Phyllis Zimbler Miller

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (March 18, 1948-June 11, 2026) — author, playwright, podcaster, filmmaker – was perhaps most known before her death for her work to combat antisemitism with her particular interest in the Holocaust. This was not an inevitable life path.

Phyllis’ grandparents – on both sides – came to America at the turn of the 20th century. She grew up in Elgin, Illinois, where she faced period-typical antisemitism “jokes” about Jews love of money. Her CPA father couldn’t join certain social clubs. (Only as an adult did Phyllis learn that her parents had protected her three younger siblings and herself from the antisemitism her father faced as a CPA in Elgin).

Similarly, her future husband Mitchell Miller’s family came to America at the turn of the 20th century. Mitch encountered the period-typical antisemitism that came with growing up a Jew in a mainly Catholic neighborhood pre-Vatican II.

Neither Phyllis nor Mitch grew up amongst Jews who experienced the Holocaust first hand.

Phyllis wrote for her high school newspaper and then at Michigan State University, where she earned a B.A. in Journalism.  She also wrote for the daily college newspaper, the State News, as did Mitch. This is how they met.

In May of 1970 Mitch went on active duty at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, and Phyllis tagged along with him. Her self-published women's friendship novel MRS. LIEUTENANT is a fictionalized account of her nine weeks as a new officer’s wife – then called a “Mrs. Lieutenant” in the U.S. Army.

What triggered Phyllis’ path to a life-long passion in antisemitism and the Holocaust was Mitch’s military service. He was in Army ROTC at Michigan State. Instead of serving as an infantry officer in Vietnam, he was assigned to military intelligence in Germany. Phyllis was allowed to accompany Mitch, forever changing her life’s work.

From September 1970 to May 1972 Phyllis and Mitch were stationed in Munich, Germany, where Mitch served with the 18th Military Intelligence Battalion.  Phyllis eventually got a security clearance and worked as a civilian with the 66th Military Intelligence Group.

Their experience being part of the U.S. Army occupying force in Germany while also experiencing, as Jews, living in Germany only 25 years after the end of WWII, and the Holocaust would be part of them forever – both as Americans and as Jews. 

Some stand-out moments:

A few months before they arrived, some group had set fire to the synagogue in Munich. At the adjoining Jewish old age home, seven elderly Jewish residents died in the fire. At the time, this terrorist attack was thought to be committed by Arabs. Only in the last few years has it been discovered that it was a single Neo-Nazi.

In October 1971, some 500 members of the Nazi “Das Reich” SS division – which massacred over 600 men, women and children in a French village in 1944 – had a reunion.

Phyllis and Mitch visited the concentration camp of Dachau -- only a short tram ride from downtown Munich – where they viewed the crematoriums in which the bodies of people, who died or had been murdered at Dachau were burned. Then, as they walked back into the main part of the camp, Phyllis spotted three Gypsies, two men and a woman, a stark reminder that the Gypsies had also been marked for extermination. (“Gypsy” is the term Phyllis knew them as – at that time. A more accurate and less problematic term is “Roma.”)

Phyllis and Mitch visited the Medieval walled city of Rothenberg ob der Tauber, where Jewish tombstones have been defaced and placed in the outer walls of the pig market.

In addition, they were influenced by the Orthodox Jewish chaplain and his family stationed in Munich when Phyllis and Mitch first arrived.

When they returned to the U.S. in May 1972, Phyllis and Mitch moved to Philadelphia.

Phyllis and Mitch had changed in two significant ways, both influenced by the Holocaust:

First, they had decided to keep kosher and become more observant as their small way of honoring the lives of six million Jews brutally exterminated by the Nazis.

Second, they realized that as American Jews they were no more safe than the seemingly assimilated Jews of Germany.

Phyllis worked as a reporter and editor of the monthly literary supplement Friday Forum of the Jewish Exponent. She published first-person accounts of Holocaust survivors and their rescuers, and something that was very rare in the 1970s.

