David Schaechter, the president of the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation who himself survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, condemned Zone of Interest writer and director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars acceptance speech in an open letter Monday.
“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,” Schaechter wrote.
Glazer, whose film captures the lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Höss and his wife living near the camp in striking banality, used his acceptance speech Sunday night to attack Israel — both its response to Hamas’s October 7 attack and, seemingly, its very existence:
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, rather, look at what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. 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 or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?
Schaechter, in the letter signed by the Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA executive committee, said Glazer exhibited both historical illiteracy and a twisted morality in his speech.
“The ‘occupation’ of which you speak has nothing to do with the Holocaust. The Jewish people’s existence and right to live in the land of Israel predates the Holocaust by hundreds of years,” Schaechter wrote. “Today’s political and geographic landscape is the direct result of wars started by past Arab leaders who refused to accept Jewish people as their neighbors in our historic homeland.”
Schaechter continued, commenting on the “disgraceful” nature of Glazer’s use of the Holocaust in his speech.
“Worse is that you chose to use the Holocaust to validate your personal opinion. You made a Holocaust movie and won an Oscar. And you are Jewish. Good for you,” he wrote. “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.”
Schaechter, though, had one more level of criticism, drawing from his own life story as a Holocaust survivor and emphasizing the necessity of a Jewish state in which Jews facing persecution can find a home:
And it is disgraceful for you to presume to speak for those of us who personally saw the world stand silent as our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were murdered. We actually had nowhere to go — no possible place of refuge. No country would accept us even though world leaders knew full well that thousands of Jews were being murdered every day. There was no Jewish nation to which we could flee.
He then said Glazer should be “ashamed of” himself for “using Auschwitz to criticize Israel,” writing to the director that “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.”
