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Spielberg’s ‘Fabelmans’ earns 7 Oscar nods, WWII epic with anti-Nazi past gets 9
(JTA) – “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama about his Jewish upbringing, had an expected strong haul of Oscar nominations, picking up seven nods Tuesday morning.
A remake of a movie once targeted by the Nazis, a blockbuster embroiled in a lawsuit with an Israeli family and a documentary by the program director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival also got recognized in a list jam-packed with Jewish characters, stories and artists.
Spielberg’s movie overcame an anemic box office showing to score nominations in the major categories of best picture, director and screenplay, for Spielberg and celebrated Jewish playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner. The directing nomination brings Spielberg’s total nominations in the category to nine, tying him with Martin Scorsese for the second-most directing nominations in Oscar history.
The film also scored acting nods for Judd Hirsch, who is Jewish, and Michelle Williams, who recently said she is planning to raise her two children with Judaism.
“The Fabelmans” was the best picture nominee with the strongest Jewish themes, but it wasn’t the only one. The psychological drama “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as a problematic conductor, picked up six nominations, including for picture, actress and director; the film weaves Jewish mysticism into its storytelling.
“All Quiet On The Western Front,” Netflix’s new German-language adaptation of the classic 1929 novel about the horrors experienced by German soldiers during World War I, was also nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture, international feature and adapted screenplay. The film’s source material was once banned and burned by the ascending Nazi Party, which believed its anti-war stance made the German military look weak and constituted a threat to their plans for world domination.
When the book’s initial 1930 film adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker Lewis Milestone, was released in Germany, Nazis led by Joseph Goebbels set off stink bombs, released mice into the theaters and called the movie a “Judenfilm” (or “Jewish film”). Germany and Austria banned the film from being shown in their countries, and the public censorship campaign led the novel’s author, Erich Maria Remarque, to renounce his German citizenship (Nazis were erroneously labeling him as a Jew).
In response, Jewish studio head Carl Laemmle Sr., agreed to heavily edit the movie and remove material deemed objectionable to the Nazis in order to improve its commercial prospects in Germany. One possible silver lining for the remake’s producers: The 1930 film went on to win best picture that year.
Tom Cruise at a “Top Gun: Maverick” premier at Leicester Square in London, May 19, 2022. (Neil Mockford/FilmMagic via Getty Images)
Back to this year’s Oscars: “Top Gun: Maverick,” the action blockbuster sequel, picked up four nominations, including for best picture. The film’s distributor, Paramount, is currently embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with the family of Israeli journalist Ehud Yonay, whose magazine article about a Navy fighter pilot school was the basis for the original “Top Gun” in 1986. In November, a judge dismissed Paramount’s attempts to throw out the suit and ruled the Yonay family could proceed with their claims.
The writer, director and actress Sarah Polley also scored a nomination for best adapted screenplay for her drama “Women Talking,” about a group of abused women in an isolated Mennonite community, which was also nominated for best picture. Polley has a Jewish biological father, whose secret parentage she explored in her 2013 documentary “Stories We Tell.”
The Jewish film producer Gail Berman also scored her first Oscar nomination for producing best picture nominee “Elvis,” while Jewish producing partners Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel scored their own best picture nomination for “The Whale.” The movie, which Aronofsky directed, stars Brendan Fraser (also nominated) as a morbidly obese English professor.
In the performing categories, one actor was nominated for playing a real-life Jewish convert: Ana de Armas received a best actress nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in Netflix’s “Blonde.” Monroe converted to Judaism in the 1950s and remained devoted to the religion even after divorcing her husband, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller.
Also, veteran actress Jamie Lee Curtis — whose father, Golden Age Hollywood actor Tony Curtis, was Jewish — picked up her first-ever Oscar nomination for her supporting role as a sinister tax officer in the multiverse sci-fi comedy “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
Curtis is nominated in the category alongside her co-star Stephanie Hsu, who is also known to fans of the very Jewish TV series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as Mei Lin, a Chinese restaurant owner who gets together with co-lead Joel Maisel. Early buzz on the upcoming fifth season of “Maisel” says that Hsu’s character will convert to Judaism.
