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      Jewish Group Assails Film Academy’s Diversity Efforts

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      An open letter signed by notable actors and producers criticized the organization for not including Jews as an underrepresented group as part of a new initiative.More than 260 Jewish entertainment figures — including the actors David Schwimmer, Julianna Margulies and Josh Gad, and the producers Greg Berlanti and Marta Kauffman — signed an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Tuesday, criticizing the organization for excluding Jews as an underrepresented group in its diversity efforts.In 2020, the academy issued a set of standards as part of its diversity initiative that recognized a number of identities as “underrepresented,” including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or those with cognitive or physical disabilities.Religion is not one of the categories considered.These initiatives will become part of the standards required for a film to compete in the best picture category beginning this year. For a film to be eligible, at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. The academy has said that includes actors who are Asian, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.“An inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands antisemitism,” said the letter, which was organized by the Hollywood Bureau of the group Jew in the City. “It erases Jewish peoplehood and perpetuates myths of Jewish whiteness, power, and that racism against Jews is not a major issue or that it’s a thing of the past.”The letter added that Judaism was not just an issue of faith, but also an ethnicity.This is not the first time in recent years that the academy has faced criticism from the Jewish community. When the organization opened its long-awaited museum in Los Angeles in 2021, the contributions of Jewish immigrants like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer, who were largely responsible for the founding of the Hollywood studio system, were barely acknowledged. In response, the academy said it would open a permanent exhibition dedicated to the birth of Hollywood and the Jewish filmmakers who established it. Called “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” the exhibit will debut on May 19.According to Allison Josephs, the founder and executive director of Jew in the City, the letter has been in the works since the summer, months before the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, as the new academy standards were being discussed.“It feels like a very big mistake to not recognize that we are maybe the most persecuted group throughout all time,” she said in an interview.The academy declined to comment. More

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      ‘Occupied City’ Review: Mapping the Holocaust, Street by Street

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      In his four-and-half-hour documentary, the British director Steve McQueen charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation.Early in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary documentary “Occupied City,” the film cuts to the interior of the elegant main hall in Amsterdam’s grand Royal Concertgebouw. In World War II, the Nazi-German occupiers held events in the hall, but at some point in 1942 the names of the Jewish composers adorning it were covered. Concerts continued, but without Jewish composers, conductors, orchestra musicians, concertgoers and even names on walls.Not long after this section ends, “Occupied City” shifts to a new location, a nondescript, boarded-up storefront. This, the narrator explains, was the site of a cafe that, in 1940, was among the first in the city to ban Jews. Soon after, the movie cuts to another location and then to another and another. And so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address.In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director (whose earlier films include “12 Years a Slave”) explores the city’s past exclusively through images of quotidian Amsterdam life today — in and outside homes, in squares, on trams — that he shot over several years beginning in 2019. These 35-millimeter visuals are, in turn, accompanied by sounds that include voices, birdsong and so on recorded during the filming; fragments of music (some composed by Oliver Coates); and the narration (delivered in the English-language version with dry equanimity by Melanie Hyams, a British voice actor).McQueen’s decision to only use images of contemporary Amsterdam in the film is as effective as it is conceptually bold, though it takes time to fully grasp what he’s doing and why. Without ceremony, textual explanation or a flourish of introductory music, he drops you into the city’s gentle and clamorous bustle right from the get go, and there you remain even as the film hopscotches across Amsterdam, covering miles and years. The movie opens, for instance, with a daytime shot of a warmly lit hallway in what looks like an apartment, with a door opened onto a garden. It’s quiet save for the homey sounds of rustling, the metallic tinkling of what seems like silverware and some faintly babbling voices, perhaps from a radio or TV.An unidentified woman enters, and the narration — as it does throughout — begins with a recitation of an address, which grounds you. This was once the office of a printer-publisher who, with his wife and two sisters, died by suicide on May 15, 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated to Germany. As the woman onscreen opens a trapdoor, the narrator continues, recounting that while many Jews hoped to escape to England, “most could not find a boat willing to take them.” The dead man’s brother did escape, and he transferred the business to an employee, who helped Jews hide in the office. One hid for days “on top of the elevator.”McQueen continues this approach for the remainder of the film, though with striking variations that create linkages, by turns obvious and oblique. In one sunny segment, a cozy spell of pleasure and play becomes a ghost story as you watch people skating on a frozen canal outside a building where a woman sheltered Jewish residents and resistance fighters. Elsewhere, though, McQueen folds in images without commentary, notably in scenes of people protesting against pandemic lockdowns, met by police with water cannons. These images raise the specter of state violence even as the film — with its relentless, harrowing narration — puts the protesters and their freedoms into historical context.As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force. A pilot who shot down German planes before the Netherlands capitulated lived at one address; a 10-month-old baby was taken from another address to a police station; the following year, the baby was murdered at Auschwitz. Amsterdam, McQueen repeatedly reminds you, is occupied by both the living and the dead, an obvious point that takes on specific, deeply profound resonance as the film unfolds. Most of Netherland’s Jewish population, as the narrator reminds you, died in the Holocaust.Among these, alas and of course, was Anne Frank, who’s mentioned a few times in “Occupied City.” It’s notable, I think, that McQueen doesn’t include Prinsengracht 263, the building where her father’s employees kept the business running while she, her family and four others hid in the annex until they were betrayed and eventually deported to Auschwitz. The building is now a tourist attraction, which might be one reason that McQueen avoids it. I imagine that he also wanted to distance the film from the popular, commercially palatable conception of Frank, the one that seizes on her diary’s most famous line — “in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart” — and can attenuate the barbarism of her murder.McQueen’s film is “informed,” as the credits put it, by Bianca Stigter’s huge 2019 book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” which she described in an interview with the BBC as “a kind of travel guide to the past of Amsterdam.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, and McQueen, who’s British, are married and live in the Netherlands.) She wrote and helped produce “Occupied City,” and she also directed “A Lengthening: Three Minutes” (2022), a feature-length documentary about a segment of a home movie that an American tourist, David Kurtz, shot in 1938 of a Jewish community in a Polish village. Using only images from this fragment, Stigter movingly reclaims a lost world, face by face, second by second.Time is stretched differently in “Occupied City” and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past. It’s instructive, for one, that he hasn’t shaped the narration chronologically. Instead, as the film shifts from address to address, and as the seasons and people pass by onscreen, the narration skips from 1940 to 1944 and back again, pausing in moments before and after the war. For McQueen, history isn’t a neat little package that can be experienced at a safe remove and then forgotten. Here, history is in every wintry park and sunlit room because it is insistently present and very much alive.Occupied CityRated PG-13. Running time: 4 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. 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      ‘Maestro’ and the Fake Nose Hall of Fame