In 1980, Phyllis earned her M.B.A. in Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Later that year, Phyllis and Mitch moved to Los Angeles to live in a more vibrant Jewish community to raise children. Their daughters Rachel and Yael were born in Los Angeles.

Phyllis co-authored a Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION with Rabbi Karen Fox which is published in 1992 by an imprint of Penguin. The book is now available on Amazon.
 

In February 2007, Phyllis donated physical copies of the Holocaust accounts, which she published in Friday Forum, to Chapman University’s Holocaust Library

For years, Phyllis monitored the rise of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. In the fall of October 2017, Phyllis transformed her Friday Forum accounts into a play – first called SURVIVORS AND SAVIORS, currently called THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE (which is defined as a minor harmful change that starts a chain of more and more changes resulting in dangerous consequences).

Phyllis created THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE as a free nonfiction Holocaust theater project. The goal of the project and the accompanying resources is to both educate about history and spark engaging conversations about what can happen when people allow the step-by-step encroachment of their civil liberties. The project is especially developed for students to use in their classrooms.

THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE is set in an historical timeline showing how Nazi military aggression and anti-Jewish activity proceeded with little or no world reaction — until it was too late. The play contains no fictional material — everything is either based on firsthand testimony or historical research. 

Putting these firsthand accounts into theatrical form proved to be a powerful way of getting students and others to experience empathy and confront the dangerous consequences of hate.

Silence and inaction in the presence of antisemitism and hate can have deadly consequences.

These accounts had been burning in her heart since then, and she believed she was given a responsibility to tell these accounts as a cautionary warning to the current generation.

The project’s goal is to get the play in front of students, religious groups, and community organizations to educate and spark engaging conversations about what can happen when people allow the step-by-step encroachment of their civil liberties.

Amos Kraemer, a German history teacher, so liked the play that he commissioned a German translation SCHRITTE IN DEN ABGRUND (Steps Into the Abyss). And uses it in his classroom. See www.SchritteInDenAbgrund.com for more information.

In January 2023 School District U-46 (Illinois) ran three programs initiated in connection with THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE: drama students and digital media students traveled to the Illinois Holocaust Museum (Skokie location), the drama students doing a stage reading of THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE, and a talkback of the drama students with local teachers. The digital media students recorded all activities and highlights of the experience was turned into a video (available on YouTube.)

Many of these students went on to another project producing their own documentaries that were assembled into one film FIGHTING ANTISEMITISM: STUDENT-PRODUCED DOCUMENTARIES.

In 2021, Phyllis saw the documentary NEVER AGAIN IS NOW, featuring Evelyn Markus, a Dutch Jew and daughter of Holocaust survivors. In 2006 Evelyn immigrated to the U.S. because of the rising antisemitism in Europe.  

Phyllis realized that the antisemitism that caused Evelyn to immigrate to the U.S. was now rising in the U.S.

Together Phyllis and Evelyn created NEVER AGAIN IS NOW PODCAST raising awareness of the rise in antisemitism in the U.S. and outside it. Beyond raising awareness of antisemitic events, Phyllis and Evelyn showcased Jews and non-Jews that were actively working on-the-ground to stem antisemitism.

While Phyllis had to stop co-hosting due to her failing health, Evelyn has continued on with the podcast. You can find it on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

In the fall of October 2017, when Phyllis decided to turn those Friday Forum accounts into a play, she started to research the Holocaust intensely. Phyllis continued her research until she was no longer able to due to her failing health.

At her core, Phyllis Zimbler Miller was a journalist. Facts always needed to be correct and conveyed in the clearest way possible for anyone to understand. It was the point of view with which she looked at the world.

Phyllis’ intense research into the Holocaust and journalistic point-of-view lead to two in-progress projects: the documentary JEWS OF CZECHIA: YESTERDAY AND TODAY and the nonfiction book THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT STEPS LEADING TO THE HOLOCAUST.

