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The real Jewish history behind Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ and the WWII rescue mission that inspired it
(JTA) — While the United States swung its door shut to most refugees during World War II, a young American in France saved thousands, including some of the 20th century’s defining artists and thinkers — such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt — from the Nazis.
The rescue mission of Varian Fry, which went largely unrecognized during his life, is the subject of Netflix’s new drama “Transatlantic,” launching Friday from “Unorthodox” creator Anna Winger.
Starring Cory Michael Smith as Fry, the seven-episode “Transatlantic” aims to recreate his operation in Marseille after the Nazis defeated France and before the United States entered the war. Winger has injected several imagined romances, war efforts and characters into the fictionalized series, including one posed as Fry’s lover, named Thomas Lovegrove (played by Israeli Amit Rahav). Although Fry’s son has said that he was a “closeted homosexual,” no such person is known to have existed.
Winger believes these inventions will invite Netflix viewers to learn more about the true story.
“The people who lived through these stories are dying out,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My job is to bring this to a wide audience, to people who don’t know anything about it.”
The story behind the series
The real Varian Fry, a 32-year-old journalist and suit-clad Harvard graduate, showed up in Marseille with $3,000 taped to his leg and a list of 200 names in August 1940.
After France surrendered to Germany, Fry was among 200 Americans — including journalists, artists, museum curators, university presidents and Jewish refugees — to create the Emergency Rescue Committee at the Hotel Commodore in New York. This group was concerned with Article 19 in France’s armistice with Germany, which required French authorities to surrender any individuals demanded by the Germans.
The private relief organization drew up frenzied lists of anti-Nazi intellectuals who were trapped in France. With the help of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the ERC obtained some emergency visas and sent Fry to lead the rescue efforts in Marseille, a port city in the southern, unoccupied part of France.
What he found there was impossible to manage alone. His mission began in his room at the Hotel Splendide, where long lines of refugees waited in the morning before he woke up and at night after he went to bed. They sometimes walked straight into his bedroom without knocking, Fry wrote in a letter to his wife shortly after he arrived.
Gathering a small devoted staff, including Frenchmen, refugees and American expatriates, Fry moved his office to Rue Grignan and later Boulevard Garibaldi. Outside of Marseille he rented the Villa Air-Bel — colorfully recreated in “Transatlantic” — to house eminent writers and eccentric Surrealist artists waiting for visas.
The group developed legal and illegal branches, with the cover organization offering humanitarian relief while a behind-the-scenes operation flouted the law to help refugees escape. Using Marseille’s lively black market, the staff found hiding places, forged documents and bribed officials. Bil Spira, a Jewish Austrian-born cartoonist, forged passports for the ERC. (He was caught and deported to Auschwitz, but survived.) Resistance fighters Hans and Lisa Fittko devised an escape route to Spain, guiding refugees across the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
By the time he was forced out in October 1941, Fry’s shoestring operation had enabled 2,000 Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees to flee Europe, including such towering artists as Chagall, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and intellects such as Arendt, Heinrich Mann and André Breton. It has been estimated that 20,000 refugees made contact with the rescue center in Marseille.
Fry’s illegal efforts made him plenty of enemies from his own country, who accused him of interfering with American neutrality in the war. He angered the state department, officials at the American consulate in Marseille and ERC members in New York. In August 1941, he was arrested by Vichy police and sent back to New York.
Fry died in 1967 at the age of 59. Only a few months earlier, he had received the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration of merit — and the only official recognition in his lifetime. In 1994, he became the first American honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and history authority, as Righteous Among the Nations.
The Emergency Rescue Committee merged with another relief organization and became the International Rescue Committee in 1942. It is still in operation today and currently led by a Jewish CEO, former British politician David Miliband.
