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Playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner has come out in defense of director Jonathan Glazer, whose speech at the Oscars almost a fortnight ago continues to polarize opinion.
While accepting her award for best foreign language film on March 10, Glazer linked her film, The Zone of Interest, to current events in the Middle East.
He said he hoped his film, which shows the domestic lives of Rudolph and Hedwig Höss just outside the walls of Auschwitz, where he was a camp commander, “will show where dehumanization, at its worst, leads. He shaped our entire past and present.”
Standing on stage with producer James Wilson and financier Len Blavatnik, Glazer continued:
Right now we are here as men who refute their Judaism and the Holocaust hijacked by an occupation, which has brought so many innocent people into conflict. Whether it is the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
Kushner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work Angels in America and collaborated with Steven Spielberg on four films, including 2022’s The Fabelmans, was a guest on Monday’s edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s podcast.
When asked if he identified with the speech, Kushner said: “Of course. I mean, who doesn’t? What he is saying is very simple. “He is saying: Judaism, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering should not be used in a campaign of… as an excuse for a project to dehumanize or massacre other people.”
Kushner continued: “This is a misappropriation of what it means to be Jewish, of what the Holocaust meant, and (Glazer) rejects it. Who doesn’t agree with that? What kind of person thinks that what is happening now in Gaza is acceptable?”
Kushner, who is Jewish, told The Guardian that he was proud that The Fabelmans, which is based on Spielberg’s early life, attempted to expose anti-Semitism in the United States. “It’s always good to say that anti-Semitism is abhorrent,” he said, “it has a history of insurmountable ignominy, and if you play with it, if you tolerate its existence, it will take you somewhere terrible, because fascism and authoritarianism are incredibly boring movements.” every time they reorganize and escalate, and they will follow the same tropes over and over again.
“They don’t have a big imaginative arsenal, and anti-Semitism is always there and has been there for centuries, so if someone starts sounding like an anti-Semite, they’re done, repudiate them, it’s over, don’t make common cause. with them.”
Kushner has spoken frequently about the conflict in the Middle East; In 2011, the City University of New York did a U-turn on its decision to block granting an honorary degree to the playwright on the grounds that he was not sufficiently pro-Israel.
The fallout from Glazer’s speech, which was enthusiastically applauded at the Dolby Theater, began early the following week, when he was condemned by the American Holocaust Survivors Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who said his comments “ “they excuse terrorism.”
However, Glazer’s avowed supporters, including directors such as Boots Riley, Zoe Kazan and Asif Kapadia, were quick to come to her defense, with Kapadia counting Variety: “He stood up and told the truth. This is what true artists do.”
Meanwhile a editorial in Haaretz argued that Glazer was right, while the director of the Auschwitz Memorial also defended him, saying that “Glazer issued a universal moral warning against dehumanization.”
Dr. Piotr MA Cywiński continued: “Their goal was not to descend to the level of political discourse. Critics expecting a clear political stance or a film solely about genocide did not grasp the depth of its message.”
Later that week, The Zone of Interest executive producer Danny Cohen broke ranks, telling the Unholy podcast that he “fundamentally disagreed” with Glazer’s words. On Friday, Laszlo Nemes, who also won the foreign film Oscar for a film set in Auschwitz towards the end of the war, 2015’s Son of Saul, told the Guardian Glazer “should have remained silent rather than revealing that he didn’t “understands history and the forces that undo civilization, before or after the Holocaust.”
Nemes continued: “If I had accepted the responsibility that comes with a film like that, I would not have resorted to talking points spread by propaganda aimed at eradicating, in the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”
On Monday, Spielberg’s sister, Laura Spielberg, was one of 450 Jewish creatives who signed an open letter condemning Glazer’s speech and criticizing what they perceived as his “drawing of a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people and an Israeli nation that seeks to avoid its own extermination.”
By Tuesday, about 700 more names had signed the letter, which also took issue with Glazer’s “use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, (which) distorts history.”
The Guardian has contacted Glazer and Spielberg for comment.