‘The Zone of Interest’ Executive Producer Disagrees with Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars Speech Critical of Israel

I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this. The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn’t use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that.

Danny Cohen, Executive Producer, ‘The Zone of Interest’


Variety

The Hollywood Reporter

Unholy Podcast

‘The Zone of interest’: A ‘Vacuous’ Movie

 Manohla Dargis writing for The New York Times:

What is the point of “The Zone of Interest”? I’ve seen Jonathan Glazer’s movie twice, and each time I’ve returned to this question, something that I rarely feel compelled to ask. Movies exist because someone needs or wants to make art, tell a story, drive home a point, defend a cause, expose a wrong or simply make money. All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.


In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer doesn’t simply tell a story; in his use of art-film conventions he provides a specific frame through which to watch it. This is clearly part of its attraction as is the breathing space his approach creates: it is scary, but not too.

These conventions can create a sense of intellectual distance and serve as a critique, or that’s the idea. They also announce (fairly or not) a filmmaker’s aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition. They signal that the film you’re watching is different from popular ones made for a mass audience. These conventions are markers of distinction, of quality, which flatter filmmakers and viewers alike, and which finally seem to me to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie.

Producer of an Oscar-Winning Holocaust Film Offended by Jonathan Glazer’s Remarks at the 96th Oscars

Richard Trank, Academy Award-winning producer of the 1997 Holocaust documentary ‘The Long Way Home’, writing in The Hollywood Reporter:

Jonathan Glazer made a powerful film based on an incredibly powerful book. Sadly, his arrogant performance accepting his Oscar has diminished that achievement for people like me as well as my family and friends. He can return to England to what I assume is a very comfortable home while many of his fellow British Jews continue trying to figure out a way to leave the U.K. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are homeless in the south and now in the north, under attack by Hamas’ ally Hezbollah, backed by Iran. It’s unclear whether these facts trouble Jonathan Glazer as he calls for people to “resist” and equates Israel with Nazi Germany. One thing I do know is that many** **Jews around the world were outraged and disgusted by what the Oscar winner had to say at this year’s Academy Awards. And joining that group, I would say that if we are going to resist or refute anything, it’s statements like the one issued by Jonathan Glazer.

Switzerland Reports Unprecedented Antisemitism in 2023

SWI:

The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) and the Foundation against Racism and Anti-Semitism (GRA) reports that in 2023, 1,130 anti-Semitic cases took place in the German- and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland, In 2022, the figure was 910.

Of the ten physical assaults against Jewish people registered in German- and Italian-speaking Switzerland last year, seven came after the Hamas attacks. Some 114 of the 155 “real world” incidents were logged after October 7, or 74% of the annual total.


Another group, the Intercommunity Coordination Against Anti-Semitism and Defamation (CICAD), previously reported that anti-Semitic incidents increased by 68% in French-speaking Switzerland last year. Almost half of the incidents occurred after 7 October.

Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA Open Letter to Jonathan Glazer

David Schaecter, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, wrote this letter on March 11, 2024:

I am 94 years old and the only member of 105 souls in my family to survive the Holocaust. I miraculously survived nearly three years in the hell of Auschwitz and one year in the hell of Buchenwald.

I watched in anguish Sunday night when I heard you use the platform of the Oscars ceremony to equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.

Your comments were factually inaccurate and morally indefensible.

The “occupation” of which you speak has nothing to do with the Holocaust. The Jewish people’s existence and right to live in the land of Israel predates the Holocaust by hundreds of years. Today’s political and geographic landscape is the direct result of wars started by past Arab leaders who refused to accept Jewish people as their neighbors in our historic homeland. Now that several Arab countries are making peace with Israel because security and prosperity are better for all people, Iran and its terrorist proxies started another war, abetted by too many, who, through naïveté or malice, blame “the occupation.”

Worse is that you chose to use the Holocaust to validate your personal opinion. 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 half million children, who were murdered solely because of their Jewish identity.

And it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for those of us who personally saw the world stand silent as our mothers, father, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were murdered. We actually had nowhere to go — no possible place for refuge. No country would accept us even though world leaders knew full well that thousands of Jews were being murdered every day. There was no Jewish nation to which we could flee.

You should be ashamed of yourself for using Auschwitz to criticize Israel.

