Israel, The Holocaust, and Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar Speech

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In the wake of the Oscars, Hollywood has been treated to a rare spectacle: Jewish communal leaders attacking the Jewish director of an award-winning Holocaust movie.

The Anti-Defamation League and an organization representing Holocaust survivors are among those now angry with Jonathan Glazer, the British Jewish filmmaker behind the widely acclaimed drama “The Zone of Interest,” which is set in Auschwitz. During his acceptance speech Sunday for best international feature, Glazer denounced the “occupation” and “dehumanization” that he said has led to loss of life in both Israel and Gaza — and connected it to a lesson that he said his own film tried to teach.

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present,” Glazer read from his prepared remarks. “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

He went on to say that they are “all the victims of this dehumanization,” and asked, “How do we resist?” He concluded by dedicating his Oscar to a real-life Polish resistance fighter who was depicted in the film.

Glazer’s comparing of the “dehumanization” of the Holocaust to the Israel-Hamas war has not sat well with many institutional Jewish and pro-Israel leaders. Their reactions point to a deeper division within the Jewish community, which has only grown since October 7, over when and how to link the Holocaust to Israel.

You made a Holocaust movie and won an Oscar. And you are Jewish. Good for you. But it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for the six million Jews, including one and a half million children, who were murdered solely because of their Jewish identity,” David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, wrote in an open letter to Glazer on Monday.

Schaecter, a Holocaust survivor himself, also called Glazer’s message “factually incorrect and morally indefensible” and said that Israel “has nothing to do with the Holocaust.” He claimed Glazer was trying to “equate Hamas’ maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.”

His comments were echoed almost word-for-word by the Anti-Defamation League, which posted on X, formerly Twitter, “Israel is not hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Glazer’s comments at the Oscars are both factually incorrect & morally reprehensible. They minimize the Shoah & excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.”

Foxman’s own objection stemmed from what has become a common misinterpretation of Glazer’s words: that the filmmaker was actually rejecting his Jewishness.

“As a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his Jewishness. Shame on you,” Foxman posted on X, while adding that he was “pleased” the film won.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and pro-Israel influencers including Montana Tucker and Hillel Fuld were among those also incorrectly claiming the director was “refuting” his own Judaism. And the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in its own refutation of the speech, flipped the message on its head by accusing Glazer of appropriating his own Judaism to criticize Israel.

“Unfortunately, Jonathan Glazer has turned a magnificent achievement into another ‘As a Jew’ moment, where he appropriates his religious and ethnic identity to attack the national homeland of the Jewish People which is fighting a war on seven fronts against those who openly call for the genocide of Jews,” the group’s CEO, Sacha Roytman Dratwa, told the Hollywood Reporter.

Some major figures in Israel also got in on the act, with Michael Freund, a former advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling Glazer “a self-hating Jew of the worst sort who exploits the Holocaust to attack Israel in public at the Oscars ceremony.

Adding to the speech’s confusion was the fact that one of the film’s producers who stood next to Glazer was Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born Jewish billionaire who has extensively supported pro-Israel causes and joined a recent donor campaign against antisemitism at Harvard University.

While Glazer’s use of “we” seemed to imply he spoke for both himself and his producers Blavatnik and James Wilson, who both joined him onstage, it’s unclear how much they knew about the content of his speech beforehand.

Jay Michaelson, a progressive rabbi and author who won a 2022 National Jewish Book Award, argued in a piece for The Daily Beast that Glazer’s speech “reflected the best of Jewish values.” He pointed out that Glazer acknowledged Israeli victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks and avoided lightning-rod terms like “genocide,” “colonialism” and “from the river to the sea,” which pro-Israel groups have condemned.

“It was harsh, but even-handed and balanced,” Michaelson wrote. “And it is accurate: defenders of Israel’s actions frequently invoke the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the often-tragic sweep of Jewish history to make their case.” (Historians and Jewish supporters of Israel often frame its founding three years after the camps were liberated as a necessary response to ensure Jewish survival after the Holocaust. Israel’s Declaration of Independence said the Holocaust “proved anew the urgency of the re-establishment of the Jewish state.”)

Yet even Glazer’s defenders have trafficked in misinformation, with some suggesting that the Oscars have deliberately refrained from posting his speech to YouTube because of its content. In fact, according to film-industry publication IndieWire, the speech is not up yet because of an agreement between the Academy and ABC, the channel that airs the Oscars, giving the channel a 30-day window to post video content from several categories including the one Glazer won. (ABC’s own YouTube page has posted the speech.)

“It isn’t a partisan film,” Glazer told the New York Times in December. “It’s about all of us.” He also said that he was revulsed both by Hamas’s attack, in which Palestinian terrorists killed 1,200 people and took 253 hostages, as well as by the severity of Israel’s response that has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza to date, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, an unverified figure that does not differentiate between civilians or combatants. Israel says over 13,000 of the Gaza dead were Hamas and other terror group fighters.

Glazer and his team did extensive research into the Höss family, even filming the movie at a house near theirs just outside Auschwitz which they designed in meticulous period detail.

The intra-Jewish feud over a Holocaust movie is unusual. But Glazer himself — who attended Jewish day school in London, and is the grandson of Eastern European Jews fleeing Russian persecution in the early 20th century — is an unusual director. His earlier, heavily cerebral films like “Under the Skin” and “Birth” defied easy interpretation. And “The Zone of Interest” was already a polarizing Holocaust movie, a world away from past Oscar-feted dramas like “Schindler’s List,” “The Pianist,” and “Life is Beautiful” — the kinds of films that led the term “Holocaust movie” to become a punchline for cynical awards-bait.

