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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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Iran Launches Missile Featuring Poster Thanking Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez

An Iranian missile carries a poster of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, featuring a message in Farsi and English thanking him for condemning the war and praising Tehran. Photo: Screenshot

Iran has launched a missile toward “US-Israeli assets” bearing a poster thanking Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for what it portrayed as his support for the regime and condemnation of the ongoing US-Israeli military campaign in the Middle East.

According to Iranian state-owned and semi-official media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Sunday released footage of a missile carrying a poster of the Spanish leader, thanking him for his message of solidarity as part of one of the regime’s latest propaganda moves.

“We praise the Spanish minister who calls this war illegal. We say: not only is this war illegal, it is also inhuman. Thank you, Prime Minister,” the poster reads, featuring a portrait of Sánchez in both Farsi and English.

Ahead of a European Union summit in Brussels last week, Sánchez once again denounced the ongoing war against Iran, saying Madrid “has condemned the war from the very first moment” and describing the US-Israeli operations against the regime as “illegal.”

As diplomatic ties between Madrid and both Washington and Jerusalem fray over Spain’s refusal to back the US–Israeli offensive and its increasingly outspoken posture on the conflict, Israel’s Foreign Ministry blasted the move as a troubling alignment with Tehran’s narrative.

“Pedro Sánchez – Iran’s mullah regime is thanking you by putting your words on the missiles it fires at civilians in Israel and the Arab world,” the statement read.

“How does it feel knowing your face & words are on these missiles?” it continued. “Keep in mind that Europe – including Spain – is within range of these missiles.”

In one of its most recent moves, the Spanish government blocked the United States from using its bases for military operations against the Islamist regime, prompting US President Donald Trump to threaten Madrid with the suspension of trade ties.

Iran earlier this month praised Spain for its decision.

Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, Spain has become one of Israel’s fiercest critics, a stance that has only intensified in recent months, coinciding with a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents targeting the local Jewish community — from violent assaults and vandalism to protests and legal actions.

From unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state to repeatedly branding the war in Gaza a “genocide,” Sánchez has spearheaded an aggressive diplomatic campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state on the international stage.

Most recently, Spain permanently withdrew its ambassador from Israel, further straining relations and garnering the praise of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

Last year, the Spanish government announced a ban on imports from hundreds of Israeli communities in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

In September, Spain passed a law to take “urgent measures to stop the genocide in Gaza,” banning trade in defense material and dual-use products from Israel, as well as imports and advertising of products originating from Israeli settlements.

Spanish officials also announced that they would bar entry to individuals involved in what they called a “genocide against Palestinians” and block Israel-bound ships and aircraft carrying weapons from Spanish ports and airspace.

As the local Jewish community continues to face an increasingly hostile climate and targeted violence, Sánchez has drawn mounting criticism from political opponents and Jewish leaders who accuse his rhetoric of fueling antisemitic hostility across the country.

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US Bishops Call for Catholics to ‘Stand Clearly’ Against Hate, Violence Toward ‘Our Jewish Brothers and Sisters’

Carrie Prejean Boller, who was ousted from the White House Religious Liberty Commission in February 2026 following outrage over her repeated downplaying of antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot

As antisemitism in online Catholic discourse has accelerated under influencers Candace Owens and Carrie Prejean Boller — both recent converts to the religion — US Catholic leadership has again spoken out firmly by releasing a video condemning hate targeting the Jewish people as heretical to the faith.

“Sadly, the celebration of Easter has at times been the occasion for outbursts of hatred and even violence against Jews,” said Archbishop Alexander K. Sample of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon. “The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that the Jews do not bear the collective guilt for the death of Jesus. The church made this teaching explicit at the second Vatican council in Nostra Aetate.”

The 1965 Nostra Aetate teaching instructs Catholics that “indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles, making both one in Himself.”