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      “Maestro” isn’t the first time a supersize sniffer set off a whiff of controversy. Here’s a look at the most notable schnozzes onscreen.In August, the first trailer for “Maestro,” a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the composer of “West Side Story” and so much more, set off a backlash almost immediately: Bradley Cooper was wearing a prosthetic nose for the title role.Critics on social media accused the star, who is also the director, of playing into an antisemitic trope with the Size XL prosthesis — and asked whether someone who is Jewish would have been more sensitive about makeup choicesWhile Cooper and Netflix, where “Maestro” will begin streaming on Wednesday, declined to comment. In a statement at the time, Bernstein’s three children, who had been working with Cooper on the film, came to the actor’s defense, noting in a series of posts on X, “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose.” (The family declined to offer additional comment.)It’s hardly the first time an oversize septum has made an onscreen appearance or courted controversy. Here are 12 of the most memorable fake noses in cinematic history, sorted by size from dainty 🥸 to elephantine 🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸.Orson Welles, ‘Touch of Evil’🥸Universal PicturesLike Edmond Rostand’s poet and swordsman, Cyrano de Bergerac, Orson Welles was obsessed with his nose. (He believed his was too small; it was, of course, completely normal.) But instead of channeling his fixation into a healthy pursuit like, say, helping another man win the affections of his own beloved, he sported dozens of fakes over his career. One of the largest was the pugnacious pair of nostrils he wore as the corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan in the 1958 murder mystery “Touch of Evil.”Nicole Kidman, ‘The Hours’🥸Clive Hoote/Paramount PicturesNicole Kidman may have delivered a stirring performance as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours” (2002), but Denzel Washington joked that it was the prosthetic beak she wore that won her the best actress Academy Award. (“The Oscar goes to, by a nose, Nicole Kidman,” he joked when announcing her win.) Kidman wore a fresh one each day on set, though she told The Associated Press that she hung on to a silver one she was given when shooting wrapped.Ralph Fiennes, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2’🥸Warner Bros.Is that thing even functional? Probably not; snakes don’t have noses — just nostrils — and smell with their forked tongues. We wouldn’t be surprised if J.K. Rowling’s reptilian baddie in this 2011 franchise finale had one of those, too. But at least we may finally have an answer as to what Voldemort’s unnaturally long fingers are good for.: Nose-picking.Meryl Streep, ‘The Iron Lady’🥸Alex Bailey/Weinstein CompanyLike Kidman, Meryl Streep rode the prosthetic nose she donned to play the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2011 biopic to an Oscar win (her third). But this time, the transformation’s genius was in its subtlety — when the first photos of Streep on set were released, the press made nary a peep about the nose.Laurence Olivier, ‘Richard III’ 🥸🥸Laurence Olivier as Richard IIILondon Film ProductionsUnlike Welles, Laurence Olivier didn’t habitually don a fake nose for his roles because of a perceived insecurity about the size of his own; rather, it was just one of the suite of theatrical accessories, including masks and wigs, that he, and many other actors, used transform into various characters. In “Richard III” (1955), which Olivier also directed, his character’s nose is, as one blogger put it, “majestically prominent.”Rudolph, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’🥸🥸Rankin/Bass Productions and NBCWith a workshop of Santa’s elves nearby in this 1964 special, the best Rudolph’s dad, Donner, could do to help his son fit in at school was make a fake nose from mud? He won’t be winning any father-of-the-year awards for that effort.Margaret Hamilton, ‘The Wizard of Oz’🥸🥸🥸MGMMargaret Hamilton came by some of the goods to play the Wicked Witch of the West naturally: She was known for her overlarge nose, which her own father had encouraged her to have surgically altered. But she got the last laugh when she landed the role of the now-iconic villain in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) — for which her nose was made even longer (and greener).Matt Damon, ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’🥸🥸🥸Warner Bros., via AlamySure, there are performers with bigger noses on this list, but Matt Damon might be the only one who planned a con around his. In this 2007 sequel, his character, Linus, dons the prosthesis — which Damon nicknamed “The Brody” in a nod to the actor Adrien Brody’s well, you know — in a bid to disguise himself and gain access to a case full of diamonds.Steve Carell, ‘Foxcatcher’🥸🥸🥸Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures ClassicsSteve Carell’s souped-up schnozz in this 2014 true-crime tale may have left some people scratching their heads — the real-life version of his character, John du Pont, the millionaire wrestling enthusiast-turned-murderer, wasn’t well known, so the attention to detail seemed excessive. But the nose did serve another purpose: It made audiences forget they were staring at Carell, who was known mainly for comedies at the time.Alec Guinness, ‘Oliver Twist’🥸🥸🥸🥸United Artists, via Alamy StockCharles Dickens wrote Fagin in “Oliver Twist” as a thoroughly antisemitic villain, and in the 1948 film adaptation, Alec Guinness, the non-Jewish actor who played the character, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose. The nose was deemed “incredibly insensitive,” as The Jewish Chronicle wrote, and it provoked significant anger from Holocaust survivors.Billy Crystal, ‘The Princess Bride’🥸🥸🥸🥸20th Century Fox, via AlamyBilly Crystal was already so funny in “The Princess Bride” (1987) that the director, Rob Reiner, claimed that he had to leave the set during Crystal’s scenes as Miracle Max because he was unable to contain his laughter. Adding a bulbous tomato of a nose took Crystal’s physical comedy over the top. (Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya, actually bruised a rib trying to stifle his own chuckles.)Steve Martin, ‘Roxanne’🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸Columbia PicturesYou could land a bird on that thing (which the director, Fred Schepisi, did.) Steve Martin’s five-inch appendage for the 1987 film took 90 minutes to apply every day and two minutes to remove. “God how I hated that thing,” he told The Washington Post. More

