Hannah Einbinder said what she said

When British writer-director Jonathan Glazer accepted the 2024 Oscar for Best International Feature Film for “The Zone of Interest,” he issued an impassioned statement with wording that wasn’t as precise as it could have been. “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people,” Glazer stated. “Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims, this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Glazer’s words were meant to condemn the way that the Holocaust has been weaponized to defend both Israel’s 58-year occupation of Gaza and the horrific events of October 2023. Instead, a hair-trigger media heard only the phrase “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust,” and looked no further before coming for the Oscar winner.

Hannah Einbinder probably didn’t have that misstep in mind when she closed her acceptance speech at last Sunday’s Emmys with the statement: “Go Birds, f**k ICE and free Palestine.” Given the show’s ill-conceived running bit, it’s more likely that she was just economizing her words. But backstage, standing with her “Hacks” costar and fellow Emmy winner Jean Smart, Einbinder elaborated for a curious press: “I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel, because our religion and our culture is such an important and longstanding institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”

Her words echoed Glazer’s, but were clearer and more concise. This did not stop media outlets from rushing to contort them in the ugliest of ways. Right out of the gate, The Hollywood Reporter’s Hen Mazzig noted that the gunman who murdered two people at Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum also shouted, “Free Palestine,” writing that “Einbinder did not condemn [the slogan]. Instead, she repeated it onstage.” In the New York Post, Andrea Peyser whipped out a piece titled “A Hollywood nepobaby cheers Hamas, and they repay her by censoring her shoulders,” neglecting to add that Einbinder said nothing about Hamas at all. A representative from ICE, meanwhile, condemned the actor’s words, saying, “As this woman fans the flames of hatred, our brave law enforcement will continue enforcing the rule of law and protecting Americans,” a whopper of a statement given that the majority of people detained in the agency’s recent spate of extrajudicial raids have no criminal convictions at all.

In dismissing Einbinder as a Hollywood flake parroting a trendy line, these responses, among others, echo a with-us-or-against-us media narrative about Israel and Palestine that has been pervasive for decades, but in the last two years has been presented as an unchallengeable truth. In this narrative, there are two sides: one faultless, the other irredeemably evil. The former deserves all our sympathy and resources; extending any of either to the latter is labeled radicalized anti-Semitism. I’m glad Einbinder said what she said, if only so the mainstream media can no longer ignore the third group — Jews, both American and Israeli, who reject its simplistic binary.

Einbinder herself is Jewish, and media attempts to portray her as the benighted Hollywood version of a performative campus protester don’t hold up. Earlier this year, she received the Human Rights Council’s Visibility Award, an honor given to public figures who raise the profile of LGBTQ+ individuals and movements onscreen and off, and her acceptance speech there addressed Judaism’s values of social justice and tikkun olam, the work of healing the world; it also pointedly addressed HRC’s corporate sponsors. (“All struggles for liberation will be won by loudly opposing the corporations who fuel the destruction of our planet and the institutions that fuel mass death.”) Einbinder demonstrated with the organization Jewish Voice for Peace at a recent sit-in at California senator Adam Schiff’s office, urging him to cease funding the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza.

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Meanwhile, Peyser’s attempt to discount Einbinder’s words by labeling her a “nepo baby” isn’t doing the work she thinks it is. We’ve always appealed to celebrities to use their privilege and platforms for good, and the fact that Einbinder, the daughter of former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and original Conehead Laraine Newman, deployed hers to defend human rights in front of an audience of 7.4 million (the highest viewership since 2021) is only laughable to Peyser because she doesn’t think the message is important. Recognizing that you can afford to take an unequivocal stance others in your cohort can’t is the opposite of a failing — something that Einbinder’s “Hacks” costar Meg Stalter pointed out when asked about the tote bag bearing the handwritten label “Cease Fire” she carried on the red carpet: “What’s the point of being at these big events if you’re not going to use your privilege?”

Those who complain about Hollywood awards shows making “political” statements generally aren’t doing so for any ethical reason, but because they don’t like the statements themselves. And so it was this year, when Ted Cruz led a small chorus of outrage that the broadcast didn’t pay tribute to a recently slain man whose only connection to the Emmys was that his death happened three days before it. But even if Einbinder had said nothing about ICE or Gaza, there was simply no way to decouple the awards broadcast from a context that this year in particular is intrinsically politicized.

Obsessed with Hannah Einbinder knowing her angles and letting the camera get her Artists4Ceasefire pin pic.twitter.com/6RkJOFYG6k

— Carrie Courogen (@carriecourogen) September 15, 2025

For one thing, it aired on CBS, a network that recently announced the politically motivated cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the highest-rated show on late-night television. For another, it honored the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with the Television Academy’s Governors’ Award, acknowledging the CPB’s long-running commitment to funding TV in the public interest; the audience booed loudly when Academy chairman Cris Abrego stated that CPB will close at the end of 2025 “because Congress has voted to defund it.” And for a third, both of these decisions were made in response to a former reality TV–show host who, in his role as U.S. president, demanded them.

The media bias that has characterized Western coverage of Israel and Palestine is well documented. It portrays harm to Israelis with sympathy and humanizing language that it often refuses to grant Palestinians. Political alignment, racism and commerce all play a part in this skewed vision, but the upshot is the same: One good guy, one bad guy and almost no nuance.

Last Thursday, after conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov addressed the audience with a statement he could no longer justify holding back. “I come from Israel and live there,” he said. “I love it, it’s my home, but what’s happening now is atrocious, and horrific in a scale that’s unimaginable.” When a smattering of grumbles broke out, Volkov addressed it calmly, saying “You can go if you don’t want politics. Politics is part of life every day.”

Such a statement is only controversial to those whose history and existence has never been politicized — a population that, across the globe, is growing ever smaller. (Even Ricky Gervais, a perennial scold of celebrities who bring politics to the awards stage, seems to finally understand this.) Portraying Israel/Palestine as a binary, as author and rabbi Danya Ruttenberg writes, is “a game of forced choices [that] has been an exceedingly powerful means of communal control.” Refusing to co-sign facile media portrayals and instead acknowledging that human cruelty and suffering has never been zero-sum is neither a trendy stance nor an inexplicable one. You may not want to engage with it or be confronted by it, whether on the Emmys stage or at a family gathering or beyond. But those willing to look at it head-on owe their silence to no one.