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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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Writer of sitcom airing instead of Eurovision in Ireland calls broadcaster’s boycott over Israel ‘disgraceful antisemitism’
(JTA) — Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan accused Ireland’s public broadcaster of “disgraceful antisemitism” over its decision not to air this year’s Eurovision Song Contest because of Israel’s participation — even as his work will get prime airtime as a result.
Instead of airing the annual international song contest’s finale Saturday, which Ireland and four other nations have boycotted this year over Israel’s participation, the country’s public broadcaster, RTÉ, is scheduled to air an episode of “Father Ted,” a beloved Irish sitcom that Linehan co-created.
“I am disgusted that Father Ted is being used as a fig leaf to cover RTE’s disgraceful antisemitism,” Linehan wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. He later added that the broadcaster was “turning Father Ted into an antisemitic dogwhistle.”
Linehan, who has become a prominent anti-transgender activist in recent years, also posted an online petition on Monday calling for the resignation of RTÉ Director General Kevin Bakhurst over the broadcaster’s decision not to air the Eurovision finale because of Israel’s participation.
“I did not give my permission for Father Ted to be used as a prop in an antisemitic political gesture. I object to it in the strongest possible terms,” Linehan wrote. “This is not the Ireland I know. This is not the Ireland that gave Father Ted to the world. RTÉ’s institutional antisemitism is poisoning Irish public life, normalising Jew-hatred under the guise of solidarity, and it must be confronted.”
Linehan’s petition, which had garnered over 4,000 signatures by Wednesday afternoon, comes months after RTÉ announced plans to boycott the competition in December, writing in a statement at the time that its participation “remains unconscionable given the appalling loss of lives in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there.”
On Tuesday, Israel’s Eurovision contestant Noam Bettan was met by chants of “stop the genocide” as he performed his song “Michelle” in Vienna. Bettan’s semifinal qualified him to perform in Saturday’s finale, where he will compete against entrants from 25 other countries.
Bettan told the BBC that he was shocked by the protests, and hoped that the public broadcasters of Iceland, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia would return for next year’s competition.
“It’s bad for them,” Bettan said. “They’re losing the opportunity to be in this amazing experience. So I am full of hope that next year they can sing and spread their light.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Writer of sitcom airing instead of Eurovision in Ireland calls broadcaster’s boycott over Israel ‘disgraceful antisemitism’ appeared first on The Forward.
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At Jewish Democratic event, Jacob Frey says anti-Zionism can blur into antisemitism
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — Jacob Frey, the Jewish mayor of Minneapolis, decried some criticism of Israel during a Jewish Democratic event on Wednesday.
Speaking at the national conference of the Jewish Democratic Council of America in Washington, D.C., Frey recounted visiting a local grocery store shortly after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“The tiny little Jewish section, which had hummus and maybe one other product, was tagged with, ‘Why do you support genocide?’” he said. “And this was just the Jewish section, it wasn’t even the Israeli section.”
Frey continued, “So as much as people say, and have often said, ‘No we’re talking about Zionists, not Jews’ — well many of those same people are tying Zionism to Judaism. You can’t have it both ways at the same time.”
He concluded that “you can both believe in a State of Israel and support it, and simultaneously be opposed to some of the horrific acts that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has conducted.”
Frey’s comments, which came in response to a question from the audience, were some of his most extensive on Israel and his first on the topic since he took the national spotlight earlier this year for his defiant stance against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement in his city.
The fact that Frey, 44, decided to appear at JDCA’s national leadership summit itself was notable because he is a relatively young rising star in a Democratic Party where the ascendant sentiments, especially among the progressive wing and among younger voters, are critical of Israel. The JDCA promotes a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Responding to a question about anti-Israel sentiment in his party, Frey said he thought Democrats should do more to constrain fringe sentiments within the party.
“It’s easy for me, and it’s very easy for Democrats, to critique the right,” he said. “I’ve got a whole team supporting me when I said get the F out of Minneapolis. That was not a hard thing to do, that’s just what I felt. What’s harder to do is to tell your own side, sometimes your own friends that, you know what, you’ve gone too far.”
He added, “My deep concern right now is that people don’t have the guts to tell their own side what they don’t want to hear.”
Asked in an interview following the session about whether Democrats should be campaigning alongside figures like the progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who is a staunch Israel critic and has drawn accusations of antisemitism, Frey told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he was not familiar with the debate around Piker nor his positions.
But Frey said he takes issue with litmus tests and opposes the villainization that comes from people on both ends of the political spectrum.
“I am uncomfortable with, ‘Get on board, say the word, say the phrase or we’re going to tar and feather you — put out this post or say on the stage this exact term, or else we’re going to consider you to be a villain,’” he said.
While Frey has drawn support from progressives over his showdown with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that staged weeks of raids in Minneapolis earlier this year, he has clashed with that wing before on Israel. In 2024, Frey blocked his city council’s resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, calling it “one-sided resolution that adds more division to an already fraught situation.”