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      Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87

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      Women, sex and Jewish mothers were just some of the targets of his popular satirical writing in books, essays, screenplays and more.Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.“Never accept a compliment,” Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?”“Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”“I don’t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.Mr. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Greenburg’s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, “Something’s There” (1976), was praised by John Leonard in The New York Times for its “skeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world” look at the occult.“Fans of the author of ‘How to Be a Jewish Mother’ and ‘Scoring’ will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn’t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,” Mr. Leonard wrote. “He is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.”Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.Wanting to abandon Chicago’s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.He wrote a satirical version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title “The Snob’s Guide to Status Cars.” The publisher, Roger Price (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: “How do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?”A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, “I’ll write that.” Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg’s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O’Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Greenburg outside his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1998. He published more than a dozen books for adults and scores more for children.Librado Romero/The New York TimesA fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children’s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city’s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.“I visit schools constantly,” he said in an interview for the website of Harcourt Books (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in 2006. “I talk to kids. I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I’ve tried to put all three things in these books.”In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Greenburg admitted to missing some of the ego rewards of writing adult fiction, but insisted that writing children’s books had been deeply gratifying.“It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” he said. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books. That’s enough for a career right there.”Alex Traub More

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      How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

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      Poetry makes nothing happen, W.H. Auden said in 1939, when words must have seemed especially impotent; but cinema is another matter. For several decades after the end of the Second World War, what’s come to be seen as its central catastrophe — the near-total destruction of the European Jews — was consigned to the status of a footnote. The neglect was rooted in guilt: Many nations eagerly collaborated in the killing, while others did nothing to prevent it. Consumed by their own suffering, most people simply didn’t want to know, and a conspiracy of silence was established. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.What definitively broke it, in the late 1970s, was — of all things — an NBC miniseries starring Meryl Streep. Crude, contrived and overblown, “Holocaust” is not a work of art; by today’s standards, it is barely even a work of television. Nonetheless, the show’s graphic depiction of the death camps, unprecedented at the time, shocked a vast global audience into belated recognition. Fifteen years later, the process of mnemonic restitution was completed by “Schindler’s List.” Released to stratospheric acclaim in 1993 and seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world, Steven Spielberg’s movie triggered a commemorative boom. For members of the newly united, post-Cold War Europe, Holocaust remembrance became an unofficial civic creed, or in the words of the historian Tony Judt, “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.”Not everyone took this moral U-turn at face value. The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum. The action, such as it is, charts the daily round of what appears to be a normal German family. The paterfamilias, a baby-faced bureaucrat with a high-and-tight hairdo, goes off punctually to work each morning, while his blond and fertile wife — a mother of five — stays home to raise the kids. On weekends, there are parties in their walled garden, with its wading pool and beds of dahlias and roses, or excursions to their nearby lake house. From a distance, they seem to be living a version of the good life, and as the hausfrau insists during a rare moment of disharmony (the prospect of a move has just been raised), “We’re living how we dreamed we would. … Beyond how we dreamed.” There’s just one catch: Her husband is none other than Rudolf Höss, the long-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and their attractive villa looks out over the camp. Such a premise may strike some viewers as unsalvageably grotesque, and Glazer himself spent a good part of the nine years it took to make the film wondering if he was doing something he ought not to. His doubts were assuaged only during postproduction, when he discovered Rose’s essay, with its appeal for a cinematic treatment of the Nazi mind. She seemed to be describing the film he’d just shot — or, as he put it, the one he was currently “rewriting” in the edit suite. “It was incredibly reassuring,” he told me. “It gave me the confidence to believe in my own instincts, the confidence to complete the film.” Glazer, a gangly man in his late 50s with hazel eyes and a mop of graying hair, had met me at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where he was spending time between appearances at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto in early September. So far, it seems, his instincts have been validated. “The Zone of Interest” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, and the early reviews have been rapturous. Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal — this could be any wife addressing any husband — that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said — in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”Jonathan Glazer (left) on the set of “The Zone of Interest.”Agata GrzybowskaIn doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster — Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that “The Zone of Interest” seeks to recover. Bracing for a backlash that had yet to transpire, Glazer was surprised at the film’s positive reception. “I suppose to some extent it must be due to the state of the world,” he mused, referring to the fit of racist populism seizing the West. