If you’re a Jew in the arts these days, it’s hard to keep track of all the people and industry groups that are boycotting you. The latest is a group of more than 1,000 people organized by Film Workers for Palestine, an extremist organization with a habit of amplifying some of the most notorious anti-Semitic accounts on social media. The boycott is of Israeli film companies or “agents” that “have never endorsed the full, internationally recognized rights of the Palestinian people” and are therefore “implicated in genocide” against Palestinians.
The statement is vague by design, so that “complicity” includes not having made a fuzzy loyalty oath in which Jews in the arts renounce the Jewish state. Anyone can be boycotted using this template. If you are in any way connected to an Israeli company you must be openly engaged in resistance against the Israeli state.
The list of signatories does not yet include any Jewish stars, though it does include Ilana Glazer and Hannah Einbeinder.
Headlining the blacklist pledge are Emma Stone (though it’s unclear if she signed on because she agrees with the boycott or because director Yorgos Lanthimos also signed on and therefore Stone just assumed she was obligated to join the project), obsessive anti-Zionist Mark Ruffalo, Ayo Edebiri, Olivia Colman, and Josh O’Connor.
On the one hand, the fact that they’re only boycotting the one Jewish state isn’t surprising. On the other, it does make it easier to see through any attempts to portray this is as a principled act. Although neither the United States nor the United Kingdom considers Israel’s defensive war in Gaza to be genocide, both countries have used that word to describe China’s campaign of repression and ethnic cleansing of its Uighur minority in Xinjiang. Yet I struggled to find the Hollywood boycott of Chinese film institutions.
One doesn’t have to wonder why. As I wrote last week, the actress Indya Moore, who is also on this boycott call, publicly defended accepting money from film companies that have Israeli investments while protesting those very investments. No one on this list is sacrificing; they are simply Jew-baiting.
The China example is illuminating. There is no way around the “complicity.” As Jane Hu observed in the New Yorker:
“By 2008, China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television had even published a list of nineteen codicils laying out conditions that foreign movies needed to meet in order to be shown in Chinese theatres. Although some of the terms were fairly straightforward (no ghosts or time travel, lest these fantastical elements give citizens undue faith or hope), others were more open to interpretation (nothing that would pose a threat to Chinese national security). Soon, Hollywood films weren’t just being screened in Chinese theatres; Chinese policies were infiltrating Hollywood filmmaking as well.”
U.S. studios paid top dollar to have Chinese insignia removed from the Red Dawn remake, for example, or to delete dirty laundry from Chinese clotheslines in Mission: Impossible III. Erasing anything that might offend the Chinese government is only half the game, of course: “As American producers learned what to remove from their movies, they also acquired the art of adding cinematic flourishes that might subtly bolster Chinese nationalism.”
In other words, Hollywood became soft-power propagandists for a regime carrying out a genocide in full view of the world. During the Biden administration, Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused China plainly of “genocide and crimes against humanity.” In 2021, the UK House of Commons passed a resolution shaming China’s “crimes against humanity and genocide.” China has detained as many as 2 million of the region’s minorities in internment camps, at which investigations have found “patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” Outside the camps, Uighurs have been reportedly systematically subjected to forced sterilization and the criminalization of the practicing of Islam.
All of this has been known for years. Unlike the fabricated accusations of genocide against Israel, the accusations against China are true (and not particularly controversial). Real genocide doesn’t bother much of Hollywood; the existence of Israelis does. Anything else is an act.