What’s in the show, and why some are against it
Some of Fry’s colleagues are fictionalized in “Transatlantic,” including the Jewish Berliner Albert Hirschman (Lucas Englander), who would become an economist in the United States; the Chicago heiress Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs); and the Jewish Austro-Hungarian activist Lisa Fittko (Deleila Piasko). American diplomat Hiram Bigham, who gave Fry crucial help and even hid writer Lion Feuchtwanger in his home, is also a character in the show.
Throughout the seven episodes, rescue missions swirl around a series of fictional love affairs. In addition to Fry’s relationship, a triangle unfolds between Hirschman, Gold and the fictional American Consul Graham Patterson. (There is no evidence that Gold romanced either with her comrade or with any American consul in Marseille.) Lisa Fittko has an affair with the fictional character Paul Kandjo, who organizes armed resistance to Vichy.
Gillian Jacobs as heiress Mary Jayne Gold. (Anika Molnar/Netflix)
Several wartime plot points are also invented, including a prison break at Camp de Mille and Gold’s collaboration with British intelligence.
The degree of fictionalization has angered some people close to the real history. Pierre Sauvage, president of the Varian Fry Institute, called the show’s trailer “shocking.” Born in 1944, Sauvage survived the end of the Holocaust in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, although his Jewish parents were turned down by Fry’s overwhelmed committee. He became close friends with some of Fry’s fellow rescuers in their later years, including the late Gold, Hirschman and Fittko.
“Are there any red lines?” he said. “Can one fictionalize at will, with no concern for the reality of the story, for the false impression that people will get — and for the way it affects the private lives of the families of people portrayed?”
Sheila Isenberg, who documented Fry’s operation in her book “A Hero of Our Own,” has described the series as a “travesty.” Thomas Fischer Weiss, a child survivor who attempted Fry’s escape route through the Pyrenees at 5 years old, also said the historical events needed no embellishment.
“I think you should tell it straight,” he told the JTA.
The legacy of the ‘troublemakers’
Sauvage believes that if Fry and his associates were alive today, they would like to be remembered for their convictions.
“These were people who were sort of in your face,” he said. “People who knew clearly what they felt and expressed it. They would often describe themselves as troublemakers. Mary Jayne [Gold] said about Varian that he was an ‘ornery cuss’ — it took orneriness to stick to your guns.”
That orneriness was critical at a time when many Americans were apathetic to the plight of European Jews — a 1938 poll in Fortune magazine found that fewer than 5% believed the United States should raise its immigration quotas for refugees. By the summer of 1941, it was too late to open the doors. The German policy of expelling Jews had changed into extermination.
According to Sauvage, America’s refusal to accept more refugees had something to do with that shift.
“The Nazis could legitimately come to the conclusion that the world wouldn’t do anything about the murders and wouldn’t really care all that much,” he said. “What the Varian Fry mission symbolizes is people who cared.”
Varian Fry with Miriam Davenport in the first offices of the Centre Américain de Secours in Marseille in 1940. Davenport, a friend of Mary Jayne Gold, also worked in the rescue effort but is omitted from “Transatlantic.” (Varian Fry Institute)
After their year in Marseille, the rescuers settled into more ordinary lives. Hirschman became an economist with appointments at Yale, Columbia and Harvard. Lisa Fittko ended up in Chicago, where she worked hard in import-export, translation and clerical jobs to earn money, eventually joining protests against the Vietnam War. Gold divided her time between New York City and a villa on the French Riviera.
They all remembered the rescue mission as their finest hour. Speaking with Sauvage, Gold called that year “the only one in her life that really mattered.”
A refugee story for troubled times
Fry’s rescue mission inspired Julie Orringer to write “The Flight Portfolio,” a 2019 novel that became the basis for “Transatlantic.” Orringer was captivated by the image of a young man arriving in Marseille, idealistic and unprepared for the depth of anguish he would find.
“The task was way too big,” she told the JTA. “He realized quite early on that he was going to ask for help, that he was going to have to turn to others who had deeper experience. And in collecting this group of incredible individuals around him, he assembled a kind of collective mind that really could make a difference under the very difficult circumstances that he faced.”