Sample said in the video posted last Wednesday that “Good Friday ought to be an occasion for us to return to the Lord, not to scapegoat others. Holding the Jews collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus represents a profound misunderstanding of what took place on Good Friday.” He warned that this theological belief has caused “a great deal of the hatred for the Jewish people that we have seen in history and continue to see today.”

Deicide, the concept of collective Jewish guilt for the execution of Jesus, inspired the antisemitic epithet “Christ killer” and justified centuries of pogroms and forced conversions throughout Europe. This conspiratorial view of Jews scheming to crucify Jesus often went in tandem with the Medieval blood libel, which asserted that Jews would plot in secret to murder Christian children to collect their blood as an ingredient in Passover matzos.

Sample called out this history of conspiracism and its ties to antisemitic theology. “As Catholics, we are called to walk in the truth and so to reject the conspiracies and lies that lead to harassment and even violence against our Jewish brothers and sisters. There is a strong connection between religious freedom and working to counter antisemitism,” he said.

Noting that “the Jewish community is attacked at a far higher rate than any other religious group in the United States,” Sample asserted that “if we Catholics, in truly living out the gospel, are to defend religious freedom with integrity, we must clearly speak out against antisemitism.”

The ongoing tensions among Catholics over Israel, antisemitism, and the impact of far-right podcasters boiled over on Feb. 9. when Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative activist and former Miss California, chose to hijack a hearing of the White House Religious Liberty Commission to question panelists about their views on the war against Hamas in Gaza, religious beliefs about Zionism, and opposition to Owens.

This provoked Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of Texas and chair of the commission, to announce Prejean Boller’s removal from the group. She responded in a statement on X addressed to President Donald Trump where she wrote, “You knew exactly who I was when you appointed me,” and declared her “unwavering commitment to the Christian principles I stand for.”

Prejean Boller’s “unwavering commitment” to her newfound theological beliefs inspired the anti-Zionist political group Catholics for Catholics to present the former beauty pageant contestant a “Catholic Champion” award during Thursday’s Catholic Prayer for America Gala.

Speakers at the event included retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Owens, her former Daily Wire podcasting colleague Matt Walsh (who supplied a video address,) and Joe Kent, the recently-resigned director of the National Counterterrorism Center who stepped down from his position on Tuesday before beginning to publicly blame Israel for drawing the United States into the ongoing conflict with the Islamic regime in Iran.

In a discussion last week with far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson, Kent promoted the longstanding antisemitic trope that Israel controls the US government. He asked rhetorically, “Who is in charge of our policy in the Middle East? Who is in charge of when we decide to go to war or not?”

Kent also suggested a potential Israeli hand involved in the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. While refusing to blame the Jewish state outright, he said, “When one of President Trump’s closest advisers who was vocally advocating against a war with Iran is suddenly publicly assassinated, and we’re not allowed to ask questions about that — it’s a data point. A data point that we need to look into.”

On Monday, John Grosso, the National Catholic Reporter‘s digital editor, analyzed the anti-Israel sentiments as “a major rift in the coalition that elected Donald Trump, split between traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals.” Grosso noted a similar online incident, pointing out that “shortly after Israel and the United States started a war with Iran, a viral post on X by user ‘Insurrection Barbie’ amassed more than 5 million views, bringing the conflict into the mainstream — earning the endorsement of Cruz.”

On March 15, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — one of the Republican Party’s most vocal opponents of far-right antisemitism — shared a post from the anonymous user titled “The Long Game and the Conservative Right,” which has since received 4.1 million views, and wrote, “READ every word of this. It’s the best & most comprehensive explanation of what we’re fighting.”

The essay on X is more than 8,000 words and says it seeks to expose “How a Network of Political Catholic Integralists, Russian Ideologues, and Media Provocateurs Are Systematically Dismantling the Evangelical Foundation of the American Right.”

