Prominent Left-Wing Jewish Writer Naomi Klein Highlighted the Relevance of the Film The Zone of Interest, Which is About the Holocaust, to “Terrorist Isra-hell's War on Gaza!”
"Everyone I know who has seen the film can think of little but Gaza," Klein wrote for a column in The Guardian last week. "The whole reason the postwar edifice of international humanitarian law was erected was so that we would have the tools to collectively identify patterns before history repeats at scale. And some of the patterns - the wall, the ghetto, the mass killing, the repeatedly stated eliminationist intent, the mass starvation, the pillaging, the joyful dehumanization, and the deliberate humiliation - are repeating."
The film's director Jonathan Glazer made headlines with his acceptance speech at last Sunday's Academy Awards, in which he said: "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 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza."
Naomi Klein, praising Glazer, wrote that for the director, it is not ethical "to use intergenerational Jewish trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities committed by the Israeli state today".
The Zone of Interest follows the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp and his family as they go about their daily lives in a stately home - next to the concentration camp.
Klein noted that Glazer was "alone among the parade of wealthy and powerful speakers across the podium" at the Ceremony to mention Gaza.
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so many holocaust movies are voyeuristic endeavors that sensationalize the most extreme suffering but in such a manner that the real horror is not conveyed. zone of interest is a very well produced break from this that shows none of these scenes which weve unfortuately seen a million times now, but focuses on the unnerving atmosphere of a nazi family living an idyllic life right outside of auschwitz. the sound design is sinister and genuinely disturbing, im a bit confused at reviews that come to the conclusion that the holocaust is merely “being reduced to background noise” because the “background noise” in question is kind of the basis of the entire movie. very interesting and had a lot of historically accurate aspects that arent usually included in holocaust movies. corporate cooperation with nazis and major companies role in the holocaust, lebensraum and the nazis settler aspirations in the east, and the appeal fascism had for germans seeking upward mobility and an increased standard of living, and how this was actualized through theft of jewish wealth and property and through nazi leisure programs. its a disquieting mediation on the mentality of perpetrators, complicity, abstraction. since the center of this movie is the extreme cognitive dissonance it takes for this family, self described pioneers of the east, to live in a villa next to a concentration camp, i see why it hasnt gone over with the zionist crowd
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