By age 10, my yeshiva day school classmates and I were surrounded by stories and visuals of the Holocaust. In classes and programs, we saw pictures of hollow-eyed concentration camp inmates, learned Yiddish songs from the ghettos and the partisans and heard in-person accounts from survivors.

This early, repeated experience reflected my community’s commitment to those twin phrases of warning and remembrance: “Never Again” and “Never Forget.”

That exposure in the late 1980s was part of my Jewish upbringing in Bergen County, N.J. But for many children and adults in the United States, that kind of direct immersion is less common.

For the wider world, television and film may be the most ubiquitous conduits of narrative about the Holocaust. Nearly 500 Holocaust-related feature films have been produced across 40 countries since 1945, according to Holocaust educator and film historian Rich Brownstein, who is the author of Holocaust Cinema Complete. Add to that hundreds of documentaries and shorts, and it becomes clear that the screen has become one of the Holocaust’s most enduring storytellers.

That steady stream continues today. Jewish pain took center stage at this year’s Academy Awards: Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor for playing one of two cousins on a heritage trip to Poland in A Real Pain, directed by co-star Jesse Eisenberg, while Adrien Brody took Best Actor for his role as an architect finding his way in America after surviving the Holocaust in The Brutalist.

And in what the Forward called a “boom in Holocaust TV,” 2024 and 2023 brought a wave of World War II stories to the small screen, including the series A Small Light, about Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who helped hide Anne Frank and her family, and We Were the Lucky Ones, based on Georgia Hunter’s novel of the same name about how her Polish family evaded the Nazis.

According to film and television insiders, the pipeline for Holocaust documentaries, dramas and television series has widened in format and narrative scope. Holocaust films “keep evolving with the times and technology,” said Jeremy Goldscheider, documentary filmmaker and host and producer of the Jewish Life Television (JLTV) network’s documentary film series J Docs.

Yet as new content continues to surface along with a surge of antisemitism, creatives and academics disagree about what fuels the ongoing interest as well as the degree to which—and even whether—these films are meant to impact the way audiences see and understand anti-Jewish bias.

While it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of Holocaust films currently in production worldwide, Hilary Helstein, co-founder and executive director of the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, one of the largest such festivals in the country, said she is encouraged by the interest from filmmakers.

“This is the last generation to hear from Holocaust survivors firsthand. It’s important we continue to tell these stories,” said Helstein, who also directed the 2008 documentary As Seen Through These Eyes, about artists who fought the Nazi regime.

Roberta Grossman, an award-winning filmmaker and executive director of Jewish Story Partners, echoes those sentiments. “We will continue to grapple,” she said, “with this rupture in civilization and catastrophe for the Jewish people for as long as people are making films.”

Supported by Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, Jewish Story Partners is dedicated to Jewish-themed filmmaking. Since its launch in April 2021, it has funded 101 documentaries—about 30 percent focused on the Holocaust or antisemitism, Grossman said. Among them is 999: The Forgotten Girls, an award-winning 2024 film based on a book of the same title by Heather Dune Macadam, about the young women on the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz.

Yet for some viewers around the country, the sheer volume of films can be overwhelming.

“We find that our audience gets Holocaust fatigue,” said Beth Toni Kruvant, artistic director of the Berkshire Jewish Film Festival. “Especially in the summer, they look for comedies and nostalgia.”

The bulk of festival submissions are Holocaust movies, she said. Nevertheless, the final slate usually limits such films to about 25 percent of those shown to make space for other offerings.

Among the Shoah-connected films at this year’s festival, which will take place in July in Lenox, Mass., is Soda, which shows the aftermath of the Holocaust and the struggles to rebuild a life in Israel, and the biopic Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire.

Holocaust features and documentaries make up about 20 percent of the programming at the Holocaust Museum LA, located in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. According to Jordanna Gessler, the museum’s chief impact officer, its programs have reached some 100,000 students this year alone.

The museum is investing considerably in cinema. When the museum’s new $65 million Jona Goldrich Campus opens next spring, so will its long-awaited auditorium for film and stage works, said Jen Maxcy, the museum’s chief program officer.

Both Maxcy and Gessler observed that many of the films made today have a broader focus than those in previous decades, exploring stories about perpetrators and the descendants of survivors with “a deepening of psychological aspects,” Maxcy said. She pointed to newer themes such as intergenerational trauma, depicted in the personal struggles of the cousins in A Real Pain, and the complicity of bystanders, seen in the 2024 Academy Award-winner The Zone of Interest, about German SS officer Rudolf Höss and his family.

