The Jews Who Fought Back

Resistance: They Fought Back, directed by Paula Apsell and Kirk Wolfinger and written by Apsell and Jay Owens, spends a lot of time on the written word. It’s the story of Jews who fought the Nazi murder machine, and while there is a section dedicated to the much-heralded armed partisans in the forests of Belarus, made famous in movies like Defiance, the lesson of the film is that spiritual and intellectual resistance are prerequisites to effective armed rebellion—and that the Jews of Europe excelled across all three. “People have this myth stuck in their heads that the Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” A myth is exactly what it was.