Jewish American actress Mayim Bialik said that her support for Israel has led to calls to boycott her and the popular television show she stars in, “The Big Bang Theory.”
“It hasn’t yet, that I know of, impacted my acting career, but it has impacted the way that I am seen, and that does impact my career in terms of speaking engagements and endorsements,” she said on Tuesday night in a keynote address at the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem.
Bialik said she has been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks on social media, where she has a high profile. “I’m happy to take that public bullet for the state,” she also said.
She said the internet could become a tool to “make this a more peaceful and compassionate world.” She added that because of the wide use of the internet “anti-Semitism now has a deep and significant reach in ways it never did, and I’m being touched by it in ways I never was before.”
Bialik, 42, has a doctorate in neuroscience and plays neuroscientist Amy Fowler-Farrah on her show. A divorced mother of two sons, she was raised Reform and now practices Modern Orthodoxy. In many interviews she has described herself as a Zionist and has family living in Israel.
“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be alive and to be able to speak freely about my love for this country, which my grandparents prayed for as they fled Eastern Europe, and to hopefully educate people through my public platform about the truth about Zionism and Jews and the State of Israel,” she said at the biennial anti-Semitism forum, organized by Israel’s ministries of foreign affairs and Diaspora affairs.
Earlier this month, Bialik asked her two million followers on Facebook to nominate her to light the torch reserved for a representative of Diaspora Jewry during the opening Israel Independence Day ceremony on Mount Herzl.
In 2015, amid calls by anti-Israel activists to boycott her, Bialik took to Facebook to make her views abundantly clear to the haters.
“For those of you who refuse to follow me and discourage others from doing so because I am a Zionist (as if that's a crime!!), I highly recommend you look up Zionism in a dictionary rather than using the definition perpetrated by anti-Semitic media and leaders. Zionism is the belief that Jewish people deserve an autonomous homeland free from terrorism and threat to our global existence. if you don't want to follow me because I believe in that, by all means don't,” she wrote.
In the following video, Arutz Sheva speaks with Akiva Tor of the Israeli Foreign Ministry about the goal and mission of the global forum: