I received a few emails about this. Might as well report on it.
Yesterday, Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” won Best International Feature at the Oscars. That’s all fine and dandy, it was surely one of the best foreign films of 2023, and didn’t have much competition in the category.
However, what wasn’t expected was the “politicized” acceptance speech Glazer gave when accepting the award. I’ll admit, I couldn’t hear a lot of it because Glazer was being drained out by screams, and cheering, coming from the audience. This is, more or less, the transcript of what he said:
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say, ‘look what they did then’; rather, ‘what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s 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 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
I had a few minutes to chat with Glazer at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. We briefly bonded over our Jewish heritage. He seemed to, my eyes and ears, at least, be very proud of his Jewish ancestry and he’s even been to Israel, a few times. He attended Jewish school as a young boy, and his ancestry, grandparents, had to flee Soviet pogroms — you can tell he had pride in his upbringing.
Now, obviously, his Oscar speech sparked controversy that leaked into the political sphere. Was Glazer refuting his own “Jewishness”? That’s not what I gathered. I believe he didn’t choose the correct words to express what he meant to say, you could see his hands shaking while on-stage, reading from a paper, but his words have led to his being called a “self-hating Jew.” Others are saying he “hijacked the holocaust” for political gain.
Here’s Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, who tweeted, “I am pleased that Zone of Interest was won the best international film at the Oscars – but 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.”
Of course, Ben Shapiro attacked Glazer on X, writing “In Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’, you don’t see one Jew. Those are the best Jews, according to Glazer: the faceless victims screaming in the distance. Ironically, he’s the villain: picking up awards from the bodies of those anonymous dead Jews while ignoring the living ones getting slaughtered in the Gaza Envelope by genocidal murderers.”
The result is that every acceptance speech has been posted on the Oscars’ YouTube channel, except for Glazer’s. Will it end up finally getting posted? If so, will it be censored?