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas. During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”Whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an exceptional event — different in kind, not just degree, from all genocides before or since — will naturally determine how you think it ought to be portrayed, or whether you think it ought to be portrayed at all. “We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi-Yar,” Wiesel wrote of NBC’s “Holocaust” in a coruscating piece for The New York Times. “We see the naked bodies covered with ‘blood’ — and it is all make-believe.” Such techniques may be appropriate for other historical films, but when it came to the subject at hand (which was “not just another event”), they amounted to a kind of sacrilege. “Auschwitz cannot be explained,” he insisted, “nor can it be visualized.” Of course, you don’t have to be an exceptionalist to sense there may be something morally dubious about making entertainment out of mass death, or in the complacent assumption that the means of cinema are commensurable with that task. Claude Lanzmann’s magisterial documentary “Shoah” (1985), which famously abjures archival footage of the camps in favor of oral testimony from survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, can be understood in part as a rebuttal to the guileless verisimilitude of “Holocaust.” At nine and a half hours, it was never going to reach as wide an audience as the American TV show, but the way it foregrounds the limits of its representational powers set a standard of artistic integrity against which all subsequent Holocaust films would be measured.Most of those films, it must be said, have taken their cues more from the NBC series than from Lanzmann’s documentary. “Schindler’s List,” “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) and “The Pianist” (2002), to name just a few, are unalike in many ways, but they all take for granted that the horrors they portray are accessible to cinema. These films have, to their credit, contributed to the de-erasure of the Holocaust, but they have also produced a distorted and simplistic understanding of history. To center the victims, as most films do, makes both moral and commercial sense, but it leaves us in the dark about the perpetrators. In general, the Nazis are drawn as stock villains: They do evil because they are evil. Some may say that there is wisdom, and decorum, in leaving it at that. In an addendum to his Auschwitz memoir “The Truce” (1963), the writer Primo Levi tries to answer the question “How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?” but ends up drawing an eloquent blank. “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify,” he wrote. To understand someone means, in some sense, to identify with him, but for a normal person to identify with Hitler and the Nazi top brass, Levi continues, is impossible. “This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counterhuman.”This timeless-sounding passage, it’s worth remembering, was written at a specific historical moment, some 30 years before the belated boom in Holocaust memory got going. To grant understanding to the perpetrators in the 60s, before their victims had been widely recognized as such, may have struck Levi as improper. It’s instructive to compare his proscription with the words of another great chronicler of Auschwitz, the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz, who admired him deeply. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life … and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” Kertesz wrote in an essay from 1998, which condemns “Schindler’s List,” among other works, in terms that echo Rose’s critique. He was thinking, he continued, of “those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”Glazer, who steeped himself in Holocaust cinema and history, told me that he is not an exceptionalist. “I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” he said. A few days before we met in Los Angeles, he was in Telluride, where the traces of Native American culture reminded him that Hitler had drawn inspiration from Manifest Destiny, an ideology whose death toll, by conservative estimates, numbers in the tens of millions. When I asked why he decided to tackle the Holocaust, he said it was probably rooted in his family history. Glazer’s grandparents were Eastern European Jews who fled the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. Although his parents weren’t religious, they sent him to a Jewish state school in their North London neighborhood. Bricks were sometimes tossed into the playground by local children bleating slurs.His first knowledge of the Holocaust arrived early, at age 10 or 11, when he came across pictures of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led pogroms of November 1938, in an old issue of National Geographic. Without understanding what he was looking at, he noticed his physical resemblance to the people in the photos — the ones on their knees, that is, scrubbing sidewalks and sweeping up debris. The expressions on the faces of the bystanders, some of whom seemed exhilarated by what they were seeing, others merely indifferent, left him in a state of bewildered alarm. Glazer’s work often yields a similar response. His signature dread is present in its rawest form in some of the music videos he made at the start of his career. In the video for Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” a car pursues a fleeing man down a country road at dusk. The camera, which looks out from the driver’s seat over the car’s sharklike hood, seems to take a lingering delight in the man’s flailing limbs and heaving torso — and to tempt us into doing the same. The unnerving suggestion of collusion recurs throughout Glazer’s acclaimed, and utterly dissimilar, feature films: “Sexy Beast” (2000), a gangster movie-cum-surrealist nightmare; “Birth” (2004), a supernatural melodrama; and “Under the Skin” (2013), a work of sci-fi mumblecore with visionary intent. In the latter, Scarlett Johansson, disguised in a black wig, plays a dead-eyed alien who drives the streets of Glasgow in search of eligible men to take home with her. Once she gets them there, things turn deadly, and aggressively surreal. Glazer used hidden cameras and nonprofessional actors, most of whom had no idea they were participating in a film. (Chris Oddy, Glazer’s longtime production designer, described his freewheeling M.O. as one of “jazz filmmaking.”) It sounds like a Situationist prank