Hannah Einbinder Blasts Hollywood’s Silence on Gaza

Hannah Einbinder is done staying quiet about the people who are staying quiet. The Emmy-winning Hacks star went off on Hollywood’s collective silence over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza during a live taping of Zeteo’s Beyond Israelism podcast, recorded at Riverside Church in New York City on April 16 and released in full on May 12.

“It pisses me off,” Einbinder said plainly. “Because I’m sitting here with Mahmoud, who has so much to risk and who has risked so much, who has sacrificed so much — and I look at these people who have absolutely every privilege imaginable to mankind and they cannot utter a single word. I guess it makes me naive, but I cannot understand it. I really can’t understand it.”

She was seated onstage alongside Mahmoud Khalil — the Algerian-Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student who was arrested by federal immigration agents in March 2025, only to have a federal judge order his release in June after ruling his detention unconstitutional. Also on stage were British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad and podcast host Simone Zimmerman.

When it came to celebrities who claim they simply don’t know enough to speak up, Einbinder wasn’t buying it. “I hear people say that they don’t know enough and I — I don’t, it’s like, OK, so what do you do all day? Are you just literally walking around like this?” At that point, she stood up from her chair and stumbled around the Riverside Church stage with her eyes covered — making the point physically.

The White Person Problem

Einbinder’s sharpest critique wasn’t just about silence — it was about who Hollywood chooses to notice. She argued that the industry follows a clear racial hierarchy when it comes to which injustices register as real.

“People in Hollywood, unfortunately, need these issues to affect a white person for them to see it as relating to them,” she said. “Like, they see Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air suddenly, they see Stephen Colbert’s show being canceled by CBS — which is owned by the Ellisons — and they go, ‘How could this possibly happen?’”

“And it’s like, we know how. Because we saw students and professors and journalists and authors and Palestinian folks be silenced and fired and expelled and imprisoned. So we tried to say, ‘This is going to set the precedent for this whole thing to explode,’ and it took it happening to these white men for people to be like, ‘Oh my god.’”

She also pointed to the ICE presences that escalated under the Trump administration, and referenced the deaths of Keith Porter and Renee Good as moments that began to shift awareness. “I think that those were moments, too, where people started to wake up,” she said.

On the question of whether more celebrities might eventually speak out, Einbinder offered a grim kind of optimism: “As Israel ramps up its genocide, the reality is harder and harder to ignore for a lot of people.”

“I Don’t Want Cowardice to Be the Metric”

Einbinder also pushed back hard on the idea that her own outspokenness takes courage — not out of false modesty, but because she refuses to let silence be reframed as a reasonable baseline.

“I always resist the idea that what I am doing is in any way brave because I don’t want cowardice to be a metric by which I judge bravery,” she said. “What I am doing is having eyes and seeing reality and saying what I am seeing. And I think that so many people risk so much more in a tangible sense.”

It’s a line that lands differently when you consider what Khalil, sitting beside her, has actually been through.

Einbinder has been among the most consistent Hollywood voices on this issue for some time. At the 2025 Emmy Awards, where she won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Hacks, she ended her acceptance speech with: “Go Birds, f— ICE, and free Palestine.” She has also signed the Film Workers for Palestine pledge, committing not to work with Israeli film institutions that signatories view as complicit in genocide and apartheid.

She’s not alone among festival circuit names making noise right now. Pedro Almodóvar, whose new film Bitter Christmas debuts in competition at Cannes, recently told the Los Angeles Times that the 2026 Oscars telecast struck him as notably apolitical. “It was quite notable watching the Oscar telecast where there were not many protests against the war or against Trump,” Almodóvar said. “The only real example I can remember came from a European, a friend of mine, Javier Bardem, who did directly say, ‘Free Palestine.’” The director added: “People are obviously very frightened. The U.S. is not a democracy right now.”

Einbinder is heading to Cannes herself — as the star of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which premieres in the Un Certain Regard section. Whatever the red carpet looks like, don’t expect her to keep it strictly about the movie.