Stephen M. Flatow is President of the Religious Zionists of America (RZA) He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995 and the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror. Note: The RZA is not affiliated with any American or Israeli political party.
Hannah Einbinder may have won an Emmy for “outstanding supporting actress,” but her acceptance speech revealed something far less praiseworthy: the outstanding self-righteousness of the entertainment world.
From the stage, Einbinder declared, “Go Birds, f--- ICE and free Palestine.” The audience cheered. The networks bleeped. And the Twitterverse or should we say Xverse lit up with praise for her “courage.” But what exactly was courageous about parroting the slogans of the moment to an audience primed to applaud them?
Einbinder’s comments were not spontaneous outbursts of conscience; they were a calculated performance, part of a larger campaign. She signed onto a pledge by thousands in the entertainment world to boycott Israeli cultural institutions—an effort CBS’s parent company, Paramount, had rightly condemned. Her speech was less about principle than about branding, another way to signal her virtue in the most fashionable way possible: aligning with causes that carry zero personal cost but maximum applause from her peers.
The entertainment elite has long loved to imagine itself as the conscience of the nation. Yet the same actors and producers who rail against America’s immigration enforcement or Israel’s right to defend itself rarely spare a word for the Uyghurs in China, the women of Iran, or the millions crushed under genuinely totalitarian regimes.
Silence there, slogans here. Why? Because it’s safe. Because it plays well. Because, in their insulated world, performance is mistaken for moral clarity.
The dissonance is glaring. The same industry that has no trouble doing business with Beijing, taking oil money from Gulf monarchies, or cashing checks from human-rights abusers suddenly rediscovers its moral compass when Israel is involved. For Einbinder and her peers, the lesson is simple: saying “Free Palestine” costs nothing in the entertainment world. Speaking out against real repression elsewhere might threaten their careers.
Awards shows are supposed to honor achievement in art. Increasingly, they’ve become platforms for lecturing and sloganeering by performers who mistake applause lines for acts of justice. Einbinder’s speech was no exception. What it revealed, though, is more troubling: that in the world of the entertainment industry, moral posturing has become the highest form of performance art.