and, in lesser hands, may well have become one. Instead, Glazer spun his materials into a kind of extraterrestrial docufiction, which bristles with the random poetry of street life. Shortly after finishing that film, Glazer came across a newspaper preview of a forthcoming Martin Amis novel, “The Zone of Interest.” Another story about an enigmatic predator, the book is narrated in part by a fictional commandant of Auschwitz. The perspective intrigued him, and after reading the novel in galleys he optioned it. To call the film an adaptation would be putting it too strongly, however. Much of the novel, which centers on a love triangle involving the commandant, Paul Doll; his wife, Hannah; and one of Doll’s subordinates, struck Glazer as superfluous, including the love triangle itself. He seems to have been more interested in Amis’s source material than in what Amis did with it. The Dolls were based, loosely, on the Hösses, and Glazer’s first big call was to revert to the originals. Before starting work on the script, he spent two years researching them, during which he came across a staggering data point: The garden of their villa shared a wall with the camp. What feats of denial, he wondered, would it have taken to live in such proximity to the damned?Glazer found a clue to the answer in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which he’d hired a pair of researchers to scour for information on the Hösses, the more quotidian the better. According to the testimony of the family gardener, the couple had a blowout argument one day in the summer of 1943 after Rudolf learned he was about to be transferred to an SS office near Berlin. Hedwig, the gardener recalled, was apoplectic at the idea of leaving their rural hideaway. For the Hösses, who in their youth were members of an idealistic back-to-the-land movement, life in Auschwitz was something of an idyll, Glazer came to grasp. This stunning reality comes through in his imaginative reconstruction of their quarrel. “They’d have to drag me out of here,” Hedwig says after hearing the news. “Everything the führer said about how to live is how we do. Go east. Living space. This is our living space.”A still from “The Zone of Interest.”Photograph from A24In his book “Black Earth” (2015), the historian Timothy Snyder argues that the concept of living space, or lebensraum, carried two distinct but related meanings: on the one hand, “a living room, the dream of household comfort”; on the other, a “habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human.” Glazer read the book while working on his script, and his depiction of the Hösses as both creatures of household comfort and pioneers on a grand historical mission clearly chimes with Snyder’s thesis. It’s indicative of just how thoroughly he inhabits their moral universe that neither husband nor wife at any point betray the slightest hint of bad conscience. The idea that they lost sleep over what they were doing, Glazer said, is without foundation, as is the assumption that we are ethically superior to the Germans of the Nazi era. “If states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed toward murder,” Snyder writes, “few of us would behave well.” Lanzmann’s “Shoah” has spawned a slender but vital countertradition in Holocaust cinema, one founded on the principle that formal rigor is inseparable from moral truth. You can see the principle at work in a recent film like “Son of Saul” (2015), by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, which follows a day in the life of an Auschwitz sonderkommando, a member of the group of inmates who were forced to remove the corpses from the gas chambers. The film consists of smothering close-ups of the lead actor, Geza Rohrig. The horrors of the camp remain either out of focus or outside the frame: We read them off Rohrig’s reactions, or more often, his lack of reaction.The influence of “Shoah” is also palpable in “The Zone of Interest,” which makes a similar formal choice: to keep the camera on the civilian side of the wall. “I don’t think they should be represented,” Glazer said of the film’s unpictured atrocities. “I don’t think they can be represented.” The idea of simulating violence (“extras in striped pajamas being beaten”) struck him not only as distasteful (“and then the extra is there later in the catering tent, eating his apple and custard”) but also as redundant. Forty-five years after NBC’s “Holocaust,” images of the camps have become a cheapened visual currency. The stifling sound design, by Johnnie Burn — an aural froth of gunshots, dog barks and human shouts and screams — is all we need to visualize the horror for ourselves. Glazer shot most of the film in summer 2021. Drawing on extensive research, Oddy spent the previous few months meticulously converting a derelict home just beyond the camp’s perimeter wall into a replica of the Höss house. (The actual house, a few doors down, which would have been Glazer’s first choice, has been a private residence almost since the end of the war.) Oddy began planting the garden, previously a stretch of wasteland, in early April, so that everything flowered in time for the shoot. When Friedel, Hüller and the rest of the cast and crew arrived, they were taken aback. “It was like walking into 1943,” one of them told me.The goal was an immersive naturalism, and Glazer went to great lengths pursuing it. By using multiple stationary cameras running simultaneously throughout the house, he gave his actors an extraordinary freedom to improvise; they were often unaware if the cameras were even rolling. Glazer remained outside, holed up in a shipping container decked out with monitors. “Cinema is at odds with atrocity,” he said, explaining his approach. “As soon as you put a camera on someone, as soon as you light them, or make a decision about what lens to use, you’re glamorizing them.” Lukasz Zal, his cinematographer, arrived early to the shoot and made some initial studies of the house. Glazer told him they were “too beautiful.” He wanted the images to seem “authorless.”Friedel’s first major role came in 2009, when he appeared in “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s haunting film about a German village on the eve of World War I. He told me that the two directors could not be less alike. “Haneke knows everything from the beginning,” he said. “When I read the script of ‘The White Ribbon,’ I thought, This is perfect. The shooting process was to shoot the script, and there were no surprises.” Glazer, by contrast, is more open to chance. “He wasn’t thinking, OK, this is a great script, let’s do it,” Friedel went on. “He was searching every moment. He was always asking, Is there something I don’t know?”Often there was. The moment when Rudolf breaks the news to Hedwig that he is being transferred away from Auschwitz comes during a