Spielberg: Holocaust Education Should Be Mandatory In Schools
Steven Spielberg Image by Getty Images
NEW YORK (JTA) — Out of all his celebrated films, Steven Spielberg is most proud of “Schindler’s List,” the 1993 Oscar winner about a German businessman who saved over 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
The filmmaker made the claim at a Tribeca Film Festival event on Thursday marking the film’s 25th anniversary that brought him together with actors Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and others involved in the movie.
“I have never felt, since ‘Schindler’s List,’ the kind of pride and satisfaction and sense of real, meaningful accomplishment — I haven’t felt that in any film post-‘Schindler’s List,’” Spielberg said.
The filming, which took place in Poland, took a toll on Spielberg and some of the cast, the director revealed. Neeson, who starred as Oskar Schindler, found the process “dangerous and unforgettable”; Spielberg needed regular calls from his friend Robin Williams to cope with the experience.
Two young Israeli actors had “breakdowns” on set after the filming of a scene in which Jewish women thought they were going to be killed in an Auschwitz gas chamber. Spielberg called the day in which actors were asked to strip naked before being marched around the camp set one of the most difficult of his career.
Spielberg and the crew experienced anti-Semitism firsthand during filming as well. Swastikas were painted near their set at one point, and Kingsley (who played Schindler’s Jewish accountant) stood up for an Israeli actor in a bar after a German-speaking man approached and asked if he was a Jew.
Spielberg, who said the process of making the film brought his “Jewish life pouring back” into his heart, also said he thinks Holocaust education should be more universal in the U.S.
“It’s not a pre-requisite to graduate high school, as it should be,” he said. “It should be part of the social science, social studies curriculum in every public high school in this country.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
