DUBAI: More than 450 Hollywood professionals have slammed “The Zone of Interest” writer-director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the 2024 Academy Awards, in an open letter published by Variety. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @arabnews.lifestyle While accepting the award for best international feature, Glazer connected his Holocaust film with the attack on Gaza and said: “Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. “Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?” In the open letter, movie industry figures said: “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose 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.” US actors Debra Messing, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julianna Margulies, and Brett Gelman, director Eli Roth, writer Amy Sherman-Palladino, and producer Amy Pascal were some of the Hollywood stars who signed, as did many other creatives, executives, and Hollywood professionals. The letter added: “The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. “It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood. “The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish state of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film.”