There was a time when Hollywood understood its role. But by 2025, Hollywood has strayed so far from its roots that it appears morally clueless. The clearest sign of this is the industry’s open flirtation with antisemitism and its casual disregard for the impact that spreads into Jewish lives around the world. The irony of Hollywood is almost too rich: men and women who make millions pretending to live lives of suffering, heroism, and consequence now believe their playacting qualifies them to deliver sermons about war, peace, and morality. But while most of us live reality, Hollywood only acts it out.
These are people who have never stepped onto a battlefield, never buried a friend killed in uniform, never shouldered the weight of protecting a community from real-world violence. And yet, from their insulated mansions in Beverly Hills and Malibu, they speak with smug certainty about conflicts they do not understand. They live among the 1%—more precisely, the 0.5%—and their detachment is complete. Detached from the cost of food, detached from the risk of terrorism, detached from the humiliation of antisemitic threats in schools and synagogues. When such people presume to “explain” geopolitics, they are not merely foolish. They are dangerous. Because their words don’t stay on a red carpet—they circulate, amplify, and shape perceptions across a fragile, volatile global stage.
The Venice Film Festival exposed this moral decline. While The Voice of Hindon Rajab—a film promoting anti-Israel narratives and produced by Brad Pitt—received a grotesque 22-minute standing ovation, Gal Gadot was effectively banned for simply standing up for her people’s right to exist. Consider the imbalance: applause for propaganda that incites a global intifada, silence for a Jewish actress whose only fault is speaking the truth. This is not neutrality. It is cowardice pretending to be sophistication, bigotry dressed in high fashion. The message is clear: Jews in Hollywood are only welcome if they stay silent about being Jewish.
This isn’t an isolated incident. The “Artists for Ceasefire” letter, signed by hundreds of Hollywood names, framed Israel as the aggressor and demanded an unconditional ceasefire—never mind the October 7 massacres, the hostages still held in Gaza, or the thousands of rockets launched at civilians. Their moral compass is broken: they demand Israel lay down its arms while demanding nothing of Hamas. John Cusack, who once compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, has trafficked in antisemitic tropes and ignorant analogies. Mark Ruffalo, who plays a pretend Hulk, accuses Israel of “genocide” without the faintest grasp of international law or the realities of Hamas rule. Few celebrities illustrate the moral collapse more clearly than Javier Bardem. He has accused Israel of acting like “Nazis,” explicitly comparing the IDF to Amon Göth, the SS commander who slaughtered Jews in Kraków. This is not political critique—it is antisemitism in its purest form. Calling Jews “Nazis” is to weaponize the greatest Jewish trauma in history against the Jewish people themselves. It delegitimizes Jewish survival by equating self-defense with genocide. When Bardem and others broadcast such rhetoric to millions, it matters: Ruffalo alone has more followers on social media than Israel has citizens. Lies amplified by celebrity megaphones become global narratives. Those narratives endanger Jewish lives.
Hollywood’s Jewish elites have not fared much better. A secretive “Jewish brigade” of producers, executives, influencers, and entertainers tries to push back against the industry’s anti-Israel bias. But they have veered too far left, trying to appease those who despise them. Many of them almost certainly voted for Harris, clinging to the illusion that progressive politics will shield them. In truth, they are simply blending into the Hollywood echo chamber of left-wing nonsense while abandoning the Jewish cause.They do not realize there is a line that must be drawn. On one side are the liberal values of their non-Jewish peers; on the other side is the survival of the Jewish people. And when push comes to shove, you cannot choose fashionable politics over your own physical safety. You cannot put ideology before the protection of your Jewish body. Whatever they are doing—backroom appeasement, hollow PR campaigns, desperate attempts to look “enlightened”—is clearly not working. The anti-Israel narrative in Hollywood has only grown stronger, and their cowardice has made them irrelevant.
Nowhere is Hollywood’s duplicity more evident than in the cultural signals it sends. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie once visited Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who gassed his own people, to pose as humanitarians. Brad is now producing The Voice of Hindon Rajab, a film that has been embraced by the Venice elite for its anti-Israel message. Angelina, meanwhile, has built her reputation as a UN women’s rights envoy, yet she has said nothing about the Israeli women raped, mutilated, and paraded by Hamas terrorists on October 7. Vanity Fair, the self-proclaimed bible of Hollywood glamour, gushes over brands and celebrity humanitarian causes while ignoring antisemitism in its own ranks. This is not cultural leadership. It is a masquerade. And then there is the #MeToo movement. Hollywood swore it had learned the lessons of Weinstein and Spacey. “Believe women,” they said. “Never again,” they declared. But when Israeli women were brutalized on October 7, Hollywood was silent. Not a single standing ovation. Not a single red carpet speech. Not a single campaign to believe those women. Apparently, #MeToo does not apply to everyone, except Israelis. The silence is not just hypocrisy—it is complicity. When Hollywood refuses to acknowledge Jewish victims of sexual violence, it legitimizes their dehumanization. It says, in effect: “Your pain doesn’t matter because you are Jews.”
What makes the betrayal even worse is that Hollywood cloaks its antisemitism in the language of “human rights.” Stars who live in multimillion-dollar estates, shielded by private security, posture as defenders of “the oppressed”—while lending cover to movements hell-bent on destroying the very freedoms Hollywood thrives on. They champion regimes where women are second-class citizens, where dissent is punished, where homosexuality is outlawed, and where art itself is censored. In their naivete, they have become puppets of the radical Islamist left—a force that despises everything Hollywood claims to represent.The treatment of Gal Gadot is proof. That she was sidelined and silenced not because of anything she said, but because she is Jewish and Israeli, is a pure act of antisemitism. It reveals a sickness metastasizing through society, spreading into every organ of culture—film, fashion, media, academia. This is how cancers work: slowly, invisibly, until suddenly the body is riddled with it. Hollywood is now one of the tumors, pumping toxins into the bloodstream of global opinion. If Hollywood is fully overtaken—if its Jewish roots are erased and replaced with a pro-Palestinian National Socialist agenda—the consequences will be catastrophic. The Jewish people in America and beyond will face a future darker than any since the 1930s. The global stage, shaped in no small part by Hollywood’s cultural exports, will tilt toward delegitimizing Israel and excusing violence against Jews. Hollywood has already begun to normalize the narrative that Jews are fair game: either spoiled elites, dishonest manipulators, or oppressive Zionists. And when stories like that metastasize, history shows us what comes next.
Hollywood is not brave. It is cowardly. It has mistaken applause for courage and standing ovations for justice. But applause cannot substitute for moral clarity, and ovations cannot replace truth. The Jewish community does not need Hollywood to be its savior. But we do demand that it stop playing the role of our prosecutor. The industry that claims to celebrate diversity and inclusion must confront its own hypocrisy: it excludes Jews whenever they insist on surviving as Jews. The truth is simple: Hollywood’s decline is not just a matter of stupidity. It is complicity. And if this descent continues, the stage lights will not illuminate art. They will cast shadows over Jewish graves.