All the outrage over Julianna Margulies misses the point
Julianna Margulies at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Oct. 15, 2022. Photo by Getty Images
Liza Schoenfein December 7, 2023
There are precious few Hollywood stars willing to use their built-in bullhorns to express horror over the actions of Hamas and articulate the experience of Jews who feel they’ve been besieged since Oct. 7 with anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism. Because despite the trope that the Jews run Hollywood, speaking out is a frigging minefield (even there!), and making controversial political statements is probably a great way to limit future employment opportunities.
Julianna Margulies, as we’ve probably all heard by now, stepped on one of the mines. In the course of an intense conversation with Andy Ostroy on his podcast The Back Room — they talked about the Hamas attack, the war, and the proliferation of antisemitism and misinformation — she ventured down the path of a particularly fraught subject, calling out the lack of support for Jews and for Israel from some members of the Black and LGBTQ+ communities.
Her concerns echoed those of queer Jews of color such as journalist David Christopher Kaufman, who wrote in these pages: “It’s hard to describe the depths of despair as a gay man knowing that other gay men, lesbians and transfolk have bafflingly aligned themselves with the monsters who want all of us dead.” He went on to say: “Then there is the grief I feel, as a Black man, watching African American after African American — whether professors or protesters — insist that the Palestinian struggle is their struggle, seeing the 1,400 Israelis that Hamas killed as some sort of trophy.”
Needless to say, it didn’t sound as good coming from Margulies. Her most incendiary comments quickly made their way around the internet, as incendiary comments do.
It’s to be expected that fallout rained down. But I was surprised to see some of the most convoluted commentary coming from a very smart writer right here in the Forward, in the form of an ill-conceived takedown of Margulies, who suddenly came to represent the “many white Jewish women,” who are channeling “their inner Karen,” according to author Lux Alptraum. In the face of the Hamas atrocities, these women are apparently anxious about the potential loss of their “conditional privilege,” and are therefore attempting to “shore up their own claim to whiteness.”
Alptraum’s thesis belittles the very real fear Margulies shares with so many Jews: the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world.
This is probably a good time to explain why I feel compelled to respond, even though Margulies is clearly more than capable of speaking for herself. Like the actor and so many American Jews, I’ve been gobsmacked by the reality that so many lifelong allies within the progressive community — people with whom we’ve stood on every crucial issue of social justice — no longer stand with us. Like them, many of us have long opposed the occupation, and we’re sick as anyone about the plight of the Gazan people.
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (“gay shul,” as my daughter and I lovingly refer to it) wrote a letter to the congregation recently, saying this: “As Jews, as thinking human beings, we must reject the binary. We must feel the pain of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis and the pain of those in Gaza and the West Bank. We can hold the pain of all who are suffering, and we must hold it all.” (Alptraum wrote something similar at the end of a powerful piece about the raping and subsequent mockery of Israeli women.)
Many of us, both here and in Israel, are rejecting the binary, then looking at fellow progressives who are dealing in absolutes that leave us out in the cold.
As a longtime contributor to the food section of the Forward, I’ll use an example from the restaurant world: In Philadelphia on Sunday, protesters stood outside Goldie, a falafel shop owned by Israeli-American chef Michael Solomonov, shouting, “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” When businesses (not to mention individuals) are targeted because of nationality, religion, or allegiance to homeland, we have a real problem here.
In numerous interviews, Margulies has noted the deafening silence among her non-Jewish friends and Hollywood colleagues in response to Hamas’s murder, gruesome sexual violence, and hostage taking. In USA Today on Nov. 20, she wrote an opinion piece in the form of a letter, entitled “My non-Jewish friends, your silence on antisemitism is loud.”
Only two of them had been in touch to see how she was fairing in the days and weeks following the horrific events, just as only two of my non-Jewish friends reached out to me. (One, in full disclosure, was a friend I have in common with Margulies.)
“By your inaction to reach out,” Margulies wrote, “I immediately thought about the Jews of the Holocaust and what that must have felt like when no one spoke out, or stood up to protect them. Perhaps that is why I jump at the chance to march in Black Lives Matter protests, rally everyone I know to fight for LGBTQ+ rights and sound the siren when I hear that immigrant children are being held in cages.”
Margulies noted that only 26 of the 50 states teach Holocaust education, which is why she spearheaded a program at the Museum of Jewish Heritage called HESP (Holocaust Educator School Partnership), which trains interns to teach middle and high-school students in public schools about the history of the Holocaust.
“So perhaps you can understand our fear when we hear nothing,” she wrote. “We think to ourselves: Who will hide us when they come for us? We ask ourselves: If we have to flee, where could we go?”
I hope that the scathing response to some poorly chosen words doesn’t quash one of the few celebrities willing to go out on a limb to voice the very real fear of what can happen when the people around us choose to stay silent.
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