Based on Samuel Kassow’s book of the same name, the documentary Who Will Write Our History tells about a heroic Jewish undertaking during the Holocaust that is almost unknown to non-historians. Simi Horwitz writes in her review:

Set in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1944), teeming with Jews [who are] flanked by encroaching Nazis on all sides, the movie zeroes in on a group of intellectuals, journalists, artists, and writers—led by the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum—who, while living in the depths of hell and struggling to survive, made it their top priority to collect, record, and preserve eyewitness accounts (essays, diaries, surveys, letters, paintings, photographs, and children’s writings, among other forms of documentation) that would serve as testimonials to the truth even if its writers did not survive. The ghetto’s underground intelligentsia gave themselves the code name Oyneg Shabes, meaning “enjoyment of the Sabbath.”

In the end, only three survived, but most of the documentation buried in the ground beneath the rubble was ultimately uncovered after the war, revealing a treasure trove of more than 60,000 pages written by ordinary, and sometimes not so ordinary, civilians evoking what life at its most quotidian, grotesque, and heroic was like on a day-to-day basis. What emerges so forcefully is that despite the mindbogglingly inhumane setting, education, religious ritual, civic life, and culture flourished.

Arguably, the most controversial element of the film is not the content, but rather the reenactments that some may view as tacky. [The producer], Nancy Spielberg, admits that she generally didn’t care for them, at least not initially, but finally came to the conclusion that there’s nothing objectionable in a reenactment if it’s well done.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.