Oliver Stone Says ‘Sorry’

Stone Cold: The director apologized for his anti-Jewish remarks. Image by GETTY IMAGES

By Nathan Burstein July 28, 2010

Maybe he’s not such an expert on natural born killers, after all.

Stone Cold: The director apologized for his anti-Jewish remarks. Image by GETTY IMAGES

For the second time this year, filmmaker Oliver Stone has generated controversy with comments about Adolf Hitler, contending in London’s Sunday Times that the Nazi dictator needed to be viewed “in context.” The July 25 interview also quoted the “Platoon” and “Wall Street” director as criticizing “Jewish domination of the media,” saying that it had distorted popular understanding of the Holocaust. The comments followed a January press conference in which the three-time Oscar winner told journalists, “Hitler is an easy scapegoat…. We can’t judge people as only bad or good.”

A swift online backlash (which included a tongue-lashing from several prominent Jews, including Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League) prompted a July 26 apology for the most recent comments, in which Stone also contended that Israel has “f—ed up U.S. foreign policy for years.”

“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret,” the director said in a statement. The apology also noted that “Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity — and it was an atrocity.”

Stone was born to a Jewish father and was raised Episcopalian. His Sunday Times interview came as part of efforts to promote “South of the Border,” a Stone-directed documentary that has been criticized by some as being overly sympathetic to Hugo Chavez and other South American leaders.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO