Hollywood's Holocaust-Industrial Complex

I just spent a week with my parents and each evening I selected a film for us all to watch.

The need to cater to differing tastes and find the overlapping spot in the Venn diagram meant that I kept the research frame fairly narrow. This resulted in recommendation websites spitting out lists largely comprised of historical dramas and thrillers. These lists were long, but one theme was overwhelmingly dominant: the Nazi holocaust.

It really was astonishing.

And when I say the Nazi holocaust, you probably know I’m not talking about the mass murder of half a million European Roma or Sinti people, or their resistance. You probably know I’m not talking about the three hundred thousand disabled people the Nazis gassed, starved of lethally injected to death, or their stories of survival. You know very well I’m talking about the death, survival, heroism and resistance of European Jews.

The sheer number of films the big studios have pumped out about Jews during the holocaust, or about Jews who survived the holocaust, and the varied stories they layer around these characters is quite incredible. And they cover all the thematic bases, from epic dramas to action-packed thrillers to musicals all the way through to comedies such as Jojo Rabbit.

It honestly feels like Hollywood has a decadal quota of holocaust-involved films and shows it has to fulfil. Looking at a list, there has been at least one big name, big budget holocaust production every year or two for the past at least fifty years, the latest being The Zone Of Interest and The Brutalist.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve watched and appreciated my fair share of holocaust-themed films in the past. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, The Pianist and Defiance with Daniel Craig are three that spring instantly to mind. I saw these films and the stories they told as cultural necessities. But after the last two years it is impossible for me to see films about the holocaust, and especially about Jewish resisters or survivors in the same light. I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever watch another holocaust-themed film again, especially if the story is centered around Jewish characters. Because after two years of a genocide committed by the Jewish state, I’ve stopped seeing these films as the warning they are sold as and instead see them as cultural propaganda whose intent is to create the social license for Israeli apartheid and genocide. Because if these films had been taken as the warnings they advertise themselves as, warnings about what the dehumanisation of an entire people enables, warnings about the ideological and practical evils that underpin a holocaust, we wouldn’t have seen another fucking holocaust.

The memory of the holocaust which has been seared into our brains since childhood through films and TV shows has been desecrated and turned to ash. I now see our holocaust education as a warped one, designed not to ensure we learn the lessons that can help us avoid another holocaust, but as a tragedy weaponised to facilitate Zionist apartheid and genocide.

And Hollywood’s holocaust industry is an essential component part of the soft power that helps legitimise these crimes against humanity, a soft power which buttresses Jewish supremacy. Zionism is the geopolitical outgrowth of that supremacy, and Zionists, from its leaders to its casuals, constantly bring up the holocaust as the reason why Israel must exist. The Jews were holocausted and this conferred on them the right to a homeland where they can be safe, so the argument goes. Every new Hollywood ‘must watch’ that depicts the suffering of the Jews under Nazism then, is, at this point, merely the scaffolding that allows Zionism to justify and pity-wash its crimes. Every new blockbuster that sees us following a sad or traumatised or heroic Jewish person is more cultural grist to the Zionist mill. The truth is that depicting Jews as perpetual victims or heroic warriors, depending on the story being told, has helped create the cultural cover for the Jewish state to apply their final solution against the Palestinians.

Yes some of these films are more obviously pro-Israel than others (Spielberg’s pro-Mossad thriller Munich or 2023’s Golda, directed by an Israeli with Helen Mirren, who lived on a kibbutz, playing Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir). Some of the directors and actors are more overt Zionists than others (only doing some research did I find out the director of Defiance, Edward Zwick, is a deranged Zionist who has said Israel could carry out a genocide if they wanted and the fact they don’t demonstrates “extraordinary restraint.”) But even where the Zionist angle isn’t overt, the implication that the genocide of the Jews was a special case that explains Zionism, justifies Israel and the special treatment afforded to Jews, lingers. Even Jonathan Glazer, the Zone Of Interest director who is widely seen as anti-Zionist because he used the word occupation in his Oscar’s speech, equated the attacks on October 7th with the genocide of Gaza, saying both are the result of ‘dehumanisation’. Can you dehumanise occupiers? Aren’t they just occupiers who can and should leave? If they don’t leave, isn’t your violence then driven by resistance rather than dehumanisation?

Most of the movies I’ve referenced so far are more recent, but Hollywood’s role in whitewashing ethnic cleansing and glorifying the creation of Israel goes back decades, traced well in this article in Jewish Currents. The writer points to Sword in the Desert from 1949, The Juggler from 1953, Exodus from 1960, and Cast a Giant Shadow from 1966 starring John Wayne, as all recounting Israel’s so-called ‘War of Independence’ in romantic terms. Palestinians and Arabs are portrayed as brutal and irrational, while Jewish settlers are uniformly portrayed as courageous and compassionate. These films were early soft power properties in service of Zionism, fully inverting the reality of European Jews as the violent settler-colonialists and Arabs as the reluctant resistors against dispossession and the theft of their ancestral lands.

