Gal Gadot and the Controversial Jewish Practice of Merely Existing – Commentary Magazine

Gal Gadot received the ADL’s International Leadership Award last night, and opened her speech in an interesting way:

“My name is Gal. I’m a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, an actress. I am Israeli and I’m Jewish. I’m going to say it again: My name is Gal, and I’m Jewish. Isn’t it crazy that just saying that, just expressing such a simple fact about who I am, feels like a controversial statement? But sadly, this is where we’re at today.”

Later on in the speech, the movie star said that she has long tried to avoid talking politics “because no one wants to hear celebrities talking about political issues, but also I regarded myself as a citizen of the world… I never thought of myself as being where I came from; it was an aspect of who I am, but it didn’t define me. And then Oct. 7 happened.”

That formulation—and then Oct. 7 happened—has become an almost ubiquitous figure of speech among Jews. One can easily picture it as the title of a memoir, a blog, a story collection, a piece of longform journalism about being Jewish today. One day soon it might be too generic to be any of those things, so commonly is it spoken.

Even more commonly is it thought. It is almost impossible to understand the world we inhabit without using Oct. 7 to divide the timelines in our heads.

Gadot—unfairly to her—is a reminder that the enemies of the Jews also think this way to some extent.

Take the Oscars on Sunday night. As is common, Gadot and her costar in her upcoming film (an adaptation of Snow White), Rachel Zegler, presented one of the awards together. Their assigned category was Best Visual Effects.

Yet a rumor quickly sprang up online that Gadot was supposed to have presented the award for Best Documentary Feature, and that she requested to switch because the frontrunner in that category was a pro-Palestinian agitprop film.

One doesn’t have to be a Hollywood insider to understand immediately that this theory is insane. Zegler is vocally anti-Israel in the current conflict and has courted controversy by taking her lemming-like social-media activity to great lengths: After the trailer for her own upcoming movie received spiteful backlash online because of Gadot’s participation in the film, Zegler signaled her agreement with the trolls. All of which is to say: Had Zegler been scheduled to present an award to an anti-Israel film, she would have crawled over hot coals to do so, not traded categories quietly for the sake of avoiding some imagined discomfort on Gadot’s part.

Now, it happens to be the case that Gadot is a class act, in stark contrast to many of her peers, and she would’ve presented whatever award the Academy asked her to. So whoever invented this rumor had an axe to grind. And who was that, anyway? According to Newsweek, the source of the rumor was Jen Perelman, a progressive congressional candidate in previous cycles whose entire political persona has been constructed out of obsessive anti-Zionist rage.

So, yes, Gadot is completely correct to have said last night that just being an Israeli Jew is considered controversial. Apparently there were a number of social-media users who, prior to the Oscars, expressed their wish that Gadot would have to present the award to the Palestinian director. Why? Because she is a Jewish Israeli, and they think it would have made her uncomfortable.

But that’s quite the admission in itself: People want Gal Gadot to be made to feel uncomfortable in public. It gives them great pleasure to imagine it. Why? Because she is a Jewish Israeli. That’s it—a number of Oscars viewers simply wanted to see someone make a Jew feel bad. When that didn’t happen, these folks imagined that the reason it didn’t happen was due to a Jewish conspiracy.

Gadot is handling all this with aplomb, but it is an ominous sign for society that it’s happening at all.