Holocaust survivors condemn Zone Of Interest director’s “morally indefensible” speech

The Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA has condemned The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer for his “morally indefensible” Oscars speech.

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On Sunday (March 10) Glazer won two Academy Awards for Best Sound and Best International Feature. The film focuses on the Nazi commandant Rufolf Höss and his family who live next to Auschwitz concentration camp.

During his acceptance speech for Best International feature, Glazer directly addressed the current conflict in the Middle East, following the October 7 attack by Hamas on the Supernova music festival. “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 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza. All the victims of this dehumanisation, how do we resist?” he said.

David Schaecter, the 94-year-old president of the The Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA shared an open letter that read: “I watched in anguish Sunday night when I heard you use the platform of the Oscars ceremony [to] equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.

“Your comments were factually inaccurate and morally indefensible,” he continued, arguing: “The ‘occupation’ of which you speak has nothing [to] do with the Holocaust.

“You made a Holocaust movie and won an Oscar. And you are Jewish. Good for you. But it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for the six million Jews, including one and a half million children, who were murdered solely because of their Jewish identity,” he added.

She concluded: “You should be ashamed of yourself for using Auschwitz to criticise Israel. If the creation, existence, and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish state equates to ‘occupation’ in your mind, then you obviously learned nothing from your movie.”

Meanwhile, Cillian Murphy dedicated his Oscar for Best Actor for his role in Oppenheimer to “peacemakers everywhere”.