A year ago, I woke up to the disturbing news that came out of Israel that, 50 years and a day after the outbreak of the Six-Day War, the country came under attack once again. This time, not by a nation, but an ideology.
I’d like to say I was as mortified and activated as some of my dear friends were, but I’d be disingenous if I alleged that. I have no family ties to Israel as these friends do, nor have I always had the most ideal relationship with Judaism per se. In fact, I’ve never set food in the country, and at this rate, I’m not so sure I ever will. Certainly, not while the current situation, frustratingly appearing like it will go on at least until our election results are certified (and who knows when that will be?), is ongoing.
I do know I sympathize with those who have much stronger opinions on both sides, which probably makes me a target on either end. And I know that my dear friends would absolutely love if I were to side with them as to where they land because it means that much to them. Some are even willing to cast a vote for someone they personally abhor because of how they believe their presence will impact their desired result. And I also know some of them would love even more if I took a stand as I am want to do in these musings in the hopes of swaying even a scant few of you to their viewpoint.
I consume quite a bit of information and listen to a host of podcasts that allow each side to raise their points. Most of them are ultimately biased, and as the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks neared those skews and the urgency each side attempted to convey became more polarized and impassioned as ever. I hear the despair, I empathize with the pain the express in worrying about their loved ones, or even simply other human beings.
I wish I had the mindset to pick a side, but, honestly, I see flaws with each side’s logic. Much as I still am as to who will get my vote, I am reluctant to throw unilateral support behind either wing of Israeli ideology or completely dismiss the concerns of clearly non-terrorist supporting Gazans. I offer no defense other than I’m a conflicted human with more pressing priorities.
But I do know it’s important for all of us to be informed, particularly when these issues hit closer to home. Which is why I’m so glad that THE ANKLER’s Peter Kiefer authored this seminal piece on Friday entitled One Year Later: Jewish Hollywood Still Feels Abandoned. Kiefer has taken one of the deepest and most even-handed dives I’ve yet to come across at identifying the issues, concerns and impact this has had on both the prominent and obscure. It’s hidden behind a paywall, but I felt it was both important and timely enough to share with you on a day like this. If Richard Rushfield wants to come after me for denying him a handful of subscriptions, I defy him to do so. Maybe that might finally prompt a response from him and his team to my many requests to meet.
It’s admittedly lengthy but it’s definitely worth your while. It provoked many emotions in me, and I suspect you may experience something similar. Who knows, it might prompt y0u to make a decision, including the possibility of subscribing to THE ANKLER yourself. If so, please let them know I had something to do with it. I’ll at least feel a tad less conflicted on this issue.
Until next time…
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What if someone told you that in the past six weeks a petition has been circulating demanding an end to discrimination against Palestinian performers, and its signatories included Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon and Susan Sarandon? Or that a top talent agent had posted an incendiary comment on WhatsApp about the prosecution of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, causing an Academy Award-winning client to drop the agency? How about the story of the walls of the Academy Museum being briefly hijacked by a pro-Palestinian art collective calling for a ceasefire? Or a beloved Brentwood bookstore being forced to close early after protests broke out over the sale of an academic book that attempts to explain Hamas?
These events — all of which took place since late August — echo ones from the fall of 2023, so much so that you’d be forgiven for thinking that you were experiencing déjà vu. “I’m shocked that we’re still having the same conversations,” says UTA vice chairman Jay Sures. “I wish we could be talking about the facts of October 7th, but the politicization of this topic has been the most challenging impediment to making real progress.”
For the past few months, with the first anniversary of Oct. 7 looming, and conflict in the Middle East widening, I set out to get a sense of how prominent Jews in the industry are processing the past 12 months. I interviewed a broad swath of professionals, including agents, writers, and executives, along with guild officials, publicists and lawyers — not all of who are necessarily in line with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But many remain disturbed by the lack of empathy from others in the industry about how it feels to see a Jewish nation-state under attack as well as the rise of antisemitism.
