ZONE OF DISINTEREST: Seth Mandel: Glazer’s Partners Refute Glazer.

It is immensely important that Danny Cohen, the executive producer of The Zone of Interest, has publicly repudiated the director Jonathan Glazer’s atrocious Holocaust statement at the Oscars.

In his speech, Glazer was at once self-loathing toward and obsessed with his own Jewishness. Upon accepting the Academy Award for his film and its portrayal of the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss’s life next to a concentration camp, Glazer seemed express deep shame for his heritage while blaming Judaism for Palestinian suffering, and took the extraordinary step (for a director of a Holocaust movie!) of equating the Jews of today with Höss’s fellow Nazis of yesterday.

In his public comments on Glazer’s moral misconduct, Cohen made three separate points, all of which are significant for their own reasons.

First, and most obvious, was his repudiation of Glazer’s statement. “I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this,” he told podcast hosts Jonathan Freedland and Yonit Levi. “The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn’t use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that.”

That is well said and correct in every particular. The relevance of Judaism to the current conflict is entirely contained in the fact that it was Hamas’s motivation to murder and torture and rape and kidnap men, women, children and the elderly. The war happened because there are monsters walking the earth who seek to eradicate Jews, and the war continues because those monsters refuse to stop trying.

As Ben Shapiro wrote last week on “Jonathan Glazer’s Evil Oscars Display:”

In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In “Zone of Interest,” there are no Jews: all we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He’s happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.

All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It’s the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.

Seth Mandel concluded, “We can only hope Cohen is right that Glazer’s stunt will fade in the public’s mind far sooner than will the movie’s ability to impart on a new generation the horrific reality of the Holocaust.”

But does it really? As Sonny Bunch wrote of the film in January:

I find The Zone of Interest somewhat flummoxing. Glazer has undoubtedly made a masterpiece of not-showing…I can’t help but wonder what the one-in-five young Americans who think the Holocaust was exaggerated will make of the very act of not-showing. I can’t help but wonder what the teachers who have noted a rise in antisemitic humor and students ironically praising Hitler as based will respond to it. Or how such a film will be received in a period of soaring antisemitism. Assuming knowledge that either isn’t there or has been warped by the vicissitudes of the online swamp alters the cinematic calculus in ways that I am not entirely sure how to grapple with.

Glazer was fine with audiences hearing in the background of his movie what Hannah Arendt dubbed “the banality of evil.” Actually showing it on the big screen? Obviously not, except in the most abstract form possible, alas.