Steven Spielberg: The Director Who Found His Jewish Soul

The Man Who Made the World Watch

There is a scene in Schindler’s List (1993) — shot in black and white, like nearly all of the film — where a little girl in a red coat walks through the chaos of a ghetto liquidation. She is the only spot of color in the frame. Later, her red coat appears on a cart of corpses being taken to be burned.

That image — a single child, visible and then destroyed — is one of the most devastating moments in the history of cinema. The man who created it, Steven Spielberg (born 1946), had spent the previous two decades making the most commercially successful films ever produced: Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He was the king of entertainment. And then he made a film about the Holocaust that changed his life and the world’s understanding of genocide.

The journey from E.T. to Schindler’s List is really the journey of Spielberg’s Jewish identity — from avoidance to awakening, from a boy who was ashamed of being different to a man who devoted his greatest talents and resources to ensuring that the worst chapter of Jewish history would never be forgotten.

Cincinnati to Phoenix

Steven Allan Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer, and Leah Adler, a concert pianist. The family was Jewish — observant enough for Steven to have a bar mitzvah, but not deeply religious.

When the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, Steven found himself one of the few Jewish kids in his school. He was bullied — called names, shoved in hallways, humiliated. “In Phoenix, I felt like an alien among humans,” he later said. He was embarrassed by his Jewishness, by his parents’ accent, by the mezuzah on the front door.

His escape was movies. He began making films as a teenager — amateur productions shot on 8mm film, with elaborate special effects improvised from household materials. By the time he was a student at California State University, Long Beach, he had attracted the attention of Universal Studios. He was given a contract before he graduated.

The Blockbuster King

Spielberg’s early career was a rocket ride. Jaws (1975) invented the summer blockbuster and became the highest-grossing film of all time (until Star Wars). Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) combined spectacle with emotional depth. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) reinvented the adventure film. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — the story of a lonely boy who befriends an alien — became the most beloved film of its era.

He was criticized for being “merely” an entertainer — a master of manipulation who lacked the seriousness of auteurs like Scorsese or Coppola. The criticism stung. His more ambitious early films — The Color Purple (1985) and Empire of the Sun (1987) — earned respect but not the Academy Awards he craved.

Throughout this period, Spielberg avoided Jewish themes. He had been approached about making a film of Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s Ark as early as 1982 but passed on it repeatedly, feeling he was not ready. He offered it to Roman Polanski (who declined, saying his own Holocaust experiences were too painful) and to Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese.

Schindler’s List: The Turning Point

In 1993, Spielberg finally made the film. He shot Schindler’s List in Krakow, Poland, near the actual locations where Oskar Schindler had saved over 1,100 Jews from extermination. He filmed in black and white. He used handheld cameras. He populated the film with actual Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

The experience shattered and remade him. He has described moments on set when he could not stop crying, when the weight of what he was depicting overwhelmed his professional detachment. He called Robin Williams at night to hear jokes, just to keep his spirits up.

He refused his salary — calling it “blood money” — and donated his share of the profits to Jewish organizations. The film earned seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and grossed $322 million worldwide. It is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made.

But for Spielberg, the Oscars were not the point. The point was what happened next.

The Shoah Foundation

In 1994, inspired by the experience of making Schindler’s List, Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation). The mission was monumental: to record and preserve the video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses before they died.

Over the next decade, the Foundation recorded over 55,000 testimonies in 65 countries and 43 languages. Each testimony runs several hours. The survivors speak into the camera, telling their stories — often for the first and last time — in detail that is by turns horrifying, heartbreaking, and astonishing.

The archive has since expanded to include testimonies from the Rwandan genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Armenian genocide, and other mass atrocities. It is the largest video archive of its kind in the world, housed at the University of Southern California and accessible to researchers, educators, and students globally.

Jewish Awakening

Making Schindler’s List changed Spielberg’s relationship to his own Jewishness. He became more observant — lighting Shabbat candles with his family, attending synagogue, raising his children with a stronger Jewish identity than he had experienced. “I always felt like an outsider,” he said. “Schindler’s List made me feel like I belonged.”

He continued to explore Jewish themes in his work. Munich (2005) examined the Israeli response to the 1972 Olympic massacre — a morally complex film that pleased neither hawks nor doves. The Fabelmans (2022) was an openly autobiographical film about his childhood, including his experiences of anti-Semitism in Phoenix and his parents’ troubled marriage.

Legacy

Steven Spielberg is, by almost any measure, the most successful filmmaker in history. His films have grossed over $10 billion worldwide. He has won two Academy Awards for Best Director. He has produced, through DreamWorks and Amblin, dozens of additional films that have shaped popular culture.

But his most important legacy may be the Shoah Foundation — the decision to use his resources, his fame, and his organizational genius to preserve the voices of the dying before they were lost forever. It is the act of a man who understood that entertainment is powerful but testimony is sacred — and that the greatest gift a Jewish filmmaker could give the world was not a perfect movie but an imperfect, devastating, irreplaceable record of what happened, told in the survivors’ own words.