The Only Thing Jonathan Glazer's Oscars Speech Got Right
musings on the ugly, the bad, and the (kernel of) good
I really wasn’t going to write more about this speech. Silly me, I actually thought that since Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” performance was infinitely more memorable than a garbled speech in a category no one cares about for a movie hardly anyone saw, that people would forget it and move on.
Alas. Since we are determinedly not forgetting about it, I figured the best coping option is, naturally, capitalization. So here I am, jumping on the bandwagon before the train does eventually leave the station, because I’m pragmatic that way.
For those of you who have been fortunate enough to be living under a rock, here is the money quote from Jonathan Glazer’s speech that has so many people in a tizzy, many with either full-throated support or full-throated condemnation:
The whole speech was about how his Best-Adapted-Screenplay-winning Holocaust film, “The Zone of Interest,” depicts dehumanization, and what we can learn from that — which, in this sentence, he applied directly to the current Israel/Gaza war.
There were a lot of problems with this speech and especially this sentence (his own producer disagreed with him), which you’ve probably heard about by now, so I’m not going to go into much depth on that. But for a quick rundown:
It was poorly phrased (the sentence structure and use of “refute” was a syntactical nightmare, leading to easy misunderstanding that he was rejecting his Jewish identity as a whole, which he wasn’t)
It was poorly delivered (understandable given the overwhelming pressure of the Oscars stage)
It was poorly timed (outside of Tiktok, a 45-second Oscars slot is the worst platform for any complex political statements)
It was vague (the “occupation” could refer to anything from the West Bank and Gaza to the entire state of Israel)
It was ahistorical (attributing all the violence in Israel/Palestine to the occupation, ignoring the multitude of other factors, many of which preceded the occupation, no matter which definition of it you use)
It drew false equivalences (paralleling Israel with Nazis and Holocaust victims with their perpetrators)
It was universalized (using a horrific atrocity to draw general life lessons for others rather than respecting the actual victims of the atrocity or acknowledging the specific bigotry — antisemitism — that caused it)
It was victim-blamey (asserting that the October 7 massacre happened because of the occupation)
It was painfully ironic (accusing other people of “hijacking” the Holocaust for their own reasons after following the time-honored path of using the Holocaust to make a movie that will win awards)
There are more, but you get the gist.
Safe to say I’m not going to the mat for Jonathan Glazer or trying to argue that he was just misquoted or misunderstood, because while some people stopped at Bullet Point #1, there are so many more bullet points, ye gods.
But I do think that part of what was so upsetting about the speech was that it contained a point — about using trauma to justify extremism — that some of us (and by “us” here I mean liberal/progressive/often artsy Jews) have felt for years, but Glazer made it SO POORLY. And someone mangling your point of view is often worse than them simply having a different point of view.
So here's my point of view, written some years back, given through the lens of a different movie, Operation Finale, and without the time constraints of an Oscars speech.
If you missed Operation Finale in 2018, it’s a movie starring Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley, about the Israeli operation to extract Nazi mastermind Adolph Eichmann from his hidey-hole in Argentina, in order to bring him to Israel to be tried for his crimes.
At the time, this was my review:
Verdict on Operation Finale: Well, this is tough. Because on the one hand, this is the most Jewish movie I have seen in a long time, and in this age of Holocaust denial and particularly erasure of Jews from much of the dialogue surrounding Nazis nowadays, it felt really good to see a movie that acknowledges and depicts the particularly Jewish focus of this genocide, and the deep, deep impact it had on an entire subsequent generation of Jews, who carry the enduring trauma in various ways. And seeing so many Jewish actors playing Jewish roles in a story where Jews have agency over their own narrative, and correctly pronouncing Hebrew words and names - that was really nice too.
On the other hand, Ben Kingsley's performance as Adolph Eichmann is absolutely hypnotic, and I think that's actually a drawback. For me, the movie spends too much time allowing him to be his mesmerizing self (let's face it, Oscar Isaac may be good but for the most part Kingsley wipes the floor with him), and not enough time on the actual atrocities he masterminded, and his role in committing them, which undercuts the impact of *SPOILER* bringing him to justice. I feel like if the ratios had been more 50/50 between fascinating/weirdly compelling old man Eichmann and evil monster mastermind Eichmann, the climax would have been more satisfying.
