Hannah Einbinder Criticizes Hollywood's Silence on Gaza and Palestine

Hannah Einbinder is taking aim at the entertainment industry for its reluctance to publicly support the Free Palestine movement and address the conflict in Gaza.

During an appearance on the "Beyond Israelism" podcast, the Hacks star voiced her frustration with prominent figures in power who have remained quiet on the matter. "It pisses me off," she said. "Because I'm sitting here with Mahmoud Khalil, who has so much to risk and who has risked so much who has sacrificed so much… And I look at these people who have absolutely every privilege imaginable to mankind and they cannot utter a single word. I guess it makes me naive, but I cannot understand it. I really can't understand it. And I hear people say that they don't know enough and I — I don't, it's like, OK, so what do you do all day?"

Einbinder went on to suggest that Hollywood's attention to social issues shifts dramatically depending on who is affected. "People in Hollywood, unfortunately, need these issues to affect a white person for them to see it as relating to them," she explained. "Like, they see Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air suddenly, they see Stephen Colbert's show being canceled by CBS, which is owned by the Ellisons, and they go, 'How could this possibly happen?' And it's like, we know how because we saw students and professors and journalists and authors and Palestinian folks be silenced and fired and expelled and imprisoned… it took it happening to these white men for people to be like, 'Oh my god.'"

When asked about her own activism, Einbinder pushed back against characterizing her efforts as courageous. "I always resist the idea that what I am doing is in any way brave because I don't want cowardice to be a metric by which I judge bravery," she stated. "What I am doing is having eyes and seeing reality and saying what I am seeing. And I think that so many people risk so much more in a tangible sense."