While accepting the award for best international feature at the Oscars 2024, The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer became the evening’s first filmmaker to acknowledge the ongoing conflict in Gaza. When making his German-language film, which depicts the evil complacency of a Nazi commandant and his family as they live comfortably next to Auschwitz, Glazer said he wanted to acknowledge current atrocities. “All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘look what we do now,’” he said alongside producers James Wilson and Len Blavatnik. “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present.”
It’s what Glazer says next that has been misquoted, misunderstood, or taken out of context by some, leading to social media backlash. “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,” Glazer, who himself is Jewish, continued. Thanks to some awkward phrasing, some onlookers blatantly misinterpreted Glazer to say that he was publicly refuting his Jewishness, not that part of his identity was being “hijacked” for war.
Abraham Foxman, director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, 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.” Newsweek opinion columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon, who also criticized Glazer, wrote on X, “I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone’s soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept that award by saying, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness.”
Many were quick to correct those posts. In reaction to a particularly inflammatory tweet from conservative journalist John Podhoretz, another user wrote, “100% how you know Glazer nailed it.” Others, including Sorry to Bother You filmmaker Boots Riley, openly celebrated Glazer’s stance. “Salute to Jonathan Glazer,” Riley tweeted. “Not just for speaking out against the atrocities in Gaza & saying that his movie is about the present day- but I finally saw Zone Of Interest last night. Since Under The Skin he has shown that you should not wait til post to figure out sound design.” (Zone went on to win best sound at the 2024 Oscars as well.)
“Whether the victims of October the seventh in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?” Glazer concluded before citing as a model Alexandra, a character in the film inspired by a real resistance fighter, before dedicating the movie “to her memory and her resistance.”
The filmmaker previously spoke to Vanity Fair about meeting the then 90-year-old Alexandra during pre-production on The Zone of Interest. “She was a local Polish, non-Jewish girl who lived locally and felt compelled to do what she could for prisoners,” Glazer explained. “And part of the thing she did was to leave food for them in construction sites at night, where she was less in danger than she would’ve been obviously during the day. It was the simple, pure goodness in her that made me feel like I could carry on with this project because there was an opposition to this dark force.”
Wilson, a producer on the project, also warned against current complacency during genocide while accepting an award at the BAFTAs last month. “Those walls aren’t new from before or during or since the Holocaust,” he said of the characters’ thin barrier between home and hell. “And it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Mariupol or in Israel.”