Get our free weekly electronic mail for all the newest cinematic information from our movie critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic electronic mail for freeWill & Grace star Debra Messing and Hostel director Eli Roth are among the many 450 Jewish creatives and Hollywood executives who’ve signed an open letter denouncing director Jonathan Glazer for the speech he gave at this yr’s Oscars.Glazer was accepting the Oscar for Greatest Worldwide Movie for The Zone of Curiosity, his film about an Auschwitz commandant and his spouse who attempt to construct a dream life subsequent to the camp.“Our movie exhibits the place dehumanisation leads at its worst,” Glazer stated. “Proper now, we stand right here as males who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to battle for thus many harmless folks – whether or not the victims of October the seventh in Israel or the continued assault on Gaza – all of the victims of this dehumanisation … how will we resist?”Now, his speech has been criticised in a press release signed by all kinds of Jewish folks working in Hollywood, together with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, Venom producer Amy Pascal and actor Jennifer Jason Leigh.Their assertion reads in full:“We’re Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.“We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the aim of drawing an ethical equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of individuals, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its personal extermination.Jonathan Glazer holding his Oscar for Greatest Worldwide Movie for ‘The Zone of Curiosity’ (AFP by way of Getty Pictures)“Each civilian loss of life in Gaza is tragic. However Israel is just not focusing on civilians. It’s focusing on Hamas. The second Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders is the second this heartbreaking struggle ends. This has been true for the reason that Hamas assaults of October seventh.“Using phrases like ‘occupation’ to explain an indigenous Jewish folks defending a homeland that dates again hundreds of years, and has been acknowledged as a state by the United Nations, distorts historical past.“It provides credence to the trendy blood libel that fuels a rising anti-Jewish hatred all over the world, in the US, and in Hollywood. The present local weather of rising antisemitism solely underscores the necessity for the Jewish State of Israel, a spot which is able to all the time take us in, as no state did in the course of the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s movie.”Final week Glazer’s speech was additionally condemned by The Holocaust Survivors’ Basis USA, which known as it “morally indefensible” and “disgraceful”.In an open letter posted on the inspiration’s web site, the group’s 94-year-old president, David Schaecter, wrote: “I watched in anguish Sunday night time once I heard you employ the platform of the Oscars ceremony [to] equate Hamas’s maniacal brutality in opposition to harmless Israelis with Israel’s tough however mandatory self-defense within the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.”Others have spoken out in assist of Glazer, with the Israeli army veterans’ organisation Breaking the Silence saying in a press release on X/Twitter: “[Glazer] took an unequivocal stance in opposition to the cynical utilisation of Judaism and the Holocaust within the identify of justifying the occupation … we refuse to simply accept the benefit with which the blood and lives of civilians is used as a justification for political ideologies, or as a bargaining chip. Empathy is just not a zero-sum sport.”In a five-star assessment of The Zone of Curiosity, The Impartial’s chief movie critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote that the movie “points a warning from simply exterior the partitions of Auschwitz, spreading its soul-sickness throughout every body”.