Jonathan Glazer Is Only Comfortable with a Jewishness of Victimhood

By Philip Klein

Monday, March 11, 2024

 

Due to a long-standing tradition, I was not watching the Academy Awards ceremony last night. But it was hard to avoid seeing the clip of Jonathan Glazer’s despicable acceptance speech. For those who missed it, the director of The Zone of Interest had this to say upon receiving an international-film Oscar for a film about the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp:

 

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, rather, look at 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 or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

 

Much of the attention last night was on the “refute their Jewishness” part of his comments, with Glazer’s defenders arguing that it was grossly unfair to just cite that aspect of his remarks without the “hijacked” section. Either way, it was an odd formulation. If Jewishness means a lot to you, why would you ever utter the words “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness” in any context? If you think others are exploiting a religion and its history, you’d think you’d want to focus on other people’s use of Jewishness. As a proud and unapologetic Jew, for instance, I might say, “I refute Jonathan Glazer using his Jewishness and hijacking the memory of the Holocaust to score anti-Israel points at an award ceremony.” But I would never include any combination of words that would be anywhere in the neighborhood of making it appear as if I were refuting my own Jewishness. 

 

But even tossing aside that clause as poor phrasing, it only gets at a small part of what was wrong with what Glazer said. If you look closely, his statement does not even say anything about Hamas dehumanizing Jews on October 7, despite its being the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust which included the murder of babies and the rape of women. He says that Judaism and the Holocaust are being “hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” So he is blaming “the occupation” for everything. Given that Israel had not occupied Gaza for 18 years prior to the October 7 attacks, what he is effectively doing is blaming the existence of Israel itself for the attacks of October 7.  

 

Furthermore, to analogize the existence of Israel, and the actions it takes in self-defense, to what happened at Auschwitz is morally obtuse. Auschwitz was not merely a historical example of dehumanization at mass scale, but a core part of the systematic extermination of innocent Jews for being Jewish. Israel’s actions in Gaza target a terrorist group responsible for a horrific attack against Jews with the aim of preventing a repeat of that horrific attack. Hamas hides behind civilians, refuses to release the hostages it has been holding for over five months, and won’t surrender to prevent further bloodshed. 

 

What is ultimately happening here is that Glazer is only comfortable with Jewishness when Jews are the victims. Jews who are denied any agency and herded into gas chambers are pure and innocent and, by his measure, sympathetic. But he is uncomfortable with the idea of Jews who refuse to be victims. Because in this moral universe, fighting back comes with supposed moral compromises. It’s a phenomenon that was also apparent with Steven Spielberg, who portrayed Jews as noble victims in Schindler’s List and then made Munich, which invented the idea that Israeli Mossad agents were somehow spiritually broken up by the idea of assassinating the terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Incidentally, like Glazer, Munich also advanced the idea that Israel’s creation was an exploitation of the Holocaust, which neglects thousands of years of Jewish history in Israel, as well as the 60 years of Jewish migration prior to World War II. 

 

Given his attitude about the nobility of Jewish victimhood, it’s no surprise that Glazer feels shame about — and deep contempt for — the state of Israel. Israel was founded as a rejection of Jewish victimhood, with the idea that Jews will stand proud and fight for their own safety and survival even when the world is against them. 

 

Some are calling Glazer’s speech an act of courage, but I find it completely the opposite. Notice that when Glazer was out promoting his film, he wasn’t yammering about his Jewishness being hijacked by Israel. When the film was released in the United States in the wake of the October 7 attacks, my guess is that audiences may have felt a bit different about seeing a movie whose director was out there comparing the modern state of Israel to the Nazis. But once he was securely holding his award, he suddenly found the nerve to do so to a Hollywood audience dominated by anti-Israel leftists, who unsurprisingly cheered his remarks.