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‘Unimpeachable, irrefutable’: US playwright Tony Kushner praises Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech

The playwright and screenwriter, who was Oscar nominated last year for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, has backed The Zone of Interest director

“It’s always a great thing to say antisemitism is abhorrent,” he said, “[It] has a history of ignominy second to none, and if you play footsie with it, if you tolerate its existence, you’re going to be led into some terrible place, because fascism and authoritarianism are unbelievably dull movements every time they reorganise and recrudesce, and they will follow the same tropes over and over again. On Friday, Laszlo Nemes, who also won the foreign language Oscar for a film set in Auschwitz towards the end of the war, 2015’s Son of Saul, told the Guardian Glazer “should have stayed silent instead of revealing he has no understanding of history and the forces undoing civilisation, before or after the Holocaust ”. By Tuesday, some 700 additional names had signed the letter, which also took issue with Glazer’s “use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognised as a state by the United Nations, [which] distorts history”.

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