Dear Jonathan Glazer,
You received an Oscar for your film, Zone of Interest, depicting Rudolf Hoss, the SS commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp. It shows Hoss and his family happily farming and ignoring the extermination Hoss engineered. Hoss was incredibly efficient at killing. With innovative cotton filters and ZyklonB he achieved the killing of 2,000 people/hour.
Ironically, in your film, not one Jew is seen, only their cries are heard.
In receiving your Oscar for this film, you could have spoken for the Jews who are afraid to wear their Kipa and fear another Holocaust. You could have mentioned the Jews murdered for being Jewish and crowds yelling, gas the Jews.
Instead, you used your platform to say, “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.”
Jonathan, you are not the first Jew who refuted his Jewishness to support those who kill Jews. Like the Kapos, Jews who collaborated with Nazis to enforce Nazi rules (and killed other Jews), you stand with those who openly express the desire to kill every single Jew.
I have sympathy for Kapos. They faced the gut-wrenching choice: help the Nazis or the death of their families. I can’t imagine what I would have done.
But you, Jonathan, did not face that decision. You did not descend from Holocaust survivors like I did. Like Commander Hoss, you lived a life of luxury. You attended a liberal private school in Britain and handed every opportunity. You never lived with rockets raining down on you; never carried your kids to bomb shelters. You never sent your child to war or received a call that your cousin’s daughter was kidnapped. You did not fear sending your kids to schools on buses or getting pizza from Sabbaro.
You had the undeserving honor of making a movie about the Holocaust, received a personal award, then blamed Jews for their own slaughter in front of the most grossly privileged people in the world. You ought to be ashamed.
Congratulations on claiming your position alongside other Kapos, Bernie Sanders, Rabbis for Ceasefire, Bar Kamptza, and other Jews who refute their Judaism.
If only Jews would just agree to get killed quietly, you could make another heart-throbbing movie about the Hamas commanders' families. So inconvenient of those stubborn Jews.
I join you in, you refuting your Judaism. When, even today, rockets fell on Israeli civilians, and Jews are killed for their faith - our community has no place for Jews like you.
To blame Jews for being killed while Jewish hostages are currently tortured and killed; while the blood in Kibbutzim is barely dry - our synagogues should not welcome you.
Make no mistake, Jonathan, refuting your Judaism would not have saved you from Hoss’ death camp, just as it did not save my high-brow German-Jewish intellectual family, and just as it did not save the Lefty Peace Activits in Kibbutz Berri on October 7, 2023.
Master’s Degree at Collumbia University Teachers Collegd
1moRuth was so amazing weworked over many years at UJA Federation and also years ag at FEGS