The Good Wife star Julianna Margulies is facing backlash for her comments on the “Black community” and LGBTQ+ people in relation to the violent conflict in Israel and Palestine. Margulies had previously written an op-ed in USA Today condemning friends’ silence around recent Hamas attacks as antisemitism; her appearance on Andy Ostroy’s Back Room podcast expanded upon the subject, in a much more inflammatory manner. Her remarks have been deemed by some listeners as racist, Islamaphobic, and homophobic, as she seemed to claim some authority on the lesbian experience “as someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show” (via The Hollywood Reporter).
Discussing the current political climate as it regards Israel and Palestine, Margulies said she has shown up for anti-racist causes (“I put a black screen on my Instagram”) and LGBT causes alike (“I made a commercial for same-sex marriages with my husband in 2012”). When Ostroy suggested there’s less pushback on antisemitism than “if we use the wrong pronouns on college campuses,” Margulies added, “It’s those kids who are spewing this antisemitic hate, that have no idea if they stepped foot in an Islamic country—these people who want us to call them they/them, or whatever they want us to call them, which I have respectfully made a point of doing—it’s those people that will be the first people beheaded and their heads played with like a soccer ball. And that’s who they’re supporting? Terrorists who don’t want women to have their rights? LGBTQ people get executed.”
Margulies followed up this violent imagery by citing an example of a “Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus” that advertised a film night with “signs that said, ‘no Jews allowed.’” (The flier reportedly read “Zionists aren’t invited,” according to The Columbia Spectator.) “As someone who plays a lesbian journalist on The Morning Show, I am more offended by it as a lesbian than I am as a Jew,” she said. “Because I wanna say to them, ‘You fucking idiots. You don’t exist. You’re even lower than the Jews. A. You’re Black, and B. You’re gay and you’re turning your back against the people who support you?’ Because Jews, they rally around everybody.”
She went on to say, “In the civil rights movement, the Jews were the ones that walked side by side with the Blacks to fight for their rights. And now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us.’” Discussing the similarities between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany, she later added, “The fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us to me says either they just don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews.”
As the conversation continued, a heated Margulies said, “Here’s what kills me. These kids are calling Jews colonialists. If you’re gonna go with that argument, kids, then get the fuck out of America. Because you were not here first. Native Americans were here first and you owe them a big fucking apology.”