Jennifer Garner, Chelsea Handler, Scooter Braun Share ‘Borrowed Spotlight’ With Holocaust Survivors

Yetta Kane, a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, steps onto the set of a Hollywood photoshoot. It’s August 2023 and sticky hot in Los Angeles. Kane is dressed in a knee-length skirt and matching jacket, a Star of David pendant affixed to her lapel. Her hair is a sweeping crest of pale blonde, her eyes the same hue as the cloudless L.A. sky. Kane’s granddaughter, Emily Kane Miller, pregnant with her third child, is also in tow, and they take a seat in the studio’s waiting area. Yetta opens her purse, pulls out a make-up compact and applies lipstick, and it’s at that moment I think back to a conversation I’d once had with another Holocaust survivor decades earlier. 

“Did you dream about anything when you were here?” I’d asked the woman. We were standing alongside the train tracks at Auschwitz, where I’d gone on the March of Living Holocaust study tour as a student at Hebrew University. The middle-aged woman, once a child in this monstrous death camp, looked at me and said, “Lipstick. A party dress. I dreamt about a party dress that I would wear after the war.” 

I tell Kane this story and, of course, she understands: Jewish survival often falls at the intersection of the miraculous and the mundane. Historically, we have hung our fate on objects as simple as a dress. 

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the resort town of Miadziol, Poland, Kane was a child when the Nazis rose to power, ultimately murdering six million Jews. For more than three years, Kane and her immediate family survived by hiding amongst partisans in the Belarusian forest. They drank from puddles and scoured the land for raw potatoes. Eventually, they were sent to a work camp in the wilds of Siberia where Yetta shared a room with a horse and subsisted on frozen food. In 1949, Kane and her family immigrated to Los Angeles. 

From 400 family members, only three survived. 

Kane is one of dozens of Holocaust survivors photographed in Borrowed Spotlight: Stories of Holocaust Survivors, a portrait series and coffee table book pairing these survivors with high-profile members of the entertainment industry. The brainchild of New York-based fashion photographer Bryce Thompson, Borrowed Spotlight features such celebrity talent as Cindy Crawford, Wolf Blitzer, Billy Porter, David Schwimmer, Scooter Braun, George Stephanopoulos, Sheryl Sandberg, Nicola Peltz Beckham and Barbara Corcoran, among others. Kat Graham, the Swiss-American Emmy-nominated actress and singer, is paired with Kane. 

But the real stars are the survivors themselves, each one with a story charting a harrowing escape path from the hell of Holocaust-era Europe. At a time wherein only 20 percent of the global population knows what the Holocaust is and antisemitism is on a steady uptick — per FBI statistics, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the United States are at a record high — Borrowed Spotlight, which debuted at Detour Gallery in New York City, will serve as both an educational tool and a project through which to inspire anti-hate initiatives. Proceeds from book sales will support campaigns to educate younger generations about the Holocaust, while proceeds from a private auction of select prints will benefit two organizations dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and survivor support: Selfhelp, which provides services and assistance to living Holocaust survivors in New York, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This summer, the Borrowed Spotlight exhibition will travel in Los Angeles. 

On the day of Kane’s shoot, we are still months away from the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Thompson, who is not Jewish but was raised in “a Jewish community” in South Africa, was compelled to do something to combat the hate.   

“A few years ago, I saw the rising antisemitism — the swastikas on bridges in Los Angeles and people getting attacked at synagogues and businesses being destroyed for no other reason than they were Jewish,” says Thompson, whose mother’s second husband was Jewish; she converted when Thompson was nine years old, and Thompson has a Jewish brother and sister. 

“While I never converted myself, growing up we went to synagogue and Shabbat dinner,” says Thompson. “Even as I moved out of Cape Town, I remained a big part of the Jewish community. When I saw all this antisemitism rise up, I reached out to people in the New York community asking, ‘How can I help? Is there a way to raise money to have these damaged businesses, to help pay for their medical bills?’ I said, ‘Look, I can’t write a blank check, but what I can do is a photo exhibition. Sell some of my prints.’” 

Thompson’s operating premise was straightforward. “We can survive hate — but not alone,” he says. “Indifference to hate is not survivable.” 

