By Norman Solomon
Given all that has happened, I recently contacted some signers of the open letter to ask whether they still fully believe in its contents and whether their perspective on Israel has changed since then. Ten responded to my questions.
If you understand that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, why read an article focusing on the viewpoints of people who vehemently deny it? I wasn’t sure how to explain why, until I remembered something that screenwriter Frédéric Krivine said when I interviewed him in Paris eight years ago. He was the head scriptwriter of the brilliant film series Un Village Français, dramatizing the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two.
“People who do horrible things are human beings,” Krivine said. “We have to find a way to talk about them without hiding what they do and without treating them as nonhuman people, nonhuman beings. They are human beings; like us they belong to, we are in, the same species, human species…. It’s humans who kill now everywhere in the world where people are killed. It’s because they are human beings that we have problems – because if they were just extraterrestrial or monsters we could just erase them.”
When director Jonathan Glazer gave the acceptance speech for his film The Zone of Interest at the 2024 Academy Awards, these words caused an uproar: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look 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 the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”
Quick reactions included a furious open letter that identified its more than 1,000 signers as “Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” The letter declared, “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination…. The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood. The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film.”
The Gaza war was then in its fifth month. At the time, citing information from UNICEF, Reuters reported that “over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s offensive,” and “many kids were suffering from severe malnutrition.” The United Nations issued a statement saying, “This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”
Deaths and injuries mounted swiftly for another 19 months, until an ostensible ceasefire in October 2025. Assaults by Israeli forces have continued at lower levels, with no letup in miserable conditions for 2 million Palestinian people living in Gaza.
Given all that has happened, I recently contacted some signers of the open letter to ask whether they still fully believe in its contents and whether their perspective on Israel has changed since then. Ten responded to my questions.
Koura Linda, who owns a film production company based in Los Angeles, was appalled by the applause and cheers that Glazer received when he spoke at the Academy Awards. “If anything, I would sign that letter 100 times over today,” Linda told me. Later, she said: “It’s very confusing to me why people are so fixated on Israel specifically…. I don’t understand the fixation on the only piece of the world that belongs to the Jewish people.”
Les Glassman, a dentist and documentary filmmaker, spoke with me from his home in Jerusalem. He recalled that The Zone of Interest – which depicts the ordinary everyday life of a Nazi commandant and his wife living next to a concentration camp – was very warmly received when it premiered in Israel. “People loved it,” Glassman said. Later, when Glazer made his Oscar speech, “it was a shock…. It was a stab in the back…. Like treason…. He used the Holocaust against Israel…. I don’t know one person who was impressed with his speech. People were the opposite, they were like totally flabbergasted and could not believe what they were hearing. It was like a traitor really.”
Glassman has dedicated himself to interviewing elderly Jews who survived the Holocaust. “In nearly all my interviews of Holocaust survivors worldwide which I have been privileged to do,” he said, “the important message imparted by the survivors [is] ‘we have our own Jewish country’ as they remember when the world shut its doors and Jews had nowhere to flee or find refuge.”
Actor and director Geoffrey Cantor told me, “I completely stand by the letter 100 percent.” He had recently voiced an audio book by Eli Sharabi, who was abducted from a kibbutz on October 7 and held prisoner in Gaza tunnels for 491 days. I asked Cantor about the letter’s vehement objection to Glazer’s use of the word “occupation,” referring to Israel’s control of Gaza and the West Bank. “It’s not an occupation,” said Cantor, who described himself as “a liberal politically.”
After noting that “war is horrible, it’s always been horrible,” Cantor went on: “Israelis fight war to protect themselves. And it hasn’t been until the establishment of Israel that Jews were able to even engage in a war. Until then, we were just slaughtered. And so, that does something to one’s way of viewing war.”
I asked, “What do you make of the outlook of some who say, not only was The Zone of Interest a great film, but it has something to say about the current situation with Israel and Palestinians?”
“I think I saw like the trailer,” Cantor said. “I did not see the whole film…. I’m sure the film is beautiful and probably deserved a lot of praise – but then to use that, to say, and Israel’s the worst perpetrator. Ever. In the history of the world. Is so absurd, so wrong. And when it comes from a Jewish person, is so damning… because it feeds the fires. Stokes the flame of righteous indignation against the Jewish people and anybody who supports our only country.”
When I asked if it made any difference that Glazer is Jewish, Cantor replied: “When a Jewish voice uses the language that I disagree with about Israel, in such a public forum, it feels a little bit more like a betrayal.”
Remembering Glassman’s comment on the phone line from Jerusalem likening Glazer’s speech to “treason,” I asked Cantor if he thought the word applied. “No,” he responded, “just betrayal, not treason. But betrayal.”
The interview with Cantor lasted an hour and a half. In contrast, the response was terse from another signer of the open letter, the emeritus rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, David Wolpe, who is a consultant to Warner Bros. and Gulfstream Pictures for a feature film adapting his book about King David. Does Rabbi Wolpe still fully believe in the contents of the open letter? “Yes.” Has his perspective on Israel changed since signing it? “No.”
Interviewed separately, all of the signers said that they still completely support the open letter. They often returned to the same themes: Glazer’s speech had been a “blood libel” with “false equivalency.” Glazer had used the Holocaust to invert its true meaning while feeding into antisemitism. Hostility to Israel has gained the upper hand in U.S. media and politics. Israel is held to a much higher standard than other countries. Zionists have been increasingly besieged and subjected to hatred. Israel protects Jews from a future Holocaust. Civilian deaths in Gaza were unfortunate but Israel went extraordinarily out of its way to prevent them.
