Why I Launched a Podcast About Antisemitism

By Phyllis Zimbler Miller

BEVERLY HILLS, California  – In August 2016 in Berlin my younger daughter and I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism, and Holocaust exhibits at the Jewish Museum Berlin. It seemed that Germany was doing rather well with coming to terms with the country’s horrendous crimes against Jews and others during WWII.

This was especially important to me because my U.S. Army officer husband and I had been stationed in Munich, Germany, only 25 years after the end of WWII. At that time we would get on the tram and look at Germans of a certain age, wondering what they had done during the war. And we saw no public displays of remorse or apology for the Holocaust.

Yet the positive signs in Berlin in 2016 were shadowed by the political posters we saw for the AfD political party (Alternative fur Deutschland). The party, as Wikipedia says, “is a German nationalist and right-wing populist political party … often characterized as being on the far-right of the political spectrum.”

Since that time in 2016 in Berlin I have kept an eye on news of the AfD as it has grown in numbers and won seats in the Bundestag. I have also read daily news accounts of antisemitism around the globe.

Fast forward to before the coronavirus lockdown when a close friend urged me to write a play. She did so because I felt badly that the firsthand accounts of survivors and saviors that I published in the 1970s would be lost to history. (Upon my husband’s and my return from being stationed in Munich I worked as a reporter and editor at the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. As the editor of the monthly literary supplement, Friday Forum, I published firsthand accounts of survivors and saviors.)

One survivor account has always haunted me: When the Nazis broke the German-Russian nonaggression pact, a mother in Lithuania had the presence of mind to give her diamond ring to a peasant in exchange for trusting him to bring her daughter back from summer camp run by the Russians to turn young people into good Communists. This prescient act was the first of many miracles that saved the daughter (although the mother was gassed at Stutthoff). I have always wondered if I would have been that prescient? (All the Jewish children at the summer camp were subsequently murdered by the Nazis.)

So I wrote a nonfiction play – www.ThinEdgeOfTheWedge.com — and rewrote and rewrote it. In February of 2020 we held a pilot program at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. And then came the lockdowns.

All was not lost – Zoom to the rescue with some amazing outcomes!

One such outcome was a sci fi Zoom event from Germany (in English) where I met a high school history teacher who offered to pay for a professional German translation of the play, which became in German www.SchritteInDenAbgrund.com

On an LA-sponsored Zoom networking event I connected with someone who introduced me to a long-time LA casting director. From there has followed many months of working with actors on Zoom for a pro bono professional Zoom recording of the play.

And on an LA Federation Zoom networking event I met Aaron Ozlevi, an international film director relocating from Istanbul to Los Angeles this summer. He became the director of  Thin Edge of the Wedge, and then we embarked on another Holocaust project together. (We are now developing a documentary on the Struma. This was an unseaworthy ship carrying almost 800 Jewish men, women and children desperate refugees during WWII that became a pawn in political machinations. After being towed from the Istanbul harbor, the Struma was sunk in the Black Sea by a Russian ship’s torpedo, leaving only one survivor.)

How is all this connected to starting a podcast about antisemitism?

For Thin Edge of the Wedge, I reached out to a range of people, including Jeremy Wootliff, CEO of the streaming platform Jewzy.tv During a Zoom conversation he recommended that I watch the documentary Never Again Is Now featuring Dutch Jew Evelyn Markus, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

After I watched the powerful documentary, I contacted Evelyn Markus, who had immigrated to Los Angeles in 2006 due to the rise of antisemitism in Europe.

Meanwhile, I had been wanting to do a podcast about combatting antisemitism. Then at Shavuot dinner (the first-time we had guests in over a year – yes, we had all been vaccinated) one guest, who is South African, asked us when we had first learned about the Holocaust. A light bulb went off in my head!

I met with Evelyn in person and pitched her being a co-host with me on a podcast show titled Never Again Is Now. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Both Evelyn and I are very concerned about the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and around the globe. Interviewing a range of people on the show would enable us to showcase many different aspects of antisemitism as well as encourage the efforts of individuals to “speak up.”

We have now published the first two Never Again Is Now podcast episodes on YouTube and have very interesting guests lined up for upcoming interview.  The first guest, Karen Jungblut, is Director of Global Initiatives for the USC Shoah Foundation with a perspective on antisemitism in Europe. The second guest, Natan Pakman, is Senior Associate Regional Director of ADL Los Angeles with a perspective on antisemitism in the U.S.

Evelyn and I hope that the interviews on our podcast will help give people some tools to speak up against antisemitism in everyday life. We must work together to educate people about what antisemitism is and how to address it in a calm and informative manner.

Check out Evelyn’s documentary website at www.JoinNeverAgainIsNow.com and listen to our podcast at https://b.link/NeverAgainIsNowpodcast – we would appreciate your subscribing (it’s free!) to our YouTube channel.

And whenever you can – speak up against antisemitism and all hate!

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Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the co-author of the Jewish holiday book Seasons for Celebration, the founder of the free nonfiction Holocaust theater project www.ThinEdgeOfTheWedge.com, and the co-host of Never Again Is Now, a podcast about antisemitism on YouTube.