Admittedly, Holocaust movies are often problematic. So much of the material is familiar and repetitive. Many audiences have grown inured to the subject if not downright turned off, for whatever reasons. Documentary maker Nick Davis says he did not want to make another Holocaust film, at least not one that we had seen before. He has succeeded. Instead of focusing on the relentless atrocities and victims, his film, This Ordinary Thing shines a light on the often forgotten heroes of the era.

It tells the story of gentiles who helped save Jews across Europe during The Holocaust. Narrated by an all-star cast — including F. Murray Abraham, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Ellen Burstyn, Jeannie Berlin, Eric Bogosian, Lily Tomlin, and Stephen Fry — the film combines archival footage with the testimonies of more than 40 individuals who, at great personal risk to themselves and their families, worked to rescue Jews.

This was no collective endeavor. As told in this film, none of these people had histories as resistance fighters, although they may have become partisans later. They rose to the occasion, that’s all. Those they hid were desperate neighbors, friends and sometimes strangers who showed up at their doorsteps begging for help.

In some instances they sheltered Jews for years in tight unlit quarters without plumbing; elsewhere, they adopted Jewish children and passed them off as their own; in one situation, a housekeeper prostituted herself to appease and silence her employer who discovered she was hiding Jews in his home. In another, a housewife was hiding Jews underneath and between the cushions in her large, bulky sofa.  And when Nazi soldiers stormed the house, eyeing the sofa, she challenged them to shoot it up, adding that when they found nothing, but succeeded in ruining her furniture, they would have to buy her new fabric and pay for reupholstering. The soldiers, who may or may not have believed her, left the home.

If caught, any one of these brave souls could have been shot on the spot or hung; some of them were. But by the end of the war, they had rescued thousands of Jewish strangers from almost certain death in the camps, ghettos or streets. Precise statistics are not known, but Yad Vasham estimates that the Jews saved number in the tens of thousands, and the museum acknowledges 28,000 saviors as “The Righteous Among the Nations.”

The 62-minute film, with haunting music by Tony-winner Adam Guettel, is understated and subtle. Set within a chronological structure, starting at the cusp of the Holocaust and continuing post liberation and beyond, these courageous figures recount matter-of-factly what they observed and experienced. Devoid of back stories, short of their names and countries of origin, they become, in the film, at once heroes and historical witnesses.

Most of our heroes are voice overs, nothing more. A few, however, were interviewed decades ago; some of these video testimonials are interwoven, as well as many black and white photos of the narrators.

Throughout the movie, the overarching questions remain unanswered. How do people like this come to exist? What makes it possible for them to step up to the plate? What, if anything, unites them?

Their motivations were all over the map. Some of the people who sheltered Jews were genuinely religious; others, less traditionally so, nevertheless held a kind of simple morality as axiomatic.  One said “It’s natural: When people come to you hungry, you give them food.” Another notes, “How would you feel if, later, that person died? How could you survive?”

Many of those interviewed in the film said they were driven to act through the stunning outrage they felt in response to their fellow countrymen’s willful ignorance and, in more than a few cases, outright denial of the growing antisemitism. Hatred of Jews was pervasive and had always been endemic in their countries, which included Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Indeed, the majority of their gentile neighbors, some observed, couldn’t wait to be marching in lockstep with the Nazis, who offered them the perfect platform to voice their deep seated antisemitism.

But nothing could compete with the shocking scenes the gentile heroes  personally witnessed that confirmed the necessity to do something, at whatever peril to themselves. The brutality was unprecedented; one witness described walking into a public square to see five bodies swinging from the gallows, including a gentile couple and the Jewish family they sheltered. Another recalled seeing a Nazi officer smashing a crying Jewish infant to the ground and then stomping on its head.

Some of the images, such as the grisly gallows scene, are projected on screen. But in most cases, the archival footage has nothing to do with the particulars that are being recounted at that moment, and in fact often border on the generic. Still, they effectively serve as potent backdrops. There are the marching Nazis and cheering crowds, Jewish owned stores with “Jude” scrawled across broken windows and abandoned Jewish homes, the owners’ possessions strewn all over the floor.

At the end of the war, most Jews and their gentile protectors went their separate ways, but not all. One Jewish man married the gentile woman who saved him; another Christian who rescued Jews reports that he converted to Judaism, including undergoing a circumcision at the age of 68. One recalls a conversation with his wife, marveling in retrospect at how they saved Jews during the war.

“I said, ‘We’d be crazy to risk our lives for those strange people.’ And my wife said, ‘Yeah. We’ll never do it again, will we?’ ‘No,’ I said, and she looked at me and we laughed. She said, ‘You know, just as well as I do, we would do the same thing over.’”

To show the timelessness of antisemitism, Davis incorporates chants from the antisemitic demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017.  “Jews will not replace us.” But the snippet is unnecessary — in fact, it almost dilutes the impact of what has preceded it.

The references to current events trivialize the Holocaust and unwittingly undermine the actions of the gentile heroes. I also can’t help feeling that Davis was looking for a theme that was universal, like heroic individuals, from any era, who do the right thing despite the peril that is involved.”

While it’s tempting to look for universal resonance in the film — to attempt to answer the question, “What would I do?” — there is no application. This story and its heroes are very much of their time and place. The word “inspiring” does not cut it. I watched this one gob-smacked.

This Ordinary Thing is running at the Cinema Village.

The post Righteous gentiles in the Holocaust were no ‘ordinary thing’ appeared first on The Forward.