It is the sort of raw wound that feels uniquely local to Hollywood, in its own ways a small town in a big city, where relationships more than anything matter.
The controversies mentioned at the top — the petition, WME agent Brandt Joel’s “Screw the left kill all” WhatsApp message, the Brentwood Country Mart’s Diesel Bookstore and a high school employee targeted for the store carrying the book Understanding Hamas and Why that Matters — all took place after my reporting began.
But they certainly offer a high-level answer to my initial question about whether passions have cooled, and if conversations have been able to move out of WhatsApp groups and out into public.
I made it clear at the outset of each conversation that this was not about litigating who is right. Rather, my goal was to identify what was revealed about this industry that we did not know before Oct. 7.
For many, the uncomfortable truth is that “antisemitism is written in invisible ink,” even in a place supposedly engineered as a safe space for Jews. “We have to have a reset and realize that this is not a political issue. It has to do with the worst and ugliest forms of antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate since the Holocaust. Period. End of story,” Sures tells me.
Last year, Sures who is also a member of the University of California system’s Board of Regents, was on the receiving end of death threats after he wrote a letter condemning a statement issued by a faculty group called the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council which he says contained falsehoods including that Israel was committing “genocide” and that Hamas wasn’t a “terrorist” organization.
For others in the larger community it was the hypocrisy of an industry that has long presented itself as a bastion of creative freedom and free expression that now feels anything but. “The immediate reaction to October 7, whether you are pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, wasn’t anything humanitarian,” laments the writer Alex O’Keefe (The Bear), noting how Sarandon was dropped by UTA after comments she made at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York and the actress Melissa Barrera was fired from Scream over social media posts she’d shared to Instagram that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. “It was, how do we destroy the careers of people we disagree with?”
Hollywood Jews, needless to say, are far from monolithic in their feelings about the moment (exhibit A: the leaks about agent Brandt out of his own WhatsApp group). An Oscar acceptance speech from Jonathan Glazer outraged many when, after The Zone of Interest won best international feature film, he said from the stage, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.”
More than 1,000 actors, creatives and executives signed a letter accusing Glazer of supporting the “modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world.” A second open letter, however, followed, signed by Joaquin Phoenix, Joel Coen and Todd Haynes, in support of the director: “We are proud Jews who denounce the weaponization of Jewish identity and the memory of the Holocaust to justify what many experts in international law, including leading Holocaust scholars, have identified as a ‘genocide in the making,’ We reject the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom.”
When Hamas launched its early morning attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — resulting in the massacre of almost 1,200 people across 21 Israeli communities and the kidnapping of hundreds more — Hollywood was already on the verge of a nervous breakdown. One long, crippling strike just resolved, another ongoing. Physical altercations had been breaking out at picket lines, and the local economy had been hammered with a $6.5 billion economic loss as well as tens of thousands of jobs.
It was at this precise moment of distrust, heightened tension and frayed nerves that Oct. 7 hit dry tinder like a torch. L.A. is home to the second-largest Jewish community in the United States and the third-largest Arab American population, not to mention an industry never shy about expressing its political views. With so many divisions still fresh, here was another fault line — and this one, on top of everything else, opened up and swallowed Hollywood.
The road to this moment started well before Oct. 7, 2023. Many people tell me how acutely they’d been taking note of increased instances of antisemitism over the past few years. They cite the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which started in 2005, one year after the U.N.’s International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that “Israel’s building of a barrier in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal” and which has gained more mainstream support over the years. BDS seeks to pressure both global and Israeli businesses believed to be profiting from Israel’s actions vis-a-vis Palestinians, including its occupation of the West Bank and ongoing building of settlements (the forced seizure of land and property by Israeli citizens from Palestinians). The United Nations’ top court deemed the occupation illegal in July of this year. Last month, the U.N. General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution demanding that Israel end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within 12 months. Events as varied as Eurovision and the Paris Olympics have experienced anti-Israel protests in the wake of a death toll in Gaza that now stands at 41,000. (To date, 97 hostages remain in captivity by Hamas in Gaza.)
