FILMS

Everything you think you know about the American-Jewish effort to save Hitler’s victims will be challenged by this eye-opening documentary about Peter Bergson. A young Zionist firebrand, Bergson led a Herculean effort to jar the Roosevelt administration and mainstream Jewish groups into action on behalf of the vulnerable. Bergson organized non-Jewish congressmen, Hollywood stars and writers like Ben Hecht to campaign across the country on behalf of imperiled European Jewry. Yet the Jewish establishment reviled him, fearing for its own status, even as the Nazis tightened the noose. A scorching indictment by a division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the film is narrated by Dustin Hoffman and features a 1977 interview with Bergson, seen here for the first time.