It’s good that Jewish stories are being given a hearing, but when it comes to showing solidarity with the hostages why are so few Jewish actors prepared to stand up and be counted?
January 31, 2025 17:38
The Oscars ceremony last year proved to be a bittersweet occasion. British Jew Jonathan Glaser picked up an Academy Award for his Auschwitz film The Zone of Interest and used the occasion to say he wanted to “refute” his Jewishness and said the Holocaust was being “hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people”.
What are we likely to be in for this year?
Three overtly Jewish films are in the running for the hottest category of the night – Best Picture. The Brutalist and A Real Pain are both brilliant post Holocaust stories and should be seen as complementing each other. Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown – about a Jew, starring a Jew – is also running for the top award.
I was at a special screening for The Brutalist in London in which the film’s actors came on stage and I couldn’t help wondering what lead actor Adrien Brody, whose father is Jewish, must think of his Australian co-star Guy Pearce, who was wearing a “Free Palestine” badge that evening and has been vocal in his anti-Israel rhetoric. Both are up for acting awards. There are several ironies in Pearce’s actions for me. In The Brutalist he stars as an antisemite who thinks he’s a good person. The film is one of the biggest arguments on film I have ever seen for Zionism. Even in America these Holocaust survivors struggle to fit in.
And even as these stories are told – of the enduring nature of antisemitism, of living in the shadow the Holocaust – another irony is that so few Jewish actors wear a yellow ribbon for the hostages. Are they too scared?
Yet, the nominations can be seen as a win for Jewish talent. Among the Jewish stars up for gongs, as well as Timothee Chalamet for A Complete Unknown there is Jesse Eisenberg in the screenwriting category for his audacious dark comedy A Real Pain about survivors’s descendants on a concentration camp tour. Eisenberg also stars in and directed the film.
Jesse Eisenberg is nominated in the Original Screenplay category for A Real PainGetty Images for BFI
The film September 5, about the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, is also up for an original screenplay gong while another nomination has gone to No Other Land, which is seen as an anti-Israel tract about the occupation of the West Bank, and is a co-production between Jewish Israeli and Palestinian film-makers.
Jewish musicians nominated include Brit Daniel Blumberg for The Brutalist score and Stephen Schwartz for the soundtrack of Wicked.
Hollywood was founded by brilliant Jews who set up an entirely new industry in this Los Angeles backwater.
While Jews around the world – particularly in the arts – are struggling, it is good to see that there is at least one place where our stories are still being given a hearing. Long may that continue.