“What it comes down to is an acknowledgment of the Jewish story and that we have a right to our own narrative,” says a prominent television writer. The BDS movement feels threatening to supporters of Israel as an existential threat because it recasts the desire for a post-Holocaust Jewish homeland as apartheid or settler colonialism. “Nobody likes it when their story gets taken away from them and whenever people say that’s not antisemitism, it’s like, well, you don’t know what that is if you’re not Jewish. You don’t get to define that.”
Then there were the specific Trump-era incidents. Specifically, the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which torch-wielding white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us!” Then, a little more than a year later, the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11 people and wounded six. Or Trump’s meeting with renowned antisemite Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. Even more recently, this year, Tucker Carlson interviewed and endorsed a Holocaust denier on his new show on Elon Musk’s X.
Last month, the FBI released data showing that incidents of anti-Jewish hate crimes were up 63 percent over 2022, to 1,832, the highest total since the bureau started tracking in 1991.
Further complicating matters is the precedent the industry set by Hollywood earlier weighing in on cultural and geopolitical events. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, all the major Hollywood guilds quickly issued statements and almost every media company went to great lengths to show support. Disney and ViacomCBS both donated $5 million to a variety of nonprofits that “advance social justice.” Amazon donated $10 million. Warner Bros. Discovery signed an overall deal with Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors. And Comcast unveiled a three-year, $100 million plan to distribute $75 million in cash and $25 million in advertising time to “fight injustice and inequality against any race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation or ability.”
Perhaps the biggest legacy from 2020’s racial reckoning was the increased demand for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments inside every company, along with C-suite DEI officers. (Many of those departments have since been dismantled.)
But in Hollywood’s blossoming interest in DEI, “Jews didn’t register,” says Ari Ingel, director of Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit made up of entertainers committed to fighting rising antisemitism and organizing support to stop what it calls “the cultural boycott” of Israel. “Unfortunately, no one on these DEI teams had any training in antisemitism and how it works. They didn’t understand that it was rising before Oct. 7 and then after [the attacks], these DEI teams are like, What you are talking about? There’s nothing to see here. They weren’t equipped or educated enough to deal with any of these issues, and that’s why you saw such a slow response from these companies.”
For assimilated Jews in Hollywood, the response reminded them that, in the aftermath of Oct. 7, “You’re Jewish first and American second.” (Granted, George Floyd happened in America, whose racial discrimination against Black Americans traces its roots back to slavery; the Israeli-Hamas conflict was more than 7,000 miles away from Los Angeles on foreign soil, abstract to many not personally attached to Israel.)
Still, these feelings manifested among many Jews in the realization that the support and sympathy they had hoped to receive from industry peers — especially from members of other marginalized communities — fell short. Their pain was no one else’s.
“Every single Jew I know feels like they don’t have allies,” says Saba Soomekh, director of training and education of the American Jewish Committee. “Especially after supporting other minority communities, and that’s led to a lot of Jewish trauma.”
Days after the Oct. 7 attacks, Mike Seid headed to LAX and boarded an El Al flight bound for Tel Aviv. At the time, the author and screenwriter was developing a show for a major streamer and was under contract to write a feature for a small production company. But those jobs would have to wait.
For the next several months, the 47-year-old Santa Monica native who was Bar Mitzvahed at Chabad synagogue, became accustomed to the sounds of sirens warning of incoming rocket attacks as he volunteered to make and distribute food to soldiers and then worked at various farms that had lost most of their manpower due to a surge in young Israelis enlisting in the IDF.
During those months, Seid had a unique vantage point from which to observe how his hometown and the industry he had worked in for two decades was processing the events taking place right outside his apartment complex. It inspired him to put his screenwriting on pause, opting instead to devote his time to working on a book about Judaism that he says will be a mix of history and memoir.
