Peloni: This complete rewrite of history to suit the antisemites in Hollywood is simply horrifying to read. Hopefully, the public outrage over this historical revision will defeat the purpose of having done so.
by Rafael Medoff
America’s response to the Holocaust, a subject of much historical scholarship and public discussion in recent decades, increasingly is coming to the stage and screen—with mixed results.
Last year’s George Clooney film, The Boys in the Boat, is an example of how Hollywood sometimes sacrifices history on the altar of entertainment. It tells the story of a gritty American rowing team that made it to the Olympics despite various obstacles. There’s nothing Hollywood likes better than a triumphant underdog. But what happens when half the story is omitted in order to prioritize the thrilling narrative?
The Olympics in question were the 1936 games in Nazi Germany.
By that time, Germany’s Jews had been driven out of their professions and stripped of their civil rights. Hundreds had been injured in a pogrom in Berlin. Hitler intended to use the Olympics to impress foreign visitors and thereby soften his international image.
American Jewish organizations, the NAACP, and the Catholic War Veterans all called for an American boycott of the games. So did New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. A public debate over whether the U.S. should take part raged for more than two years. The athletic community was deeply divided: the delegates to the convention of the Amateur Athletic Union, which certified American athletes to compete in the Olympics, voted to support U.S. participation–by just two and a half votes.
As a result, a handful of American athletes boycotted the games to protest Hitler’s persecution of German Jews. The boycotters included the entire Long Island University basketball team, which had been favored to win the try-outs and represent the U.S. in the first-ever Olympic competition in that sport. The LIU Blackbirds chose to stay home and forego the glory rather than lend a hand to Hitler’s makeover.
Yet none of that is mentioned in The Boys in the Boat. The scrappy rowers of the University of Washington, underfunded and underestimated, are shown battling their way through a series of competitions to qualify for Berlin. Along the way, not one of the athletes expresses the slightest qualm about legitimizing Nazi Germany. None of them seem to be aware that what they are doing is at the heart of a major public debate. And the audience watching “The Boys of the Boat” is never informed that such a debate took place.
Were the rowers somehow unaware of the heated dispute raging around them? Or were they simply unconcerned about the suffering of the Jews? Whatever the answer, it should have been in the film. Instead, the only conflict portrayed in The Boys in the Boat is what director Clooney imagines must have been class resentment between the impoverished University of Washington rowers and the well-to-do rowers of the Ivy League teams.
The critically-acclaimed play The Accomplices, by contrast, demonstrates that historical controversy can be brought to the stage with the facts intact. This dramatic production will be revived at the Khan Theater in Jerusalem in February, fifteen years after it was last performed.
Written by former New York Times correspondent Bernard Weinraub, The Accomplices tackles the subject of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failure to aid Europe’s Jews, and the conflict between American Jewish leaders and activists over how to respond. There are a few scenes in the production that are more compressed than literal, but that is the sort of minor artistic license one would expect when history is portrayed on stage.
What makes The Accomplices especially poignant is that the role of Rabbi Wise will be played by Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin, who comes from two generations of Holocaust protesters. His grandfather, Rabbi Mordechai Golinkin, participated in the famous march to the White House in 1943, and his father, Rabbi Noah Golinkin, was a student activist who clashed with Wise over the need for a more forceful American Jewish response to FDR’s abandonment of the Jews.
The Accomplices provides an important service in focusing attention on the Bergson Group, the activists who organized that march in Washington and other protests. Too many museums and films have minimized or ignored the Bergson Group’s efforts.
Another dramatic interpretation of America’s response to the Holocaust will soon be attracting public attention, as well. Laemmle’s List, a documentary by Deborah Blum, debuted last month at the Miami Jewish Film Festival. It tells the remarkable story of her relative, the late Hollywood mogul Carl Laemmle.
Laemmle was co-founder of Universal Pictures, which created such blockbuster films as Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Phantom of the Opera. Laemmle, who was born in Laupheim, Germany, rescued hundreds of his landsmen from Hitler—until the Roosevelt administration intervened and stopped him, on the grounds that Laemmle was “too old” (71) to serve as a financial guarantor for would-be immigrants.
We can expect the public conversation on these topics to grow in the months and years ahead, as dramatists and filmmakers continue to bring history to stage and screen—for better or worse.
Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.
When I was growing up, the story of racism at the Olympics played ad nauseum on public television along with Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film was always about Jesse Owens. A recent tablet article revealed that 2 Jewish runners were replaced by Owens and another black runner, both whom had already won medals. Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller never got to run. But, the narrative was about how blacks were more oppressed than anyone else, always. Quite an eye-opener. I never knew this. How many people know this? Even in pre-Holocaust Hungary, my father’s pejorative nick-name in school was Owens. How many people knew this even back then around the world? How many other former leftists feel like such suckers*, I wonder?
*I don’t know if this is an American idiom. “A person easily, cheated or deceived.”
“A sucker is born every minute” – P.T. Barnum – apocryphal attribution
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/sports/articles/marty-glickman