Jewish actress Scarlett Johansson, currently the highest-grossing actor in the world and star of the new movie Jurassic Park Rebirth, recently released Eleanor the Great, starring real Holocaust survivors playing Holocaust survivors, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category on May 20.
When Johansson first read Tory Kamen’s script, she told the Hollywood news site Deadline in an interview, “I cried, and that almost never happens.”
Another film script that made her cry, she said, was Jewish director Taika Waititi’s 2019 Holocaust film Jojo Rabbit. In the film, Johansson hides a Jewish girl from the Nazis.
The star is well known for her roles in Woody Allen’s films Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). She began acting professionally at age nine, and four years later was attracting serious attention for her role in The Horse Whisperer (1998), co-starring with Robert Redford, the film’s director. Her range is wide. While her filmography is too large to list, suffice it to say that she has incarnated characters as diverse as those in Girl with a Pearl Earring (with Colin Firth); Marriage Story (with Adam Driver); and the Marvel movies.
In 2008, she became one third of a Jewish American all-star cluster, along with Natalie Portman (Anne Boleyn) and Eric Bana (King Henry VIII) in the film The Other Boleyn Girl.
Thus far, Johansson has won five Golden Globe Awards, two Oscars, a Tony Award, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) for her work.
The SodaStream scandal
In 2014, Johansson contracted to be the global brand ambassador for the Israeli company SodaStream, However, she also represented Oxfam at the time and the UK-based international relief organization, along with Palestinian rights advocates, attacked her decision. Since SodaStream was located in Ma’ale Adumim in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), the charity objected to a conflict of interests.
Faced with a crossroads, she resigned from Oxfam, choosing SodaStream, a company that promotes economic cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, employing both. She said she considered “that factory [SodaStream] as a model for some sort of movement forward in a seemingly impossible situation.”
She gave a “fundamental difference of opinion” as her reason for ending her involvement with Oxfam.
At the time, 29-year-old Johansson told the UK dailies The Guardian and The Observer, “I stand behind that decision. I was aware of that particular factory before I signed. And it still doesn’t seem like a problem.”
Not bothered by the UN, Red Cross, ICJ
Johansson told The Observer that she was not bothered by the fact that the UN, the Red Cross, and the International Court of Justice all agreed that the SodaStream factory was in contravention of international law.
“Sure, I think that’s the way you can look at it. But I also think for an NGO [Oxfam] to be supporting something that’s supporting a political cause – something feels not right about that to me,” she said.
She went on to call out Oxfam: “There’s plenty of evidence that Oxfam does support and has funded the BDS [boycott, divest, sanctions] movement in the past. It’s something that can’t really be denied.”
Until 2017, all Johansson knew about her Jewish ancestry was that her mother, producer Melanie Sloan, was the descendant of Polish and Russian Jews. Her father, Karsten Olaf Johansson, an architect, is Danish. His father was Ejner Johansson, a film director, screenwriter, and art historian, whose father was Swedish.
She recalled winter holiday activities with her family in a 2015 interview with The Irish Times. “Even though we’re Jewish, we always celebrated Christmas alongside Hanukkah, just because we loved the traditions of Danish Christmases. We’d go to different harvest festivals and churches and all that kind of stuff.”
Tears on TV
In October 2017, on the PBS show Finding Your Roots, she was presented with evidence of her family’s direct connection to the Holocaust. Johansson became tearful, saying, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry” as she read aloud details of how members of her family had fared during the Holocaust.
She learned that in 1910, at the age of 25, Saul Schlachne, her mother’s grandfather, had gone through Ellis Island from a small town in Poland to Ludlow Street in New York City’s Jewish Lower East Side. He traveled alone, as his brother, Moishe, stayed behind in Poland. Eventually, Moishe and most of his children were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but it’s hard not to. Just hell, it must’ve been hell. The fate of one brother versus the other. It makes me feel more deeply connected to that side of myself, that side of my family,” Johansson said on the air.
‘Eleanor the Great’
In the film Eleanor the Great, Eleanor (June Squibb) is a nonagenarian who has recently relocated from Florida to Manhattan after the death of her lifelong best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar, who was born in a concentration camp), and moves in with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht). Attending the Jewish community center to take a class, Eleanor ends up in a Holocaust survivor support group instead.
A convert to Judaism when she married, Eleanor was never in the Holocaust. When it’s her turn to speak, though, she panics and out of her mouth comes her friend Bessie’s story of detention in and escape from a Polish concentration camp.
As Eleanor speaks, the screen flashes back to Bessie telling her story to her friend.
Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student, befriends Eleanor and wants to write her story. Eleanor decides to have a bat mitzvah, leading to a debacle.
The lead character in Eleanor the Great was inspired by Kamen’s Jewish grandmother Elinore. Kamen posted on Instagram that she was “in fact, the greatest.”
As members of the Holocaust support group, Johansson cast real Holocaust survivors whom she had met through the USC Shoah Foundation and Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York. Their stories became a focal point in the film’s narrative.
Stories slipping away
Kamen told Deadline, “We had a really natural rapport,” pointing to the parallels between herself and Johansson. “Both of us telling stories about our grandmothers, who we grew up with, and how much they meant to us, and how it felt like that generation’s stories were slipping through the cracks as they were leaving us.”
She added, “We don’t have really too many films about what it looks like now, as these survivors are in the final chapter of their lives – and what that looks like and what that means.”
Johansson said, “The film, to me, very much, is a movie about grief; it’s about human connectivity, and it’s also about forgiveness. It’s also about the truth vs reality, and it’s also about who has the right to tell someone else’s story – or do we have the right to tell someone else’s story? There’s a lot in it.
“Certainly, Jewish identity is a part of that,” she said.
“It was an honor to be able to help tell some of these stories,” Kamen concluded.
TNS and JTA contributed to this article.