Hollywood loves its rituals. The red carpet. The rehearsed smiles. The applause that feeds itself. And every year, one winner decides the stage is not a stage at all but a pulpit. This year it was Hannah Einbinder. Accepting her Emmy, she lifted her chin, flashed her red protest pin, and declared, “Free Palestine.”
Safe because there is no cost. Hollywood is not Gaza. It is Beverly Hills. To attack Israel in front of a room built to cheer is not courage. It is performance. Her words were not meant for Palestinians. They were meant for the room, for her agents, for social media.
Backstage, she went further. “It is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel,” she said. “Our religion and our culture is such an important and long-standing institution that is really separate to this sort of ethnonationalist state.” It sounded like something picked up at a campus protest. Einbinder knows nothing of Israel and Gaza. Nothing of Israel and Judea and Samaria. The Palestinians she claims to speak for are ruled by Hamas, a group that fires rockets into Israel and jails its own people. To “free” them means freeing them from Hamas first. That truth never made it into her speech.
Her ignorance runs deeper. She speaks as if Judaism were a lifestyle brand that can be separated from Israel at will. But Jewish life has always been bound to the land of Israel. It is in the prayers. In the holidays. In the memory of exile. Strip Israel out and you hollow Judaism out with it.
Then there was the pin. The red hand. Einbinder may have thought it was a simple protest symbol. It is not. It comes from one of the ugliest lynchings of the Second Intifada. In 2000, two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn into Ramallah. They were torn apart by a mob. One of the killers held his blood-stained hands up to the cheering crowd. That is the image Einbinder wore on her gown. She may not have known. But ignorance does not wash it clean.
And this is where we are. The most painful conflict of our time reduced to a pin and a slogan. Israelis bury their dead. Palestinians suffer under Hamas. Hollywood claps.
And then, silence. The same ceremony that made space for “Free Palestine” and red pins found no room to mention the assassination of Charlie Kirk days earlier. An American gunned down for his politics. Not a word. That is not neutrality. That is cowardice dressed as compassion.
Einbinder and her peers call this “using their privilege.” No. It is posturing. There is no privilege in repeating slogans you do not understand. There is no virtue in pinning yourself with the symbols of murderers. And there is no conscience in looking away from blood spilled both abroad and at home while you bask in Hollywood’s glow. That is not courage. It is theater.
She does not know what Judaism is. She does not know what Israel is. She does not know what suffering is. What she offered on that stage was vanity dressed as virtue. To wave away centuries of Jewish history, to ignore Hamas tyranny, to wear the symbol of a lynch mob — that is not leadership. It is fraud. The world deserves better than slogans packaged as moral clarity. And Hollywood, which has never been morally serious, deserves the contempt it earns.
Spot on!
Nailed it!