‘Culture Workers’ Against Israel
Oh no, not him too, I said to myself, while bingeing on the HBO series The Night Of, a gritty tale of a Pakistani-American college kid in New York accused of murder after a one-night stand. He’s Riz Ahmed, British actor and signer of the recent Film Workers Pledge to End Complicity (in “genocide and apartheid” as defined by, among others, Amnesty International). They won’t work with institutions, including film festivals, linked to the Israeli government.
I wanted to get to the end of The Night Of and figured Ahmed made the show almost ten years ago, maybe before he got these politics. I would finish the series (also starring John Turturro) and then add him to the movie people I’d not be seeing again.
I reluctantly skimmed the list of well over a thousand signatories. Some of the regulars were there: Javier Bardem, keffiyeh wearer at the Emmys, Cynthia Nixon who unfortunately for me had a big part in HBO’s The Gilded Age. I was hooked on it, looking away when she came on. There’s Mark Ruffalo who’s had it in for Israel for ages, like Tilda Swinton. Susan Sarandon of course signed.
Actors I’d seen and liked unfortunately turned up too, like Dutch Carice van Houten who played a Jewish woman hiding from the Nazis in the 2006 Black Book, and Australian Guy Pierce, a drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and recently Adrian Brody’s twisted benefactor in The Brutalist.
A few I didn’t have strong feelings about made the list: Oscar winners Emma Stone and Olivia Colman, both active in women’s issues, and Elliot Page, Ellen before, a trans man vocal about sexual abuse in the industry.
A big blow was openly gay and proud comedian Bowen Yang of Saturday Night Live. It’ll be tricky but I’ll somehow skip his sketches.
There are others: British actor Charles Dance (wants the Balfour Declaration torn up), Native American actress and Oscar contender Lily Gladstone who works for women’s rights and wants to decolonize gender, Australian actress Toni Collette, and Julie Christie, Dr. Zhivago’s Lara and persistent critic of Israel.
Then there are the Jewish celebs: Debra Winger, nominated for three Oscars including for Terms of Endearment, and privileged Wallace Shawn, son of longtime New Yorker editor William, who along with acting (The Princess Bride, etc.) has made a career out of Israel bashing. His CV includes a stint on the advisory board of Jewish Voices for Peace and a comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany.
Actress Miriam Margolyes I expected. She’s a constant opposer of Israel. Her turn as a Mother Superior in Call the Midwife nearly ruined three seasons for me.
There’s good ol’ Joaquin Phoenix. He was great as Johnny Cash. I’ve always liked his sneering presence. Along with wife Rooney Mara (Cate Blanchett’s lover in Carol), he too is charging Israel with crimes.
Some directors are on the list, like Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, the 2014 docudrama about Martin Luther King, and 13th, a doc dealing with American slavery and its repercussions.
Jonathan Glazer, one of the “as a Jew” crowd, naturally added his name. It wasn’t enough to equate the Israeli “occupation” to Nazi dehumanization when accepting his Oscar award for the Auschwitz-set film, The Zone of Interest. I still don’t get it: Jews accusing their own people of genocide with no mention of Hamas, its atrocities and charter.
The bulk of names, including uncapitalized ones, I don’t know. They’re probably behind the scenes or aspiring filmmakers.
What a crew, these self-defined “culture workers,” ready to axe any connection to the Israeli government, wanting to ban Israel from the film world, no mention of Hamas.
It’s good to know who these people are. My parents taught me well. As a kid, I learned who named names. The actors and directors betraying their colleagues in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee were people whose movies we didn’t go to. I still know who the bad guys were and the good ones who didn’t fall in with the mob to look moral or save their jobs.
Now I wonder if any of the culture workers are going to speak up when a peace agreement has been signed.
