Says Black and LGBTQ Supporters of Palestine Are “Brainwashed to Hate Jews”
Julianna Margulies has called out the Black and LGBTQ community’s lack of support for Israel in its fight against Hamas, and suggested that people backing Palestine were “brainwashed.”
Appearing on the Nov. 21 episode of The Back Room With Andy Ostroy podcast, Margulies briefly spoke about her role on The Morning Show, before the topic of the Israel-Hamas conflict took over. The actress began by saying she believed that the current rise of antisemitism in the U.S. was boosted by Donald Trump legitimizing the neo-Nazi protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
After Israel was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, Margulies expressed her sadness that Black and LGBTQ people were, in her estimation, not supporting Israel when it retaliated, especially as she believed Jews had supported Black people, and other minorities, in their struggles. “I’m the first person to march [for] Black Lives Matter. When that happened to George Floyd, I put a black screen on my Instagram, like I ran to support my Black brothers and sisters,” Margulies said, sounding exasperated.
She added, “When LGBTQ people are being attacked, I run. I made a commercial for same-sex marriages with my husband in 2012. Like, I am the first person to jump up when something is wrong, as I think most Jews are, because we have been persecuted from the beginning of time, not just World War II, but literally from the beginning of time when we first lived in Israel way before anybody else.”
Margulies then said that the current anti-Israel sentiment among young people was due to TikTok. “I guess what’s happening to the crazy people out there who are getting their news from TikTok, which in my estimation — after this whole Osama bin Laden letter — should be banned. TikTok should be banned.“
The actress then had a warning for progressive young people about what Hamas and Islamic fundamentalists think of them. “It’s those kids [who use pronouns] who are spewing this antisemitic hate that have no idea if they stepped foot in an Islamic country. These people who want us to call them they/them or whatever they want us to call them — which I have respectfully really made a point of doing, like, be whoever you want to be. It’s those people that will be the first people beheaded and their heads played [like] a soccer ball. Terrorists who don’t want women to have their rights, don’t want LGBTQ people…this is who you’re supporting?”
Later in the episode, Margulies returned to her notion that some in the Black community were not sufficiently supportive of Israel or had been engaging in antisemitism. “You know, there was a film being shown by this Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus and they put up signs that said, ‘no Jews allowed,'” Margulies said in an apparent reference to a New York Post story about the LionLez group at Columbia University disinviting Zionists from a film night. “And as someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show, I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew, to be honest with you.”
She continued, “I want to say to them, ‘you fucking idiots, you don’t exist [to Hamas]. You’re even lower than the Jews [to Hamas]. A. You’re Black. B. You’re gay, and you’re turning your back against the people who support you.’ Because Jews, they rally around everybody.”
Margulies also had harsh words for Hollywood for not more vocally standing up for Israel, saying she was “stunned by my industry…. Can you imagine the WGA not putting out a statement after George Floyd?” she said. “And yet when it was the Jews. By the way, all of our great material on television is pretty much from the Jews. Like the fact they stayed silent until they feel were pressured.” She was also disgusted by the silence of the MeToo movement over the Hamas attacks.
The conversation then switched to education and the supposed lack of Holocaust education in the U.S. Margulies spoke at length about Ken Burns’ documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, and how it showed how Adolf Hitler had looked to the Jim Crow era South for ideas about racial policies in Germany in the 1930s that would eventually lead to the Holocaust.
Margulies pivoted to the Civil Rights Movement and said that “the Jews were the ones that walked side by side with the Blacks to fight for their rights. And now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying we stand with you the way you stood with us? Jews died for their cause. Where’s the history lesson in that? Who’s teaching these kids?”
She added, “Because the fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us, to me, says they don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”
An audibly angry Margulies later exclaimed, “Here’s what kills me. These kids are calling Jews colonialists. If you’re going with that argument, kids, then get the fuck out of America. Because you were not here first. Native Americans were here first, and you owe them a big fucking apology.”
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