And beyond their films, many of the biggest stars in Hollywood were and are ferociously committed Zionists. Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Vincent Price, and Frank Sinatra sponsored events and fundraisers in support of Israel. Sinatra was so deeply committed he helped the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah smuggle the equivalent of one million dollars out of the US and onto a ship in New York harbour, the money used to buy machine guns and small arms to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Marlon Brando spoke regularly at fundraising events for The Irgun, a Zionist group who were considered a terrorist organization by the US and Britain. In the modern era, Hollywood actors including Michael Douglas, Ashton Kutcher, Gerard Butler, Andy Garcia, Katharine McPhee, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger have helped raised money for Friends of the IDF via their annual Beverly Hills gala.

Gerard Butler with IDF soldiers at an IDF fundraising gala in LA

A long list of actors including Jojo Rabbit director Taika Waititi and liberal anti-Trump hero Mark Hammill signed a letter in support of Israel after October 7th, a letter which completely flattened Israel’s history as a violent, settler colonial state.

This hard and soft power peddling by the Hollywood elite on behalf of genocidal Zionism goes back seventy years and is unlikely to stop anytime soon. There’s a new biblical historical drama on Prime called House of David which is designed to imply Israel, a 70-year old settler colony actually has ancient roots. It is directed by a Christian Zionist called Jon Erwin and stars Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer who was given her big Hollywood break by Spielberg in Munich. Another film you’ll be hearing about soon is Scarlett’s Johansson’s directorial debut Eleanor The Great. Dramatising the lives of aging Jewish holocaust survivors in the US it ‘covers themes such as Jewish identity and grief.’ Of course it does. Johansson, among many other Jews in Hollywood, has not signed the open letter by other Hollywood and global actors and filmmakers pledging to boycott the Israeli film industry.

This conveyer belt of holocaust films and TV shows speaks to an insight from Italian historian Enzo Traverso who said last year that in the west the holocaust has become a ‘civil religion’ that may once have had useful civic features but has been ‘perverted’ by the west’s unconditional support for Israel. Someone, I forget who, has, in a similar critique, called the holocaust a ‘secular liturgy of remembering’ to absolve liberalism of its sins.

Hollywood films and TV shows are vital component pieces of the holocaust as ritualised civil religion, a religion which, because it tends to be wrapped up in hero stories about the defeat of the Nazis, encourages zero self-reflection by western audiences: we saved the Jews, we defeated evil, and this made us the good guys in perpetuity. Hitler has become the forever balm, the permanent defence against the charge that western liberalism is anything other than a virtuous, valourous ideology.

The over-representation of the Nazi holocaust in Hollywood, in comparison with other genocides and campaigns of mass death, also underscores another central truth: Hitler is seen as a unique evil because he brought the tools, methods and tactics of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism back home to Europe. The millions killed by the Nazis were killed in Europe, by Europeans. This wasn't supposed to happen. White Europeans were supposed to confine their genocides and brutality to Africans, Asians and native Americans. Concentrations camps were for Indians and the indigenous. But to depict these events in film, many of which we have extremely strong documentary evidence of, especially in the case of the British in India and Africa, makes us the bad guys. Better to make out there was one evil white European guy in all of history who transgressed against our supposed values, who we immediately confronted, defeated, and move on.

Never mind that Hitler looked to the settlement of the American west and the genocide of native Americas as the blueprint for Lebensraum.

Never mind that Israel is a settler-colonial project in the shape, spirit and long history of European settler-colonial projects.

Never mind that concentration camps were integral to the ethnic cleansing programmes carried out by mythical European heroes like Winston Churchill.

Never mind that Europeans like Yitzhak Shamir, a Pole and Israel’s seventh prime minister offered a deal to Hitler and Mussolini: we’ll open a front against the British to help you conquer the Middle East if you recognise a Jewish state in Palestine and expel Jews from Europe.

Never mind the Nakba.

Never mind the Gaza genocide.

Never mind the other genocides.

Never mind reality.

From Scarlet to Sinatra, Zionism has been promoted by Hollywood and absorbed via osmosis into the marrow of the culture.

Hollywood’s holocaust industrial-complex was clearly not intended to warn us about evil, because in Gaza evil flourished.

And it was clearly not intended to stop another holocaust, because another one happened.

So when you next watch a movie about the Nazi holocaust, its Jewish victims or survivors, remind yourself that at this point it’s probably just Zionist propaganda.