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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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Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz z”l, on Hasidic life in pre-war Czernowitz
[The following is an English version of the original Yiddish article, which you can read here.]
Rabbi Mayer Moskowitz, a beloved longtime educator at the Ramaz School in New York and the Hebrew-immersive Camp Massad, and author of the book A Memoir of Sanctity, has passed away.
In 2010, I interviewed Rabbi Moskowitz to learn what the Hasidic community was like in the city where he was born and raised — Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), then part of Romania, and today Ukraine.
Most contemporary scholars of East European Jewish history focus on prewar Czernowitz as a hub of intellectual and cultural Jewish life; as the location of the first Yiddish conference in 1908; as the milieu where the poet Itsik Manger and fabulist Eliezer Shteynbarg produced their greatest work.
But as the oldest child of the Shotzer Rebbe — Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz, Mayer Moskowitz had a very different perspective of the city, describing it as a center of five Hasidic dynasties and a vibrant Orthodox Jewish community.
I met Rabbi Moskowitz through my son, Gedaliah Ejdelman, who was a student in his class on halacha (Jewish law) at Ramaz Upper School. The following anecdote gives you an idea of the kind of person Rabbi Moskowitz was:
On the day before the final exam, one student asked if he could write his answers in English rather than Hebrew. Half-jokingly, the rabbi told the students that they could respond in any language they wished.
Gedaliah raised his hand and asked if he could write in Yiddish. “Sure,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. So Gedaliah did, citing Rashi and other commentators in mame-loshen. Moskowitz was so delighted by the Yiddish responses that he shared them with his colleagues.
When I met with Rabbi Moskowitz in his Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan, I asked him what life was like in Czernowitz. He told me he was born in 1927, a son — in fact, the only son — of the Shotzer Rebbe, Avrohom Chaim Moskowitz. He explained that Czernowitz had no less than five Hasidic dynasties. Besides his father, there was the Boyaner Rebbe; the Nadvorner Rebbe; the Zalischiker Rebbe and the Kitover Rebbe.
“All the Rebbes were related because the marriages of their children were arranged solely with other rabbinical families in Czernowitz,” he said.
Every Rebbe had his own court of Hasidim but there were marked differences between the Rebbe and his worshippers. The former wore beards and peyes (Yiddish for sidelocks) and donned a shtreimel for the Sabbath and holidays, while their worshippers, seeing themselves as “modern Jews,” were clean-shaven and came to services wearing a tsilinder (top hat) and tailcoat.
“I myself had little peyes,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
His family lived in the same building as his father’s shul. His mother, Alte Sheyndl, was a daughter of the Pidayetser Rebbe, so she wore a sheitel. But, like the other rebishe kinder (Rebbe’s children), she was apparently influenced by the cosmopolitan character of the city. In contrast to her husband who spoke Yiddish with their children, the Rebbetzin spoke German. She went to the theater, read secular Yiddish poetry and shook men’s hands. On Mother’s Day, little Mayer would bring her a bouquet of flowers and on New Year’s Eve the Rebbetzin and the other daughters of rabbinical families threw a party.
“On New Year’s Eve they came to our apartment on the second floor, elegantly dressed, ate and spent many hours together,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “Although they didn’t drink any alcohol, the daughters-in-law of the Bayoner Rebbe smoked thin cigarettes.”
Rabbi Moskowitz recalled his first day in cheder at the age of three: “My parents never walked together in public but on that day they dressed me in completely new shorts, shoes and a talis-kotn.” The latter is the traditional four-cornered fringed garment that Orthodox men and boys wear under their shirt.
His parents walked him, hand-in-hand, to the cheder. When they arrived, his father wrapped him in a tallis and carried him inside. On the table, little Mayer saw the diminutive of his name, ‘Mayerl,’ written with large golden letters.
The teacher asked him to repeat each Hebrew letter and its corresponding sound. Every time little Mayer correctly repeated it — “Komets alef ‘o’ … komets beyz ‘bo’ — a honey cookie dropped onto the table in front of him.
“I really thought it was falling from the heavens,” Rabbi Moskowitz said. “As it says in Proverbs: ‘Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.’”
When he was five, Mayer began learning khumesh, the Bible. “It was shabbos afternoon. My relatives, family friends and all five Rebbes came. They lifted me onto the table. I was wearing a brown velvet suit. Each grandfather gave me a golden watch with a little chain and attached it to my suit. Then they asked me: ‘What are you learning in khumesh now?’”
After the quiz was over, the guests began dancing and singing, eating cake and fruit. All the Rebbes wore shtreimels as they sat at tables surrounded by their Hasidim and handed out shirayim — remnants of the blessed food that a Rebbe would give his followers, who believed they would receive a spiritual blessing by eating it. Mayer sat between his grandfathers.
