Why Are They Still Making Holocaust Dramas in 2024?

By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 4, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 4, 2024 |

It’s important to note at the outset that this piece is not about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or who you should vote for in November. It’s also not about Israel or the atrocities being committed in Gaza. It’s not really even about We Were the Lucky Ones, a decent Holocaust drama on Hulu starring Joey King (that we may review with more depth soon).

To me, it’s about why We Were the Lucky Ones exists. Or why The Zone of Interest exists. Or All the Light We Cannot See. Or why the Holocaust continues to be such fertile ground for bestselling novels (see: All the Light We Cannot See, The Book Thief, The Nightingale, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, etc., etc.) It’s not just because the Holocaust is a ripe setting for bleak and/or inspirational work, these movies, books, and television shows are a much-needed reminder that the Holocaust is real, it happened, and it wasn’t that long ago.

I’ve had the benefit of living my life in both a Jewish household and a non-Jewish household. Most people who don’t live in Jewish households or spend a lot of time with Jewish friends don’t know much about Judaism. Most think they know a lot more than they actually do. For most of those people, Jews are largely defined by antisemitic tropes because it’s the only thing they have ever heard about Jews. I grew up in the South. I didn’t meet a Jewish person until I went to college. The only things I ever heard about Jews were antisemitic, so much so that when I finally did meet a Jewish person, I was surprised that she did not have horns or drink the blood of children. Ignorance is not bliss when we fill those absences with bigotry.

It wasn’t until I became immersed in the religion that I realized that, oh wow, this is pretty tame stuff. I spent a lot of time in Christian churches growing up, and that shit was scary: Hellfire and brimstone and a lot of scary, authoritarian language. And so many collection plates! My experience in synagogues for the last many years has been wildly different. The experience itself is not that much different from a Unitarian church, only there’s more Hebrew and all the services contain the Mi Shebeirach — where everyone gives a shout-out and a little prayer for those who are sick and in need of healing. It’s pretty loving and sweet, and Jews do not use the fear of hell — which does not exist in our religion — to scare people into bigotry.

I also lived way too many years before I realized that Christianity is basically just the Bible stacked on top of the Torah. They took the Torah and the Tanakh and they added Jesus and the New Testament and made up a whole new religion, and in that new Testament there are two passages — Matthew 27:1-26 and Matthew 26:14-16 — that essentially formed the entire basis of antisemitism, the whole blood libel trope, and even the bullshit about Jews being greedy snakes.

Jews have been tortured, executed, and run out of every Dodge on the continent since ancient times because of that motherfucker, Matthew. Six millions Jews died in the Holocaust because of some shit Christians took way too literally, and then they were like, “Money is dirty, so only Jews can handle money,” and then when Jews extended loans and the Christians didn’t feel like paying them back, they just ran them off. Thanks a lot, Matthew. Demonizing people to whom you owe money is some real Trumpian bullshit.

But that brings me back to We Were the Lucky Ones and the importance of these Holocaust dramas. I recently took a class on Judaism and antisemitism, and one of the things that made a lot of sense but never really occurred to me is how antisemitism often works by changing the perception of a David into that of a Goliath. All this bullshit about Jews controlling the media or the economy or how they are some evil global cabal is designed to create the impression that Jewish people are this brutal, dominating force. I mean, listen to Kanye West for five minutes, and he’ll have you believe that Jews control the worldwide agenda and will blackball anyone who speaks out against them.

There are 7 million Jews in America. Out of 335 million. There are 15 million Jews in the world. That’s .2 percent of the population. Not 2 percent. 1/5th of 1 percent. But it’s a lot easier to demonize Jewish people if you imagine them as a global force and that you are the underdog righteously taking on the evil empire instead of someone acting on behalf of 1.8 billion Christians scapegoating Jews or trying to amass power by taking on the global cabal of sinister Jews baking the blood of gentile children into their matzah.

And that, to me anyway, is why I appreciate that television series like We Were the Lucky Ones continue to be made. Because they are a reminder of how myths can snowball into the death of six million Jews, so many that — 85 years later — Jews still have not made up the population loss. And this is all I will say about Israel here, and it is this: The actions of a far right-wing government in that country are making the world a lot less safe for Jews everywhere else, and I do not want to see a bunch of frat boys with tiki torches screaming “Jews will not replace us” show up in my backyard because the actions in one country empowered 330 million people to turn on the other 7 million people in America. If a bunch of Jew-hating assholes come after us, and the rest of the country looks away because they think we control Hollywood, the media, the banks, and the global military, we don’t stand a chance.