In the New York of my childhood, each year’s change in seasons, from winter to spring, meant renewed memories of the Holocaust as the adults in my neighborhood swapped long sleeves for short, and the numbers burned into the flesh of more than a few of their arms were laid bare for all to see. Observing the awful evidence of the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews, in hushed tones, my friends and I would trade stories we’d heard about first wives, first husbands, and first sets of children that our classmates’ parents and grandparents lost in mass executions and concentration camps in Europe during World War II.

Awful as the Holocaust was to us and humbled as we were by the courage and defiance of the survivors who made no effort to cover up their arms while sunbathing at our local swimming pool, as children often do, we indulged in gallows humor about the terrible events that brought these refugees to our neighborhood.

A favorite of ours was imitating a question we’d been told many former Nazis asked after the Nazi defeat, responding to accusations of collaboration in the Holocaust. “There vas a var?” we’d ask one another, giggling, in our best reproduction of German-accented English, trying to sound the way we imagined culpable Germans might sound while screwing up our faces in exaggerated disbelief, just as we’d heard many former Nazis did to prove how they, personally, had nothing to do with the genocide.

These childhood moments came back to me as I listened to the tapes Claude Lanzmann recorded while doing research for his epic film, Shoah. The tapes have been made available to the public for the very first time, in two Shoah anniversary exhibitions, at the Jewish Museum Berlin and at The New York Historical in New York.

The tapes capture perpetrators and bystanders getting all bolloxed up in justifications, self-serving claims, deflections of guilt — including blaming the Jew victims — and efforts to extract themselves from culpability. On one of the tapes, a former SS man responds to a request for comment on the killing of Jews: “No, that’s over for me!” I thought of the jokey question of my youth – “There vas a var?” – which made pretty much the same point.

Perhaps because of my experience growing up in a New York that gave refuge to those whose scars went well beyond the numbers on their arms, branding them like cattle, it was obvious to me why Lanzmann’s tapes belonged in an exhibition in New York. It was New York’s hospitality to refugees that allowed the Holocaust survivors I knew to build new lives and new families.

But many who learned of The New York Historical’s decision to offer this unique audible Holocaust history coincidentally with the Jewish Museum Berlin, which owns the tapes, were perplexed, asking me why an institution focused on New York and American history would mount an exhibition of Lanzmann’s recordings.

In spite of the connection I felt to the history Lanzmann’s tapes told, my response was not personal. Listening to the tapes illustrates a universal point: the ease with which hatred of a people based on their religion can sink its roots in any society, and the dangers of underestimating this power.

Set against the backdrop of the rise of antisemitism today, the tapes, which record the voices of victims like the parents and grandparents I knew, provide a vital history lesson to a new generation, showing how quickly the belief that Jewish people and their faith are the problem can find its way into a nation’s political consciousness, and how that mindset can ultimately fuel violence on the world stage.

There are, as well, the moral questions raised by the rise of the Nazis in Germany, which transcend geographical boundaries and fall squarely on the permanent agenda of institutions like The New York Historical, which look to the lessons of history as a way of encouraging contemporary audiences to reflect on their own roles and responsibilities, as well as those of institutions like The New York Historical when confronted with injustice.

There is also a direct connection between the antisemitism in Europe that promoted the extermination of Jews, and the history of New York. Who could fail to recognize the enormous impact of those who fled Europe in the wake of Nazism on the city’s cultural institutions, its colleges and universities, its scientific institutions and organizations?

A whole “University in Exile” was founded in New York with some of Europe’s most notable Jewish scholars as faculty; Jewish artists and musicians formed the bedrock of our city’s modern art museums, institutes, conservatories and concert halls in the 1930s and 40s.

Finally, and above all, the tapes underscore the old adage about the importance of history: how it is impossible to understand who we are without knowing from where we came. The tapes offer an incomparable opportunity to convey, especially to young people, how a significant part of our city’s demographic came to be in New York; how this demographic, like so many others in our city right now, sought the basic right to live without fear or threat of violence because of ethnicity or religious belief.

Listening to the Lanzmann tapes in both the context of today’s debates about whether people displaced by violence around the world should be offered refuge in the United States, and as we prepare to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026, reminds us not only of the importance of testimony and of preserving voices from the past, but of who we are as Americans and what responsibilities our democracy gave us 250 years ago. Let this extraordinary audible history be a guide.

The post My childhood echoes in newly-released Shoah recordings appeared first on The Forward.

A NVIDIA logo appears in this illustration taken Aug. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Israeli high–tech companies raised $15.6 billion in private funding in 2025, up from $12.2 billion in 2024, Startup Nation Central said in a report on Monday citing preliminary data.

The tech sector, regarded as one of the largest in the world, accounts for about 20% of GDP, 15% of jobs and more than half of Israeli exports.

It has proved resilient, despite the war in Gaza, which began in 2023, when total funding was $10 billion.

Global giants, such as Nvidia, in 2025 said they would increase their physical and talent presence in Israel.

The number of funding deals, at 717, was the lowest in the last decade, but the deals were higher value. The median private deal, SNC said, reached a record $10 million – up 67% over 2024.

The year 2025 “was not about a return to business as usual; it was a pivot toward high-conviction maturity,” said Avi Hasson, CEO of SNC.

M&A activity reached a record $74.3 billion in value, spread over 150 deals, the data showed.

It was led by Alphabet’s $32 billion purchase of cyber firm Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion acquisition of cyber rival CyberArk.

SNC said the level of M&A in Israel reflected multi-nationals’ efforts “to secure critical innovation.”

“These companies are effectively turning to Israeli startups into their next generation of R&D engines, laying the groundwork for additional acquisitions,” it said.

Funding for tech startups in 2024 was led by $5.2 billion for mid-stage rounds, followed by early-stage investments of $3.9 billion and $2.5 billion for later stages, SNC said.

A number of Israeli companies went public, raising more than $10 billion.