Another focus is survivors’ postwar challenges, such as in The Brutalist and in the 2022 HBO Max movie The Survivor, about boxer Harry Haft’s attempt to create a life in America after surviving Auschwitz.

“There is a common misconception that after the Holocaust…life was great. People came to America, they had jobs, they were successful, they got married, they had lots of kids,” Gessler said. “A section of people do fit that narrative, but for the vast majority of Holocaust survivors, liberation was not just a day of celebration. It was a day of torture and hardship, and realization that life was truly destroyed.”

It is not just the topics that are different, but also how they are told. One example is the use of animation. Some 20 animated films related to the Holocaust have been released since 2020, according to the International Animated Film Association of San Francisco.

Goldscheider, J Docs host, called the 2022 Academy Award-nominated animated short Letter to a Pig “hauntingly beautiful.” The Israeli and French co-production explores intergenerational trauma as a teenage girl slips into an animated reverie about identity and memory as a Holocaust survivor reads a letter he wrote to her class.

“Visually, the film is wildly unique, and it resonates because it forces viewers to confront how we see the other,” he said.

For all the new storytelling, “it is of the utmost importance to be accurate,” Gessler said—especially with Holocaust denial on the rise. Some films, she noted, emphasize period details but obscure who the victims of the Holocaust actually were.

She pointed to The Zone of Interest, which describes the lives of Höss and his family in their home right next to Auschwitz, while over their garden wall the sounds of gunshots and the camp furnaces can be heard.

“The film is visually meticulous—the setting of Auschwitz’s commandant’s home, the costumes and props are all compelling,” she said. “But the film focuses so tightly on the peripheral banality of evil, without directly showing or acknowledging the scale and mechanisms of mass murder just beyond the wall, that some viewers could walk away without a clear understanding of the actual historical atrocities.”

“I struggle when films take other perspectives and don’t give true and honest and accurate space to the horrific inhumanity of a massive genocidal campaign against Jewish people,” Gessler added.

She also criticized films that blur fiction and fact, creating “fictional Holocaust stories based on real events.”

In contrast, her colleague Maxcy believes that these films can have value. If the fictional A Real Pain “interests people because they like Jesse Eisenberg, and it tells you a little bit about Majdanek, so curiosity is provoked, it’s a good thing,” Maxcy noted.

That said, most Holocaust film projects are not intended as educational tools or in service of Jewish memory, explained Holocaust and film educator Brownstein. Rather, they are pieces of art, something to see.

He also asserted that some of them are made simply to win awards. “People who are making the films”—Brownstein mentioned A24, the studio behind The Brutalist and The Zone of Interest—“are manipulative and know what they’re doing specifically for the Academy,” he said, suggesting that they prioritize award potential, which brings prestige to studios and directors, over authentic Jewish experience or education.

Meanwhile, the constant stream of Holocaust content is not impacting the way people view Jews or the Holocaust itself, said Nathan Abrams, a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales. “What we’ve learned since October 7 is that these films don’t make people less antisemitic,” Abrams said. “Whoever thinks they’re going to make a difference is naïve and misguided.”

But perhaps that was never the role of such films to begin with. “It is a mistake to rely upon media and culture to remedy bigotry,” Brownstein said, noting that despite their critical and commercial successes, director Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), about racial tensions between Black and Italian residents in Brooklyn, and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) didn’t eliminate racism or antisemitism.

“Responsibility for tolerance is in the home, schools and theology, not films, necessarily, unless used specifically for that purpose,” he added. “Asking art to fix society is unfair and unrealistic.”

Still, others contend that Holocaust films provide a way to address antisemitism, both historical and current, especially for young people.

Helstein, director of the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, also sees educational value in the abundance of Holocaust content. As part of her annual event, she introduces local teens from diverse backgrounds to the history of Nazi Germany. In January, she was honored by the city for her decades-long work preserving Holocaust stories through film and education.

Just reaching one person who wants to spread the message is worthwhile, she said. Despite the challenges, “I’m going to do what I do: Keep the history of the Holocaust in the forefront.” 

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Esther D. Kustanowitz is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor and consultant. She also co-hosts The Bagel Report podcast.