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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Some people were shocked when Jonathan Glazer used the Academy Awards to launch into a vicious diatribe, disavowing his Jewishness, and demanding that Israel stop attacking Hamas.
But that’s probably because they didn’t watch his movie.
There are two kinds of Holocaust stories, the particular, which deal with the realities of what happened, with the Jews, with the Nazis and their collaborators, and those that make all of us into Nazis. Glazer’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ is the ultimate example of universal ‘Nazification’.
Particularists go to great trouble to retell the story of what really happened. They value and cherish the actual history. Universalists however see the Holocaust as only another example of capitalism, nationalism and the bourgeoisie making all of us (except leftists) into monsters.
For the particularists, Jews are the survivors of the Holocaust, but for the universalists, like Glazer, Jews (and all of us who aren’t militant leftists) are on the verge of being Nazis.
That is why ‘The Zone of Interest’ is not concerned with Jews, with Nazi ideology or with anything except depicting the comfortable family life of the Auschwitz commander. The point that we are meant to take away is that there are always ‘holocausts’ going on, shooting and screaming just a little past where we choose to look while we enjoy our comfortable lives.
‘The Zone of Interest’ is not the story of Rudolf Höss, one of the worst mass murderers in human history: it’s an argument for why we are all (except Glazer and his comrades) like him.
Jews and Jewish organizations embraced the movie because they failed to understand it.
Jonathan Glazer, like most revisionists, had made his intention abundantly clear. His goal was to create a film that would “make us feel ‘unsafe’, by showing how we’re emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we’d like to think.” In other words, we are the Nazis.
Why are we Nazis? Because we’re middle class, bourgeois, citizens of great powers. And because, above all else, we’re not leftists. Antifa, which is joining Islamists in attacking Jews outside events commemorating the Oct 7 atrocities, springs from the old Communist assertion that we’re all either leftists or fascists. Today that means the majority of us are fascists.
That’s why Jonathan Glazer hates us. It’s why he made ‘The Zone of Interest’ to tell us so.
Oct 7 drew a clear binary line. The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust could be met by viewing the brutal Islamic killers, rapists and kidnappers as the new Nazis, or the Jewish families, living in peaceful sheltered communities, who were brutally murdered as the real Nazis.
Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ firmly come down on the side of the Jews as the new Nazis.
‘The Zone of Interest’ focuses its attention on the complicity of peaceful middle class families and that was the message of the ‘ceasefire’ rallies and of Glazer’s Oscar night rant. It’s the justification so often put forward for the Nova music festival rapes because the sheer obliviousness of the young women to the nearness of Gaza made them more guilty, not less.
It’s a sentiment that one could easily imagine Jonathan Glazer agreeing with, and whether or not he does, it is what moviegoers were meant to walk away from ‘The Zone of Interest’ with.
That so many Jews, liberal and even not, were surprised by Glazer’s hateful display is a symptom of how little they understand about the pervasive hijacking of the Holocaust.
For a long time after the Holocaust, its story could virtually not be told. But while the Holocaust did not appear in the media, in movies, theater productions and television, it was instead being quietly told by survivors, by families and by communities to each other. When the Holocaust began to appear in the media it was quickly hijacked, bastardized and perverted to attack Jews.
The only reason the Left agreed to tell the story of the Holocaust was to appropriate it.
The universalist reinvention of Anne Frank’s story by Communist writers climaxes today in productions that reinvent the story as illegal aliens hiding from ICE or last year’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ set in Nazi Germany, with a black or Asian cast, but no Jews. Underneath the identity politics virtue signaling is the same underlying interchangeability as ‘The Zone of Interest’.
The Jews and the Nazis are not fixed elements, but characters whose roles can be filled by anyone. The ‘Jews’ are not the Jews, they are the people who claim to be oppressed,’ the Nazis’ are not the Nazis, they are the comfortable middle class people on the other side.
This idea at the heart of ‘The Zone of Interest’ is a poisonous Marxist lie. The Jews were initially targeted because they were successful middle class professionals. And the Nazis, like the Muslim terrorists, were supremacists who saw themselves as oppressed because they had lost territory and lost a war. Indeed, both sides had lost the same war, WWI, which united Nazis and Muslims in their hatred of the Allies and the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas springs, had ties to Arab Muslim officials who had wielded power under the Ottomans, but then lost that power under the British, and wanted to restore slavery and repress non-Muslims.
But Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ are not interested in history, especially Jewish history, but in indicting us, and making Americans and Jews into the new Nazis, and Muslims into the new Jews, ultimately justifying another Holocaust as the true lesson of the original Holocaust.
The universalist hijacking of the Holocaust was one of the great tragedies of its aftermath. It allowed leftists to not only exempt themselves from guilt for its crimes, but to make Jews and the Allies into the new Nazis. A generation after the Holocaust, German leftist terrorists started killing Jews all over again, this time in the name of the ‘Palestinian’ cause, arguing that Jews were the new fascists and they were the anti-fascists when they rounded up and killed Jews.
The universalization of the Holocaust is not just historical revisionism, as we can see at Entebbe or at the Oscars, it swiftly becomes an argument for killing Jews all over again. The USSR, which had partnered with Hitler in carving up Eastern Europe (before being betrayed by its former Nazi partners) and then set out to exterminate its own Jewish population, helped invent the idea that the Jews of Israel were the new Nazis and had to be exterminated all over again.
The Soviet Union created the ‘Palestinian’ cause and Moscow recently hosted a summit featuring Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad and all the ‘Palestinian’ terrorists.
Jonathan Glazer, denouncing Israel for defending itself against the new Nazis at the Oscars, was in the best tradition of the Soviet reversal of Nazis and Jews, and good and evil.
Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ follow up on a long leftist tradition of genocidal reversals which relabel the Hamas terror bases for wiping out the Jews as “open air concentration camps”, the campaign to stop another Oct 7 as “genocide” and “another Holocaust”, and Israel as a “fascist state”. Hamas terrorists burning Jewish families alive in their homes are just “ghetto resistance fighters” and the extermination of the Jews becomes the final solution of the “resistance”.
The Holocaust as a metaphor relentlessly flips the script until the real message is preventing another Holocaust by killing the Jews. The climax of the ideology at the heart of Glazer’s politics and ‘The Zone of Interest’ is that the lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jews of Israel must die.
‘The Zone of Interest’ is not a movie about the Holocaust, it implicitly incites another Holocaust. It has no room at Jewish film festivals, in Jewish homes or in the halls of Jewish memory.
Excellent analysis, thanks Daniel!
This article by Daniel Greenfield proves as fact the depraved psychopathological berserk crazy nature of the Islamic and other aggression and murderous attacks and real genocide against Israel and Jews.
When is America and Europe and the West going to do something effective to eliminate the insanity that is well underway and will end up as an American as well as a Jewish/Israel Apocalypse.
Wake up America …. Wake up Europe …. Wake up the Western World before it is really too late.
Yeah! it’s too bad Greenfield didn’t actually see the movie…. (no single actual detail about the film in his ‘analysis’).
I thought it was a good review, because reveals the motivation and the ideals, of Hollywood.
He wasn’t reviewing the plot, he was reviewing the motivation and message of the filmmaker.
Demagogues try to incite the lower classes against the middle classes. The population of the lower classes can grow so large that it becomes very dangerous.
Especially if class is measure in terms of knowledge rather than income. When that is done, most Harvard students are underclass.
Did you actually see the movie, Daniel?
Nothing blessed to expect from people that play pretend for a living.
Did you? Really?
I wonder if Danusha Goska, who praised this film in a recent article posted here will read Daniel’s article and be moved to leave a comment. It would be most interesting to read her response. I personally have not seen the film, but Glazer’s Oscar remarks make it unlikely that I will do so.
You didn’t. Did you?
Why should she?
Everyone who opposes the NWO and the UN leaf One World Government is now a Nazi in the minds of all those Globalists
Thank you…I knew it couldn’t only be me…Short version;; It sucked..I’d rather watch grass grow.
Hopefully not many will see it his movie. I won’t. But this universalizing is why I took my name off lists of orgs who use to mailed me. .
In fact there was a review of the same movie on this site that missed the point entirely. So, I’m grateful you wrote this.
I guess red hands at Oscars was to specifically reiterate that killing Jews is now en vogue. If it ever wasn’t.
Superb analysis! The message that we are all Nazis unless we are woke intersectional radicals is the worst lesson possible to learn from the Holocaust and is the ultimate distortion of the message of the so called banality of evil articulated by Hannah Arendt a Nazi loving self hating Jewish philosopher
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
From the book of Isaiah.
