Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Michel Hazanavicius has voiced his fears over rising antisemitism in a heart-felt opinion piece in France’s Le Monde newspaper.
The French-born director is descended from Jewish grandparents who fled persecution in Lithuania and Poland in the 1920s, making a new life in France, to then find themselves on the run again during World War Two.
The director – whose black and white silent movie The Artist won five Oscars in 2012 – has said in the past that he was raised in a family that identified as Jewish but was not religious.
In his opinion piece, Hazanavicius said that until recently his Jewishness had been just one aspect of his identity, to which he did not give much thought, but this was now changing.
“Why, for some time, do I, who am Jewish among other things, who has never really given a damn, have the impression of being more and more obliged to be Jewish? To react as a Jew, to think as a Jew, basically to be Jewish above all,” he wrote.
The opinion piece comes amid a sharp rise in the number of recorded antisemitic incidents in Europe and North America, in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
The terror attacks on farming communities, a rave and military posts in southern Israel left more than 1,100 dead and another 200 people being taken hostage.
Israel’s subsequent military action in Gaza aimed at wiping out of Hamas and getting back the hostages, has resulted in a death-toll of more 39,000 according to Gaza health authorities.
Hazanavicius wrote he had the impression of going from being a member of “a minority” to being a member of a “dominant caste”, seen as “a figurehead of oppression, of imperialism and injustice?”
He said it was as if being “Jewish had become something really murky, vaguely suspect, possibly detestable”, asking: “How could I have become so evil in such a short time?”
Hazanavicius also questioned why Israelis and Jewish people were automatically associated with the actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has opted for the tough military response in the face of protests at home and demands from the families of the hostages to make a deal.
“Why, when we put Netanyahu on trial, do I too often hear the trial of Israel, or even the trial of the Jews, instead of simply putting the extreme right on trial, even if it were Israeli? And, also, why couldn’t a Jewish asshole just be an asshole? Why does every Jew who says or does something stupid have to take all his people with him? Why do I feel like, for a while now, Jews are the coolest enemies to hate? Much cooler than the Russians or the Chinese, for example.”
Hazanavicius, whose diverse filmography also spans comedies such as OSS 117: Cairo Nest Of Spies, Jean-Luc Godard biopic Redoubtable and the zombie picture Final Cut, is gearing up for the release later this year of The Most Precious Of Cargoes, his first film directly tackling the consequences of antisemitism.
The somber animated feature – adapted from Jean-Claude Grumberg’s 2019 novel – follows the fate of a baby found by a childless, Polish peasant woman after been thrown from an Auschwitz-bound train by her desperate father.
In the face of opposition from her husband, deadly local prejudices and the vicissitudes of war, she fiercely defends and raises the child driven by love. Hazanavicius began working on the film more than two years ago.
The director said in his opinion piece that he felt like there was growing reticence about talking about the Holocaust, saying he feared its trivialization would open the door to more antisemitism.
“Why do I have the impression that when we have succeeded in making the Jewish genocide an event like any other, or a very exaggerated event, or even an event too often exploited by the Jews themselves to justify their power, then the anti-Jewish hatred will be able to flourish in complete peace, in quiet serenity?
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