I directed a controversial Israel documentary. Efforts to cancel Jonathan Glazer are a symptom of a bigger problem
Jonathan Glazer, winner of the best international feature film award for The Zone of Interest, poses in the press room during the 96th Annual Academy Awards. Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
Somehow, almost two weeks after the Oscars, backlash against Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer is still ongoing.
While accepting the award for best international feature, Glazer said, “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst … 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.” He was promptly accused of any number of horrors — including by the ADL, which wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that his words had excused “terrorism of the most heinous kind.”
Glazer is only the latest Jewish film director to face fury — the kind that can derail a life or career — after speaking out against the actions of Israel. I know, because I’ve shared a version of his experience.
After I co-directed Israelism, which tells the story of younger American Jews heartbroken at the treatment of Palestinians under occupation, my fellow filmmakers and I faced a tide of outrage. One example: A mass email, tens of thousands of copies of which were sent to college officials demanding they cancel our screenings, claimed that “the movie openly gives justification to those shouting ‘Kill the Jews.'”
What Glazer’s experience, and my own, shows: The pro-Israel Jewish community is further muddying the distinction between fact-based criticism of Israel and hatred of Jewish people. By attempting to silence Jewish voices of dissent, they are refusing to allow the possibility that Jewish people can disavow the weaponization of our identity to justify what we consider war crimes while still loving our Jewishness.
This week, more than 1,200 Jewish entertainment industry professionals signed a letter lambasting Glazer, saying that his speech “gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world.”
The disingenuous criticism Glazer has faced is part of a broader effort to delegitimize the voices of Jewish creatives who use their art to critique the Jewish state.
Last month, Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham was called “antisemitic” in both Israeli and German media outlets over his awards acceptance speech at the Berlinale Film Festival. Abraham is one of the directors of No Other Land, a film that shows the destruction of the West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers and explores the friendship between Abraham and Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta and co-director of the film.
In his speech, Abraham described the legal inequality between himself and Adra as apartheid. After the speech was denounced as antisemitic, he said that his family had to flee in the middle of the night after a right-wing mob showed up at his home. The accusation that his remarks were hateful “empties the word antisemitism of meaning and thus endangers Jews all over the world,” he said.
The attacks on Glazer and Abraham reflect my own experiences since the release of Israelism. Our film was made by an almost entirely Jewish team, and won an audience award for best documentary at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Yet since the film’s release, both it and those of us who created it have been accused of antisemitism. As Mira Fox wrote in the Forward, we have faced nonstop attempts to cancel the film, including claims that campus screenings “put Jewish students in danger” — even when the students and professors inviting us to campus are themselves Jewish.
My suspicion: The voices who have spoken out against Glazer, Abraham, and Israelism desperately want to conceal the reality that the Jewish community is, in fact, not unilaterally in support of Israel’s actions, but rather deeply divided.
A substantial and growing portion of American Jews, particularly in younger generations, were deeply disturbed by Israeli policies toward Palestinians well before Oct. 7: In a 2021 survey, 25% of all Jews and 38% of Jews under 40 described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid.
Today, polls suggest that a clear plurality of American Jews and a majority of Jews under 30 favor a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Many prominent protests calling for a ceasefire have been organized and led by Jews — including during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, when Jewish protesters blocked his motorcade’s route to the Capitol — and Bernie Sanders, arguably the nation’s most prominent Jewish politician, opposes continuing U.S. arms supplies to Israel.
The leaders of pro-Israel Jewish organizations have responded to these Jewish voices in the same manner they have responded to Jewish filmmakers like Glazer, Abraham and myself: by pretending we are a tiny, radical minority who tolerate or even encourage antisemitism, and might actually have renounced our Judaism.
ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt has described the Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire as “hate groups, the photo inverse of white supremacists,” and the ADL has included Jewish-led protests on a map of “antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel rallies.” The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations even objected to the nation’s other most prominent Jewish politician, Chuck Schumer, calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “obstacle to peace,” saying this “is not a time for public criticisms.”
This rhetoric belies a deeper issue which we explored in Israelism: In much of the pro-Israel community, support for Israel is not just a political or ideological stance but a core part of Jewish identity itself.
The message Jews raised in institutions affiliated with this community receive is that Israel and Zionism are an inherent part of Judaism. The dark consequence of this logic is that if the state of Israel is core to Jewish identity, then criticism of the state is perceived as antisemitism, and Jews who renounce what we consider a Jewish supremacist regime in Israel are seen as renouncing our Judaism itself.
What these critics find particularly threatening about us is that, by exposing the profound flaws in this logic, we also help to show the extent to which accusations of antisemitism against Palestinians and others who speak out are often equally bad-faith.
But if anything, the ongoing conflict over Glazer’s brave Oscars speech shows those hollow arguments don’t hold the immediate power they once might have. After all, it’s hard to criticize remarks as being full of anti-Jewish hate when the Auschwitz Memorial itself has defended them. And as Glazer’s comment revealed, uniform and unconditional Jewish support for Israel is a thing of the past. Just this week, the renowned playwright Tony Kushner defended Glazer, telling Haaretz that Israel’s actions in Gaza “look a lot like ethnic cleansing to me.”
The public is going to continue to hear from those of us who oppose Jewish supremacy and occupation — whether the pro-Israel establishment likes it or not.
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