You Will Regret This

The second Oscars since Oct. 7 were underwhelming at best and downright infuriating at worst.

For one, though some commentators tried to frame the number of Jews winning awards for Holocaust-related movies as some sort of communal success, the timing of the evening cannot be overlooked. Fifty-nine hostages remain in Gaza after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and just a week ago, the world learned in horror that the youngest hostages, 4-year-old Ariel Bibas and 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, were brutally murdered in captivity alongside their mother, Shiri. This dark reality has become the backdrop for a global uptick of antisemitism, where Jewish students in the diaspora are harassed and threatened at their Ivy League universities and Jewish neighborhoods are terrorized by Hamas cheerleaders. In the face of all this, it feels like the bare minimum to expect Jewish and non-Jewish actors portraying Jewish roles in Jewish movies to spare a thought for the urgent tribulations of the Jewish community today. After all, Mikey Madison paid tribute to the sex worker community after playing one in Anora.

Apparently, yes, it is too much to expect anyone to care—let alone use the massive global platform given to them for portraying Jewish themes to advocate for the Jewish people. The expectations of respect that all other minority groups have for people portraying them in art and drama are never applied to Jews, who are certainly not consulted about what their community might actually want from an actor accepting an award for telling their stories. Instead, the de facto status quo is that anything that touches on the thorny reality of 2025 Jewishness—not to mention Israel and Israelis—is uncomfortable and should be avoided as much as possible. It’s best to speak in broad, focus-group-tested platitudes about “hate” and “prejudice,” or even to dodge the issue entirely, lest one damage their Hollywood credit or, God forbid, offend any pro-Hamas spectators by being “problematic” or a “Zionist” for mentioning a murdered Jewish baby or a suffering hostage.

Within this limp moral logic, it becomes understandable—no, even commendable—that Adrien Brody bravely uttered the word “antisemitism” in his incredibly long acceptance speech for portraying a Holocaust survivor in The Brutalist. Never mind that he immediately went on to equate it with “racism and othering,” whatever “othering” means, in order to ensure that the word didn’t draw undue attention during his record-smashing six minutes of blathering. The pointed obliqueness is striking in its spinelessness, though it’s to be expected from nearly all celebrities—even the Jewish ones—making mealymouthed forays into politics these days. What’s more striking, though, are the legions of Jews who listened to his yammering and raced onto social media to praise the statement.

Have some self-respect, people. They’re giving you crumbs. Hollywood is broken and boring, but if you’re a Jew who still cares about the Oscars and sees them as a meaningful cultural arbiter, you should be even more invested in making sure that your community receives the same consideration the industry is so eager to give everyone else. Enough applauding for bottom-of-the-barrel, end-of-the-list acknowledgements, or for selectively Jewish actors who cite their identities as justification for cowardly silence—especially when they’re also profiting off telling stories of Jewish trauma, and winning awards for these portrayals that secure them prosperous careers in one of the most profitable industries in the world.

Instead, we should be expecting—no, demanding—more from the people who represent our community on this massive global stage. For Jews, this has been the defining moment of our generation and several more to come, and we are still living through this complicated, heartbreaking moment in history. It’s just not acceptable that the most high-profile Jewish people in the world have nothing to say.

"Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh"—“all Jews are responsible for one another.” Perhaps many of these celebrities feel so detached from any sense of their Jewish identity that they cannot see themselves, or their relationship to others, in this Talmudic statement. I’m not so sure, though, because some of them are making Holocaust movies and spending months of their lives exploring the greatest trauma of their people. The more believable answer seems to be that they are simply narcissistic, so concerned with advancing their own careers in an industry that demands perfect woke politics that they’ve left their own people behind.

I vehemently disagree with the hand-wringing Jews online telling us that we should sit back and be happy with Adrien Brody’s speech or Kieran Culkin’s Oscar for A Real Pain. It’s fine to be angry and demand better from the likes of Brody, Madison, Eisenberg, Culkin, and Chalamet. In fact, holding ourselves and each other to a high moral standard, even when it’s hard, and even when our enemies do not, is a crucial part of Jewish identity. Our tribe does have barriers to entry and requirements for belonging. It’s time that we remember this when evaluating the people who claim to represent our community—especially because public opinion matters in Hollywood, and Hamas is wasting no time recruiting red-pin-wearing celebrities.

In the meantime, instead of meekly holding out our hands for lame moral scraps, I recommend we continue cheering on the celebrities who have stuck out their necks and meaningfully spoken out. People like Jerry Seinfeld, who visited Be’eri two months after the attack, or Debra Messing, who made it to Gaza to support IDF soldiers, or Michael Rapaport, who started wrapping tefillin every day since Oct. 7, or Jason Isaacs, who managed to sneak a hostage pin into a Vogue TikTok and proudly wore it to the BRITs, should be the heroes that our community cheers for. Everyone else is a passable afterthought until they prove themselves worthy of Jewish communal respect.