Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Steven Spielberg To Produce New World War II Film

It seems like just yesterday Elizabeth Banks was accusing Steven Spielberg of never having directed a movie with a female lead.

Of course, Banks was quickly put in her place and apologized after hordes of people reminded her that Spielberg was behind the film “The Color Purple”, which had a black female lead. But is it possible Bank’s comments stayed with Spielberg?

Possibly, considering the director’s production company has announcedthat it will be producing a new World War II film told from a woman’s perspective.

The film will be based on the forthcoming book “Daughters of the Resistance: Valor, Fury, And the Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos”, by Judy Batalion.

The book proposal is largely based on first-hand accounts of young Jewish women fighting in the Resistance against the Nazis, most of which were written in Yiddish. The author, who discovered these first-hand accounts, is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

The book will not be published until 2020, which I suppose is how book optioning works nowadays. Spielberg has not offered a timeline for the project’s completion.

Becky Scott is the editor of The Schmooze. Follow her on Twitter, @arr_scott

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.