“The best way I can explain it is that there was an awkward, sudden and violent reconnection with history that many American Jews thought had been superseded by generations of integration — that was one of the things that was so jarring,” says Seid, speaking to me from Tel Aviv, where he had just returned to be there in time to commemorate the first anniversary of Oct. 7. “Nowhere was that felt more dramatically than in Hollywood. Because Jews who work in Hollywood— this generation and the previous one — are even more distantly divested from that history than almost anyone else. Suddenly we were forced to ask ourselves, What am I? What is my relationship with all of this? We had to re-enter this history from which we had absented ourselves.”
Over the past year, much of the country — high schools and academia, Fortune 500 companies and municipal governments — have been swept up in thorny debates regarding Oct. 7. Must one’s support for Israel’s war effort be unequivocable even as tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians are being killed? Is there such a thing as an equal and just response to an unprovoked terrorist attack from a group like Hamas, which has vowed to do it again? Where does legitimate criticism of Israel end and actual antisemitism begin?
Due to Hollywood’s history of political activism and its ties to Israel, the industry has been particularly tortured by these questions.
For many Jews working in the entertainment industry, the message — whether real or perceived — was delivered, and they’re responding by closing ranks.
Across Hollywood, there have been several ways in which this awakening has taken hold.
“I’ve given up on expecting anything from our peers,” one publicist tells me. “The industry was built on the diaspora of the Jews, and it literally fell silent after Oct. 7th. Everything we knew about our place in Hollywood came crashing down. We were blindsided.”
People who feel like this publicist are seeking each other out in fellowship. Employees at WME formed a Jewish affinity group, joining existing ones at Disney and Netflix. Notably, for the first time in the WGA’s 90-year history, members created a Jewish writers committee within it. The WGA’s Jewish committee held its first meeting in February and has held four since. One member I spoke to described it as a space to congregate and discuss issues like spotting antisemitism. It’s also an opportunity for young Jewish writers to meet mentors.
This source mentioned that there has been frustration with the amount of red tape that the WGA imposes on these committees, specifically noting challenges in getting speakers approved by guild staff. “It’s brought a lot of Jewish writers out from the cold and brought us together,” says this source. “At the very least it has offered safe harbor.”
One of the Jewish writers meetings included a field trip to visit the Nova Exhibit in L.A.’s Culver City. The interactive memorial is dedicated to the music festival that was attacked on Oct. 7, resulting in the killing of at least 360 attendees with dozens more taken hostage. It first opened in Tel Aviv last December, came to New York in April and debuted in Culver City on Aug. 17. The haunting exhibit aims to recreate the war-torn scene of the festival grounds moments after the attack.
The exhibit space has also doubled as a venue for a variety of events commemorating Oct. 7. WME held a Shabbat dinner there on Sept. 20 with a mix of industry figures like Marc Platt and Usher as well as elected officials including U.S. Senator Alex Padilla and California Rep. Adam Schiff. A week earlier, Sherry Lansing, Jody Gerson, and Amazon’s Sue Kroll attended the exhibit. Also on hand was CAA’s Maha Dakhil.
But even the exhibit has not offered the full sanctuary Jewish attendees have been seeking. In recent weeks, residents of Culver City have noticed a dramatic uptick in the amount of private security circulating in their neighborhood.
Israelism is an 85-minute documentary that offers a critical look at the American Jewish relationship to Israel, as told through the eyes of two millennial Jews whose uncritical backing of their spiritual homeland is challenged as they learn more about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The film, which was first screened in the U.S. in early 2023 — at a time when Israel was being roiled by huge weekly protests after Netanyahu proposed a law that would reshape the country’s judicial system. Demonstrators demanded that Netanyahu resign. The events of Oct. 7 would reset the narrative for Israelis and Israelism.
I wanted to talk to co-director Erin Axelman about Hollywood’s response to Glazer’s Oscars speech. Glazer has yet to respond to the controversy and a spokesperson declined to comment, but Axelman, who has faced his own blowback over his low-budget film, was more than happy to come to Glazer’s defense.
“They weren’t attacking the content of Glazer’s speech,” Axelman tells me, “they were smearing him with antisemitism and that type of attack is lazy and sad. But it’s also incredibly dangerous because it makes people not take antisemitism as seriously. It cheapens the word.”
