Richard Trank
The Hollywood Reporter, Mar. 13, 2024
“Jonathan Glazer took the stage and gave a speech that to many ears, including mine, equated Israel with the Nazi death machine his film was about.”
Twenty-six years ago, I had the great fortune to stand on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium and accept the Oscar for best feature documentary during the 70th Academy Awards. It was for the The Long Way Home, a very personal story as it recounted what many of my relatives and hundreds of thousands of Jews endured after the Holocaust, forced to live in Displaced Persons camps while the British government kept them from emigrating to what was soon to become the state of Israel. Others who were trying to make their way to the United States and other places were stymied by strict immigration laws that kept them in the DP camps, many located in the same Nazi death camps where they had supposedly been “liberated” at World War II’s end. They were the fortunate ones. More than 50 members of my family, including my grandparents and my youngest uncle, perished at the hands of the Nazis.
Eventually, my family and others made new lives for themselves after Israel was declared a state in 1948. They raised children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Then, 75 years later, the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Shoah was committed when Hamas terrorists breached the southern border of the country, murdered more than 1,200 people, sexually assaulted women and children, and kidnapped more than 240. Toward the end of October, the Israeli army attacked Hamas in Gaza, determined to wipe it out forever so that an atrocity like this will never happen again.
In the subsequent months, we have watched pro-Hamas and anti-Israel forces unleash a campaign of worldwide antisemitism the likes of which has not been seen since the Nazi era. Synagogues, schools, Holocaust museums, as well as other Jewish institutions and businesses, have been attacked and vandalized. … [To read the full article, click here]