“I am going to map out what I think is the most sophisticated attack in modern political history and all of its corresponding vectors — institutional, intellectual, theological, generational, and media — and explain how each one feeds into a single ten-year project: the replacement of evangelical Protestant political theology with a Catholic integralist or ethnonationalist framework that views Jews, Israel and Protestants not as covenant partners but as adversaries of Christian civilization,” the essay states.

Before laying out the map, the author makes clear the distinction between mainstream Catholics and Catholic Integralists, the latter of which seek to impose a theocratic government on the world. “The political integralist Catholicism being deployed in this operation bears no relationship to the ordinary American Catholic faith — it uses the vocabulary and symbols of a faith tradition as a vehicle for a power project that most practitioners of that faith would find alien and alarming,” Insurrection Barbie explains.

The essay identifies Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin and his 1997 textbook The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia as a key influence on these efforts with his ideas passing through former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a Tridentine Catholic who advocates for the Latin mass. The two reportedly met secretly in Rome for eight hours in 2018.

“Trump’s voters deserve better than to be used as raw material for a project imported from Russian geopolitical theory and pre-Vatican II European political theology,” Insurrection Barbie writes.

Podcaster Nick Fuentes is a key influencer in this network, with the essay describing how on his shows, which reach more than a million viewers each episode, “every weeknight, before streams begin, viewers see scrolling text from the Apostles’ Creed alongside images of Christ and Scripture passages. Catholicism — specifically the SSPX-adjacent traditionalist Catholicism the Vatican has repeatedly disciplined — is at the heart of his presentation. He actively recruits viewers into his version of the faith. He is building a movement, not just an audience.”

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Catholic Church urges clergy to address ‘misleading statements’ about Jews by far-right influencers

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops cautioned its members in a recent memorandum that Catholic “media personalities” are distorting the church’s position on Jews and Israel, and said that priests should use Holy Week and Easter sermons to clarify these stances.

Bishop Joseph C. Bambera, who chairs the conference’s committee on interreligious affairs and authored the March 13 letter, specifically named Carrie Prejean Boller, a recent convert to Catholicism who was removed from the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission after a combative hearing in which she attacked Zionism, declaring it incompatible with Catholicism. In the same hearing, she also defended Candace Owens, the far-right influencer and a fellow Catholic with a long track record of offensive comments about Jews and Judaism.

The move comes amid growing alarm by many Jews over far-right Catholic influencers who have paired hostility toward Jews with opposition to Israel

Prejean Boller stated that devout Catholics were required to be anti-Zionist and should not be slandered as antisemites on that basis, and has argued elsewhere that Catholics have replaced Jews as “the new people of God.”

“There were witnesses at the hearing who rebutted Ms. Prejean Boller’s assertions about Catholic teaching, but it was her claims and not the rebuttal that have circulated in the media,” Bambera wrote in the confidential letter, which was first reported last week by Joe Enders, a conservative Catholic podcast host.

Rev. Russell McDougall, director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the conference of bishops, said that the memo was intended to help clergy facing questions from local members or journalists about the Catholic position on Jews and Israel.

It was accompanied by a public-facing video released last Wednesday that declared “Catholics must reject antisemitism.” McDougall said in an interview that the video was originally scheduled to be published at the start of Holy Week next Monday but was rushed out after Bambera’s memo was leaked and met with a hostile reaction from some right-wing Catholics.

“Media influencers are out there claiming to be speaking on behalf of the church,” McDougall said. “But practicing Catholics know that within the church it’s the Pope, in union with the College of Bishops, that are the teachers of the church.”

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Carrie Prejean Boller at Trump Tower in 2009. She was removed from the White House’s religious freedom commission after clashing with witnesses at a hearing on antisemitism. Courtesy of Getty Images

The controversy over Prejean Boller’s remarks came amid growing alarm by many Jews over far-right Catholic influencers, including Owens and Nick Fuentes, who have paired hostility toward Jews with opposition to U.S. government support for Israel, and often suggested their faith motivates both positions.