Another “Everything Everywhere” co-star, Jewish actress Jenny Slate, helped a different film score an Oscar nomination in the best animated feature category: the stop-motion mockumentary “Marcel The Shell With Shoes On.” Slate co-wrote the feature with her ex-husband Dean Fleischer-Camp, who directs; Slate also voices the lead role of Marcel. However, she is not one of the nominated producers on the film.
“All The Beauty And The Bloodshed,” a portrait of the outsider artist Nan Goldin and her years-long activism campaign against opioid manufacturers the Sackler family, was nominated in the best documentary feature category and is favored to win. The film documents how Goldin was born to Jewish parents but had an emotionally abusive family life and left home in her teens. The Sacklers are also Jewish.
The documentary short category saw the second nomination in a row for Jewish filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose documentary “How Do You Measure A Year” chronicles many years of his daughter Ella’s birthdays. Rosenblatt is the program director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski was also nominated in the international feature category for his drama “EO,” told from the perspective of a donkey. Skolimowski’s father was a member of the Polish Resistance and his mother hid a Jewish family in their house during World War II.
Jewish composer Justin Hurwitz, who won an Oscar for his work on “La La Land,” was nominated again for the score for “Babylon,” a follow-up production with that film’s director, Damien Chazelle.
And in the original song category, Jewish songwriter Diane Warren extended her nomination streak to 14 for the number “Applause,” from the feminist documentary “Tell It Like A Woman.” Warren has never won a competitive Oscar but did receive an honorary Academy Award last year.
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The post Spielberg’s ‘Fabelmans’ earns 7 Oscar nods, WWII epic with anti-Nazi past gets 9 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel’s Top Diplomat Calls on Jews to Make Aliyah Amid Global Surge in Antisemitic Violence
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar attends a press conference with the Danish Foreign Minister (not pictured) in Jerusalem, Sept. 7, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard/via REUTERS
Amid a global surge in antisemitic violence, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has urged Jews living abroad to make aliyah to Israel, warning that diaspora communities are increasingly vulnerable to hatred and hostility as foreign governments fail to protect them.
“Over the past year, we have concentrated efforts in the fight against the rising antisemitism around the world,” Saar said Sunday during a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in Rishon LeZion, a city in central Israel.
“We demanded that foreign governments take real steps against the new antisemitism. Few did so. Most allowed an unrestrained surge of overt antisemitism in the public sphere,” the top Israeli diplomat continued.
Saar’s latest remarks come in the wake of a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last Sunday, which left 15 dead and at least 40 injured.
Earlier this year, a string of deadly terrorist attacks also targeted Jewish communities, including the Yom Kippur assault in Manchester that killed two Jewish men, the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado – which killed one and injured 13 – and the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
“Jews have the right to live in safety everywhere. Today, Jews are being hunted across the world. Today I call on Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Australia, Jews in Canada, Jews in Belgium: come to the Land of Israel! Come home!” Saar said during his speech.
“We are waiting for you here with open arms. With love. In the true home of the Jewish people. Why raise your children in this atmosphere?” the Israeli diplomat continued. “Come with your families to the land of our forefathers, to the State of Israel, where the Jews taught the entire world what Jewish self-defense means. The time has come.”
Jewish communities around the world, especially in Europe, have faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes, ranging from the vandalism of murals and businesses to violent physical assaults, that their communities continue to face.
In the United Kingdom, more than half of British Jews — 51 percent — believe they have no long-term future in the country or elsewhere in Europe, according to a survey conducted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released Monday.
Amid this climate of rising hostility, almost half of British Jews (45 percent) report feeling unwelcome in the UK, while a majority (61 percent) have considered leaving the country in the past two years, citing the recent surge in antisemitism as the main reason.
The newly released report also found that 59 percent of British Jews try to avoid displaying visible signs of their Jewish identity out of fear of antisemitic attacks, while 96 percent believe that Jews in Britain are less safe now than they were before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Fewer than one in ten British Jews believe authorities are doing enough to tackle antisemitism, with only 14 percent feeling that the police are adequately protecting them.
In France, the local Jewish community has also faced a growing climate of hostility and antisemitic violence, which has even extended into politics, sparking national debates and drawing condemnation from leaders and civil society groups.
