One Year Later: Jewish Hollywood Still Feels Abandoned
Top industry figures talk about raw wounds as war in the Mideast escalates: 'Every single Jew I know feels like they don’t have allies'
This Ankler Feature is an 18-minute read.
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.