Indeed. I was going to mention Arendt but it’s just beating a dead horse.
Glazier is British yevsektsia, making his living by destroying other Jews. Sadly, a common type. His end undoubtedly will come in a similar manner to that of the original, Russian yevsektsia, all alone in a dark place, crying out, “But why me? I served them so well.”
Very good article. Thank you Mr Greenfield
Thank you, Nicolas
There are two types of Jews. Jews who love their religion and Israel, and what author Laura Rosen Cohen dubs Official State Jews or what others might call Jews in Name Only—like Glazer and Schumer.
I put it like this: There are Jews, and then there are “As-a-Jews.” IYKWIMAITYD.
Jonathon Glazer is typical of self hating Jews in the entertainment industry. Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay for “Playing For Time” Fania Fenelon’s account of survival in the Women’s Orchestra at Auschwitz. It was he that suggested the casting of known Jew hater and PLO supporter Vanessa Redgrave. He felt that what he experienced testifying before the House Unamerican Activities Committee in th 1950s (arriving in a convertible, with Marilyn Monroe in tow) was equivalent to the experiences of a Jew in Auschwitz, and casting Redgrave would expose the evils of blacklisting. Bear in mind that the woman she was portraying was a decade younger, a foot shorter in stature and survived because she had a beautiful singing voice (Redgrave sounded like a hinge in need of oil). And of course the Hollywood Left agreed with Miller that condemning the casting of Redgrave (which Fenelon herself did) was worse than what Fenelon witnessed in Auschwitz
Holocaust inversion (“Israelis are Nazis, Palestinians are ‘Jews'”) and Holocaust trivialization are as dangerous as Holocaust Denial (which by the way is espoused by “moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas”).
Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, “The Crucible,” gave communists the term “witch hunt” to use against anti-communists. Witches were imagined in Salem in 1692. Communists were real in 1953. They must have been victims of a Gaza style “genocide,” because their population has increased exponentially.
A film version of “The Crucible” was filmed in East Germany by DEFA (the East German state film company) in 1956, as the Communists were suppressing uprisings in Hungary and Poland. Miller approved. He also allowed “Death of a Salesman” to be performed in Communist China but opposed Israeli productions of his plays.
I hadn’t heard that story, but it is a perfect embodiment of the narcissistic politics of the Left.
Thank you for sharing it.
Thanks, I love to hate Steinbeck, Miller, Herrmann Hesse, and all the other leftist propaganda, I was forced fed at public school. I love to read about how awful those people were.
Thanks for the info! When I was young I was pressured by my worst enemy into reading Hesse, such as the “Bead Game”. It didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t know he was a leftist.
Leftist Politically Correct Jews who hate Israel are the kids who did not get to sit at the cool kids table in high school and they never got over it.
This is their chance to be cool.
What could be cooler than hating your people, your family, your country, your history, your heritage and ultimately yourself. It just shows how dedicated you are to your ideology.
The thing these Politically Correct Jews don’t get is that when the Jew Haters in the streets scream, “Gas the Jews!” they mean them also.
in the society of antisemites, what could be a better status symbol than antisemitism
This universalization of the Holocaust was obvious to me even back in 1970, when I visited the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam. I was appalled by the material on display referencing discrimination of other groups in places ranging from Tibet to Timbuktu, where Jews do not even exist and where there were no plans to annihilate entire peoples despite human rights abuses. The unique tragedy and horrors of the Holocaust were trivialized; the message of the museum reduced to a mockery. Again, this was over fifty years ago.
It got worse. In the 1990s, Yasser Arafat visited the Museum (while Palestinians were concurrently claiming Anne Frank’s diary was a forgery) for a photo op during a “State Visit” to the Netherlands. More recently, the Anne Frank House forced a Jewish employee to conceal or stop wearing a Magen David because it “triggered” Muslim visitors.
The two main ways to deny the Holocaust is to say that it did not happen or the numbers killed were much fewer and to trivialize it by saying everything is a holocaust.
The Anne Frank House is a ceaseless horror show of leftist virtue signaling and antisemitism.
The old adage, “There are two types of Jews — those who believe that Judaism is about social justice and those who know Hebrew”.
excellent
Hello Dr.Greenfield, and thank you for your review. And I am impressed that Frontpage has posted two reviews – yours and Dr.Goska’s – which have completely opposing viewpoints about his movie. I won’t be seeing it as I have tried to avoid the product of Hollywood for many years now, so I can’t take sides between the reviews.
