Over 150 Jewish Hollywood professionals, including Joaquin Phoenix, Joel Coen and Ilana Glazer, have supported English film director Jonathan Glazer after he received backlash for a pro-Palestine speech delivered after winning the Best International Feature at the 2024 Oscars.

“[We are] alarmed to see some of our colleagues in the industry mischaracterize and denounce his remarks,” the signatories wrote in an open letter published today, Friday.

“Their attacks on Glazer are a dangerous distraction from Israel’s escalating military campaign which has already killed over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza and brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation,” the letter says.

Glazer, in his acceptance speech, refuted his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people” in the Gaza Strip.

Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned his remarks and hundreds of Jewish Hollywood figures accused him of “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination”.

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