‘Vile’ and ‘auto-antisemitic’: Israeli minister slams Oscar-winning Jewish Holocaust film director

Jonathan Glazer, the director of the Best International Feature academy award winning Holocaust film, “The Zone of Interest,” who in his victory speech said that “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation” and called out the “dehumanization” of the victims of October 7th in Israel and of the ongoing attack on Gaza, was “brave” and exhibited “high morals” in mentioning the “dehumanization” amidst the “images of atrocities” coming out of the Gaza Strip, Hadash-Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi said in a press conference ahead of his party’s weekly meeting on Monday.

Earlier on Monday, Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism Minister said to the Jerusalem Post that Glazer was the “next useful idiot who stuck a knife in the back of his people and in the backs of women who were raped and then shot in the head afterwards, in children who were slaughtered in their beds, in entire families who were burned alive.”

“There is no forgiving such vile types – auto-antisemitic Jews, from Judith Butler until last night’s idiot, but there is no reason to get excited over the phenomenon, it has accompanied us for generations,” Chikli said.

Chickli alludes to the history of Jews 

Chikli continued, “As one of Israel’s greatest leaders, Yigal Alon, said, ‘Amongst the Jews there are always groups of people whose past weighs on them, and they are the first to conduct plastic surgeries to their spiritual-national physiognomy, in order to adapt it to the latest cosmopolitical fashion. Granted, it is true that Jews had multiple reasons to tire from ‘bearing the burden’, but they [also] had and have all of the reasons to treat with respect their past and themselves, to be as they are in the annals of culture. Because only he who has courage to be himself, contributed the largest contribution to universal culture.”

Glazer’s German-language film is about the family of the commandant of Auschwitz living on the death-camp grounds.

After thanking the Academy, his cast and producers, and Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Glazer said read from a written statement, although he was clearly emotional, as he spoke about the war in sentence fragments, saying, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say that what they did then, rather than 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 for so many innocent people.”

At this point, Glazer was interrupted by applause, and after a pause he went on to say, “Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”

Hannah Brown contributed to this article

JPost