As Celebrities Join Protests, Media Follows — and So Does the Backlash

While many people on social media thanked Messing for sharing stories about the hostages and their families, she was also called out for only talking about one side of the conflict and not addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or the tens of thousands of Palestinians who Israeli forces have killed.

“Something about standing with a colonial force that is expelling people from their homes and killing thousands of civilians doesn’t exactly say ‘activist,’” reads one comment on Messing’s Instagram.

Ingel says more than 2,000 artists and industry leaders, including Gal Gadot, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jerry Seinfeld, Mayim Bialik, Chris Pine and Michael Douglas, signed CCFP’s open letter supporting Israel.

The letter calls for the “entertainment community to speak out forcefully against Hamas, to support Israel, to refrain from sharing misinformation about the war, and do whatever is in their power to urge the terrorist organization to return the innocent hostages to their families.”

Ingel says celebrities who’ve spoken up in support of Israel have faced “condemnation.” He points to a protest outside a Syracuse theater where Seinfeld performed. Equally troubling, he says, was the “silence” from individuals and organizations after the Hamas attacks. He points to the Writers Guild of America waiting more than two weeks to comment on the atrocity.

“I think a lot of Jews in the entertainment community felt abandoned, not just by their silence, but by their condemnation,” Ingel says.

‘Taking a stand’ vs. ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’

At the storied March on Washington in 1963, the late activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte told the crowd that he believed artists “revealed” society to itself. Sometimes, that means revealing things that are hard to hear.

Jane Fonda has done that often throughout her life. In 1973, speaking to KQED about the Vietnam War, she asked, “What business have we to try and exterminate a people?” Fonda was insistent, “My father fought against people in the Second World War who were trying to exterminate a people. I don’t think today we should repudiate everything that our fathers fought against.”