Hollywood tore itself apart after this year’s Oscars ceremony following a Jewish director’s acceptance speech for a Holocaust film, in which he criticized Israel months into its war in Gaza.
The spat over Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” came alongside Jewish backlash to new diversity and inclusion standards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which had neglected to include Jews as an underrepresented Hollywood group.
Taken together, it might have portended a difficult Jewish year in Hollywood. Would the world of prestige cinema — with its top prize awarded by a body that recently had faced controversy for downplaying the role of Jews in the film industry’s founding — fail Jews in their time of need, like so many other cultural organizations had?
But there was a surprise at the multiplex this year. As antisemitism has spiked, debates about Israel have consumed cultural spaces and anxiety over inclusion has simmered, Jewish movies are actually having a moment.
“The Brutalist,” a historical epic about a Hungarian Jewish architect trying to succeed in postwar America, and “A Real Pain,” a modern-day dramedy about two Jewish cousins on a Holocaust tour through Poland, are two heavy favorites in this year’s Oscar race after racking up big festival prizes. The new Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” which includes a brief glimpse of a photo album showing the boy once known as Robert Zimmerman becoming a bar mitzvah, has earned raves for the performance of Jewish lead actor Timothée Chalamet and is expected to land well with mainstream audiences when it opens over Christmas.
Works focusing on Jewish clergy and religious life have also found success. This fall, “Between the Temples,” a low-budget neurotic comedy about a depressed cantor and his adult bat mitzvah student, was an indie box office hit, and Jewish supporting actress Carol Kane has become a dark-horse awards contender after a win at the New York Film Critics Circle. (Meanwhile, the small-screen romantic comedy “Nobody Wants This,” starring Adam Brody as a meme-worthy “hot rabbi” dating a non-Jewish woman, was one of the year’s most popular and buzzy TV shows.)
There’s a simple reason for these successes, entertainment industry professionals say: They’re good movies that people — both Jewish and not — want to see.
“I don’t think it’s exclusively because they are quote, unquote ‘Jewish stories,’” said Eric Kohn, a Jewish longtime film critic who currently works for a movie production company and as a programmer for a film center on Long Island. “I think it’s because they have other access points.”
And any echoes of the post-Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish experience are largely unintentional. With the exception of “A Complete Unknown,” all of this year’s big Jewish films — including “September 5,” a historical drama about the Israeli athlete hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics games — were shot before the Hamas attack and subsequent war.
In addition, not every filmmaker explicitly set out to make a project dealing with Jewish identity. While “A Real Pain” writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg and “Between the Temples” director Nathan Silver have been up-front about their interest in Judaism as a subject, “The Brutalist” director Brady Corbet and “September 5” director Tim Fehlbaum have said their films just happen to deal with Jews or Israelis, and that their central thematic interests lay elsewhere.
The movies bear that out: Kohn noted that they have additional draws beyond the fact of their Judaism. “The Brutalist” is as much the story of an uncompromising artist, and of the broader immigrant experience, as it is about Holocaust survivors. “A Real Pain,” starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, is more explicitly about Holocaust trauma. But, Kohn noted, “It’s also a buddy movie with the guy from ‘The Social Network’ and the guy from ‘Succession.’”
And a Bob Dylan movie has broad cultural resonance, particularly since the figure at its center doesn’t publicly embrace his Judaism as much as many other Jewish celebrities. Still, in a year like 2024, any Jewish inclusion — no matter how incidental — was welcomed by many.
“I liked the fact that they were movies about American Jews,” the Jewish film critic J. Hoberman, who writes frequently about Jews and cinema, said about most of the year’s Jewish offerings. “It was like a release, in a sense, to deal with the Diaspora rather than Israel.”
Another crucial element linking “The Brutalist,” “A Real Pain” and “Between the Temples”: They were all independent productions, financed and filmed outside of the major studios before being acquired by mid-size to large distributors after festival premieres. Hip indie distributor A24, Disney-owned label Searchlight Pictures and megastudio Sony wound up releasing those films, in that order; “September 5,” too, was independently financed before being acquired by Paramount.
As the Oscar campaigns for the Holocaust-themed selections ramp up, their distributors appear to be leaning into the movies’ universal themes, rather than their Jewish ones — a shift away from many successful Oscar campaigns for Holocaust movies of the last few decades, ranging from “Schindler’s List” to “The Pianist” and beyond, which often placed the horrors of the Holocaust in the center of their pitch to Oscar voters as an important part of bearing witness.
“The films that we’re talking about in the best picture conversation, they’re not presenting anything related to Jewish identity that might make a non-Jewish audience uncomfortable,” Kohn said.
In addition, few of the above films tackle the subject of Israel directly. Even “September 5,” which dramatizes the Munich hostage crisis at which 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered by Palestinian terrorists, does not center the Jewish or Israeli perspective, instead focusing on the TV sports journalists tasked with covering the tragedy.
