Nearly 500 Hollywood celebrities signed an open letter to protest director Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars acceptance speech.
Some of the A-listers who added their names to the letter include stars Debra Messing, Eli Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Julianna Margulies. The document, which was published by Variety on Monday, accuses Glazer of likening Israel’s response to the Hamas terrorist attack to the actions of Nazis during World War II.
“We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of 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,” the letter said in part.
“Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic. Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas. The moment Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders is the moment this heartbreaking war ends. This has been true since the Hamas attacks of October 7th,” the letter goes on.
“The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history.”
The celebrities also accuse Glazer of giving “credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood.”
“The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film,” the letter states.
Glazer, who is British, won the Academy Award for Best International Feature for his film “Zone of Interest,” a historical drama about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss living with his family next to the concentration camp.
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“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst,” the director said during his speech.
He continued, “It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
Glazer’s speech has received a lot of criticism since the Oscars on March 10. A 94-year-old Holocaust survivor previously slammed the speech, calling it “actually inaccurate and morally indefensible,” as The Daily Wire previously reported.