Take your award, and buzz off
In 1978, English actress Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for her role in the film “Julia” and used the occasion to denounce “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews everywhere.”
Later in the ceremony, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky used his turn onstage to offer a memorable rebuttal: “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave,” he said to applause, “that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.”
Forty-six years on, history repeated itself. Last week, Jonathan Glazer, director of Holocaust-themed film “The Zone of Interest,” accepted the Academy Award for best international feature film and delivered a diatribe to “refute” having his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
It took a few days, but the spirit of Chayefsky came roaring back.
In a “Statement From Jewish Hollywood Professionals,” hundreds of signatories, including actress Julianna Margulies and producer Lawrence Bender, denounced Glazer for “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,” arguing that it could fuel antisemitism.
Politically speaking, I’m with the signatories. People can have varying views of the war in the Gaza Strip, but comparing it with the Holocaust, as Glazer did, is profoundly wrong. Among other differences, Jews did not provoke the Holocaust by murdering, raping and kidnapping German civilians in a deliberate effort to start a war.
But I’m also allergic to what Eli Lake, in a brilliant recent essay in Commentary magazine, called the “As a Jew” phenomenon: the habit of prefacing political opinions with a declaration of identity, as if an opinion about Israeli politics (usually an anti-Israel opinion) somehow becomes more credible and significant because the speaker happens to be Jewish.
It isn’t. Having once had a bar or bat mitzvah does not make one a spokesperson for Jews, much less an authority on the Middle East.
At the 2020 Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais told winners to pick up their awards, give some thanks and then buzz off. (He used a stronger word than “buzz.”) That’s advice to live by in our incessantly political age, when we could use the occasional respite from other people’s opinions—even at the Oscars.