SETH MANDEL: The Oscars and the Plight of the ‘Good Jew.’
Last night’s Oscars ceremony honored the film No Other Land with an award, but the acceptance speeches unwittingly paid homage to an old classic, the 1966 big-screen adaptation of A Man For All Seasons. “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world,” Paul Scofield’s Sir Thomas More famously says upon the realization that his friend betrayed him for the reward of being appointed attorney general for Wales. “But for Wales?”
No Other Land is about an illicit Palestinian settlement built on land designated for Israeli military training. The film takes the perspective of Palestinian settlers. Accepting the award for best documentary feature were two of the directors, a Palestinian named Basel Adra and an Israeli named Yuval Abraham.
Adra spoke entirely of Israeli wickedness and the virtue of Palestinians “resist[ing]” it. Abraham, playing the “good Jew,” joined his friend and colleague in bashing Israel, though he added a token call for the Israeli hostages to be returned. It would be condescending to praise an Israeli for saying literally the bare minimum on behalf of Israeli hostages, so I’ll leave that to others who had even lower expectations for Abraham.
Matt Walsh gleefully points out that while No Other Land was “the highest grossing Oscar-nominated documentary of 2024” – his documentary actually made bank:
[No Other Land] grossed $420,000 in the US, but the Oscar nominated bit is an important qualifier, because of course our documentary Am I Racist? grossed more than 25 times more than the highest grossing Oscar nominated documentary. So put it put into more perspective, our film grossed four times as much on the first day of release, than this movie did in its whole theatrical run, and we weren’t even on the short list. Nobody saw this movie, it had no cultural impact at all — like none — but it won because it had the right politics. So that’s how it goes, and just pointing it out, that’s all. Just little disclaimer there, a little qualifier when you hear about the “highest grossing Oscar nominated documentary.”
Plus some more fun with Julianne Hough’s woke, rote “land acknowledgement:”