casual get-together in the Höss garden. Glazer’s open-ended instruction to the supporting cast of friends and family was simply, “Have a party.” For the next three hours, they mingled on the lawn and splashed in the pool as Friedel and Hüller moved among them, trying out their lines. Occasionally Glazer stepped in to offer notes, but mostly he allowed them to improvise and experiment. “It’s like children playing,” Friedel said of the director’s hands-off approach. “You forget where you are and just be in the moment.”So, too, does the audience. Little happens in the film, dramatically speaking. Instead of exposition, conflict and rising action, its rhythms are those of lived domesticity. In a succession of medium-wide shots, which resemble surveillance footage and encourage us to view the Hösses less as characters than as human case studies, we see the family go about its daily business. Here they are gathered around the dinner table. Here they are lounging in the garden. At moments — or rather, for extended stretches — these vignettes sail close to the wind of sheer tedium, but there is method in the drabness. Rather than taking you out of yourself, as most movies do, “The Zone of Interest” provokes a disquieting self-awareness. As the minutes ticked by and little of note occurred, I found myself asking the unwholesome question: When are we going to see behind the wall?By staging acts of obscene cruelty — a pair of sociopaths breaking a man’s leg with a golf club as his son looks on, a married couple murdering their own daughter before themselves committing suicide — Haneke’s films seek to shock us into an awareness of our conditioned appetite for such spectacles. In “The Zone of Interest,” which Friedel described as a kind of spiritual sequel to “The White Ribbon,” Glazer uses different means to pursue a similar end: It’s by withholding violence that he shocks us into recognizing just how much it fascinates us. The effect, at least on me, was a shaming apprehension of complicity. As you watch the film, you slowly come to realize what Glazer is suggesting: that in its ways, the Höss house, where ordinary life goes unconscionably on, is as much a scene of horror as the camp itself. Unlike the abjection unfolding “over there,” this kind of contented obliviousness has rarely been portrayed onscreen. The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home. To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including — perhaps especially — when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.As “The Zone of Interest” receives its theatrical release, the mass murder of Jews is back in the headlines, and many seem indifferent, if not outright thrilled. Glazer was revulsed by Hamas’s killing spree in southern Israel on Oct. 7, which left a body count of roughly 1,200, according to Israeli authorities, including at least one Holocaust survivor; some 240 hostages were also taken. “It makes everything else seem so frivolous by comparison,” he said of the attack a few days later, from his home in central London. “I’ve lost interest in the film and everything surrounding it.”At the time, he was reluctant to say more, but when we corresponded in late November, he expressed his growing anger at the way that Israel was invoking the specter of the Holocaust to explain what happened and to justify its response. Now in its third month, Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza — “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — has so far killed over 18,000 people, most of them civilians, according to local health officials. That assault, accompanied by exterminationist rhetoric — “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, while advocating for electricity, food, water and fuel to be cut off from Gaza — has itself drawn comparisons to earlier campaigns of mass violence. To identify as victims, in Rose’s words, “turns us into strangers to ourselves as moral agents and social actors.” A vacuum of self-knowledge is soon filled by the desire for violent revenge, especially if you’re convinced your enemies are “counterhuman,” in Levi’s term. By inviting us to consider our resemblance to the culprits, “The Zone of Interest” is an attempt to short-circuit these ingrained responses and to open up space for self-criticism and doubt. Though it’s unlikely to have the same effect on history as “Holocaust” and “Schindler’s List,” it might chip away at the crude binary thinking — the children of light versus the children of darkness, and so on — that those movies have instilled in our culture. “It isn’t a partisan film,” Glazer told me. “It’s about all of us.”Unlike “Schindler’s List,” which leaves us, Rose says, “piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel,” “The Zone of Interest” is short on consolation. Though Höss was convicted of war crimes in 1947 and hanged at Auschwitz later the same year, the film ends in early 1944, as he learns he’s being transferred back to the camp and reunited with his family, who had remained there. It is a moment of personal vindication. “I’m pleased as punch,” he tells Hedwig on a long-distance call. In his final months in charge, the deadliest in the camp’s existence, he oversaw the murder of nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews. The action was named Operation Höss in his honor.Before the film ends, though, we are finally shown behind the wall. In a disorienting sequence, Glazer cuts to present-day Auschwitz, where we see cleaning ladies at work in the former gas chambers and crematories. Here, at last, are the victims, or what remains of them: piles of shoes and suitcases displayed behind glass panels, a corridor hung with black-and-white mug shots. Is this a bravura instance of jazz filmmaking, an unexpected formal flourish designed to catch the audience off guard? Or is it something humbler than that, an admission of artistic defeat? Glazer has taken great pains to construct an airtight historical realism, but in the end he’s reduced to shooting photos of the dead, to showing us an image of an image. Perhaps, above all, this interpolated footage should be read as a warning. Be vigilant, it seems to say: The door of history can swing open any moment. During Glazer’s childhood, the Holocaust was rarely discussed. A few years ago, when he first mentioned to his father that he was making a film about Auschwitz, he was met with a blunt response. “What are you doing that for?” his father asked. “Let it rot.” “It’s not rotting,” Glazer replied. “It’s not even dead. Read the paper. It’s in the world.”Giles Harvey is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was a profile of the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov. Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and a designer in Portugal. She is known for her retro-style collages. More