On Wednesday, the primary discussion between Frey and JDCA’s treasurer Beth Kieffer Leonard, focused on the ICE presence in Minneapolis and Frey’s response.
He also offered a Jewish reason for his determination to stop ICE “dead in their tracks” so that other cities aren’t similarly targeted, citing the value of repairing the world.
“As Jews, we have an obligation through tikkun olam to stand up for it, to make the world a better place, to heal people and to recognize that when they come for one of us, that they come for all of us,” he said.
When asked about Israel and anti-Zionism during the Q&A session, Frey expanded on his belief in the State of Israel as well as his criticisms of its government.
“You can recognize the importance of a place for peace and refuge, a place where refugees by the hundreds of thousands and millions have immigrated to Israel — from both Ashkenazi countries and also Iraq, Iran and Yemen — a very mixed ethnically and culturally place,” Frey said. “You can recognize that the history is complex. That there are areas where we collectively as Jews can improve. Where policies can be improved.”
Frey continued that he is an adamant opponent of Trump but believes in America and said the same should be possible with Netanyahu and Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post At Jewish Democratic event, Jacob Frey says anti-Zionism can blur into antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Saudi Warplanes Struck Militias in Iraq During War, Sources Say
F-15SA fighter jets are seen at King Faisal Air College in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 25, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser
Saudi fighter jets bombed targets linked to powerful Tehran-backed Shi’ite militias in Iraq during the Iran war, while retaliatory strikes were also launched from Kuwait into Iraq, multiple sources familiar with the matter said.
The strikes are part of a broader pattern of military responses around the Gulf that remained largely hidden during a conflict that began with US-Israeli attacks on Iran and has spread to the wider Middle East.
For this report, Reuters spoke to three Iraqi security and military officials, a Western official, and two people briefed on the matter, one of them in the US.
The Saudi strikes were carried out by Saudi air force fighter jets on Iran-linked militia targets near the kingdom’s northern border with Iraq, one Western official and the person briefed on the matter said. The Western official said some strikes took place around the time of the April 7 US-Iran ceasefire.
They targeted sites from which drone and missile attacks were launched at Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the sources said.
Citing military assessments, the Iraqi sources said rocket attacks were launched on at least two occasions from Kuwaiti territory on Iraq. One set of strikes hit militia positions in southern Iraq in April, killing several fighters and destroying a facility used by Iran-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah for communications and drone operations, they said.
Reuters could not determine whether the rockets from Kuwait were fired by the Kuwaiti armed forces or the US military, which has a large presence there. The US military declined to comment. The Kuwaiti information ministry and the Iraqi government did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
SAUDI ARABIA ALSO HIT IRAN
A Saudi foreign ministry official said Saudi Arabia sought de-escalation, self-restraint and the “reduction of tensions in pursuit of the stability, security, and prosperity of the region,” but did not address the issue of strikes on Iraq. A spokesperson for Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia launched strikes directly on Iran during the war in retaliation for attacks on the kingdom, the first time Riyadh is known to have hit Iranian soil. The UAE also carried out similar strikes on Iran, three people familiar with the matter said.
But hundreds of the drones that targeted the Gulf emanated from Iraq, all the sources said.
Militia-linked Telegram channels repeatedly posted statements during the war claiming attacks on targets in Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Reuters could not independently confirm their authenticity.
Sustained attacks from a second front in Iraq prompted Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to lose patience with the militias, which collectively command tens of thousands of fighters and arsenals including missiles and drones.
Kuwait summoned Iraq’s representative in the country three times during the war to protest cross-border attacks, as well as the storming of the Kuwaiti consulate in the city of Basra on April 7. Saudi Arabia also summoned Iraq’s ambassador on April 12 to protest attacks.
IRAQ-GULF TIES DEFINED BY SUSPICION
Gulf Arab relations with Iraq have long been defined by suspicion. Ties were severely damaged in 1990 when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and fired Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia, and they remained strained for decades.
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq deepened Gulf concerns by empowering Shi’ite political factions and armed groups closely tied to Tehran, turning Iraq into a key node in Iran’s regional network of proxies.
Gulf states have repeatedly accused Baghdad of failing to rein in those groups, which operate with significant autonomy and have launched attacks across borders.
A China-brokered détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023 had offered hope for broader regional stabilization. But the outbreak of war has severely tested those gains, drawing Gulf states into a conflict they had sought to avoid and exposing the limits of diplomatic progress made in recent years.
In March, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had warned Baghdad via diplomatic channels to curb rocket and drone attacks by pro-Iranian groups against Gulf states, according to two Iraqi security officials and a government security adviser.
Iraqi forces say they intercepted some attempted attacks, including the seizure of a rocket launcher west of Basra intended to strike Saudi energy facilities.
But Iran-backed militias continue to fly surveillance drones along Iraq’s borders with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, conducting reconnaissance and feeding intelligence to Iran, according to four Iraqi security sources and a person briefed on the matter.
“They are gathering information on what has been damaged, what is still working. They are preparing for the next strike,” the person briefed on the matter said.