Two weeks ago, the stark contrast between genuine activism and Hollywood’s superficial, low risk performative activism was on full display as protests outside the Dolby Theatre delayed the start of the 96th Academy Awards. Meanwhile, on the red carpet, high profile stars including Billie Eilish and Mark Ruffalo wore tiny “Artists4Ceasefire” pins that could easily be mistaken for the red circle stickers used for office inventory, while avoiding any mention of the ongoing crisis in Gaza during interviews by ABC reporters (who unsurprisingly did not ask about the pins). No words were uttered about Gaza until English director Jonathan Glazer took the stage to accept the award for Best International Feature for his remarkable film, The Zone of Interest. 

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst… 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 people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” The response from supporters of the occupation was unsurprising, especially considering how the words “refute our Jewishness” sound stripped completely from their context. 

Former Reagan speechwriter and current Commentary editor, John Podhoretz, tweeted, without a hint of irony, “By saying he refutes his Jewishness on the biggest stage in the world five months after the attack on Israel, Jonathan Glazer has instantly made himself into one of Judaism’s historical villains.” Abraham Foxman, who for almost thirty years served as the director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), posted “As a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his Jewishness. Shame on you,” 

The responses to Glazer's acceptance speech, including the failure to acknowledge his mention of Israeli victims in the October 7 Hamas attacks, reflect a binary mode of thinking that refuses to even consider the possibility that while Israel was founded by many survivors of genocide, it also has the capacity to perpetrate acts of ethnic cleansing. This mode of thinking suggests that because Jews have endured perhaps the longest and most concentrated form of discrimination in history, a Jewish state is immune to wrongdoing. It further equates criticism of that Jewish state with antisemitism, which effectively downplays the pervasiveness of antisemitism worldwide. 

In addition, these comments and others illustrate the Zionist objective to fundamentally separate the Holocaust from other genocides in human history, by taking umbrage with any equation or analogy with other mass murders of ethnic groups. In pursuing this agenda, they advance an understanding and teaching of the Holocaust centered not upon remembrance, but retraumatization. In her recent book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein aptly describes the difference, writing, “retraumatization is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us—and to stay in that state”. 

The narrative of retraumatization foregrounds the gruesome details of the Nazi genocide–the gas chambers, the torture, the unfathomable number Jewish victims–yet neglects to contextualize the Holocuast within the continuum of human history, however exceptionally horrific it was. It's a narrative that serves as an effective instrument in persuading Jews everywhere to endorse Zionism and to view the Palestinian cause as merely an extension of the same antisemitic hatred that birthed the Holocaust, rather than a struggle for self-determination. 

This plays right into a misreading of The Zone of Interest as a piece of filmmaking. Of course the film is a testament to the horrors that Jews faced in Nazi death camps–horrors industrial in scale depicted through a relentless soundscape of distant gunshots, screams, and grinding machinery, juxtaposed with Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family’s serene domestic life just outside Auschwitz’s walls. However, Glazer’s decision to limit the audience’s visual perspective to just that space outside the camp makes the sounds of terror emanating from inside the camp that much more visceral and immediate, because like all great historical films, The Zone of Interest speaks directly to the present. 

The cognitive dissonance exhibited by the Höss family is an invitation to examine our own detachment from the immense suffering happening in places like Gaza, evidence of which is just a scroll away on our screens. It is an overture to contemplate the illusion that consumer goods, like clothing, can be divorced from the exploitative conditions of their construction and acquisition. The scene where Mrs. Höss (Sandra Hüller) nonchalantly receives and tries on the fur coat and lipstick of a Jewish prisoner, reminiscent of a casual fitting room experience at Old Navy, echoes the absence of thought that goes into how the clothing we purchase gets into our hands. Just as the Höss family knows what is happening just beyond their property, we too cannot claim complete ignorance of the profound suffering that goes into the products we thoughtlessly consume–the beatings endured by women in the Bangladeshi garment factories that churn out fast fashion for us, the suicide nets that are a normal architectural feature of the factories in China producing our smart phones, the workers in countries like India and the Philipines who moderate the content we consume on social media, who are traumatized by the same ghastly, gruesome images that they protect us from are but a few examples of the dark underbelly of 21st century capitalism. Perhaps dissociation emerges as the only possible response to prevent ourselves from coming apart at the seams in the face of this knowledge. 

Even Rudolph Höss himself struggles to maintain this dissociation. In the final moments of The Zone of Interest, he finds himself at something akin to a Nazi office party in Berlin. Upon leaving the festivities, he is suddenly overcome by a powerful urge to vomit, his body's visceral response to the profound brutality of his actions. As he stumbles down the stairs, onto the next floor, he encounters a vision at the end of a cavernous hallway: the modern-day employees of Auschwitz, engaged in the mundane tasks of vacuuming, sweeping, and mopping—a museum dedicated to the victims of his genocidal crimes. At this moment, Höss's humanity briefly resurfaces. But seconds later, he has gathered himself and descends another level of stairs, further into the darkness.

The point of this is not to proclaim that we are no better than Rudolph Höss and his family, but rather to recognize that, in certain ways, most of us have the capacity to blindly ignore the horrors of the world, particularly when we are directly benefiting from them. It's a tendency often compartmentalized with language that disconnects us from reality, and effectively dehumanizes others. We see this theme depicted multiple times in The Zone of Interest as Höss is lauded for his breakthroughs in “KL practice” (KL meaning concentration camp), including circular burn chambers that can more effectively exterminate, speaking of the prisoners as if they are merely a household pest. He is described as a man who has a particular strength for “turning theory into practice”. The act of killing here is spoken of as if it were academic research. 

This same vein of disconnection is evident in the coverage of the war in Gaza by major U.S. news outlets. The deaths of the thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children killed are rendered in clinical terms such as “minors” or “people under 18”, in a seemingly deliberate attempt to avoid eliciting sympathy. Just this week, the New York Times published a piece about the two million Palestinians on the brink of famine with the headline, “How Gaza Civilians Have Fared After Israel Has Asked Them to Flee”, deliberately obscuring any Israeli government culpability for this catastrophe with clunky, passive language.

It’s the same sickening detachment found in Israel's relentless campaign to dehumanize Palestinians amidst their ongoing siege, describing Palestinians as ‘human animals' ', and frequently unloading unverified and sensationalist accusations against Hamas to justify the ongoing slaughter of civilians. Only through such dehumanizing propaganda can the forced starvation, mass killings, and societal destruction happening today in Gaza be rationalized, and it is not dissimilar from propaganda that normalized the Holocaust in the minds of German families like the Höss’.

What is so remarkable about The Zone of Interest as a film is its ability to present us with these complex questions, devoid of easy answers, which linger in our minds long after the credits roll. In one way it serves as something of a cinematic response to a query posed by Gillian Rose in her 1990 essay “The Future of Auschwitz”. After visiting the camp, Rose found that the horrors of the site were seen entirely through the “infinite pain of the victims”, and asked if Auschwitz could also find a way for visitors “to engage in intense self-questioning: ‘Could I have done this?’ Glazer’s film transcends the dominant narrative of retraumatization surrounding the Holocaust, urging us to examine our own complicity in the horrors that are unfolding across the globe today, whether they be in Gaza, Southeast Asia, or in our own communities. With his words at the Oscars, Glazer reminded us all of that imperative self-reflection.