Source

Almost Half of World Jewry Now Lives in Israel

Alvin H. Rosenfeld1 writing in Tablet:

There will be no Jewish future worthy the name without the State of Israel. At present, something like 47% of world Jewry lives in Israel. That’s almost one out of every two Jews alive. Were Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their allies ever to succeed in liquidating Israel, the loss would be immeasurable and irrecoverable. Most Jews still alive elsewhere would be physically imperiled, psychologically traumatized, and spiritually enervated to the point of collapse. That might have been the Jewish condition after the Holocaust, were it not for Israel’s founding only three years after the liberation of the death camps—an act of collective revival that demonstrated a level of national resilience and spiritual rebirth almost without parallel in history. But far from recognizing the Jewish people’s reestablishment of national independence and political sovereignty in its ancient homeland in positive terms, some of Israel’s neighbors have seen the existence of the Jewish state as an intolerable affront that needs to be reversed.


  1. Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington↩︎

The History of the Swastika May Surprise You

Germany's Domestic Secret Service Continues Legal Battle with AfD

DW:

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence service, argues that the populist far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is anti-constitutional. It therefore classified it as a “suspected case” in 2021. The party took legal action against this at the Cologne Administrative Court, but was unsuccessful. The appeal subsequently lodged by the AfD will be heard by the Münster Higher Administrative Court on March 12 and 13, 2024.

The appeal proceedings draw attention to a state organization that acts as an early warning system to detect threats to democracy and is one of the most important intelligence agencies in Germany. It gathers intelligence while coordinating information gathered by the 16 state-level intelligence agencies.

Jews in Hiding

Dara Horn, writing in The Atlantic:

At a Shabbat dinner I attended at one college, students went around the table sharing what they wished they could say to their non-Jewish friends: I wish I could say I want to spend a semester in Israel. I wish I could say I work at a Jewish preschool. I wish I could say I volunteered at a Jewish hospital. I sat at the table stupefied. They were in hiding.

Josette Molland, Member of French Resistance, Holocaust Survivor and Artist (1923-2024)

Josette Molland was a member of the French Resistance during World War II. She was captured by German forces and imprisoned in Romainville, Ravensbrück and Holleischen.

The New York Times explains:

She survived, after witnessing and enduring repeated episodes of brutality. Later, after her return to France, she spoke to students about her experiences for years.

In the 1980s, however, worrying that her story wasn’t getting through to them, she concluded that telling the young of her camp life was not enough. She would have to show them. So she set about painting, from painful memory, scenes of the harsh incarceration that she and many other female inmates had suffered. She produced 15 paintings in all, in folk-art style. Here are five of them, with the text she wrote to accompany them.


Resources:

US Attorney General Speaks Out Against Antisemitism

US Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke to the ADL’s “Now Is Never” Summit in New York on March 7, 2024.

Garland1came from a family of immigrants who fled religious persecution early in the 20th Century and sought refuge in the United States. His grandmother was one of five children born in what is now Belarus. Three made it to the United States, including his grandmother. Two did not make it. Those two were killed in the Holocaust.2


  1. Garland was raised in Conservative Judaism. His family name had been changed from Garfinkel several generations earlier. ↩︎

  2. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Administers the Oath of Allegiance and Delivers Congratulatory Remarks at Ellis Island Ceremony in Celebration of Constitution Week and Citizenship Day ↩︎

Never Again?

David Horovitz, founding editor of The Times of Israel, writes in his newspaper:

We had thought, after World War II, that much of humanity had recognized the evil it could demonstrably do, recoiled, and largely determined that it must not happen again. We had thought that, at least in our lifetimes and for a few generations to come, the oldest hatred had been marginalized. We were wrong.

Two generations ago, most of my father’s family fled Nazi Germany for London just in time — a year before the Frankfurt synagogue founded by my great-grandfather was burned down on Kristallnacht. No governments in purportedly reasonable countries are endorsing antisemitism and the targeting of Jews. But there is growing empathy in some government quarters for the obsessive and skewed hostility to Israel, and for policies that would weaken the only Jewish state’s capacity to defend itself against its avowedly genocidal enemies.

I don’t think there’s been a more worrying period for the Jewish people since World War II.

The central lesson of the Holocaust is what it says about humanity’s capacity for evil. It never occurred to me that it couldn’t happen again.

Israel has never been more important to the Jewish people. Jews must defend themselves to survive. I don’t think defeating antisemitism is a realistic goal.

I hope I’m wrong,

Orthodox Jew Stabbed in Zurich

JTA:

Swiss Jews are planning a vigil after a 50-year-old member of the Orthodox community in Zurich was stabbed Saturday night in what police say may be a hate crime.

The 50-year-old man who was stabbed is now hospitalized after suffering life-threatening wounds, according to Tachles, a Swiss Jewish magazine.

A 15-year-old male suspect was arrested at the scene, in the center of Zurich a few minutes’ walk from multiple synagogues. A first responder told Blick, a Swiss news site, that the teenager laughed while he was arrested. The site and accounts in Orthodox media reported that witnesses said the suspect made Islamist statements and antisemitic comments during the attack.