Several of the signers indicated that the open letter understates their current abhorrence of Glazer’s Oscar speech. “If anything, I am even more supportive of Israel now amidst the ever-increasing amount of anti-Israel lies, propaganda and brainwashing that is ubiquitous worldwide,” said Jonathan Geffner, a professional ventriloquist.
“Unfortunately, our letter is even more relevant today than it was back then,” said Roy Schwartz, a writer and documentary producer. “Blood libels against Israel and Jews have only escalated since. They’re rampant and unchecked, even in politics, civic orgs, and the media. Israel is subject to obsessive focus wildly disproportionate to anything else going on in the world, and it’s held to a standard that no other country is held even close to. Meanwhile, its implacable enemies and other bad players are ignored, excused, or their blatant misinformation accepted uncritically.”
Shie Rozow, an Israeli-American composer and music editor living in Los Angeles, has credits including work on 150 feature films as well as popular TV shows. “I actually wish the letter was even more strongly worded,” he said. “The only part of his speech I agree with is that dehumanization is a problem that we must confront. Whether it’s in this conflict, or in our politics. And yet again he makes a false equivalency between victims of brutal terrorism that openly and clearly sought to kill anyone it could versus military action that appears to have done more to avoid the killing of civilians than practically any other military has done in history, under unprecedentedly challenging circumstances. This isn’t to say the IDF is perfect, far from it. This is not the same IDF I served in. I’ve seen things that I couldn’t imagine happening when I served over 30 years ago. And Israel has the worst, most corrupt and extremist government in its history with senior members who belong nowhere near power.”
To the host of “The Unapologetically Jewish Podcast,” Shana Meyerson, “Glazer’s speech is symptomatic of something greater and more nefarious in society: knee-trembling desperation to bend to the rabid masses and support terrorists – the murderers of his own people – in order to pass some loyalty litmus test…. He chose applause over human decency and truth. And the fact that he would actually weaponize the Holocaust to that end, makes his speech even that much more reprehensible.”
Among the signers I interviewed, references to Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump were almost always negative. “I have no sympathy for Netanyahu’s approach, nor for Trump’s,” said director and producer Tommaso Cardile. “I would much prefer a moderate, diplomatic Israeli government pursuing a negotiated outcome, and I say that as someone who wants Israel to endure… What concerned me about Mr. Glazer’s speech was not his sincerity but its effect. Whatever he intended, the framing was instantly repurposed by people whose aims he does not share, at a moment when Jewish communities in Europe and the United States were already facing the sharpest rise in threats and harassment in decades. Statements from that stage don’t stay in the room they’re made in. I think he underestimated that.”
Working on this article, I have strived to be fair to the people I interviewed and to convey the gist of their points of view. I found their basic outlooks to be repugnant.
What should not get lost is the profound truth that Jonathan Glazer managed to articulate in the 40 seconds of his Oscar speech that caused so much distress. The director deftly took down a kind of psychological “fourth wall” that routinely separates viewers from film. His speech, like The Zone of Interest, offered the possibility of going beyond “Look what they did then” to “Look what we do now.”
For those who heard his speech as abhorrent, Glazer’s invitation to truly examine what we do now – with tax dollars, silence, passivity or active acceptance – was a betrayal of the pretense that our society is not aiding and abetting genocide in the present day. Complacency and indifference prevail about the fate of “the other.” That way, the organized atrocities that ended 81 years ago, which can no longer be prevented, can loom incomparably more important than the organized atrocities that are happening today and might be prevented tomorrow.
During the interviews, perhaps the most disturbing responses came after my last question, when I asked whether the signers had any comment on the unequivocal conclusions of Israeli genocide reached in late 2024 by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel. All those who replied were dismissive.
One response claimed that “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have Hamas members in their Gaza operations and are well-documented for their systematic bias against Israel,” and that “B’Tselem is also infamous for its far left, radical, anti-Israel agenda.”
Another signer said: “I imagine some of the information is true, and much of it was either outright Hamas-driven lies and propaganda or presented without full knowledge of circumstances or out of context. That’s not reliable. Nor are many of the assertions and claims set forth.”
Another commented that “Israel gave polio vaccines, if there was a genocide, why are they giving polio vaccines?”
Another asserted that the four human rights organizations “have repeatedly been found to be spreading misinformation and are all angled to paint Israel in a negative light.”
Another replied, “The devastation and loss of life in Gaza is horrific but it does not come close to reaching the threshold that would warrant or support the label of genocide.”
Another sent me a video of a Holocaust survivor living in Israel, filmed at age 101, who said: “If we defend ourselves, then they tell us we’re committing genocide. Genocide is state-organized killing machine and not defense against terrorism.” And, “There is no genocide anywhere committed by us. It’s a figment of imagination of the international media and international politicians.”
Another said, “What Hamas did on October 7, 2023 was genocide. Everything since has been war.”
Across the United States, denial of Israel’s actual crimes against humanity has diminished during the 30 months since Jonathan Glazer’s speech. But a flinty core of denial still remains.
To acknowledge the genocide would be to shatter the identity of Jews who love Israel. For that matter, to acknowledge the genocide would undermine the right-wing Christians United for Israel organization, which claims 10 million members in the United States. And open acknowledgement of the genocide would render almost impossible the reflex of enormous U.S. military aid to Israel that still prevails among a large majority of Congress members.
In his 1939 film The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir says: “The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has their reasons.”
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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.