She believed that Fry left an example for the inexperienced. “If you‘re the kind of person who wants to take action on behalf of refugees, but doesn’t know how to do it, ask for help,” she said.
Winger, a Jewish Massachusetts native who has lived in Berlin for two decades, conceived of making a series about Fry in 2015. Germany saw an influx of more than a million migrants that year, most of them fleeing Syria’s horrific civil war. She optioned Orringer’s book in 2020.
“I thought a lot about the fact that people like us — artists, Jews, both — had to leave Berlin as refugees, but now there were so many people coming to Berlin as refugees,” said Winger.
Then, just as she started filming “Transatlantic” on location in Marseille, a new war broke out in Europe.
“The war in Ukraine started three days into the production and there was a whole other wave of refugees coming to Berlin,” she said. “Suddenly we were making it in another refugee crisis.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hit close to the show, whose cast and crew hail from across the continent. Winger’s cinematographer is married to a Ukrainian woman. In Berlin, she saw thousands of refugees crowding into the central train station, some without shoes, food or plans for shelter.
“I think it gave us all a strong sense of purpose,” said Winger.
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The post The real Jewish history behind Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ and the WWII rescue mission that inspired it appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most
Gloria Steinem, the journalist and organizer who became the most recognizable face of America’s modern women’s movement, died Wednesday at her New York City home. She was 92.
For more than half a century, Steinem pushed American women to imagine lives beyond the limits society had set for them. She co-founded Ms. magazine, helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus and turned phrases like “sexual harassment” from unnamed experiences into subjects of national debate.
Steinem was the daughter of a Jewish father, Leo Steinem, and a Protestant mother, Ruth Nuneviller. She was raised without much religion and generally described herself as secular, but she was unequivocal about where she stood when Jews were targeted: “Never in my life have I identified as a Christian,” she said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
Her mother taught her to value her Jewish roots. Steinem told the Forward in 2015 that her father rarely discussed his heritage; it was her non-Jewish mother who presented Judaism to her as something positive — “She also told me Jewish men made better husbands” — and taught her about her paternal grandmother.
That grandmother was a feminist pioneer in her own right. Pauline Steinem, who kept kosher, was an educator, suffragist, delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women and the first woman elected to Toledo’s school board — and during the Nazi’s rise in the mid-1930s, she worked to rescue members of her family from Europe.
A feminist Seder became her strongest connection to Jewish ritual. Steinem participated for decades in an annual women’s Seder, calling it the first spiritually centered experience of her feminist life. What drew her to Judaism, she said, wasn’t the law — it was “the mystical part, the Kabbalah, the Shechinah.
She recognized how antisemitism and misogyny fed each other. In her memoir, Steinem recalled a cabdriver telling her that feminism was a Jewish plot to destroy the Christian family. Her response to such hatred was not to distance herself from Jews, but to identify with them more strongly.
That identification outlasted her. Gloria and her sister, Susanne, donated a catalog of jewelry seized from Nazi victims to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — in honor of their grandmother.
Steinem continued writing and advocating for equality into her 90s. Her final book, An Unexpected Life, is scheduled to publish later this month.
The post When Gloria Steinem identified as a Jew most appeared first on The Forward.
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UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament
(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.
Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.
Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.
“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.
Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.
Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue
Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.
The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.
Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.
Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.
Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”
He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.
In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament appeared first on The Forward.
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How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust
How did the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research find a new home in the United States after the Holocaust? Kalman Weiser (York University, Toronto) narrates this dramatic story in a new book, Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America.
Initially, YIVO’s success wasn’t a sure thing. It was “hardly clear to YIVO’s staff and supporters in the 1940s that an organization dedicated to serving the intellectual and cultural needs of a global, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation could take root in the radically different circumstances of postwar America,” Weiser writes.