But this resonates, as in the review you say: “But Glazer and ‘The Zone of Interest’ are not interested in history, especially Jewish history, but in indicting us, and making Americans and Jews into the new Nazis…”
Welcome to my world! My father was Polish, a para, who risked his life fighting against Hitler. The very moment the war was over he and his comrades in arms were no longer “our gallant allies, the Poles”, but were, on Stalin’s orders, re-defined as “fascist thugs” and barred from the Victory Parade. And we have been monstered and vilified by the most powerful media and academe in the world ever since. So, as a Polonian, I am, officially, Worse Than Hitler!!! Although, to be fair, who isn’t these days?
The English sent back their Polish fighter pilots. They knew damn well what would happen to them and didn’t care. Plenty room and need for them in post war Britain. Extraordinary bravery by the pilots. Some were executed right away.
The “Zone of Interest” sounded like trash to me
I’m amazed you watched it…you deserve a medal! I’ll never look at it myself…
I have not seen the movie and certainly do not intend to. Not because I read Greenfield’s article which I’m sure is right on the money. Because this dick Glazer said what he said to millions of people (most of whom are useful idiots). How dare he!
The fools who were there clapped like penguins including our famous Spielberg who also made sure to indict us Jews and Israel in his prize winning movie about the murders of Israeli athletes by arab terrorists during the olympics.
What both movies have in common, is that they do this inversion that Greenfield painstakingly explained, subliminally.
Sad to say that many left leaning, reform Jewish organizations in the West are often the first to give a thumbs up to movies like this one. Is it because they are too dumb to figure out the real message? Or is it because they are too busy looking for donations to help fund their high paid salaries to pay any attention to the movie’s message?
Reminds me of our woke, leftists in the West who try to promote their hatred for Jews and Israel by finding a self hating Jew to do their talking. Or promoting an antisemitic organization with the word Jewish or Israel in their org’s name (eg: Jewish Voices for Peace’)
No way would I watch it after what he said. Never a response from our side, is a big part of why America is at risk.
I agree that there are people (leftists) who have flipped the roles of perpetrators vs. victims. However, I can’t agree that the purpose of Glazer’s movie is to convince the viewers of this role reversal. Is it possible that the movie is merely showing us that many of us could do monstrous things if we were living in a horrible system? Compare the people in the movie to the torturers in the Milgram experiment. The movie should horrify the viewer, as did the results of the Milgram experiment.
No, we shouldn’t be horrified by the Milgram Experiment (“ME” below), because:
1. it has been discredited (dishonest in its methodology to prove what was wanted)
2. it was misconceived in the first place (leftist political bias)
In more detail:
1. A decade ago, researchers re-examining the ME were given access to Milgram’s archive. There, they found numerous statements by participants to say that they had seen through the experimental facade (faulty synchronization, evidence of apparatus used to perpetrate the illusion, etc.), and were prepared to follow orders simply because they knew they were not actually administering dangerous or lethal electric shocks. These statements had been excluded by Milgram from the published “results”, since they fatally undermined the project. The discovery of the suppressed statements was soon published in an appropriate academic journal, but the discrediting of the ME doesn’t seem to have seeped into public consciousness yet.
2. The motivation for the experiment came partly from Adorno’s “F-Scale” (“F” for “fascist”), which is a Marxist wish-list of characteristics displayed by middle-class people with stable families living in peaceable communities who regularly attend church/synagogue. All that is characteristic of such people is listed by Adorno as potential source of support for “fascism”. This is the same fraudulent and malevolent leftist thinking that Glazer displays, whether he knows directly of Adorno, or whether it was an indirect influence through the leftist milieu in which he moved.
To be scrupulously fair to Milgram, he wasn’t determined from the start to impose Adorno on the ME, but he spoke respectfully of the F-Scale and thought that it would be worth putting to empirical test. Since the F-Scale is politically-skewed in the most blatant way, the very fact that Milgram took it seriously is highly problematic.
I would agree with you AI, if it weren’t for Glazer’s “ani ma’amin” (statement of faith). Artists who explain their motivation in such unequivocal terms cannot be ignored when trying to understand the message behind their art. To make a film is to expose what’s in the soul.
But then again, viewers expose their own souls by what they see (or don’t see) in a film.