This week at the Oscars, a director named Jonathan Glazer made international headlines. Glazer won an Academy Award for his film, "Zone of Interest," which centers on the family life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss and his wife, Hedwig, who happily cultivate their home and garden as just behind the wall, Jews are tortured, shot and gassed. Glazer had an incredible opportunity to point out the obvious continuity between the victims of the Holocaust and the Jewish victims of Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Envelope on Oct. 7; he had the opportunity to point out the continuing plight -- largely ignored by the media and the left -- of some 134 hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas, including American citizens; he had the opportunity to observe the international community's willingness to, for its own political reasons, pile on Israel by attempting to stop the Israeli Defense Forces from destroying Hamas wholesale.
Instead, Glazer did something truly shameful: he used his Jewish background and his Holocaust film to attack Israel.
"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," Glazer intoned nervously.
There are a bushel of lies in this single sentence. First, there was no "occupation" of Gaza prior to Oct. 7; the Israelis abandoned Gaza in 2005 and turned it over to the Palestinians, who promptly tore down Israeli infrastructure and elected Hamas, who themselves turned Gaza into a full-scale terror ministate. Second, no "occupation" could justify the wholesale slaughter of some 1,200 innocents in Israel and the taking of 250 hostages on Oct. 7. Third, it is certainly not "Jewish and the Holocaust being hijacked" to point out that Hamas literally targets Jews for extermination, just as the Nazis once did. And finally, Israel is taking extraordinary measures to protect civilian life in Gaza; Israel has taken measures no military in history has taken, including sacrificing the lives of its own soldiers to go door-to-door in a terrorist-ridden urban hellscape.
In fact, Glazer has it all backward. It is he who is using his Jewishness and the Holocaust as a weapon -- in favor of Hamas. Glazer has little actual involvement in Judaism on a day-to-day level -- he grew up reform and there is little evidence of his Jewish practice today. But he's happy to pull out his Jewishness card -- to say that he, As A Jew, stands against Israel defending itself. This allows him to garner plaudits from his fellow political left-wingers, all the while maintaining his status in the intersectional hierarchy. Jews, as it turns out, are only allowed in the intersectional hierarchy so long as they use their Jewishness to attack Israel, or whatever the left-wing cause of the day is.
In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In "Zone of Interest," there are no Jews: all we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He's happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.
All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It's the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.
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