Before the war, YIVO already had an American branch in New York but its main goal was raising money for the institute in Vilna. Several YIVO activists also focused on researching Yiddish culture and history — but again, mainly in Eastern Europe.
The truth was, most American Jews had little interest in Yiddish and didn’t think highly of Jewish studies at all.
After the Holocaust, YIVO stood at a crossroads: It could either become an archive dedicated to Yiddish life destroyed in Eastern Europe, or it could further develop Yiddish scholarship to give Yiddish a new lease on life in America.
Weiser guides the reader through the fierce debates among YIVO’s associates over the direction the institute should take. Yudel Mark maintained that YIVO should focus primarily on Holocaust research, while former Bundists argued that it should study the conditions of the Jewish masses in America.
Max Weinreich, YIVO’s intellectual godfather, had an altogether different vision. He believed that American Jewry could actually play the leading role in the Jewish world after the Holocaust. At the same time, though, he didn’t think they were ready to assume this responsibility. They needed the Yiddish-speaking refugees and immigrants, such as himself and other East European intellectuals, to guide them.
According to Weinreich, YIVO should concern itself not only with visnshaft (scholarship), but with visn vos shaft (“knowledge that creates”). In other words, Yiddish scholarship needed to enable American Jews to preserve their Jewishness and secure the continuity of Yiddish.
The success of this monumental undertaking depended on the Yiddish language itself. Yiddish needed to serve as a bridge between generations of Jews, a spiritual and intellectual connection between the old country and the new.
For this reason, Weinreich held that the American Jewish intellectual leaders needed to be “de-assimilated,” and the prestige of Yiddish needed to be raised in American academia.
But despite Weinreich’s efforts, YIVO remained on the margins of the Jewish mainstream and received limited support from major Jewish philanthropic organizations. Relations between YIVO and the American Yiddish literati were also strained.
The normative, standard Yiddish that YIVO wanted to promote drew criticism from some American Yiddish writers and journalists. They argued that “YIVO Yiddish” differed considerably from the authentic, natural Yiddish they were raised with.
In his articles in the Forward, Isaac Bashevis Singer ridiculed neologisms as kadmen-yidish (proto-Yiddish) and breyshes-yidish (old Yiddish), linguistic concepts that Weinreich had invented to describe different historical phases in the development of the Yiddish language.
At the heart of the conflict between YIVO and Yiddish writers, Weiser explains, was the question: “To whom does Yiddish belong?” YIVO’s goal was to create a normative language that could be taught like other foreign languages. In this way, the future of Yiddish could be secured even if a living community of Yiddish speakers no longer existed.
The tensest chapters in YIVO’s history revolved around the struggle to recover the materials that formerly belonged to the institute in Vilna.
The Nazis sent some of the books and documents to Germany for the archives of the museum the Nazis were planning, “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question.” After the war these materials fell into the hands of the American military administration in Germany.
Recovering these materials was an incredible feat on the part of Weinreich and his colleagues, among them Lucy Schildkret (better known by her married name, Dawidowicz), who later made her name as a Holocaust scholar. Legally, the American military administration was obligated to return the plundered materials to Poland or the Soviet Union. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem was a claimant as well.
Weinreich worked his contacts among the American elite, and in 1947, YIVO recovered the archives. He also succeeded in presenting YIVO as the heir to other cultural institutions in Vilna. As a result, YIVO received the collections of the renowned Strashun Library and the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society.
The second chapter of YIVO’s history occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. A significant collection of YIVO materials was discovered in Lithuania, thanks to a Lithuanian librarian who had hidden it in the warehouse of the national book chamber.
This time, YIVO had to negotiate with the government of the Lithuanian Republic, which had recently become independent. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and these materials can now be accessed digitally.
Weiser’s history of YIVO is an engaging, well-researched book. Max Weinreich was far from the only European Jewish refugee to find a new home in America and build a successful career there. But he may be the only one who single-handedly rebuilt an important European Jewish scholarly institute that remains active till the present day.
The post How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
