Reflecting on The Zone of Interest's Oscar night success, and the unjust crucifixion of Jonathan Glazer.
Reflecting on The Zone of Interest's Oscar night success, and the unjust crucifixion of Jonathan Glazer.
Glazer showed bravery and courage by mentioning Gaza in his speech. His critics can only respond by lying about what he truly said.
Last Sunday, Jonathan Glazer was about to walk on stage to accept an Academy Award for directing and writing The Zone of Interest, a film described by Steven Spielberg himself as “the best Holocaust movie I’ve witnessed since my own.” Israeli society embraced Zone of Interest from the moment it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, with the Jerusalem Post eagerly reporting on the film’s critical acclaim.
The Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum explicitly thanked Glazer after the latter won the Grand Prix at Cannes, for his “great sensitivity and understanding.” While A24 had severely limited the scope of the film’s theatrical release, it had at least found a pathway to success on streaming platforms through the buzz of the Hollywood awards season.
And then, Jonathan Glazer walked onto the stage at Dolby Theater, and said something very few people would have expected him to say. Assuredly, the Israelis anxiously rooting for Zone of Interest to win weren’t expecting the content of his speech. It’s not an exaggeration to say that as a result, opinion of Glazer among supporters of Israel has flipped on a dime.
The Zone of Interest was filmed before the events of October 7th, but in the wake of those events Israeli society embraced the success of Zone. Haaretz would write in February that the war made it a moral necessity that Zone be awarded not merely Best International Film, but Best Picture overall. Zone of Interest only just received a theatrical release in Israel on March 7th, and that run in theatres is now likely to end prematurely due to the controversy.
And yet, for all the public acrimony that pro-Israel advocates have wrought upon Jonathan Glazer, for all the public statements made by the Anti-Defamation League, and for all the opinion screeds penned by right-wing commentators, there’s one glaring issue:
None of these people are telling the truth about what Jonathan Glazer said. So before I offer my own commentary, I believe I owe a duty to Jonathan, to print the Academy’s full official transcript of his speech, as he gave it.
Thank you so much. I’m gonna read.
Thank you to the Academy for this honor and to our partners A24, Film4, Access, and Polish Film Institute; to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for their trust and guidance; to my producers, actors, collaborators.
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — 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 the — [Applause.] Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? [Applause.]
Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.
This is clearly not the speech of a man “refuting” his Jewish identity, and there is no full quotation of any sentence that would support that claim. Cutting down “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked” to “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust” is an act of severe journalistic malpractice.
Indeed, it is absurd to suggest that Jonathan Glazer is anything but proud of his Jewish identity. Glazer grew up attending a Jewish day school in a thriving Jewish community in North London, and even spent five months living in Israel split between a boarding school and a kibbutz.
And on top of this all, Jonathan Glazer dedicated an entire decade of his life to creating The Zone of Interest. Glazer spent a decade doing the meticulous, painstaking, and emotionally traumatizing work of pouring through all the recorded documents and testimony collected by the Auschwitz Museum on the life of Commandant Rudolf Höss and his family.
The Zone of Interest is about the Höss family pretending to still be human beings after abandoning their humanity in their rampant dehumanization of others. It is about the Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig, using Jewish slaves to plant a garden of fragrant flowers, so that she can pretend she doesn’t smell thousands of Jewish corpses being burned every day.
It is about Rudolf and Hedwig Höss taking their children on pleasant picnics and horseback rides, while ignoring that both their boys are imitating the brutal executions they see their father commit when he doesn’t think they’re looking.
It is about Rudolf ignoring that his young daughter sleepwalks every night because she keeps dreaming about the smokestacks burning. It is about both Rudolf and Hedwig, trying to ignore that their dog and their baby are constantly screaming every scene they appear, because even in their innocence they can sense that the very air they breathe is viscerally wrong.
Jonathan Glazer made a film about the perpetrators of the Holocaust, who never lived with guilt but rather lived happy and joyful lives with little concern for the atrocities they perpetuated upon millions on the opposite side of the fence they built.
If the Höss family, or any other SS family working at Auschwitz ever felt a moment of disquiet, it was not from self-reflection, but rather anger that they would face even a minor inconvenience as a result of their crimes against humanity.
So, is it truly a shock that Glazer would see Israeli extremists blockading aid trucks from entering Gaza, that he would watch an Israeli named Katya proudly tell CNN that “not a single loaf of bread” should enter Gaza, and that he would be upset?
Is Israel truly shocked that Glazer would see the extremists blocking food and medicine into Gaza, and then have a party with bouncy castles and DJs at the Rafah crossing, while on the opposite side of the fence millions faced horrific sickness and famine, and draw a connection to the film he just made on the same themes?
Did Israeli media understand that The Zone of Interest had a particular message with specific themes it embodied? Did Israeli media simply watch the film vacantly, without comprehending that the film is actually trying to make an argument about how the Holocaust was perpetuated, and how banal dehumanization can become?
If Glazer faces public anger from pro-Israel advocates over his speech, it is because they do not understand that his speech was indeed acting in remembrance of the Holocaust. It is because of that growing Jewish divide over Holocaust remembrance, how Jews should interpret that memory, and what “Never Again” truly means to us, that Glazer’s remarks drew such controversy.
The Zone of Interest is more than just a mere film; it is a desperately necessary act of preservation for Holocaust remembrance. It is the strongest weapon that we have against Holocaust denialism in the pop cultural sphere. It is Jonathan Glazer’s manifesto, as he put it in his Oscars acceptance speech, about “what we do now,” not “what they did then.”
Jonathan Glazer is horrified by the dehumanization of Palestinians, just has he’s horrified by the dehumanization of anyone, because for him, “Never Again” is for everyone. Though his hands trembled as he gave his speech, and though he has wrought much controversy, I believe his conscience rests easily for having gone through the crucible.
On the opposite side, in that previous CNN interview with Katya, she states to Clarissa Ward that the life of an Israeli baby is worth more than the life of Gazan babies. So for her, “Never Again” is just for us, and we can justify anything against people if we dehumanize them enough. I believe Katya, in dehumanizing millions of Palestinians, has forsaken the human part of herself as well.
I know which of these two options I prefer, as a human being who wants to see the humanity in others. Jonathan Glazer refutes the hijacking of Jewish identity and Holocaust memory by extremists in service of the brutal occupation of Palestine. As a proud Jew, he believes that “Never Again” really does mean never again. And as a proud Jew myself, I agree with every single word he said.