Jewish Oscar winner accuses Israel of hijacking Holocaust  

In accepting an Oscar for his Holocaust film 'The Zone of Interest', JONATHAN GLAZER denounced Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.

(JTA) – As widely predicted, “Oppenheimer,” the biopic of Jewish nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, swept a number of categories at Sunday’s Oscars, including best picture, in a year unusually heavy with Jewish nominees.

But the most talked-about Jewish moment of the night came courtesy of Jonathan Glazer, writer-director of the cerebral Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, who used his acceptance speech to comment on the Israel-Hamas war.

Standing alongside producers James Wilson and Len Blavatnik during his acceptance speech for best international feature, Glazer denounced Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, which he said had led to “dehumanization” that had affected both Israelis and Palestinians.

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present,” Glazer said.

“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 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza,” he added. “All the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”

In a previous award acceptance speech last month, Wilson criticized “innocent people being killed in Gaza” as something people should face head on, rather than from behind “the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind,” in an allusion to the film’s depiction of Nazis and their families as willfully ignorant of the murder of Jews just beyond their gardens. Blavatnik, meanwhile, is one of several major donors to suspend their support for Harvard University over its response to Oct. 7.