Oscar, Tony, and Emmy award winning actress, Helen Mirren, travelled to Israel to host the Genesis Prize, which is colloquially called, “the Jewish Nobel.” According to Haaretz, she “has visited Israel several times, and has been a vocal critic of pro-Palestinian activists who have called for a cultural boycott of Israel.”
The anti-Israel movement has recruited many celebrities. “The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as BDS,” Haaretz says, “has enlisted the support of Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters and has persuaded Elvis Costello, Lauren Hill and other performers to call off concerts in Israel.”
Mirren, however, is not among the recruits. Although she is not Jewish, she has played in several roles supportive of the Jewish nation. As Haaretz reports, in the movie “The Debt,” she took on the role of a ex-Mossad agent. She played a Jewish-American survivor of WWII suing the Austrian government for art stolen by the Nazis in “Woman in Gold.”
Mirren says she is a “believer in Israel,” and that it “is an extraordinary country filled with very, very extraordinary people.”
It’s rare to find celebrities openly sympathetic to Israel, and the attitude in Hollywood helps explain this fact.
In 2015, Pink Floyd’s co-founder told Huffington Post that Israel was a “colonial oppressive regime.” Huffington Post certainly doesn’t like anything “colonial.”
In 2014, actress Penelope Cruz and her husband, actor Javier Bardem “led an effort among Spanish artists to write an open letter denouncing Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza strip as ‘genocide.’”
In 2012, Kim Kardashian tweeted, “praying for everyone in Israel,” during the mounting struggle between Israel and terrorist organization, Hamas. Jon Lovitz also expressed sympathy on Twitter. In face of harsh criticism, Kardashian apologized and Lovitz decried left-wing closed-mindedness.
