How Holocaust Movies Help Us Understand Rising Antisemitism
(ANALYSIS) Films tend to reflect our anxieties. So it’s probably not a coincidence that we’re getting so many Holocaust-themed movies at the same time as rising antisemitism has been in the news.
Historical dramas that deal with the Holocaust directly make stern warnings against ever letting it happen again, like “Bonhoeffer,” “Truth & Treason,” “The Zone of Interest” and “Nuremberg.” Meanwhile, modern-day dramas like “A Real Pain,” “Eleanor the Great,” and “Guns & Moses” wrestle with very real modern struggles of those who live in the aftermath of its legacy.
But these films also give us hints as to potential “whys” behind rising Western antisemitism. When you look at the lessons the historical dramas teach, and the movies made about their legacy today, you see deep tensions. These tensions suggest that some of the popular secular lessons our culture has derived from the Holocaust are also planting the seeds of its rejection.
Most of the Holocaust dramas of the past couple of years have focused on real-life heroic Gentiles who stood up for Jews against the Nazis — a tradition going all the way back to “Schindler’s List.” 2024’s “Bonhoeffer” follows the famous preacher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who saw the rise of Hitler and both publicly opposed him and secretly worked to undermine him from within Germany.
In this year’s “Truth & Treason,” the film follows a young Mormon boy who sees his friend get mistreated and then arrested by the Nazis, so he starts an underground newspaper telling the truth about the fascist regime. Meanwhile, “Triumph of the Heart” tells the story of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Catholic saint who died in the Holocaust in another man’s place.
Others focus on the villains — real or fictional — who were complicit in the horror by their action or inaction. “The Zone of Interest, from 2023, chronicles the family life of a Nazi commandant of a concentration camp. He treats his job with the humdrum attitude of any other office job, even as we see hints of the bodies piling up. “Nuremberg” follows a psychiatrist interviewing the Nazi high command prior to their trial at Nuremberg. His experiences led him to practically begin a crusade to warn Americans against becoming like the Nazis as well.
These movies are all — at their heart — simple moral fables designed to distill the lessons we are supposed to take from the Jewish genocide that took place during World War II. The lesson is: Evil looks like powerful people hurting weaker people; good looks like weak people fighting back against stronger people or a bystander standing up for one of those weaker people.
The “simple moral lesson” nature of these films is emphasized by 2023’s “White Bird.” This historical drama is about a grandmother who tells the story of her surviving the Holocaust to help her grandson understand the importance of standing up to victims being bullied. She tells him exactly the lesson he’s supposed to get out of this: don’t be like the Nazis and bully the weak; be like the good guys and help the weak.
It makes sense that this would be the lesson our culture would imbibe from WWII. As historian Tom Holland pointed out in his landmark book “Dominion,” Christianity’s moral precept for siding with the victim so completely dominated Western thought over the 2,000 years since Christ that by the time WWII rolled around, even secular people took it for granted. But as historian Alec Ryrie notes in his First Things piece “The End of the Age of Hitler,” the failure of so many Christians (particularly in Germany) to stop the Holocaust caused many (already secularizing) cultural elites to lose faith in Christianity as a moral guide.
So, WWII and the Nazis became the new image we used to determine and represent what good and evil looked like, rather than Jesus and the Devil. One study found that Americans' core criteria for condemning behavior was how much an act victimizes others. Political disagreements depend almost exclusively on differently perceived victims.
This is why pop culture villains are always so Nazi-coded. From “Star Wars” stormtroopers to “The Lord of the Rings” Orcs, “Wicked’s” Oz guards, “The Hunger Games” President Snow and his minions — even Captain America has a literal Nazi as a villain (a villain even the Joker refused to work with because even homicidal maniac clowns have standards). If someone wants to represent true evil, they use Nazis. Devils can be heroic — superheroes like Daredevil and Nightcrawler, vampires like Edward Cullen, and heavy metal bands. But not Nazis.
And we should give credit where credit is due: this moral framework has been remarkably successful. Overall, the 20th century has been one of the best centuries for Jews in America and the West, and has made incredible strides for racial minorities and women.
But like any culture’s dominant moral system, it’s eventually going to have trouble bearing the weight of expectations. We can see hints at these cracks starting to form when we look at modern Holocaust-themed movies set post-Holocaust.
The 2024 film “The Brutalist” follows a visionary architect who comes to America to escape postwar Europe and rebuild his life, his career, and his marriage. But in America, he continues to be exploited and abused.
Despite this, he manages to overcome these challenges and build a legacy. What defines the villains in this film is that while they are not Nazis, they are still “Nazi-coded”: They are the rich and powerful societal mainstreamers who use that power to exclude and exploit marginalized outsiders.
What defines the Jewish protagonist post-WWII is that even after the Holocaust, he’s still the underdog, still abused and exploited by the antisemitic Christian society he finds himself in. What makes him a hero — the reason we root for him — is that he overcomes these challenges.
But with that triumph over adversity comes less adversity. And that creates an existential crisis if your positive image is based on being the underdog.
The 2024’ “A Real Pain” follows two mismatched Jewish cousins, Dave and Benji, who go on a Jewish heritage tour through Poland to honor their recently deceased Holocaust survivor grandmother. Dave and Benji are the beneficiaries of their parents and grandparents overcoming the Holocaust and prejudices against Jewish immigrants, and as such, live relatively normal, privileged lives. Dave has a good job with a wife and kid in New York and admits he bottles up his personal suffering because he doesn’t see it as anything special, since everybody’s suffered.
