I’ve been in love with the movies since I was a little boy, a fat, nearsighted loner in a dysfunctional family where threats to drive oneself off the Triboro Bridge were standard dinner-table conversation. Fleeing every week to the Kent Theater on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, I drowned out the misery of my life by escaping into these magical cinema worlds where I could imagine I was someone else. That’s how I became a writer.
But now my beloved movies have turned their backs on me because I’m a Jew.
For more than 25 years, I was a proud member of BAFTA, the British Association of Film and Televisión Arts. I embraced movies from around the world by loyally attending screenings, talkbacks, and diligently voting for the Orange Awards, the British version of the Oscars.
Never Condemned Hamas
Shortly after October 7, I wrote BAFTA asking why they never condemned the Hamas attack. They responded by condemning antisemitism and Islamophobia, an insidious moral equivalency, whitewashing the unpleasant fact that only Jews were the target of genocide that day—and all the subsequent days.
I kept hoping the entertainment industry and the world would wake up to the antisemitism.
Since then, antisemitism in the British entertainment industry has surged as famous stars, including Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Charles Dance (with whom I once worked), abused their platforms—as artists, not social critics—to attack world Jewry.
Effective June 1, I resigned my membership.
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