Shabbat shalom!
First, a belated g’mar tov and a heartfelt hope that everyone enjoyed a good breaking of the fast after a steady diet of atonement. If ever there were a year that demanded repentance, reflection, and maybe an extra bagel with cream cheese schmear afterward, this was it.
And since this is the season of honest reckoning, let’s begin with a little gratitude, a “tip of the kippah” to the Boston Red Sox. They may not have been quite “Built for Fall”, as MLB’s marketing slogan insists, but they still gave us a season worth watching. Scrappy, imperfect, full of effort and flashes of youthful brilliance. They didn’t deliver another ring, but they delivered something else: joy, grit, and the sweet reminder that even when you fall short, playing with heart still matters.
If only the same could be said for Hollywood.
Because while the Sox were out taking swings (and missing too frequently), the celebrity class, the same crowd of moral exhibitionists who’ve spent the past two years preaching justice for Gaza, were suddenly benched when it came time to support an actual peace plan.
Yes, that plan. The one the orange man child’s son-in-law developed to help Dad win an “ignoble” prize. The very same newly unveiled Gaza peace proposal, endorsed by nearly every major Arab nation and supported across much of the West. A plan that could, at long last, free hostages, ease Gazan suffering, and sideline Hamas, the single greatest obstacle to Palestinian dignity and regional stability.
And yet, from the celebrity pulpit that never shuts up? Crickets.
Peter Himmelman captured the vacuum perfectly in his Substack essay Oh, Righteous Performers: Where Are Your Voices Now?, a searing open letter to the same famous faces who fill our feeds with sermons but vanish when the real moral stakes show up.
Instead of showing up for peace, they showed up for the Oscars. Draped not in courage but in red-hand pins, the now-infamous emblem of the Artists4Ceasefire campaign. To some, it’s a symbol of peace. To others, especially Jews who remember the Ramallah lynching of 2000, it’s a grotesque echo of murderers triumphantly holding up their bloodied hands. The insensitive fools apparently did not know the difference or just didn’t care.
Among those flashing their red palms of performative virtue: Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Finneas O’Connell, Ava DuVernay, Ramy Youssef, Riz Ahmed, and others. Add to that the Artists4Ceasefire letter signatories—Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Ben Affleck, America Ferrera, and Tilda Swinton—and you have a full Hollywood starting lineup of the self-satisfied nit-wits.
And after a deep search through the celebrity universe, here’s what turns up: not one of these self-proclaimed humanitarians has publicly supported the Gaza peace plan. Not one statement. Not one tweet. Not one red carpet moment of courage. A deal endorsed by nearly every major Arab nation, by European allies, by pragmatic diplomats across the spectrum, and not a single Hollywood voice brave enough to say “yes.”
That silence isn’t apathy. It’s shameful self-preservation.
Because peace, like baseball, requires hard work. It’s not glamorous. It’s not scripted. It’s built for fall. Supporting this deal means admitting that the true evil in Gaza isn’t Israel, it’s Hamas. But saying that out loud doesn’t earn “likes”, and the Hollywood ego is allergic to unprofitable and/or inconvenient truths.
As Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute explained:
This plan puts the focus again on Hamas’s evil and on the necessity to remove their ability to determine the future of Gaza. That’s what it’s about. And that focus, that’s the prerequisite for everything else now. This is the essence of what the deal is about. All the rest is peripheral. And in many ways, Israel’s greatest failure, possibly as a result of the way it conducted the war, and maybe as a result of anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment, whatever it might be, is that very quickly, this war shifted from focusing on the evil of Hamas to focusing on Israel’s evil or unjust actions.”
Exactly. The point of this deal isn’t politics, it’s moral clarity. It’s about taking the steering wheel away from the murderous jihadists who’ve driven Gaza into a ditch and giving ordinary Palestinians a real chance at life.
But the “righteous performers” can’t stomach that focus shift. Their silence isn’t neutrality, it’s complicity. They’d rather wear symbolic blood on their lapels than risk alienating their fan base by telling the truth about Hamas.
Meanwhile, Arab nations, the ones who actually live with the consequences, are showing the courage our cultural elite lack. They’ve seen enough. They’re ready for peace.
And yes, let’s be honest: these are the very same nations that for decades have slammed their own doors shut to Palestinian refugees. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, they’ve all perfected the art of proclaiming solidarity while quietly closing their borders. Yet even with that history of hypocrisy, they’re still stepping forward to endorse this plan, because they understand what Hollywood refuses to grasp: that peace, however imperfect, is better than perpetual martyrdom.
And since this is still the season of reflection, let’s close on something lighter, and more honest. Last week was also Fat Bear Week, that sacred annual ritual where the people vote not for virtue or victimhood, but for raw, unapologetic girth. This year’s champion: Chunk, the salmon-devouring colossus of Katmai National Park. Chunk didn’t tweet. Chunk didn’t posture. Chunk didn’t moralize. He just ate, slept, lived large, and—unlike Hollywood—earned every ounce of his following.
I myself admit to a form of human hibernation, turning my focus in the fall to bingeing on Redzone football and the baseball playoffs while consuming mass amounts of chicken wings, Doritos, babka, and other health food snacks in the confines of my comfy chair. Fortunately, no-one is following me around with a camera as they do with the bears in Katmai Brooks Falls. But if they did, here is what might be recorded in the archives of the competition (Sandra, don’t look):
Maybe that’s the lesson of the season and a fitting way to end this post: the Sox fought, Chunk and I ate, and Hollywood preached, only three of them were honest about what they were built for. In the end, the Red Sox showed heart, Chunk and I showed girth, and Hollywood showed its hand—red, and empty.
Be safe out there everyone. And go Blue Jays!
Brad out.
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