In one of the latest controversies, Bernard Bazinet, the mayor of Augignac in the southwestern Dordogne region, was expelled from the French Socialist Party earlier this month after posting antisemitic comments online about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
“France is too Jewish to boycott [Eurovision]!” Bazinet wrote in a post on Facebook.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez strongly condemned Bazinet’s comments, warning that he could face sanctions ranging from suspension to outright dismissal.
However, the rising wave of antisemitic attacks and hatred has spread beyond Western countries, reaching nations across the Eastern Mediterranean and other regions worldwide.
On Sunday, a group of Jews in Istanbul were attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters while on their way to light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle at the Neve Shalom synagogue.
According to widely circulated social media videos, the attackers approached the group while shouting, “These Zionists should leave this country,” waving Palestinian flags as they tried to get closer.
In a separate incident over the weekend, an Israeli man was attacked outside the hotel where he was staying in Limassol, Cyprus, after assailants reportedly heard him speaking Hebrew on the phone.
According to the victim’s father, his son was talking on the phone when a man approached him, asked for a cigarette, and then brutally assaulted him.
The victim was rushed to a local hospital and then flown to Israel on Sunday for emergency eye surgery after the attack, but doctors were unable to save his vision.
“My son, a young Israeli, was violently attacked at the entrance to the hotel where he was staying in Cyprus. Not on the street, not in a bar. At the entrance to the hotel — a place that is supposed to be safe and secure,” the victim’s father wrote in a post on Facebook. “He was brutally beaten, injured in the head and face, and evacuated for medical treatment.”
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Northwestern University’s Doha Campus a ‘Pipeline’ for Qatari Elites, New Report Finds
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani speaks on the first day of the 23rd edition of the annual Doha Forum, in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
The children of the Qatari aristocracy are vastly overrepresented at the Northwestern University campus in Qatar (NU-Q), a fact that, according to a new report, undermines the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by acting in practice as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
The Middle East Forum (MEF), a think tank whose mission is to protect Western values and promote US interests in the Middle East, published its findings on NU-Q in a damning new report. MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
“Northwestern’s Qatar (NU-Q) campus has become a de facto elite access pipeline, admitting members of Qatar’s most powerful royal and ruling families at rates that bear no resemblance to the country’s demographic reality,” says the report, titled “How the Qatari Royals and Elite Conquered Northwestern University’s Qatar Campus in Doha.”
“Rather than functioning as an open academic institution, NU-Q operates as a selective training ground for the same families who finance and control the campus, effectively blurring the line between a US university and a state-run patronage system,” the report continues. “What emerges is not merely an educational partnership, but a closed-loop system of influence production which a US university’s foreign campus helps cultivate the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class, with direct implications for US policy, national security, and foreign influence.”
The report goes on to say that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continues. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
MEF’s report has deep roots in debates over the Middle East and the ambiguities inherent in how countries conduct their international affairs.
Until the collapse of the British Empire in the years following the conclusion of World War II, Qatar functioned as a pillar and beneficiary of Great Britain’s regional order in the Middle East, having agreed to be one of many Persian Gulf protectorates which blocked Ottoman expansion and protected Great Britain’s sea route to its imperial holdings in India. The US opened diplomatic relations with the oil-rich kingdom in 1971 after it achieved independence from Great Britain, and the two states continue to enjoy what the US State Department describes as a “strategic partnership” for fostering economic growth, counterterrorism, cultural exchange, and defense and security cooperation.
The US designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally in 2022, and President Donald Trump earlier this year committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
However, Qatar has also been a patron of Hamas for years, hosting the Palestinian terrorist group’s political bureau in Doha since 2012.
During the same period, the Middle Eastern monarchy has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US. MEF released a separate report in May exposing the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts described as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. The findings showed that Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.
This effort has focused heavily on higher education.
A recent report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), for example, found that Qatar has funneled roughly $20 billion into American schools and universities over five decades as part of a coordinated, 100-year project to embed Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in the US.
The 200-page report, unveiled in Washington, DC to members of Congress, chronicled a 50-year effort by Brotherhood-linked groups to embed themselves in American academia, civil society, and government agencies, exposing what ISGAP called the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy, while maintaining an agenda fundamentally at odds with liberal democratic values.
