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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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French Court Rejects Antisemitism Charge in Murder of 89-Year-Old Jewish Man
Tens of thousands of French people march in Paris to protest against antisemitism. Photo: Screenshot
A French court on Thursday tossed out antisemitic-motivated charges against a 55-year-old man convicted of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, in what appears to be yet another instance of France’s legal system brushing aside antisemitism.
French authorities in Lyon, in southeastern France, acquitted defendant Rachid Kheniche of aggravated murder charges on antisemitic grounds, rejecting the claim that the killing was committed on account of the victim’s religion.
According to French media, the magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office refused to consider the defendant’s prior antisemitic behavior, including online posts spreading hateful content and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis, arguing that it was not directly related to the incident itself. The jurors ultimately agreed and dismissed the presence of an antisemitic motive.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated.
At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
After several psychiatric evaluations, the court concluded that the defendant was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, reducing his criminal responsibility and lowering the maximum sentence for murder to 20 years.
Due to the defendant’s age and assessed risk, the magistrate also asked for 10 years of supervision after his release in addition to the maximum prison time.
Kheniche was ultimately sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison and six years of “socio-judicial monitoring.”
The three-day trail, which began on Monday, focused specifically on the alleged antisemitic motive being contested to determine the sentence, as Kheniche’s guilt for the murder was already determined. He has denied that antisemitism played any role in his actions.
However, Alain Jakubowicz, counsel for the League Against Racism and Antisemitism (Licra) and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), both civil parties in the proceedings, argued that the defendant was “obsessed” with the Jewish religion.
Kheniche previously referred on social media to “sayanim,” a conspiracy term used to refer to a sleeper agent for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. He also reportedly took passport photos and a text in Hebrew found in his victim’s jacket and cut them out. But the magistrate argued that the law required the court only to consider the facts “at the same time as the crime committed,” thereby dismissing past antisemitic and conspiratorial comments.
The court’s decision “is a reflection of our society,” Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, counsel for members of the victim’s family, told AFP. “It is simply a reflection of the way France deals with the scourge of antisemitism.”
This is far from the first case in France to spark such alarm, as courts have repeatedly overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, fueling public outrage over what many see as excessive leniency.
Last year, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, appealed a criminal court ruling that cleared a nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned the food and drinks of the Jewish family she worked for.
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
The 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
First reported by Le Parisien, the shocking incident occurred in January 2024, just two months after the caregiver was hired, when the mother discovered cleaning products in the wine she drank and suffered severe eye pain from using makeup remover contaminated with a toxic substance, prompting her to call the police.
After a series of forensic tests, investigators detected polyethylene glycol — a chemical commonly used in industrial and pharmaceutical products — along with other toxic substances in the food consumed by the family and their three children.
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’s food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present
The nanny, who has been living in France in violation of a deportation order issued in February 2024, was also convicted of using a forged document — a Belgian national identity card — and barred from entering France for five years.
In another shocking case last year, a local court in France dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure.
The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.
The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice. Because he was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility.
Just this week, a court in Paris denied a Jewish family from Baghdad compensation for their former home, which was seized from them and now serves as the French embassy in Iraq.
The plaintiffs, descendants of two Jewish Iraqi brothers, filed a lawsuit last year seeking $22 million in back rent and an additional $11 million in damages from the French government.
According to their account, the French government leased the house as its embassy starting in 1964 and paid their family through 1974, but has made no payments for more than 50 years.
In the 1950s, the Iraqi government seized Jewish property and stripped Jews of their citizenship, yet the family retained legal ownership of their Baghdad home even after being forced to leave in 1951.
Last year, Philip Khazzam, grandson of Ezra Lawee, told The Globe and Mail that, under pressure from Saddam Hussein’s government, the French government stopped paying rent to the Lawee family and appears to have diverted the funds to the Iraqi treasury.
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Vance Defends Trump’s Iran Approach, Says Tehran ‘Can’t Have a Nuclear Weapon’
US Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles, California, US, June 20, 2025. Phone: REUTERS/Daniel Cole
US Vice President JD Vance defended President Donald Trump’s approach to reining in Iranian aggression during an interview with podcaster Megyn Kelly, arguing that Tehran’s acquiring a nuclear weapon would prove disastrous for American interests.
“Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. That is the stated policy goal of the president of the United States,” Vance said.
Vance pushed back against critics who have suggested that the president shouldn’t engage in “diplomacy” or “negotiate” with Iran, explaining that Trump will “keep his options open” while trying to advance American security interests “through non-military means.” However, Vance stressed that the president would be willing to engage militarily if left with no other options to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“I am very cognizant that the Middle East leads to quagmires,” he said. “Trust me, so does the president of the United States.”
Trump has discussed targeted strikes on Iranian security forces and leadership, partly as a way to pressure the regime over its violent suppression of demonstrators while also seeking to expand talks to address nuclear and missile issues. The protests, which began on Dec. 28 amid deep economic distress and mounting public frustration with Tehran’s theocratic leadership, quickly spread across the country. Security forces have met demonstrators with lethal force, mass arrests, and a near-total internet blackout that has hampered independent reporting and documentation of abuses. Some reports indicate that up to 30,000 protesters may have been killed by Iranian forces in just two days. Regime officials put the death toll at 2,000-3,000.
Vance also highlighted the importance of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, explaining that Tehran is the “world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
“What happens when the same people who are shooting up a mall or driving airplanes into buildings have a nuclear weapon? That is unacceptable,” Vance said.
The vice president added that in the event that Iran obtains nuclear arms, other states such as Saudi Arabia will rapidly seek to secure their regimes though acquiring nuclear weapons themselves, triggering a new era of “nuclear proliferation on a global scale.”
“The biggest threat to security in the world is a lot of people having nuclear weapons,” he said.
Vance suggested that decreasing the overall number of nuclear arms in the world would help secure long-term peace for the global community.
Vance also pushed back on the chorus of critics within the Republican Party who claim the president has expended too much energy and time on foreign affairs, arguing Trump has “gotten a lot done” for the American people and most of his accomplishments are within the realm of domestic policy.
The vice president has come under scrutiny in recent months over his chummy relationship with controversial podcaster Tucker Carlson, a pundit who has repeatedly argued that the US should not attempt to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.
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Patriots Owner Robert Kraft Unveils New Super Bowl Ad Aimed at Combating Jew-Hatred
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
An initiative that focuses on combating antisemitism and was founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft has unveiled a new advertisement set to air during Super Bowl LX on Sunday that calls on people to stand up against Jew-hatred.
The ad released by Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, formerly known as the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, is set in a school hallway and shows students whispering and laughing as a young Jewish classmate passes by. When the Jewish student reaches his locker, he discovers a hateful sticky note placed on his backpack by classmates that says “Dirty Jew.” Another student then walks over, covers the note with a Blue Square, and tells the Jewish kid, “Do not listen to that.” The video ends with the fellow student standing next to his Jewish classmate with another Blue Square placed on his chest, as an act of solidarity.
A message on the screen then states that two in three Jewish teenagers in the US have experienced antisemitism, which was first revealed by the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish youth movement BBYO in 2024. Gen Z is also three times more likely to witness antisemitism.
“For the third straight year, the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate is proud to show up on sports’ biggest stage and speak directly to more than 120 million Americans with an urgent message: Stand up for each other and stand up to hate wherever you see it,” Kraft said in a released statement.
He told CNBC he is very worried about the hatred and division taking place across the US. “You’re not born with hate, it’s learned and you have to find ways to push back on it,” Kraft said. “It’s about education and making sure every day Americans understand that this is happening.”
On Sunday, the Patriots will take on the Seattle Seahawks in Santa Clara, California, and hope to win their seventh Super Bowl title.
Kraft founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019 in response to the rise of antisemitism and all forms of hate across the US. The Blue Square was first introduced in 2023 as a symbol for expressing solidarity with the Jewish community and Kraft launched the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate in 2025.
A survey from the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate released in December 2025 revealed that Americans are displaying more antisemitism than in the past, but are also “less aware antisemitism exists, less likely to think it’s important enough to fight, and less likely to stand up to prejudice against Jews when they encounter it.”