How are Jewish creators navigating their work after Jonathan Glazer's Oscars speech?

Two weeks after he delivered it, filmmaker Jonathan Glazer's pro-ceasefire Oscar acceptance speech for his Holocaust film The Zone of Interest continues to reverberate through Jewish communities in Hollywood and beyond.

With an open letter now circulating denouncing his words, Glazer's speech has come to symbolize a divide in the Jewish community that's become ever-more pronounced in the midst of Israel's war in Gaza.

Elamin speaks with writer Emily Tamkin, klezmer hip-hop composer Josh Dolgin (a.k.a. Socalled), and Jess Salomon, a former human rights lawyer for the UN who left law to become a comedian, about why so many people took offense to Glazer's speech, and what it says about this current moment for Jewish artists.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Emily: I think the reaction to the speech speaks to the fact that Jonathan Glazer really hit people where they live. People who were receptive to the message really felt it very deeply, and people who disagree with the message really felt that very deeply. Steven Spielberg said that this was the best Holocaust movie since his, since Schindler's List.

Elamin: Yeah, which is quite a statement for Spielberg to make.

Emily: So this is a very prominent film about one of the most discussed tragedies in Jewish history — not only Jewish history, but yes Jewish history. There are people whose interpretation of the lessons of that moment, and they've said this — I think the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said, "The lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people need power." And Jonathan Glazer went up there and said, that is not the message I had in mind when I made this movie. Right? It is about the Holocaust, but this is also about complicity. And this is also about dehumanization. And this is about what we do now in our lives.

WATCH | Jonathan Glazer's Oscars acceptance speech:

Primo Levi, who was a survivor and a writer and a chemist, has this quote: "It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere." And I think Glazer's sort of unspoken addition there was: and it can be carried out by anyone. That is a very hard thing for Jewish people to hear, right? That any person, any group of people, is capable of being victim and perpetrator.

And I think it speaks to how deeply felt that message is, that the reaction wasn't "Oh my goodness, I disagree so strongly with that." It was, first, to deliberately mishear him. Then the sort of day two outrage was, "Well, he said, 'As a Jew.' You know, he's speaking as a Jew. And if you say, 'As a Jew,' you're a fake Jew; you don't really mean it." I've got news for you. Everybody who says a message about any political message drawing on their Jewish identity is speaking as a Jew. So I think there are Jewish communities, right? And each is trying to sort of assert that they're the ones whose voice really counts on this issue.

Elamin: Josh, I think the reaction to this Glazer letter sort of underscores that this is a very fraught time for artists, many of whom are thinking about how they should use their platform at this point…. You're a musician. You've incorporated Jewish culture, history into a lot of your work. How would you say the current conflict made you think about what your mission should be as an artist? Because I can't imagine it has been this simple time.

Josh: I mean, I'm interested personally in Eastern European Yiddish culture and music. And in fact, my practice comes out of, basically, this reaction as an assimilated Canadian, not religious Jewish person, reacting against the dominant ideology that was sort of foisted upon me growing up which is either synagogue and the religious practice of Judaism, and Zionism and the founding of Israel. That's the story that we're given as kids in Hebrew school, and that just sort of never resonated for me, either one of those things. And it was only finding Yiddish culture, which is sort of lost and forgotten and not a part of mainstream Jewish identity politics; I found it by accident. I found these old records, and I fell in love with this beautiful old Yiddish music. And so I guess for me, it's always been about showing people — and not even waving a flag and making a big deal out of it, but just sort of demonstrating with practice — that there are alternative Jewish identities out there, and that it's not always about the synagogue and about Israel.

For me now, during this fraught time, it doesn't matter what I'm doing. I'm a Jewish guy, and I'm making art, and people don't want to see it. And it's dangerous to have a Jewish concert no matter what it is, even [when] it's a reaction against Zionism and the Jewish establishment. It's always been for me this political action to be like, yo, there's more to Judaism; that's just one tiny piece of an amazing pie of Sephardic music and North African Jewish music and Jewish culture from all over the place. But now we're all being painted with the same brush, and it's just Jewish.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.