Golden Globes or Golden Glibs

I don’t know how long Adrien Brody’s speech was tonight because I didn’t time it but it felt like 1,000 years long. It felt like watching a kettle boil - how is this still going? How is the man still speaking? He spoke for so long about his film The Brutalist, for which he won an award, with his two parents in the audience, his gorgeous wife, and the whole of Hollywood. And during the entire time he spoke, he managed to avoid saying the word “Holocaust”. The film is about a Holocaust survivor who flees to America. I have never seen someone give a speech so painfully while fearing every word that was about to escape his lips in the event it wasn’t carefully chosen enough. The word “war” escaped. The word “immigrant”. But never the word Jew or Holocaust. Brody was so desperate not to offend anyone with the words that have become taboo in the Hollywood that apparently the Jews run. It is now taboo to say Holocaust in Hollywood.

Gal Gadot was the presenter on the podium for the category and as Brody emerged to receive his accolade, you can see her mouth “Mazel Tov” at him because Brody is a patrilineal Jew, and Gadot is a Jew, and this was kind of a Jewish win. But oh there was to be no acknolwedgment of Jewish survival or grit. This was now about a universal immigrant, I guess? We are losing the specificity of our own stories when our storytellers are not brave enough to mention us. Brody is famous because of the Holocaust; because of his depiction in The Pianist of one man’s survival in Warsaw. But tonight he was scared to say it. The Pianist was afraid of the word Holocaust.

Earlier today, Gadot became the only A-lister in Hollywood to make a public statement about the hostages, specifically 19-year-old Liri Albag, whose proof of life video was released by Hamas this weekend, and has left anyone with a soul feeling utterly sick at the sight of what these terrorists have done to a young woman for 457 days. Despite Gadot’s efforts, however, (and her efforts so unique, standalone and commendable must be acknowledged) she still did not wear a yellow ribbon upon her outfit tonight. And you can imagine as a fly on the wall that there had to be a debate about it. Wearing a yellow ribbon shouldn’t be dangerous. Acknolwedging Jews shouldn’t be dangerous.

What is happening.

Well this is what’s happening. You know who is never afraid to make statements publicly? Everyone who wants Hamas to win. Everyone who has adopted Palestinianism as the panacea to all of society’s evils. Par example, this weekend it was Robert Mapplethorpe’s ex Patti Smith. Sorry, I can’t help it.

As one friend put to me, perhaps the keffiyeh is the shroud they can bury her legacy in. At that, it is still too big. She has marked her location as Greenwich, New York, aka the Republic of Palestine. She is the matriarch of white women with savior complexes. I couldn’t believe how many people I still follow on Instagram who put a heart on this post. “A humble piece of cloth”. How about a headscarf for rapists? Sidenote: Patti Smith People are the worst. They are either upcoming “artistes” who similarly don’t have a single original idea of their own, or they are other similarly insufferable white women with the aforementioned savior complex, or they are gay men who lacked maternal figures and have never needed to find women attractive. Sidenote 2: she didn’t even write the One song; Bruce Springsteen wrote it for her.

Unlike Gadot, Smith will say nothing about Liri Albag. Let’s talk about Liri Albag. This was Liri.

This is Liri now.

These are the only two images that Liri’s family have agreed to be published; stills from an extremely difficult video of her that Hamas released this weekend. The family released the following statement:

“Today's video has torn our hearts to pieces. This is not the daughter and sister we know. She is not well - her severe psychological distress is evident. We watched our heroic Liri surviving and pleading for her life. She is just dozens of kilometers away from us, yet for 456 days we have been unable to bring her home. We appeal to the Prime Minister, world leaders, and all decision makers: It's time to make decisions as if your own children were there! Liri is alive and must return alive! This depends only on you! You must not miss this current opportunity to bring them back. All of them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”

Here was a video worse than anything else in the last 456 days showing what this time in captivity has done to a 19-year-old girl – and the world turns the other cheek. Still! Humanity has grossly failed in every way possible and not a single person wearing the badge of "Human Rights" Anything stands to be taken seriously. While the silent are all "gearing up" to speak out about the hostages, the hostages (young women, children and men) are being tortured every second of their captivity. They tweet all day about celebrity warfare but can't call to bring home 100+ innocent Jews who remain in the hands of a terrorist organization. They post constant propaganda about death tolls in Gaza but willfully ignore that the war would be over if the hostages were released, and they say nothing about them. What wastes of space they all are.

Then again, the guy who got famous from a Holocaust film can’t even talk about Jewish history, nevermind Jewish present day.

Hollywood has closed the curtain on itself. The artist has no freedom to speak uninhibited any longer. The actor cannot embrace his craft without being told he is not appropriate for the role. The producer cannot see a vision through without crashing into every conceivable and inconceivable hurdle about what a future audience will pick holes in. In Hollywood there is an elephant in every room and - you will no longer see that elephant fly. When artists cannot speak with the full force of their hearts, it makes the whole world quieter. Where there has never been more to scream about, our artists have chosen silence. Hamas didn’t even need to gag them.