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      in Television

      Julianna Margulies Apologizes After Remarks on Black Support of Jews

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      The actress had said on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the Hamas attacks had been “brainwashed to hate Jews.”The actress Julianna Margulies, who drew criticism this week after saying on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the recent attack by Hamas had been “brainwashed to hate Jews,” said on Friday that she “did not intend for my words to sow further division, for which I am sincerely apologetic.”On the Nov. 20 episode of “The Back Room With Andy Ostroy,” Margulies, who has starred on the television series “E.R.,” “The Good Wife” and, presently, “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, accused Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people of showing insufficient support for Israel and Jews in the United States since the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.“I am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect,” Margulies said in a statement on Friday afternoon to Deadline, which her publicist sent to The New York Times in response to a query. “I want to be 100% clear: Racism, homophobia, sexism, or any prejudice against anyone’s personal beliefs or identity are abhorrent to me, full stop.”Some social media users objected to Margulies’s comments as racist, and questioned why she was focusing her criticism on marginalized groups.Margulies, who is Jewish, contrasted Jews’ vocal support for Black civil rights in the 1960s with the present: “Now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us?’”She added, “The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says either they just don’t know or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”She also said on the podcast that progressive protesters on college campuses, whom she accused of “spewing this antisemitic hate,” include gender nonbinary people who, she said, “will be the first people beheaded and their heads played like a soccer ball on the field” in places run by militant Islamist groups like Hamas.Margulies also said on the podcast, “There was a film being shown by this Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus, and they put signs up that said, ‘No Jews allowed.’” (The president of LionLez, a group for queer women and nonbinary people of color at the university, had emailed, “Zionists aren’t invited,” The Columbia Spectator reported.) Margulies said that to Hamas and its ilk, members of that student club would be “even lower than the Jews — A. you’re Black, and B. you’re gay. And you’re turning your back against the people who support you?”Margulies added that she was offended as someone “who plays a lesbian journalist on ‘The Morning Show.’ I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew, to be honest with you.”In her statement on Friday, Margulies said that she usually seeks to “forge a united front against discrimination.” More

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      in Theater

      How Jewish People Built the American Theater

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      HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it […] More