Despite Israelism facing resistance and rejection as Axelman sought to screen the movie at colleges, including several encampments during the campus protests last spring, it ultimately has been shown at more than 100 schools, and Alana Hadid’s Watermelon Pictures agreed to distribute it digitally this spring. After Israelism debuted on VOD in June, it ranked as the number-one documentary on Apple and remained in the top 10 for several months.
Axelman chalks up the doc’s success to its appeal to a younger demographic — millennials and Gen Z — who are more sympathetic to Palestine, as polls have shown. “There’s a lot of reticence in criticizing Israel, which is a tragedy because antisemitism is a real thing. But when someone calls you an antisemite, it can ruin your career, so non-Jews are afraid,” says Axelman. “Within the Jewish community, not only are you called a self-hating Jew but you risk being isolated from your community, so it’s very terrifying for any Jews to criticize Israel.”
Ever since Showtime’s breakout hit Homeland, based on the Israeli series Prisoners of War, Israel has been a reliable pipeline of shows and formats for U.S. audiences. Many of those series have centered around Israel’s ongoing conflicts with its Arab neighbors, and now Hollywood’s tensions are spreading to what they’re willing to air.
I recently learned that the creators of the hit Netflix show Fauda, which centers on a team of Mossad agents (Israel’s CIA), were forced to “reconceive” some storylines in season five because of the war. In an extreme case of art imitating reality, Idan Amedi, an actor on Fauda, was wounded during fighting in the Gaza Strip where he was deployed as a reservist with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
This dovetails with reporting in May by The Times of Israel that Apple and Israel’s public broadcaster Kan had agreed to delay the release of the third season of Tehran on account of the ongoing war in Gaza. The award-winning show also centers on a Mossad agent, this one based in Iran, and it was the first non-English-language series released on Apple TV+.
Adam Berkowitz, who runs management company Lenore Entertainment Group and has worked closely with Israeli producers and broadcasters, shared over coffee recently that Israeli film producers have expressed concern about being shut out of major film festivals. But Berkowitz tells me that he doesn’t see any bias in the TV market. “All foreign language shows are having a problem,” he says. “An Israeli show or format that’s fantastic will still be hard to sell — but it’s not impossible. There’s a natural sensitivity to what’s going on in the world, but it’s a misnomer to say that people aren’t buying Israeli shows and their formats.”
An interesting test for fictionalized accounts of Middle East conflict will come Nov. 27 when Paramount’s September 5 is released in U.S. theaters. The dramatic retelling of Islamic terrorists taking Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, as told from the vantage point of broadcasters for ABC News (Peter Sarsgaard plays legendary executive Roone Arledge), was one of the breakout hits at the Venice Film Festival and is considered a serious awards contender. But Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum has already had to declaim that his film is a commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, telling the press in Venice, “We don’t want to make a political statement on that,” when asked about the Israel-Gaza conflict. But it likely won’t be the last statement he has to make about how his movie isn’t a commentary on current events.
Against the backdrop of the Jewish High Holidays, when Jews are supposed to be observing 10 days of introspection and repentance, further escalation of the war seems all but inevitable. Israel appears to be expanding its military invasion of Lebanon and is emboldened following the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iranian-backed Islamist militant organization Hezbollah. It’s also reveling in its interception of the majority of the ballistic missiles fired by Iran last week in retaliation for killing Nasrallah.
Netanyahu is riding a wave of public support within Israel, and it’s unclear who, if anyone, could help end the fighting.
A turning point may have occurred when Israel successfully detonated thousands of pagers and then a few days later simultaneously exploded walkie-talkies, killing dozens of Hezbollah fighters and injuring hundreds more. The operation was something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel.
I asked an executive who’s a member of a WhatsApp group known as The Brigade — which was created in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and has since grown to include hundreds of prominent businessmen, actors, writers and executives — what he thought of the pager attacks.
“What do I think of the attacks?” he asked before pausing. “I think it’s fucking awesome.”