Joe Kent became the latest prominent figure to be caught up in the maelstrom when he resigned last week as director of the National Counterterrorism Center with a letter claiming that Israel had caused both the current U.S.-Israel war against Iran and the previous Iraq War.

He was quickly feted at a gala in Washington, D.C. hosted by Catholics for Catholics, a right-wing group, where he said he “was able to hear God’s voice” while deciding whether to resign from the Trump administration. Prejean Boller and Owens also spoke at the gala.

Bambera, who sent his memorandum to bishops three days before Kent’s resignation, wrote: “The misleading statements made by media personalities” about the Catholic position on Jews and Israel “have been troubling not only to us, but to our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community.”

The letter emphasized the positions detailed in Nostra aetate, a declaration made as part of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, a years-long assembly to modernize the church. Nostra aetate, one of the most significant parts of Vatican II, as the council is known, redefined the Catholic church’s relationship with Jews, holding that “the Jews” as a group are not responsible for killing Jesus Christ, that the Jewish people have a legitimate relationship with God even without accepting the salvation of Jesus and that Catholics should oppose antisemitism.

Bambera also cited a resource on countering antisemitism created in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee two years ago called “Translate Hate.”

Rabbi Noam Marans, the AJC’s director of interreligious affairs, praised the letter in a statement to the Forward: “With the growth of influencers who mistakenly use their Catholicism to spread antisemitic tropes, we need and appreciate responsible Catholic leaders who distance Catholicism from this hate.”

Theological spat over Zionism

Prejean Boller said during the religious freedom commission hearing in February that she opposed Zionism on theological grounds as a Catholic, a point that Bambera’s letter pushed back on.

It said that “Catholics can appreciate the religious attachment that the Jewish people have to the land of Israel, but interpret the reemergence in 1948 of a Jewish state in a historical rather than theological context.”

Some critics of the letter — including Enders, the podcaster who first posted a copy on X — argued that by acknowledging that Catholicism rejects “theological claims” related to Israel’s establishment, Bambera was essentially validating Prejean Boller’s statement that Catholics are required to be “anti-Zionist.”

“With all the preceding indignation toward Mrs. Prejean Boller earlier in this directive, it seems out of place to take this long to say she was right about the political state of Israel having “no biblical prophecy fulfillment,” Enders wrote before calling the letter “totally insane.”

McDougall said those who argued that the letter effectively endorsed Prejean Boller’s views on Israel were misguided. He noted that many, including Enders, also complained that the letter had rejected “supersessionism,” a doctrine that Prejean Boller has also expressed support for that holds Christianity had replaced God’s covenant with Jews.

“That’s something the church has repudiated — and quite clearly,” McDougall said. “The Catholic Cchurch may not take a theological position about the State of Israel but it does take a theological position about the people of Israel, and mentions that the permanence of Israel — when so many other ancient people have disappeared without trace — is to be considered part of God’s design.”

Prejean Boller referred the Forward to a social media post she’d made about the memorandum in which she wrote that “individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility every time they issue a statement” and suggested that Bambera’s letter was at odds with Catholic doctrine.

The dispute offers a peek into a roiling intra-Christian debate over Christian Zionism and whether the Bible contains support for Israel’s modern existence. It’s a debate obscure to most American Jews, who often think of Zionism as pertaining to political support for a Jewish state in Israel based on arguments like the need to prevent another Holocaust, rather than on religious grounds like God’s promise to Abraham, which Bambera’s letter references.

The letter was intended to inform sermons across the country during Holy Week, which begins on March 29, and asked bishops to share the contents of the memo with clergy in their respective diocese.

McDougall said the memorandum and letter were intended to reach the church’s core membership, even if they were unlikely to change the views of figures like Prejean Boller and Owens. “I’m not sure that there’s much the leadership of the church can do to reach some of these individuals and groups that think of themselves as more Catholic than the Pope,” he said.

The post Catholic Church urges clergy to address ‘misleading statements’ about Jews by far-right influencers appeared first on The Forward.

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