Benji lives at home with his parents and is desperate to connect emotionally to what his grandmother felt — so much so that he has two public crash-outs because the luxury and touristy nature of the tour makes him deeply feel his privilege.
The film repeatedly shows that the Holocaust and Jewish suffering have been mythologized and commodified to somehow be both trivial and aspirational. The concentration camps are now part of a paid luxury tour where the tourists take selfies in front of memorial statues. Their tour guide isn’t Jewish himself but is obsessed with all things Jewish. One of their fellow tour mates (the same survivor of the Rwandan genocide) actively converted to Judaism because he felt kinship and inspiration from their story. The tour members bond over decrying their own privilege and the belief that vicariously feeling others’ suffering on this tour will — somehow — cause there to be less suffering in the world.
These themes are taken to the extreme in 2025’s “Eleanor the Great.” Here, a 94-year-old woman named Eleanor fakes being a Holocaust survivor in a Holocaust survivor support group. She does this because when people think she is one, they give her attention and affirmation that she never got before — even from her own family.
These films explore what happens when the only hero narrative is the victim-underdog. Those with no victim or underdog status don’t get self or social affirmation, so they have to scramble for it in increasingly desperate ways.
Victimhood is also a scarce resource: those with the most victim status deserve the most attention; so the way to get the most attention is to prove you’re the most victimized. Also, not everybody in society can be a victim; somebody has to be the oppressor.
This gets tackled head-on in the recent action thriller “Guns & Moses.” The film follows a rabbi named Moses whose dear friend is murdered in what appears to be a neo-Nazi attack on his congregation. But as Moses begins to suspect that the young accused neo-Nazi is innocent, he starts investigating what really happened and finds the real culprits.
Rabbi Moses gets to know the young neo-Nazi — Clay Gibbons — and his story is typical of many young men who get swept up in white supremacy. He lost his mother in an accident, and ended up falling in with a crowd who would affirm his felt victimhood and anger at the world. This community sees the relative privilege of the Jewish community and concludes that Jews and the rest of society invented the Holocaust and accusations of antisemitism to keep men like him — the true victims of society — down.
What’s fascinating is the film’s sympathy with Clay’s plight. Obviously, it emphatically refutes his Holocaust denial in a powerful scene where a Holocaust survivor (Christopher Lloyd) tells his story to Clay. And it showcases real violent antisemitism when Rabbi Moses is attacked by Clay’s neo-Nazi friends. But it also shows powerful people who cover up the murder by using society’s knee-jerk acceptance of traditional victim hierarchies and therefore never suspect that Clay — a straight white male neo-Nazi — might not be guilty.
This reflects growing complaints across many groups that the “oppressor vs. victim” binary is an inadequate framework to show us who the good guys are. Men argue that because men are seen as more privileged, their struggles — many of which are systemic and real — are ignored.
Israel’s allies argue that Israel can’t be seen as the oppressor and Hamas the victim just because Israel is stronger. Palestine’s supporters argue that their obvious victimhood is being ignored because of the Jews’ antiquated victimhood status. Hollywood seems to agree with the latter. The pro-Palestinian documentary “No Other Land” won an Oscar this year. James Gunn’s “Superman” had pro-Palestinian undertones. And director Bryan Singer is already starting work on a film about Israeli oppression in Lebanon.
So what’s the solution? Movies like “A Real Pain,” “Eleanor the Great,” and “Guns & Moses” suggest the answer is to love people regardless of their victimhood or allyship status. All it took for Clay to abandon white supremacy was one rabbi who told him his pain mattered and was willing to fight for him. Dave rejects the need to be a victim or to save his cousin — who refuses to be saved — and finds satisfaction in his family, who love him. Eleanor finds friendship and a community even when those people know she wasn’t a Holocaust survivor. When people don’t need to be a victim to be loved, they won’t jockey for the position anymore.
But these movies also — perhaps inadvertently — show how this is easier said than done. The people in these films who find meaning in life beyond victimhood all have a) tight-knit personal relationships and b) a story they tell where they’re a hero. Dave has his family, and his heroic story is that he suffers without complaining (unlike his cousin).
Rabbi Moses has his family, his congregation, and his heroic story that he’s a protector of his flock. Eleanor has the friends she met through her lie. These are borne out by the data. The happiest people are those who have tight-knit relationships. Married people are happier than single people. Historically, shared religion has bound communities together in tight-knit, interconnecting families under shared values.
However, these things are also increasingly difficult to find. Society is more scattered and transient. People move from place to place, job to job, and live disproportionately online.
This makes it harder to find people to share life with, and harder to keep them when you do. Society is also increasingly pluralistic and, therefore, much harder to find a common story to bind us together.
“A Real Pain” ends with Benji alone in an airport. Dave could not extend his meaningful story to his cousin. “Guns & Moses” gives a hopeful story where different religious communities — and nonreligious communities — bind themselves together over even higher principles than their particular religious tradition. But that’s exactly what the post-WWII consensus tried to do. If that one is inadequate, what will we find to replace it?
Modern Holocaust and Holocaust legacy movies show both our commitment to its lessons and our anxieties at those lessons fraying. Hopefully, whatever comes next — an updated version of what we have, or something brand new — will be better, and not far worse.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.