In Phyllis’ opinion, there was a gap in English-language Holocaust scholarship concerning Czechia aka Czechoslovakia.

The  Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 where the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia had been given away to Nazi Germany in the Munich Agreement in what supposedly would ensure “peace in our times” is well-known.

But for Phyllis there was a deeper story that needed to be explored. And a documentary was the best way to do so.

While the official start of WWII was September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany —attacked Poland, the perspective of the JEWS OF CZECHIA documentary is that the actual start of WWII was March 15, 1939, when none of the major European powers did anything when Nazi Germany occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia.

The documentary JEWS OF CZECHIA: YESTERDAY AND TODAY is planned to consist of these four parts: Jews of Czechia — WWI and the interwar period, the Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — saving the ritual objects and the “model ghetto” Terezin aka Theresienstadt, After the Holocaust — the Communist era, Prague, its synagogues and Jews in 21st Century Czechia.

Phyllis conducted recorded interviews with experts, and in April/May 2023, she and Yael K. Miller traveled to Czechia to film in Prague and Terezin.

The in-progress documentary was named one of four finalists of the Religious Heritage Europe innovator competition 2023.

The last project Phyllis worked on was the nonfiction book THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT STEPS LEADING TO THE HOLOCAUST.

Phyllis wanted to write a clear, chronological book that could be understood by anyone. In her own words: “I feel as if I am putting together pieces of a massive puzzle. The more I learn, the more cause and effect I note between the moving elements of WWII and the Nazi goal of exterminating all of Europe’s Jews.”

This obit would be remiss if it didn’t include what Phyllis called in an essay she wrote in 2025 “the one major failure” she would take to her grave – that her project SOLOMON’S JUSTICE was never made into a tv show.

While this obit has mainly concentrated on how living as a Jew in Germany 25 years after World War II changed Phyllis, it should not be forgotten that Phyllis was there as the wife of a U.S. Army officer stationed in Germany.

In 2008, after Phyllis self-published her novel MRS. LIEUTENANT, a retired female Marine, Nancy Brown, reached out to Phyllis and asked her to co-host a BlogTalkRadio show about the military. Phyllis and Nancy interviewed veterans and active duty personnel for a year.

Phyllis learned in-depth about American service members devastating experiences with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and how little support many of them received.

Phyllis learned about an amazing military court – called Veterans’ Courts – and that one existed in Los Angeles. She attended a court session and could not believe the difference in the treatment of veterans who had pled guilty to non-violent crimes. The opposing lawyers and the judge worked together to get help for the veteran. Phyllis also learned that such courts could legally be set up across the U.S. 

Phyllis turned this real-life court with a pilot script called SOLOMON’S JUSTICE – hoping it would be produced. She knew that a fictional tv series is a very effective medium to create empathy in viewers. This is especially true due to the small percentage of the U.S. population today with any connection to military personnel.

Maybe one day SOLOMON’S JUSTICE will be produced and Phyllis’ failure will be erased.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller was an extremely prolific writer and even this obit – long as it is – doesn’t capture the full picture of Phyllis’ projects. Phyllis wrote espionage, romantic comedies, thrillers, and more – some projects with her husband, Mitch, and some without.

To learn more about Phyllis’ projects, please visit www.millermosaicllc.com and you can reach out to her business partner and daughter -- Yael K.

Miller -- at yael.k.miller@gmail.com

Phyllis is survived by her husband, Mitch Miller, her daughters, Yael K. Miller, Rachel Miller Lamb, and her son-in-law Simon Lamb. Phyllis is also survived by her siblings Jay Zimbler, Debra Landay, Edward Zimbler, their spouses Idyth Zimbler, Alan Landay, Lola Zimbler, their children, and grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation in memory of Phyllis to Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger (mazon.org)

Arrangements entrusted to Ner Tamid Funerals, www.NTFunerals.com or 847-504-7336

To plant a beautiful memorial tree in memory of Phyllis Zimbler Miller, please visit our Tree Store.