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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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This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy
Mark Ruffalo is in the spotlight after facing accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of the Ellison family — but this isn’t the first time the actor has been caught in controversy on this topic.
Last Friday, the actor connected the merger of David Ellison’s Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery to Israel’s war with Hamas. He called Larry Ellison an “oligarch” due to his financial backing of his son David’s merger using wealth earned from his time at Oracle, which created technology used by the Israeli military. His statements immediately drew criticism, with Paramount leaders accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Awards nominee best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel movies, has long been an outspoken advocate for progressive causes — including the Palestinian one.
In 2014, Ruffalo made his first public statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, posting criticisms of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge military operation against Hamas.
He criticized Israel for striking Gaza’s el-Wafa hospital, writing that, “Sorry, I thought blowing up Hospitals [sic] was something that all human beings could agree was off limits.”
Ruffalo also questioned the claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields.”
“Do you honestly think these people, these fellow human beings, would use their own children as shields?” he wrote. “Use your heart.”
Around the same time, Ruffalo also disputed whether Hamas had actually kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, one of the incidents that sparked the 2014 hostilities — an incident that the terrorist group later admitted to.
Ruffalo received criticism for his posts, but stood by his perspective. “Empathizing w/ Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel,” he wrote in 2014. “It makes me human.”
As clashes between Israel and Hamas sprouted up again in 2021, Ruffalo once again took to Twitter to denounce Israel, likening the situation to South Africa and calling “for sanctions to free Palestinians.”
Soon after, Ruffalo wrote another tweet apologizing for his rhetoric.
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” he wrote. “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in 2023 and Israel’s military response, Ruffalo returned to pro-Palestinian activism. Less than two weeks after the attack, on Oct. 20, Ruffalo — along with more than 50 others creatives through the organization Artists for Ceasefire — sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the following Academy awards, Ruffalo wore a pin from the organization.
In Sept. 2025, Ruffalo, and along with more than 5,500 others in the film industry, signed a letter pledging to boycott “Israeli film institutions” that they believed were “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Ruffalo has publicly aligned himself with the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, calling to “boycott, divest, sanction and prosecute” Israel, on a podcast with Mehdi Hasan. During the same interview, he said that he has stopped talking to former friends who don’t agree with his perspective on the issue.
“I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said. “They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or in the same breath will tell me that they’re actually human shields, and they deserve to die because they’re human shields.”
Now, after making statements connecting the Paramount-Discovery merger to Israeli military technology, Ruffalo has been accused of antisemitism by numerous Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center.
The actor has now taken to social media to denounce the accusations of antisemitism, calling the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” and saying that criticizing “the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticising Jewish people.”
He added, “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
The post This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy appeared first on The Forward.
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American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough?
At Temple Israel in Bloomfield, Michigan, which was attacked in March by a gunman, getting ready for the High Holidays this year means more than preparing for crowds of worshippers.
The synagogue is spending millions of dollars on security upgrades, including a new gatehouse, artificial intelligence technology and physical and ballistic hardening of its building.
“There are major changes coming,” Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel said in an interview. “I think that extends then to many of the other places of worship in town, and then, by extension, the entire Jewish community around the country.”
But as congregations install barriers, hire guards and tighten access to their buildings, Jewish leaders are struggling to balance budgets and keep their synagogues welcoming.
Bennett fears fortressing the Jewish community through ever-expanding security upgrades is “unsustainable at all levels,” from the emotional to the financial.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization that provides threat intelligence and safety training to Jewish institutions across the country, told the Forward that the American Jewish community now spends between $765 million and $1 billion annually on security and safety.
CEO Michael G. Masters said that figure is dramatically higher than it was several years ago, when it was the exception, rather than the rule, for a Jewish institution to have a security plan, let alone layers of cameras, guards, and coordination with law enforcement.
The spending reflects what Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, a New York-focused Jewish counterterrorism and security organization, described as “the most complicated threat picture that the Jewish community in the United States has ever faced.”
According to the FBI, Jews were the victims of nearly two-thirds of religion-based hate crimes in the United States in 2025. And these days, Silber’s analysts are tracking threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists and actors inspired by or connected to Iran and Hezbollah, and left-wing violence connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“That’s taking a tremendous toll just financially on our Jewish institutions,” Silber said.
The growing costs have pushed Temple Israel to lobby Congress in support of the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, which would increase federal funding available to protect Jewish institutions. Last week, members of Congress, including the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John James of Michigan, visited the Temple to see the security updates.
When congregants help screen for danger
But as congregations pour money into keeping potential attackers out, another question looms: At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?
“The more you build, there’s, I think, an inverse proportion to how safe people will actually feel when they’re coming in,” said Bennett, whose congregants have been emotionally rattled since the March attack, during which a gunman rammed a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue. “Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns.”
A person arriving at a synagogue for the first time could have harmful intentions. They could also be new to town, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for a place to spend Shabbat. Distinguishing between those is an important challenge.
Unlike an outside guard, a longtime congregant may know who normally attends services, which unfamiliar face is expected for a wedding or bar mitzvah, and when someone’s behavior genuinely seems out of place. That’s why organizations like SCN and the Community Security Service train community members to serve as additional protection at their own institutions.
In 2026 alone, SCN has conducted close to 1,000 in-person safety trainings, reaching roughly 25,000 people. For the High Holidays, they are offering Zoom Webinars for Jewish institutions across the country, as synagogue-goers who ordinarily recognize most people walking through their doors may suddenly welcome hundreds of unfamiliar worshippers.