Every morning Mayer went to cheder and three afternoons a week he attended a Zionist Hebrew-language school. In 1936, at the age of ten, he was sent to the city of Vizhnitz (today — Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine) to learn in the yeshiva of the Vizhnitzer Rebbe. He came home only four times a year: on the shabbos of Hanukkah, Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.
Rabbi Moskowitz remembers Sukkot in Czernowitz: “All year, men and women ate together but not on Sukkot. My mother blessed the holiday candles, came into the sukkah for kiddush and hamotzi but then went back into the house where she ate in the company of the other women in the family.”
The sukkah was large. His father’s Hasidim would gather around their Rebbe’s tish (table) on the second night of Sukkot for the all-night celebration called simkhas-beis-hashoeivah. About 150 men would squeeze into the sukkah. But contrary to tradition, no one slept in it. “It was cold and a bit dangerous,” Rabbi Moskowitz said.
The Shotzer Rebbe’s house also served as an inn for rebbes from surrounding towns, when they needed to come to Chernovitz to see a doctor. Simple Jews, who leased land from non-Jewish noblemen would also come to the inn to see their rebbes. “They were common people, wore workboots and would bring fruit from their fields as a gift for the Rebbe,” he explained.
Many times, impoverished Jews would come to his father’s door asking for money. “One of them, called Fishele, used to say ‘I love you’ to my mother. She was indeed a beautiful woman. So my family would invite him in and feed him the same food we were eating.”
In describing these simple everyday events of his childhood in Czernowitz, Rabbi Moskowitz did a true mitzvah: He enabled us to see the city not only as a magnet for Yiddish writers and cultural activists, but also as a large, thriving Hasidic community.
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On final visit to Israel as mayor, Adams makes a closing argument against Mamdani
JERUSALEM — Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams embarked on a multi-day swing through Israel, billed as both a show of solidarity amid rising antisemitism and a farewell visit. But it was also something else: likely the last international trip a New York City mayor will take for years, a point Adams wanted to underscore.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a strident critic of Israel, has pledged not to visit the country, breaking with a tradition upheld by every mayor since 1951 to demonstrate solidarity with Jewish constituents at home. He has also vowed to end the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities and has said he would order the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he lands in New York.
“I think he has to have the level of political maturity to understand that government is not protesting,” Adams said in a fireside chat at an event hosted in his honor by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) in Tel Aviv on Sunday evening. “And all those who are in his midst, like the Democratic Socialists of America, he needs to explain to them that he’s now the mayor. He’s no longer someone that is just protesting in the city of New York. He has to protect the city of New York.”
In the 30-minute conversation, moderated by Sacha Roytman, chief executive of CAM, Adams repeatedly alluded to the impact of Mamdani’s political rise and victory in the mayoral election earlier this month. The outgoing mayor said he told his team a year ago that Mamdani was on track to win the Democratic primary and that he expected to face him in a general election showdown, believing he could beat him.
Adams made combating antisemitism central to his reelection effort. Elected as a Democrat in 2021, he later lost key support after striking a deal with the Trump administration to drop his corruption case, prompting him to run for a second term on an independent line dubbed “End Antisemitism.” He became popular in Israel after delivering a forceful speech at a New York City rally in the days following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, in which he declared, “We are not alright.” He also resisted progressive pressure to distance himself from Israel and faced backlash for his crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests at colleges and across the city. Adams recently signed an executive order adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which labels most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic.
Mamdani, who attended some of the pro-Palestinian protests, faced the most scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and for saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
At the Sunday event, Adams took several shots at Mamdani, calling his election “abnormal” and questioning whether outside actors had influenced the race by shaping social-media algorithms. He suggested that the seeds of Mamdani’s campaign, powered by youthful energy and a promise of unconventional change, were planted during the protests against Israel.
“He had a ready-made army,” Adams said. “He had the Free Palestine movement that was heavily in place. He had the war that was going on, and then he had a group of angry youth on our college campuses. So when he emerged and said he was going to run on one issue, the Free Palestine movement, he already had the army that responded to him.” (Mamdani also ran on issues of affordability, universal childcare, and free buses.)
Adams said the Jewish community in New York “must prepare itself” to respond to any antisemitic attacks that might come. “I think this is a period where they need to be very conscious that there’s a level of global hostility towards the Jewish community,” he said, adding, “If I was a Jewish New Yorker with children, I would be concerned right now.”