Thompson and his team reached out to celebrities, to survivors and their families. “We were asking celebrities to join in conversation with the Holocaust survivors and share their story on social media,” he says. “We told them, we don’t just want an hour of your time; we want your spotlight. We want your people and your followers and your audience to hear these stories. I didn’t want to lean on current politics. I wanted this to be like, have you decided whether the Holocaust was bad or not? If it’s a yes, please join us. If it’s a no, please don’t call me back.” 

Molly Stern, a Los Angeles-based celebrity makeup artist to clients such as Reese Witherspoon, Maya Rudolph and Greta Gerwig, was one such individual who received a call. Stern’s father, Andrew, and her paternal grandparents, are Holocaust survivors. Andrew Stern was born in 1944 in a basement in the Jewish Ghetto in Budapest, Hungary; his father survived multiple concentration camps. The family spent two years in displaced person camps before immigrating to California. 

Molly Stern immediately agreed to participate. When Chelsea Handler was confirmed, Stern remembers thinking, “Of course! They must have given Chelsea options and she chose my dad because I’ve done her makeup many times, and she’s been to our house for Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah and we consider her a dear friend.” 

But when Stern and her father arrived on set, Handler was taken by surprise. She had no idea that Andrew Stern was the survivor with whom she would be photographed. 

“I’m in the dressing room with my dad, getting him spiffed up in his blazer,” recalls Stern. “And once we’re ready we walk out onto the set. And we see Chelsea turning the corner. And she throws up her hands and says, ‘What are you guys doing here?’ I said to her, ‘You’re lying. I thought for sure you knew it was us.’ And she said, ‘Are you kidding me? No!’ She had no idea that she was going to be paired with my dad. They didn’t tell her. Everyone was flipping out. It was just kismet, serendipitous.” 

The images Thompson took of Handler and Andrew Stern — from a triptych of Andrew’s varying facial expressions to one of Handler tossing her arms affectionately around him — reflect that serendipity. In Yiddish, the word is basheret, which means destiny, or fate — a pre-ordained connection. The late Elie Wiesel, the prolific Nobel Peace Prize-winning author and survivor, spoke often of the inadequacy of language in describing the horrors of the Holocaust. “It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language,” said Wiesel. Thompson’s portraits, snapped some 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, captures in many ways what words cannot. 

“You can see it in the joy of the images–there was such pure connection and joy,” says Stern. “And I think they wanted that moment captured, that moment of somebody meeting a Holocaust survivor. “

When Stern showed her father the finished images for the first time, “he was weeping,” she recalls. “I was like, God, this is so it. This is what ‘never again’ looks like. This is what teaching our children looks like. I’m witnessing my father experience relief and joy and understanding that we are not alone.” 

Thompson hopes that when people look at the Borrowed Spotlight images, “They get a feeling of being involved in each shoot.” 

“A lot of what’s there is obviously chronological, what was happening on that particular day that we shot the portraits,” he says. “But there is also a before and after each picture. You can see how the people started as strangers in the beginning, and at the end it’s hugs, embraces, hand-holding, walking off together. And that was my intention when I laid out each story [in the book]. It really tells the arc of people coming together.” 

When Yetta Kane and Kat Graham meet the day of their photoshoot, their connection is seamless and immediate. They launch into conversation as if they have known each other for years. 

“Kat stood out because of Kat’s reaction,” says Thompson of that shoot. “Initially, it was one of the most honest and open kinds of interactions we’ve had. She had no shield up. Right off the bat, she realized she was standing taller than Yetta because she was wearing heels. And so, she took her shoes off and remained barefoot for the whole shoot, because she realized they were the same height when she was barefoot. That really spoke to me in terms of Kat’s connection and empathy. They laughed and cried together.” 

Moments Thompson captured that day: Kat reaching her hands out to Yetta, Kat with tears streaming down her face, Yetta and Kat holding hands. 

“Kat had cried so much and she was kind of emotionally drained, and that’s when Yetta grabbed her by the hands,” says Thompson. “You can physically see the pressure that Yetta is putting in Kat’s hands. And Yetta is saying to her, ‘It’s okay. We’re okay. We made it. We’re okay.’ And that happened often on these shoots, where there were tears shed, and then the Holocaust survivor would turn around and say, ‘We’re good, we’re okay, we’re going to be fine.’ ”