COMMENTARY
Jonathan Glazer, Liberal Jewish Prophet: He speaks the truth, and they will follow
Liel Leibovitz
May 2024

Oscar acceptance speeches are to culture what tax audits are to a small business: nasty, brutish, and somehow never short enough. And yet, when Jonathan Glazer took the stage at the 96th Academy Awards earlier this year to accept the statuette for Best International Film, he delivered the rare oration that was greater even than the movie he’d written and directed. In a few short and glorious sentences that have since launched a thousand think pieces, Jonathan Glazer told the truth. Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall Glazer’s fiery words. READ MORE

JNS Columbia University leaders grilled in House antisemitism hearing Columbia University’s president, its two board co-chairs and a co-chair of its antisemitism taskforce testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Wednesday about Jew-hatred on campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Student groups and professors celebrated Hamas’s attack and have since held antisemitic and anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia, which the U.S. Department of Education is investigating for potential civil-rights violations and which is the subject of a lawsuit alleging “virulently hostile” Jew-hatred. READ MORE

POLITICO ‘The Antisemitism Is Absolutely Disproportionate’ The fractious, sometimes violent debate over the Israel-Hamas war on college campuses has not cooled, even as the conflict enters its sixth month. College administrators have struggled to figure out the right balance between some students’ rights to free speech and others’ rights to be protected from discrimination and harassment. That debate erupted at UC Berkeley this week when a dinner for graduating students held at the home of law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky devolved into a heated confrontation when a Muslim student disrupted the event to make a pro-Palestinian speech and was physically confronted by Chemerinsky’s wife, Catherine Fisk. A fierce fight about freedom of speech — and accusations of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bias — quickly followed. READ MORE