Unlike those movies, “Zone” focuses not on Jewish victims but on the unbothered life of Auschwitz perpetrator Rudolf Höss and his family living next door to the camps. It was a decision some Jews criticized, but which Glazer said he made in order to bring the Holocaust out of the realm of historic victimhood and emphasize humanity’s capacity for evil in general. (The film, which interpreted noise from the camps on its soundtrack to portray the genocide in audio form, also won an Oscar for best sound.)

As a new generation of artists looks to interpret the Holocaust, Glazer’s approach — to both his speech and the film itself — has touched a raw nerve among Jews. And debates around his messaging have spun out into a more existential Jewish feud: between those who seek to reinforce that Jews were the victims of history’s largest genocide, and those who think that even Jews have the capacity to commit genocide under certain circumstances.

In an X post, Rabbi Mike Rothbaum, of the Atlanta-area Reconstructionist Congregation Bet Haverim, summed up the divide.

“What’s more frustrating,” Rothbaum wrote, “the people who genuinely didn’t get what Jonathan Glazer was talking about, or the people pretending they didn’t get what Jonathan Glazer was talking about?”

The Palestinians are only protesting against their own extermination. They've tried everything and I mean everything they could to make the world see that, but all it gets them is more fatal bullet wounds and bombed cities.

Exactly. At least more and more people are starting to see this now.

I call dehumanization happening after an invading force comes in and massacres, burns, rapes, and does other things a normal human reaction.

I'm damn proud of my Jewish heritage (mother's mother was half Jewish; I was raised protestant), which is why I loathe Israel. Jews should know more than most what happens when you dehumanize an entire religion.

I'm proud of my German heritage too. I already know how people react to that statement. It's not something I wear on my sleeve. You know why. (Haha! I don't even blame you!) Because in the long term nationalism disgraces, endangers, and humiliates those it claims to represent. Germans worldwide suffered because of German nationalists. Russians worldwide suffer because of Russian nationalists. And now Jews worldwide suffer because of the apartheid Zionist state that calls itself their protector and representative.

I definetly agree with all this. I'm not Jewish but my half-sibilings have Jewish ancestry on their dad's side (even though their family converted to being Southern Baptists a long time ago). Also I'm a southern white boy (well... mostly white. I'm also part Polynesian). We in the American South along with the Germans and Russians are essentially the white people that other white people love to hate.

I just get tired like. Zionists act like Israel is the only thing keeping Jews safe. Nationalism is a pox on any nation. Zionism is a pox on the Jewish people. How many people in the world today hate Jews, and how many of those people would have no issue with Jews at all if it weren't for Israeli genocide and segregation? I want a world where fewer people hate Jews; I want a world where Jews are safer; I want a world where Palestinians are treated basic human with dignity; ergo: I want a world without Israel.

Oh nice! Kinda random but are you from Arkansas? I hear there's a decent size Polynesian-American population there (idr which country specifically).

I suppose this refers to Israel's reaction to 7th October. But it can be applied to the Palestinian reaction to decades of violence and abuse from the Israeli military and illegal settlers as well.

How many people in the world today hate Jews, and how many of those people would have no issue with Jews at all if it weren't for Israeli genocide and segregation?

My sympathy goes out to the Jewish people who I know are indeed decent human beings and didn't deserve the horrors of the Holocaust.

But as far as I'm concerned Netanyahu and his far right oppressors of the Palestenians who compare these people to "dogs" can go rot in hell.

Same here, like I don't dislike Netanyahu for being jewish, I dislike him because he's ok with genocide and in the process of causing one.

Good question.

There was plenty of hate before Theodor Herzl started Zionism. That is suggestive that if it were not for Israel another reason would be found.

Indeed there was. And there still would be if Israel never existed. But there is not a chance in hell it would be as bad as it is now with the apartheid-genocide state that loudly proclaims over and over how much it represents All Jews Everywhere when it commits war crimes and treats Muslims as subhuman.

What, do you think Israel doesn't give endless fuel for the world's anti-semites to use? Do you think Israel has caused more love rather than hatred towards Jews? Did apartheid make the white South Africans seem sympathetic and cuddly? (To mainstream America for most of the 20th century the answer is yes. And to their unwavering apartheid buddies in Israel.) Did segregation make Americans seem moral and principled?

Nationalism breeds hatred for its perpetrators. Always, all the time, forever. It is based on the zero-sum ideology where my nation's good is more important than your nation's good, and the only way for my nation to benefit is at the expense of other nations.
Consider what I said about how I have to keep my love for my German heritage muted. People had found reasons to hate on Germans before 1939 (...or 1914, or 1871), but nationalism has left a dark, horrible stain on Germany's soul that will not be forgotten. How long will Jews have to endure the same shame? The more sins Israel commits, the longer the shame and hatred will last. Killing every single member of Hamas will not change that. Evicting all Palestinians from their homeland will not change that. Bombing Gaza into oblivion will not change that. Desecrating mosques will not change that. Shamelessly thumbing your nose at international law will not change that. Saying "Screw what you think, we'll kill as many Palestinians as we want!" will not change that. Dissolving the Israeli state will change that. Not immediately--but there is no other way.