With the battle in Gaza looming large over Sunday’s Oscars ceremony and sparking a pro-Palestinian protest exterior the venue, director Jonathan Glazer gave the night’s most politically charged speech on the topic when he took the stage to just accept the worldwide movie award for his Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest.”
Glazer, who’s Jewish, straight linked his movie’s chilling depiction of a Nazi commandant’s household blithely dwelling simply exterior the partitions of Auschwitz to the present disaster unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
“All our selections have been made to replicate and confront us within the current, to not say, ‘Look what they did then’; relatively, ‘what we do now,’” Glazer stated, studying a ready speech. “Our movie reveals the place dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s formed all of our previous and current.
Learn extra: The 2024 Oscar winners list
“Proper now, we stand right here as males who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to battle for therefore many harmless individuals,” Glazer continued. “Whether or not the victims of October seventh in Israel or the continued assault on Gaza, all of the victims of this dehumanization — how can we resist?”
As a type of reply to that query, Glazer concluded by dedicating his Oscar to the reminiscence of the real-life Polish girl depicted within the movie who sneaked into the focus camp at evening to go away meals for prisoners.
Whereas Glazer’s speech was met with applause contained in the Dolby Theatre, the place a number of Oscar attendees, together with nominees Mark Ruffalo and Billie Eilish, wore pins supporting a cease-fire, the response on social media was much more polarized, with Glazer’s feedback drawing swift and blistering condemnation from supporters of Israel.
Some, taking Glazer’s phrases out of their full context, blasted Glazer for refuting his Jewishness itself, versus rejecting its utilization as a justification for the continued Israeli army marketing campaign in Gaza.
“By saying he refutes his Jewishness on the most important stage on this planet 5 months after the assault on Israel, Jonathan Glazer has immediately made himself into certainly one of Judaism’s historic villains,” Commentary editor John Podhoretz wrote on Twitter.
Learn extra: How the Oscars addressed wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the Hollywood strikes
“I merely can’t fathom the ethical rot in somebody’s soul that leads them to win an award for a film in regards to the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to just accept that award by saying, ‘We stand right here as males who refute their Jewishness,'” Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote on Twitter.
Meghan McCain criticized the applause that the speech acquired, writing: “Lotta individuals in Hollywood displaying their ass when a person will get on stage to ‘refute his Jewishness’ and half the room claps.”
Others criticized Glazer for creating what they regard as a false ethical equivalence between the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and the battle between Israel and Hamas, arguing that it was the filmmaker who was hijacking the Holocaust.
A spokesperson for the World Jewish Congress referred to as Glazer’s feedback “an affront to the reminiscence of those that endured the horrors of the Holocaust. There is no such thing as a comparability between the Nazis’ try and annihilate the Jewish individuals and the defensive warfare that Israel is waging in response to the October seventh assaults carried out by Hamas.”
Learn extra: The top 5 takeaways from the 2024 Oscars, according to those who were there
Writing on Twitter, Michael Freund, a former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referred to as Glazer “a self-hating Jew of the worst type who exploits the Holocaust to assault Israel in public on the Oscars ceremony.”
Speaking with The Times about “The Zone of Curiosity” earlier this 12 months, Glazer stated the movie’s depiction of the banality of evil that led to the Holocaust was supposed as a type of pressing wake-up name to those that suppose such horrors are solely up to now.
“In fact it speaks to this second,” he stated. “In fact it does. However it’s about who we’re as a species and what we’re able to. I believe the movie has alarm in it. It actually was made with that intention. We’re making an attempt to ring a warning.”
This story initially appeared in Los Angeles Times.