Several years later, in 2021, one of the many wars between Israel and Gaza broke out, and my feed filled up with the typical rhetoric that goes around every time there’s a war in Israel — sweeping condemnations of the millions of Jews living there, that they should all just stop being occupiers and colonizers (no mention as to how) and everything will be sunshine and unicorns, and in the meantime, as long as they are living in Israel, they deserve whatever violence befalls them and should probably just drop dead.
(It’s super fun being Jewish on social media during wartime in Israel, can’t you tell?)
There was also some Jewish extremism, or at the very least, extreme defensiveness (and seriously, no, my dude, guns in Jewish households is not the answer, please do not), as is also typical at times of war and during spikes in anti-semitism. Plus post-Donald Trump America of 2021 was a festering blister of extremism of all stripes, which certainly did not help matters.
And I found myself reflecting back on Operation Finale and the particular things that it did well, and wound up re-posting my review with this additional commentary:
I've been thinking about this movie a lot today, in light of the dehumanized "ALL ISRAELIS ARE IMPERIALIST COLONIZER MONSTERS AND DESERVE TO DIE" oversimplification that has been going around.
This movie doesn't really address the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but what it does that really struck me was how well it portrayed how much a Jewish homeland and state meant to the generation of Jews following the Holocaust. How much each and every one of them had lost, and how that trauma permeates. And how fantastical it must have seemed to have your ancestral homeland, a refuge, a government, a military, a place where you could bring Nazi masterminds and put them on trial for slaughtering your friends and family. Israel is vitally important to many, many Jews and to continued Jewish survival.
At the same time, it is true that too many of us have let our trauma drive us to "defend at all costs" and that some of those costs are absolutely unacceptable.
I remember when I was in Israel, years ago, as a teenager, at one point visiting a former neighbor of mine who now lived in Efrat, a city in disputed territory, where it was quite common for residents to walk around with a handgun tucked into the back of their pants. There had been a lot of tension and attacks from Gaza recently (not near Efrat, but elsewhere), and the army was deliberating on whether to continue with air strikes, or to go in with troops that could - theoretically - target Hamas operatives on the ground with fewer civilian casualties. It would also, of course, put the soldiers themselves at greater risk than air strikes.
My former neighbor said something to the effect of "Just bomb them all and be done with it."
And I said something to the effect of "But the children!"
And he said, pretty much in these words, "Better to get them while they're young."
I was appalled. I had heard plenty of other, less extreme perspectives on civilian casualties (mostly denial or sad resignation at how Hamas operates within civilian centers, using their own people as human shields) but this was the first time anyone had just straight up said they didn't care.
It is unacceptable to use our trauma — and our fear and our need to defend ourselves — to dehumanize others in this way. And within too many Jewish communities, it has become acceptable. Certainly not in all, but the extremism continues to creep ever deeper.
Some military defense of Israel is necessary. Israel's existence is necessary. The Holocaust didn't happen in a vacuum, and Jews remain a minority in a world where anti-semitism still thrives, and it is crucial for persecuted minorities to have a place where they can self-determine and not have to be subject to the whims of indifferent or hostile governments and citizens. And sometimes that means having to go to war to protect that place.
But it is also crucial that we not lose sight of the humanity on the other side, that we not become disgustingly callous and cruel, considering anything and everything to be acceptable in the name of defending ourselves. That we acknowledge that their pain is as real as our own, and that they deserve the fantastical dream of a homeland just as much as we did, even if logistically that doesn't seem like a possibility.
We are a traumatized people, and battening down the hatches and going into survival mode is a common trauma response, but that is no excuse for losing basic human decency.
I don't know how to turn back this tide; I don't know if it can be turned. But I do know that oversimplifying the complexities of this situation helps no one.
There is no way anyone could have said all of this in an Oscars speech, and I don’t know if Glazer would have wanted to if he could have. And I don’t think it would have been appropriate for the Oscars either way, for many of the same bullet points listed above.
But it is a conversation worth having.
Still, how you have the conversation is crucial to how well that conversation will go, and how likely you are to reach anyone who didn’t already agree with you. I can’t say I blame Glazer for taking his best shot on the biggest stage he’ll likely ever have, but I wish his best had been better.
Thank you for reading this edition of SM’s Movie Cramming Project, where I, SM, mostly watch movies so that you don’t have to, but occasionally also give the internet a stern talking-to and encourage it to think about what it’s done.
If you’re interested in reading some non-Oscar-winning Jewish content, you can check out my novelette “Moon Melody” in Jewish Futures: Science Fiction from the World’s Oldest Diaspora, or my snapshot memoir, Millennial Quarter-Life Crisis: A Mosaic of Thinky Thoughts.