Speaking with the Forward on Monday, Adams said he is being truthful about the situation. “I’m not going to lie to New Yorkers, I know what I’m seeing,” he said. “Other people will sugarcoat this moment, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to pretend as though everything is fine.” To his critics, Adams said, “Those who want to interpret my candid view of what’s playing out now in our city and across the globe, they can do so. That is not up to me to try to convince them of what I am seeing and what I am hearing and what is playing out.”
The outgoing mayor is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office on Tuesday. Netanyahu said in an interview last week, commenting on Mamdani’s win, “If that’s the future of New York, I think New York has a very dim future.” Adams said he’ll assure Netanyahu and other leaders he is meeting with the “49% of New Yorkers did not buy into the rhetoric of the hatred towards Israel.” Madani won with 50.4% of the more than two million votes cast.
Other highlights of Adams’ Israel trip
Earlier in the day, Adams held an emotional 30-minute meeting with three former Israeli hostages — Yarden Bibas, whose wife Shiri and young sons Kfir and Ariel were murdered in captivity; Sagi Dekel-Chen, an American-Israeli released in a ceasefire deal in January; and Bar Kuperstein, who was among the last 20 living hostages freed last month.
Held at the World Jewish Sports Museum at Kfar Maccabiah, Dekel-Chen described his time in captivity and the slow and painful process of healing. Bibas described his life in grief, adding that his only purpose is “to stay alive and remember my wife and kids.”
Adams, visibly shaken, told the former hostages that he admired their resilience and that New Yorkers needed to hear these stories firsthand. He offered to host them for the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
At the museum, Roy Hessing, deputy CEO of the Maccabiah movement, invited Adams to serve as an honorary guest at the next Maccabiah Games, now scheduled to resume in June, after delays due to the war. The event is expected to draw 30,000 participants, including 15,000 from abroad.
Adams also paid a visit to the Western Wall on Sunday night, where he placed a note in the wall and prayed. In the guestbook, Adams wrote that “God is real and life has shown us this.”
Shortly after landing on Saturday, Adams walked through the Nachalat Binyamin neighborhood with Tel Aviv’s deputy mayor, Asaf Zamir, who was Israel’s consul general in New York from 2021 to 2023. Zamir was outspoken against Mamdani throughout the mayoral campaign. Adams has long referred to New York as the “Tel Aviv of America.”
In tours closed to the press, Adams visited the IMI Academy, where Israeli instructors provide tactical and emergency-response training, and the Aerial Systems facility, where he was shown the latest drone and surveillance technologies. He also addressed the annual mayors’ conference hosted by the American Jewish Congress at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.
At many of his stops, Adams said about his farewell: “I’m not just the mayor that’s leaving office, I’m your brother.”
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Graffiti during Mexican protests against Claudia Sheinbaum’s government calls out ‘Jewish whore’
(JTA) — Mexico’s Jewish community has condemned antisemitic graffiti apparently directed toward the country’s Jewish president during an anti-government protest on Saturday.
The graffiti painted on the door of the Supreme Court building said “puta judia” or “Jewish whore,” in what has been widely interpreted as a reference to Claudia Sheinbaum. It also included a crossed-out Star of David.
The graffiti was painted during a youth-led protest that responds to rising violence, crime and corruption, particularly by drug cartels. Dozens of people were reportedly arrested and injured in Saturday’s protests.
“The Jewish Community of Mexico strongly condemns the antisemitic remarks and expressions” during the march, the community said in a statement on Sunday. “Antisemitism is a form of discrimination according to our constitution and must be rejected clearly and unequivocally.”
Sheinbaum, elected last year, is Mexico’s first Jewish president. She has not made her Jewish identity a part of her public persona and is not a regular participant in the country’s tight-knit Jewish communities.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, also condemned the graffiti. “Israel strongly condemns the antisemitic and sexist slurs directed at Mexico’s President @Claudiashein,” he tweeted while sharing a picture from the protests. “There is no place for such attacks in political discourse. All forms of antisemitism, in any context, must be rejected unequivocally.”
Israel strongly condemns the antisemitic and sexist slurs directed at Mexico’s President @Claudiashein. There is no place for such attacks in political discourse.
All forms of antisemitism, in any context, must be rejected unequivocally. pic.twitter.com/HEDKzq34e8— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) November 16, 2025
Some of Sheinbaum’s detractors have previously invoked her Jewish background, including former President Vicente Fox, who called her a “Bulgarian Jew” in an apparent attempt to minimize her candidacy. He apologized, but made a similar comment after Sheinbaum briefly donned a rosary with a crucifix after being given one during a campaign stop. “JEWISH AND FOREIGN AT THE SAME TIME,” Fox tweeted. Sheinbaum produced her birth certificate multiple times to dispel rumors that she was born in Bulgaria.
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