In June, ISGAP released a separate report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” a 132-page document which described dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown University’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its Qatari benefactors — who have given it over $1 billion over the past decade — the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, located in the Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report said, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Trump signed an executive order last month directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The order did not mention Qatar, but experts have flagged Doha’s support for a wide range of Islamist groups.
“From the Taliban to Hamas to violent Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to Somalia’s Al-Shabab, Qatar allows the groups it hosts to access the global financial system and launder money,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin wrote in September. “Qatar has long been part of [a] war on the West, even as it tries to escape accountability for its actions. Moral clarity matters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Pennsylvania principal to be fired over antisemitic voicemail: ‘They control the banks’
A Pennsylvania elementary school principal is facing termination by his school district after he accidentally recorded himself making antisemitic remarks in a voicemail to a Jewish parent.
Philip Leddy, the principal of the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in Montgomery County, confirmed to the Wissahickon School District that he had made the antisemitic remarks heard on the voicemail message Friday morning after he believed he had disconnected the call, according to an email sent to the district’s parents.
In the recording, Leddy made a reference to “Jew camp,” and told another staff member at the school that the parent has “Jew money” and claimed that “they control the banks,” according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. Later, when asked whether the parent was a lawyer, Leddy responded, “the odds are probably good.”
“What is most concerning is not only the language itself, but the mindset it reflects,” the federation wrote in a statement. “The comments rely on well-known antisemitic stereotypes that reduce a parent to caricature and signal hostility rather than respect. For a family entrusting their child to a school community, hearing this kind of language, particularly from a principal, is profoundly unsettling.”
Leddy was hired as the principal for the Lower Gwynedd Elementary School in 2023 after previously serving as committee chair of the district’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, according to a since-deleted profile for him on the school’s website.
In an email to the Wissahickon School District, Superintendent Mwenyewe Dawan wrote that the district’s administrative team was recommending immediate termination of Leddy, pending an “informal private hearing on Monday morning.”
The school district did not immediately respond to a request for an update on the hearing from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency Monday morning.
Dawan wrote that Leddy had been placed on administrative leave, and that another staff member heard on the call was also placed on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.
“The fact that any employees entrusted with the care and well-being of students could make, or passively tolerate, such remarks raise concerns that extend beyond the conduct of a single individual,” wrote Dawan. “This incident underscores concerns for broader, systemic issues related to antisemitism that must be examined and addressed.”
The Jewish parent, who requested anonymity, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy had initially called him in response to an email about an incident involving his daughter.
“I couldn’t believe it, like I was seeing Jew this, Jew that, and I was thinking, ‘This can’t be the principal leaving a voicemail,’” the parent told Action News 6ABC.
Rabbi Kevin Lefkowitz, the leader of Tiferet Bet Israel, a Conservative congregation in Montgomery County, told Action News 6ABC that Leddy’s rhetoric had “boiled my blood.”
“He’s in charge of keeping our kids safe. For it to come out of his mouth so carelessly, so easily, it boiled my blood,” Lefkowitz said.
The incident comes one month after the House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation into the School District of Philadelphia for allegedly promoting a hostile environment for Jewish K-12 students.
In 2024, Pennsylvania saw 465 antisemitic incidents, marking a 18% rise from 2023, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual antisemitism audit.
“No one promoting antisemitic rhetoric should be leading and teaching our children,” said Andrew Goretsky, the senior regional director of ADL Philadelphia, in a post on Facebook. “We are urging them to fully investigate the situation, take the appropriate systemic action, and meet with Jewish families to begin the process of rebuilding trust.”
In her email to the district community, Dawan added that the school had already partnered with the ADL to provide trainings on antisemitism and bias response to the district’s administration in November and December, and that the trainings would be provided to the rest of its teachers and staff as planned.
‘While this incident is clearly deeply damaging, upsetting, and concerning, it is important to remember that our staff as a whole are deeply caring, respectful, and sensitive,” wrote Dawan. “I do not believe the actions and words of this principal reflect the views of our staff. One person’s hateful actions should not negatively impact the way our community views the rest of our staff.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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