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      in Music

      An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time

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      “Émigré,” about Jews who fled Nazi Germany, debuts amid U.S.-China tensions and cultural rifts over the Israel-Hamas war. It comes to New York in February.“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.Musicians of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra warming up before a dress rehearsal of “Émigré.” The oratorio will be performed by the New York Philharmonic in February.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and Brock Walsh, has been in the works for several years, a commission of the Philharmonic, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Long Yu. But it is opening at a delicate time, with tensions high between China and the United States and with the Israel-Hamas war spurring heated debates in the cultural sphere.The war in the Middle East is a sensitive subject in China, which has sought to pitch itself as a neutral broker in the conflict, though state-controlled media has emphasized the harm suffered by civilians in Gaza while giving scant coverage to Hamas’s initial attack. Israel has expressed “deep disappointment” at China’s muted response to the Hamas attack. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, on Tuesday called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and for “the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine.”In recent weeks, promotional materials in China for “Émigré” have rarely mentioned its plot, and listed its Chinese title, “Shanghai! Shanghai!” The major state-owned Chinese news outlets did not cover the premiere this month, although an English-language television channel for foreign audiences did.The creators of “Émigré,” which takes place during the Second Sino-Japanese War, said they hoped the piece would help underscore a shared sense of humanity in a time of renewed strife. “I don’t think music and politics really belong in the same sentence,” Zigman said. “I just want people to be human and kind, and there are certain parts of this piece that help that vision.”Brock Walsh, who wrote the lyrics to “Emigré,” with Mark Campbell.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesThe composer Aaron Zigman said, “Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy.”Qilai Shen for The New York TimesIn 2019, Yu, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten, came up with the idea for the piece. He approached the New York Philharmonic, which has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony since 2014, about commissioning the work together.Yu said he never expected the oratorio to premiere in wartime but hoped that its message would still resonate.“We always make the same mistakes in our lives, and we have to learn from history,” he said. “We can be inspired by the kindness and support that Shanghai showed in this moment.”To shape the music and the plot, Yu turned to Zigman, a classically trained film and television composer who has returned to classical music in recent years, including with “Tango Manos” (2019), a piano concerto he wrote for the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Yu has long known Zigman, who has composed more than 60 Hollywood scores, including “The Notebook,” and he and Thibaudet suggested the idea for a tango concerto.For “Émigré,” Zigman said he was eager to create a “multicultural love story” that drew attention to the violent struggles unfolding in Asia and Europe at the time. Those include the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, an eastern Chinese city, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by occupying Japanese forces; and Kristallnacht, the wave of antisemitic violence carried out by Nazis in 1938.“Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love, hope, loss and tragedy,” Zigman said.Rehearsing in Shanghai. Yu, the orchestra’s music director, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown were being forgotten.Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” tells the story of Otto, a rabbinical student, and Josef, a doctor, who leave Berlin for the port city of Trieste, Italy, and board a boat headed for Shanghai.The brothers are anguished about leaving their parents and homeland but try to settle into life in China. Josef is interested in traditional Chinese medicine and visits an herbal medicine shop, where he meets Lina, the daughter of the owner, who is grappling with the death of her mother in Nanjing. They fall in love, but their cross-cultural union draws scorn from their families.Shanghai’s role as a haven for Jews was a historical fluke. Britain, France and the United States insisted that Beijing let them set up settlements there in the 1840s. By the 1930s, the settlements had grown into a sprawling city. But the Chinese government controlled who was issued visas to enter mainland China, including for arrival at Shanghai’s docks.When Japan seized east-central China in 1937, including the area around Shanghai, the Nationalist Chinese government could no longer inspect visas at the city’s riverfront docks. But the Japanese military did not start controlling visa access to the area until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.The result? Nobody was controlling who entered China at Shanghai. It became an open port for those four years: Foreign travelers were welcomed and could stay in the Western settlements.Mark Campbell, who wrote the libretto with Brock Walsh.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesCampbell, who has written librettos for more than 40 operas, said he hoped that the stories of refugees in “Émigré” could be a modern-day lesson.“It’s very important for the audience to go away and remember there was a time in this world when one country embraced the refugees of another country,” he said.In Shanghai, the stories of Jewish residents are preserved at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The core block of China’s legally designated Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese required Jews in Shanghai to live during the last three years of the war, has been preserved. Its Central European-style townhouses and house-size synagogue still stand.But much of the surrounding area has been bulldozed amid rapid growth in recent decades, causing concern among preservationists. Two gargantuan office buildings, each 50 stories tall, cast huge shadows toward the little synagogue at midday.At least 14,000 Jews lived in the ghetto during the war, and possibly several thousand more. Another 1,000 to 10,000 secretly lived elsewhere in the city. (Almost all of Shanghai’s Jews left after the war, many resettling in the United States.)A building in what was the Jewish ghetto in Shanghai. The core block has been preserved amid encroaching urban growth.Jackson Lowen for The New York TimesShanghai was a deeply troubled place in the years that “Émigré” takes place: packed with Chinese refugees as well as Jewish ones, frequently short on food and potable water, and racked by epidemics of disease. Opium was smoked openly and prostitutes gathered on street corners.Among the ghetto’s residents was Michael Blumenthal, who fled from Nazi Germany in 1939 at 13 and who much later became treasury secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017 that when he was a teenager, a Japanese police station was just down the block from the synagogue. He and others had to apply at the station for permission to leave the ghetto during the war, and by the final year, it was almost impossible to obtain permission.Trucks patrolled Shanghai, not just in the ghetto, to collect those who succumbed to illness. “I used to see them driving around the city, picking up dead bodies,” Blumenthal said. “The city was vastly overcrowded, it was dangerous, there was constant fighting among factions, and shootings.”“Émigré” received wide attention in China when it was announced in the summer. With a Chinese and American cast, the work was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Yu joined Zigman, Campbell, Walsh and Gary Ginstling, the president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, for a news conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum celebrating the commission.When the joint Shanghai-New York project was announced, “Émigré” was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States in a time of increasing tensions. Qilai Shen for The New York Times“Émigré” will have its American premiere in February with the same cast, and Ginstling said in a recent interview that he did not expect the Israel-Hamas war would lead to alterations in the work, which Deutsche Grammophon recorded in Shanghai for release next year.“Things change quickly in the world,” he said. “We are committed to our role as cultural ambassadors.”The Philharmonic’s version, directed by Mary Birnbaum, will be semi-staged and incorporate some visual elements, including images of devastation from World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.Several New York Philharmonic musicians took part in the premiere in Shanghai, and a group of Chinese musicians will play at the premiere in New York.At a recent rehearsal for “Émigré” at Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall, choir members sang Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayers, which open the work. “Grant peace in high places,” they sang in Hebrew.“Sacred presence blossoming,” they sang in Chinese.The cast includes the tenor Arnold Livingston Geis as Josef; the tenor Matthew White as Otto; the soprano Zhang Meigui as Lina; the mezzo-soprano Zhu Huiling as her sister, Li; and the bass-baritone Shenyang as their father, Wei Song.Between rehearsals, Zhang said that she was trying to stay focused on the music, and that she hoped “Émigré” could provide some relief from the war.“We’re going through a very difficult time in this world,” she said, “but I think music has to be separate from this.”Zhang added that she had found some comfort in a song at the end of the first act called “In a Perfect World.” In that piece, Josef sings:If I ruled the world,Mine to redesign,I’d stop every gunshot, every war.Now, forevermore.Li You More