Preparation was put to the test at Central Synagogue in Manhattan last Friday, when a man stormed the temple, punched a congregant, and headbutted and spat on a security guard while directing a racial slur at him.
Silber described the response as a “tactical success.”
“Their security team had drilled. Their clergy and staff had drilled. And when the moment came, within less than 60 seconds, they had this individual moved outside of the sanctuary.”
At Temple Israel, the congregation has been fundraising specifically for security. After the March attack, Bennett said, some congregants would like to see “a moat and a full army around our buildings.”
He understands the impulse. But he worries there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety.
“How do you do this with the knowledge that it’s financially unsustainable?” Bennett said. “This is not the way we should be spending dollars.”
The post American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough? appeared first on The Forward.
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The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why.
When Jewish leaders speak out these days, it’s often to blast the anti-Israel actions of one Democratic Socialists of America politician or another. Given all the attention — and the millions of dollars raised within the Jewish community to help defeat these candidates — you’d think the greatest existential threat to American Jews was coming from the left.
But a new book by historian Steven Ross is here to tell you: You’d be mistaken.
“What you’ve seen seeping in on the far left is more anti-Israel and some antisemitism,” Ross told me in a phone interview. “But here’s the thing: the left has never called for death to people, the right has.”
Right-wing extremist groups have spent 80 years calling for the death and deportation of Jews and minorities — and sometimes acting upon those calls. The far left, whatever its failures on antisemitism, has not. And unlike in previous years, the far right today has found the two things it lacked: a single leader to unite behind, and a technology to reach millions.
In The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross, a professor of history at University of Southern California, tracks the continuous, noxious activity of hate groups in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day — and the brave and secretive men and women who sought to thwart them.
The book reads like a great suspense novel, except, unfortunately, it’s nonfiction. And its conclusion — spoiler alert — is that the threat is only growing more dangerous.
Uncannily, in his research, Ross found that Jewish leaders predicted as much — in 1945.
Even before the Allies declared victory in Europe, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Nazi League, who had launched undercover operations to infiltrate and disrupt hate groups, had come to a disturbing conclusion. They could defeat any hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan, unless the disparate groups could one day “communicate on an instantaneous basis,” and unless the far right figured out a way to make it into one of the two mainstream political parties.
“Here we are,” Ross said. “Everything has come true.” Social media has enabled hate groups to communicate and organize at scale, and President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters — direct ideological descendants of the postwar far right, Ross says — was but one example of the Republican flirtation with extremist and violent groups.
Descendants of the ‘Betrayed Generation’
In the early 1940s, Jewish leaders also predicted that when the war ended, antisemitism and racism would increase — despite Americans having just fought a savage battle against prejudice and fascism.
The Greatest Generation also birthed what Ross calls “the Betrayed Generation,” men and women who returned to a changed America in which liberals, Blacks and Jews were mobilizing and upwardly mobile.
“The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that,” Ross writes.
Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Columbians and the National States Rights Party warned that Jews were behind “race suicide,” plotting to replace white people with non-white immigrants. They accused Jews of being secret Communists and undermining the cause of “America First.”
“I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” James Madole, founder of the fascist National Renaissance Party, told a boisterous rally in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in February 1953. “I will finish the job that Hitler started.”
During this period, there were an estimated 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans, says Ross.
The groups carried out a series of bombings against synagogues and Black churches that were, Ross writes, “unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving.”
How to fight back
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which should have been tracking these groups, was far more concerned with persecuting potential communists. So the ADL, AJC and the ANL fielded undercover agents to infiltrate and disrupt these groups, often at the risk of their lives.
One of them, a 19-year-old Columbia University student named William Goring, rose to the head of the National Renaissance Party’s leadership. In a memo to his handlers, Goring described the far-right members he encountered as “the failures, the lonely,” who feel “abandoned by their government and gain a strong internal feeling of camaraderie” from the far-right parties.
“To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews, others on the Blacks,” Goring wrote.
By the 1970s, this spy network as well as internal strife had weakened these hate groups, their memberships dwindling to hundreds.
Jewish groups “thought they had won the battle against hate,” wrote Ross, and turned their attention to the causes of civil rights and Israel.
But the ideology and organizations festered and regrouped, manifesting in the anti-government militia movement, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 riots. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and anti-government groups rose to 1,400.
Media personalities with millions of followers, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, push warnings against shadowy Jewish influence and the “great replacement theory,” the new term for “race suicide.”
The bombings that wracked Jewish communities in the postwar period have declined, Ross acknowledged. What’s replaced them is a constant stream of hate pushed into people’s social media feeds. Social media has made it harder to infiltrate and disrupt hate networks, while making it easier to constantly find new recruits.
“You don’t have to bodily harm someone,” he said. “Creating a life where they’re afraid, whether it’s Muslim, Jew, immigrant — that’s terrorism, that’s domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump and others in his administration openly engage with Holocaust deniers and antisemites. In Florida’s Republican primary races earlier this month, two candidates, Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang, spouted raw antisemitism. Bilzerian, who lost to a Jewish congressman, had asked his 30 million online followers if Hitler “was a good person.”
Ross, whose father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau and whose mother survived Auschwitz, said he believes the answer is better education, but that’s “long term.”
I asked him what the short-term solution is.
“Take two people to the polls,” he said. “Get two people in their young 20s who aren’t used to voting, and get them out to the polls. That will change things right now.”
Bilzerian lost badly, but he’s not going away, and neither is the ability to infect minds and harvest hate. The question isn’t whether the far right is more dangerous — Ross has answered that. It’s whether we’re paying attention.
The post The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why. appeared first on The Forward.