Two Famous Holocaust Photos in the Public Domain

Jerry Seinfeld Heckled by Anti-Israel Supporters

TMZ:

Jerry Seinfeld exited the annual State of the World Jewry address . . . in NYC to anti-Israel protesters accusing him of supporting genocide … but he didn’t seem too fazed.

The event featured Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press.

Video of Heckling

Very sad.


This is the address that Bari Weiss delivered at 92NY, a proudly Jewish cultural and community center where people all over the world connect through culture, arts, entertainment and conversation. 

Paris: Man Attacked Near Synagogue

ABC News:

French authorities are searching for an assailant who attacked a man leaving a synagogue in Paris, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said late Saturday.

Darmanin said the alleged attack on Friday evening targeting a man in his early 60s was “a new antisemitic attack that occurred in Paris." “Everything is being done to apprehend the perpetrator of this unspeakable act,” Darmanin said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, Saturday evening.

A statement from the Paris public prosecutor’s office said an assailant was seen physically and verbally assaulting a 62-year-old man, wearing a Jewish skullcap, as he was leaving a synagogue Friday at around 5:30 p.m. local time in Paris’s 20th arrondissement.

Le Parisien (en français)

Antisemitism Today

Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, writing in Time, asserts that today’s antisemitism is more likely to come from the left:

Neither South Africa nor other states have brought a genocide case against China for its conduct in Tibet or Xinjiang, or against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.

The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills. Oppression is real. Power can be exercised without justice. Israel should not be immune from criticism when it acts wrongfully. Yet the horrific history and undefeated resilience of antisemitism mean that modes of rhetorical attack on Israel and on Jews should be subject to careful scrutiny.

Feldman’s book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People will be released on March 6, 2024.


If anything is new about post-Holocaust antisemitism, it’s the accusations that the only Jewish state in the world is committing another Holocaust. As Professor Feldman notes, “Israel’s efforts to defend itself against Hamas, even if found to involve killing disproportionate number of civilians, do not turn Israel into a genocidal actor comparable to the Nazis or the Hutu regime in Rwanda.” Those who hurl this accusation at the State of Israel — and sometimes any random Jew in the world — expect that the statement will be hurtful. And a desire to hurt Jews is at the core of antisemitism.


Audrey Hepburn's Poignant Reaction to Anne Frank's Diary

Audrey Hepburn describing her reaction to reading the Anne Frank’s diary in 1946:

I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when war broke out and 15 when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it—and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it. But I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn’t know what I was going to read. I’ve never been the same again, it affected me so deeply. We saw reprisals. We saw young men put up against the wall and shot, and they’d close the street and then open it, and you could pass by again. If you read the diary, I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today.’ That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.

Capturing a Film Princess in Life

UK Prime Minister Speaks Out Against Antisemitism; Pledges More Funding

On February 28, 2024, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spoke at the annual dinner of the Community Security Trust (CST), whose mission is to protect the UK’s Jewish community:

We’ve got to end this passive tolerance of words and actions that go against what we stand for.

Yes, you can march and protest with passion; you can demand the protection of civilian life but no, you cannot call for Jihad there is no “context” in which its acceptable to beam antisemitic tropes onto Big Ben and there’s no cause you can use to justify the support of proscribed terrorist groups, like Hamas.

And yes, you can freely criticise the actions of this government, the Israeli government or indeed any government.

But no, you cannot use that as an excuse to call for the eradication of a State – or any kind of hatred or antisemitism.

These statements are fundamental to the liberal democratic values that define Britain.

They are the very essence of our identity of who we are as a country.

To belong here is to believe these things; to stand up for these things.

And it’s time we were much, much clearer about this.

Sunak also pledged a minimum of £18 million in CST funding every year for the next four years. Previously, CST was required to bid for funding every year. This will give the organization a reliable funding stream.

The full transcript of the speech is available here.

See also, The Times of Israel

Germany Rearming: Where will this lead?

DW:

Germany’s military, the Bundeswehr, is going on a buying spree to make up for years of neglect. The challenge it faces, however, is more than a matter of money. As the Defense Ministry pours tens of billions of borrowed euros into planes, tanks and shells, it also needs the people to fly, drive and shoot them — and keep all of it in working order.

That’s why conscription has emerged from the dustbin of Cold War history for a possible second act. In Germany, as in many of parts of Europe, a political debate over the issue is heating up. Opposition parties, such as the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have expressed interest in some kind of mandatory national service. The three-way governing coalition has been more skeptical.