MJH | Documentary Filmmaking from the 2G Perspective

Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage for a virtual panel discussion on the change in storytelling as the baton is passed from survivor testimony to their children. This panel will focus on three documentary films – Family Treasures Lost and Found, directed by Marcia Rock and produced by Karen A. Frenkel, My Underground Mother, directed by Marisa Fox and UnBroken, directed by Beth Lane – all created from a second-generation perspective.

Marisa Fox, Karen A. Frenkel, and Beth Lane will be in conversation about their films with Professor Avinoam Patt, Director of the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

This program was produced by Marcia Rock, Director, News and Documentary at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

About the speakers:

Marisa Fox is an award-winning journalist and the film director of My Underground Mother. As a correspondent for Haaretz, New York Newsday, New York and a contributor to The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, CNN, Forward and The New York Times, she has reported on major news stories from 9/11 to the opioid crisis, from January 6^th to October 7^th , and is a “she source” for Gloria Steinem’s Women’s Media Center, specializing in gender, genocide, wartime sexual trauma and radical extremism. She also served as a magazine editor and cover story writer for InStyle, O, Elle, Billboard, Details, The Hollywood Reporter and a television producer for FX, MTV, Vh1 and Channel 13-WNET. Her work has earned awards and nominations from the American Society of Magazine Editors. My Underground Mother, Fox’s directorial debut, won the Best Documentary jury award at the Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival, and led her to curate one of the only women’s Holocaust monuments and a digital exhibit of women’s testimonies with USC’s Shoah Foundation. She is currently writing a book about her search for her mother’s missing past.

Karen A. Frenkel is an award-winning technology and science journalist, author, and filmmaker. In addition to producing Family Treasures Lost and Found, Karen wrote a tie-in memoir of the same title. Her previous award-winning documentaries appeared on public television. Minerva’s Machine: Women and Computing won Best Documentary in a Small Market, EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award). net.LEARNING won the National Education Reporting First Prize Television Documentary Feature. She is the co-author with Isaac Asimov of Robots: Machines in Man’s Image and three books on physics for children. Her many articles have appeared in national and trade magazines, and newspapers and their websites, including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Communications of the ACM, Discover, Essence, FastCompany.com, Forbes, Science Magazine, Scientific American, Technology Review, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and U.S. News and World Report. Family Treasures on Facebook, www.familytreasuresfilm.com, Educational Distributor: GOODDOCS, www.familytreasuresmemoir.com.

Beth Lane is the award-winning actor, director, producer and writer of UnBroken, a feature documentary uncovering her family’s extraordinary story of survival and resilience. Her directorial debut can be seen on Netflix and it has screened in more than 70 cities worldwide and received numerous honors, including Best Documentary Premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival. Most recently, Beth received an Anthem Award for Human & Civil Rights in Documentary Film, recognizing UnBroken for its social impact and contribution to dialogue around moral courage, resistance and human dignity. At the core of Beth’s work is a lifelong commitment to storytelling that expands empathy and connection. Grounded in bridge-building and dialogue, she uses personal narrative to spark understanding, civic engagement and meaningful action. A sought-after keynote speaker and moderator, she regularly curates and participates in panels focused on film, human rights, social impact and spirituality. Beth is the founder and President of The Weber Family Arts Foundation, a non-profit commited to combating antisemitim and hate by advancing awareness, engagement and compassion through the arts. @bethlanefilm. @unbrokenthefilm @theweberfamilyartsfoundation

Avinoam Patt is the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University where he also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the author of multiple books on Jewish responses to the Holocaust, including Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (2009); co-editor of a collected volume on Jewish Displaced Persons, titled We are Here: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2010); and is a contributor to several projects at the USHMM including Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938-1940 (2011). He completed a book on the early postwar memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (The Jewish Heroes of Warsaw: The Afterlife of the Revolt, 2021). Together with David Slucki and Gabriel Finder, he is co-editor of Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust (2020) and, with Laura Hilton, Understanding and Teaching the Holocaust (2020). His most recent books include Israel and the Holocaust (2024) and the document collection, The Surviving Remnant: Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (2024).

About the films:

In Family Treasures Lost and Found, journalist Karen A. Frenkel unravels her family’s World War II mysteries using investigative skills, genealogical methods, digital and real-world archives, and visits to Kraków, Lviv, Tarnów, and Vienna. Karen’s parents and one grandparent survived in uncommon ways; not forced into concentration camps, they survived on the run with extraordinary luck. Her father married an American tourist visiting Poland in early 1939. He arrived in Cuba on a French ship while the St. Louis was at anchor and, like its passengers, was refused entry. His first wife, black sheep of the family that owned the famous dairy restaurant Ratner’s, had a married gangster lover. They expected Dr. Frenkel to front for them. Instead, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Karen’s mother was a teenager when the Nazis invaded Poland. Later, her parents insisted that they separate and sent false papers so that she could pose as a Catholic. She sustained this ruse as a slave laborer in Germany. Viewers glimpse the culture of pre-war assimilated Jews due to a rare, huge family archive of hundreds of photographs, portraits, and artifacts brought from Berlin by Karen’s great-grandparents. Karen reveals her relatives’ resistance to fascism and the reasons for the survivors’ silence. In hopes of inspiring others, Karen shows how a journalist indefatigably follows leads, solves many mysteries, honors her parents and the lost, and ensures that memories of a destroyed culture will endure.

My Underground Mother: “You think you know your mother until you don’t,” says filmmaker Marisa Fox. Tamar was a New York doctor’s wife who claimed she fled her native Poland on the cusp of World War II and was never a Holocaust “victim.” Twenty years after her death, Fox, a journalist and mother, learns Tamar had a secret identity and chases down leads that span the globe, uncovering a story of Nazi trafficking and a defiant band of sisters in a women’s forced labor camp. Dogged research, extraordinary archival imagery and staggeringly candid interviews reveal a portrait of a woman who dared to be the hero of her own story, transforming herself from Nazi slave to freedom fighter, from refugee to spy and saboteur, ultimately reinventing herself as a matriarch in America. A real-life story of a daughter coming to terms with a woman who went to extraordinary lengths not to be defined by trauma.

UnBroken is the miraculous true story of the seven Weber siblings, ages 6-18, who evaded certain capture and death, and ultimately escaped Nazi Germany relying solely on their youthful bravado and the kindness of strangers, following their mother’s incarceration and murder at Auschwitz. After being hidden in a laundry hut by a benevolent German farmer, the children spent two years on their own in war torn Germany. Emboldened by their father’s mandate that they ‘always stay together,’ the children used their own cunning instincts to fight through hunger, loneliness, rape, bombings and fear. Climactically separated from their father, the siblings are forced to declare themselves as orphans in order to escape to a new life in America. Unbeknownst to them, this salvation would become what would finally tear them apart, not to be reunited for another 40 years. Filmmaker Beth Lane, daughter of the youngest Weber sibling, embarks on a quest to retrace their steps, seeking answers to long-held questions about her family’s survival. The film examines the journey of the Weber family as told through conversations with living siblings – now in their eighties and nineties – while Beth and her crew road trip across Germany, following the courageous, tumultuous, and harrowing path taken by her family over seventy years ago.

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