Despite the pro-Palestinian protests taking place outside and the number of politically charged films up for awards, the Oscars ceremony on March 10 was a remarkably politics-light affair — with one major exception that’s since caused a major backlash throughout Hollywood.
No, the director of Zone of Interest did not disavow his Jewish identity at the Oscars
Everyone is misquoting Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Academy Awards.
Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
Accepting the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film for his harrowing Holocaust film The Zone of Interest, director Jonathan Glazer took a stance against the state of Israel’s ongoing military bombardment of Gaza as part of the Israel-Hamas war. Glazer, who is Jewish, made a simple and straightforward through line from his film, which is about the literal banality of evil, to the present day.
“All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present,” Glazer said. “Not to say ‘look what they did then’ — rather, ‘look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.”
“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 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
In reaction to Glazer’s speech, on March 18, more than 450 Jewish creatives and Hollywood moguls published a blazing open letter rebuking Glazer, retorting, “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.” Signatories included actors like Debra Messing and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and director Eli Roth.
Glazer also received blowback from the US branch of the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation, which called his remarks “indefensible.”
Glazer’s speech was initially badly misquoted by some sources including Variety, which led to confusion about whether he had “refuted” his Jewishness full stop. This predictably met with conservative backlash, as when Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Sen. John McCain, and Abe Foxman, former head of the Anti-Defamation League, each incorrectly cited Glazer as “refuting his Jewishness.” Several Jewish organizations argued that Glazer himself was actually “hijacking” the Holocaust.
What Glazer actually said is much clearer: He and his collaborators reject that Jewishness and the Holocaust are being used to justify the ongoing military offensive in Gaza. This sentiment is one held by many Jewish people. Like Glazer, Jews around the world have spoken out about how they perceive their identity to have been co-opted by the extremist Israeli government and its allies in pursuit of a fully repressed Palestine state — one that many Jewish people, from liberal proponents of a two-state solution to the campaigners of the “Not In My Name” movement, no longer support.
Glazer was the only person who spoke onstage about Palestine during the ceremony, and even his remarks drew relatively light applause from an audience undoubtedly wary of placing themselves too firmly on one side of an intrinsically polarizing issue. Some celebrities, however, did wear red pins in support of a Gaza ceasefire, including Poor Things actors Ramy Youssef and Mark Ruffalo, singer Billie Eilish, actor Mahershala Ali, and director Ava DuVernay.
Update, March 19, 10:25 am: This piece was originally published on March 11 and has been updated with news about an open letter refuting Glazer’s remarks.
By Aja Romano, Alex Abad-Santos and 4 more
