With the conflict in Gaza coming to the fore during Sunday's Oscars ceremony and sparking a pro-Palestinian protest outside the venue, director Jonathan Glazer gave the night's most politically charged speech on the topic when he took the stage to accept the award. international film industry for its drama about the Holocaust. “The Zone of Interest.”
Glazer, who is Jewish, directly linked his film's chilling depiction of a Nazi commander's family living happily outside the walls of Auschwitz to the current crisis unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
“All of our decisions were made to reflect and confront ourselves in the present, not to say: 'Look what they did then'; rather, 'what we do now,'” Glazer said, reading from a prepared speech. “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It has shaped our entire past and present.
“Right now, we stand here as men refuting their Judaism and the Holocaust held hostage by an occupation that has driven so many innocent people into conflict,” Glazer continued. “Whether it is the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
As a sort of answer to that question, Glazer concluded by dedicating her Oscar to the memory of the real-life Polish woman depicted in the film who snuck into the concentration camp at night to leave food for the prisoners.
While Glazer's speech was met with applause inside the Dolby Theater, where several Oscar attendees, including nominees Mark Ruffalo and Billie Eilish, wore badges supporting a ceasefire, the reaction on social media was much more polarized, with Glazer's comments drawing fast and searing. condemnation of Israel's supporters.
Some, taking Glazer's words out of their full context, criticized Glazer for refuting their Jewishness, rather than rejecting their use as justification for the current Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
“By saying he refutes his Judaism on the world's biggest stage five months after the attack on Israel, Jonathan Glazer has instantly become one of Judaism's historic villains,” said comments editor John Podhoretz. he wrote on Twitter.
“I simply cannot understand the moral rot in the soul of someone that leads him to win an award for a film about the Holocaust and, with the platform he has been given, to accept that award saying: 'We are here as men who refute their Judaism,'” Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek opinion editor he wrote on Twitter.
Meghan McCain criticized the applause the speech received, writing: “A lot of people in Hollywood show their butts when a man comes on stage to 'refute his Judaism' and half the room applauds.”
Others criticized Glazer for creating what they see as a false moral equivalence between the Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, arguing that it was the filmmaker who was hijacking the Holocaust.
A spokesperson for the World Jewish Congress called Glazer's comments “an affront to the memory of those who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. “There is no comparison between the Nazis' attempt to annihilate the Jewish people and the defensive war that Israel is waging in response to the October 7 attacks carried out by Hamas.”
Writing on Twitter, Michael Freundformer advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called Glazer “a self-hating Jew who exploits the Holocaust to attack Israel in public at the Oscars ceremony.”
Speaking to The Times about “The Hot Spot” earlier this year, Glazer said the film's depiction of the banality of evil that led to the Holocaust was intended as a kind of urgent wake-up call to those who think such Horrors only exist in the past.
“Of course it speaks to this moment,” he said. “Of course it does. But it's about who we are as a species and what we're capable of. I think there's some alarm in the movie. It was certainly made with that intention. We're trying to sound a warning.”
