On Sunday night, the director and screenwriter Jonathan Glazer provided a particularly egregious example of the moral solipsism of which Ruth Wisse speaks by using his acceptance of an Oscar to lambast Israel and its supporters for “hijacking” the Shoah to justify all sorts of crimes. Glazer received the award for The Zone of Interest, his film about Auschwitz—a fact that also supports Wisse’s arguments about the pitfalls of Holocaust memorialization.
Howard Jacobson found the movie to be “ambitious” and “important,” but has some harsher words about Glazer’s comments:
“Hijack!” Consider the import of that word. So despicable are the Jews, they will steal from themselves the most hellish events in their history to justify visiting hell on others.
For a Jew to concur in this fashionable defamation—that Jews are moral profiteers, and that it is only by shedding such Jewishness that a Jew can feel pity—is doubly despicable.
A tragedy does not entail blame, but if Jonathan Glazer must buy into Jewish blame he must buy into Palestinian blame as well. It would have taken real moral courage to pursue that line; right now it takes none to castigate Jews.
Read more on New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/03/jonathan-glazer-zone-of-interest-oscars-speech