air Force One in a catering truck after a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
The plane then took off as usual, loaded with top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as the usual cast of aides and journalists who often accompany the president. Most believed they were on the plane with Trump, and weren’t aware of any threat. And had Iran actually attacked, and Air Force One been shot out of the sky, they would have gone down in the president’s place.
It is not unheard of for presidents to change plans suddenly for safety reasons, or otherwise use some amount of subterfuge to obscure their location; when Bill Clinton flew to Pakistan, for example, there were several decoy planes. But it is highly unusual for the plan to involve risking numerous other people, including civilians. Several journalists have accused Trump, who has long picked fights with the press, of using the media as an expendable human shield.
Much has been made, particularly in the Jewish world, of the idea of human shields, particularly because Hamas is often accused of the practice. Human shields can refer to putting civilians in harm’s way as part of a military strategy, or using them as decoys or to protect soldiers. (Hamas purportedly has used civilian sites such as hospitals or schools to protect their weapons stores and headquarters.)
There are numerous stories in Jewish texts in which innocent lives are sacrificed for ulterior motives, and the perpetrators are roundly condemned. King David sends his general Uriah to the frontlines so he will die and never realize that David had slept with his wife; God sends the prophet Nathan to rebuke David for his selfishness and Batsheva loses the pregnancy as punishment. When Simon and Levi destroy Shechem in retribution for the rape of their sister Dina, the patriarch Jacob censures their actions.
Though there is plenty of warfare in the Bible, and God at times orders the destruction of entire cities or groups, most Jewish sages interpret this to only apply to combatants because other commandments, such as to leave the gates of a besieged city open to allow people to flee, instruct that innocent civilians must be protected.
Beyond general ethics, the laws of war laid out in the Geneva Convention protect civilians and forbid the destruction of pivotal resources such as hospitals. But the strategy is, in many ways, a successful one precisely because it is so contemptible; everyone agrees that killing civilians not involved in war is morally wrong, which means that there is an international uproar if combatants do kill civilians to get to an enemy stronghold.
The U.S. and Israel both hold themselves apart operating uniquely moral armies — ones that follow the laws of war and protect civilians. Both nations publicly boast of fighting only necessary, noble wars. Reality, however, often differs. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, tens of thousands of American soldiers were discharged for misconduct. And after Oct. 7, Israel also began using human shields, forcing Palestinian civilians to go ahead of Israeli soldiers to check for traps or mines.
When Trump landed, the White House press pool asked him, on the tarmac, what the threat was, and whether the journalists and aides on board the original plane were in danger. Trump responded that he simply did what the Secret Service told him to; “I get a lot of threats,” he said, and said he believed that the plane he actually flew on — a plane no one knew he was on — was in more danger than Air Force One.
But it’s clear to everyone else — including many members of the media who were on the plane — that the civilians left on the plane targeted by the Iranian threat were human shields. Trump may have long defamed the media, but putting them knowingly in harm’s way is still a bad look. Such a bad look that, after The New York Times reported on Trump’s planes, FBI agents went to the journalists’ homes to subpoena them for their reporting.
Thankfully, neither plane was shot down. But that doesn’t make Trump’s decision to protect himself any more moral.
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Apple pays $150k to settle federal antisemitism lawsuit
(JTA) — Apple has agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that the company failed to accommodate a Jewish employee’s observance of Shabbat, and later fired him after he complained of religious discrimination.
The lawsuit, which was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in September 2025, accused Apple of discriminating against Tyler Steele, a longtime employee of one of its stores in Reston, Virginia.
Steele converted to Judaism in the spring of 2023, and while his manager initially approved his request not to be scheduled on Fridays and Saturdays due to his observance of Shabbat, another manager that replaced the previous one later rescinded the accommodation.
According to the complaint, Steele’s new manager, Anthony Dosch, denied his requests to have the days off in September 2023, allegedly telling him that month that he “could become a rules Nazi with regards to our policies.”
Days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Dosch also warned Steele not to get into politics or debates about the conflict at work, and a month later issued him a misconduct warning claiming that Steele had body odor that violated the store’s policies.
The EEOC alleged that Steele later complained to Apple officials in November 2023 about antisemitic behavior and the denial of his religious accommodation. Steele was fired from the store in January 2024, after reminding Dosch that he could not work on a Friday the following month for religious reasons.
“Employees should not have to violate their religious beliefs to keep their jobs or live in fear of retribution because they requested an accommodation,” EEOC Philadelphia Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence said in a statement at the time the lawsuit was filed.
In its lawsuit, the EEOC accused Apple of religious discrimination and retaliation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Apple and the EEOC unveiled the settlement in an Aug. 7 filing in federal court in Virginia, nearly a year after the initial complaint.
Apple denied the allegations and did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which required the company to award Steele $80,000 in back pay and $70,000 in compensatory damages and interest.
Under the settlement, the company will also be required to update its religious accommodation policies and conduct trainings with some employees in its Virginia operations within 90 days.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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