The actress had said on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the Hamas attacks had been “brainwashed to hate Jews.”
The actress Julianna Margulies, who drew criticism this week after saying on a podcast that some Black people not standing with Jews after the recent attack by Hamas had been “brainwashed to hate Jews,” said on Friday that she “did not intend for my words to sow further division, for which I am sincerely apologetic.”
On the Nov. 20 episode of “The Back Room With Andy Ostroy,” Margulies, who has starred on the television series “E.R.,” “The Good Wife” and, presently, “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+, accused Black and L.G.B.T.Q. people of showing insufficient support for Israel and Jews in the United States since the deadly Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.
“I am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect,” Margulies said in a statement on Friday afternoon to Deadline, which her publicist sent to The New York Times in response to a query. “I want to be 100% clear: Racism, homophobia, sexism, or any prejudice against anyone’s personal beliefs or identity are abhorrent to me, full stop.”
Some social media users objected to Margulies’s comments as racist, and questioned why she was focusing her criticism on marginalized groups.
Margulies, who is Jewish, contrasted Jews’ vocal support for Black civil rights in the 1960s with the present: “Now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us?’”
She 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.”
She also said on the podcast that progressive protesters on college campuses, whom she accused of “spewing this antisemitic hate,” include gender nonbinary people who, she said, “will be the first people beheaded and their heads played like a soccer ball on the field” in places run by militant Islamist groups like Hamas.
Margulies also said on the podcast, “There was a film being shown by this Black lesbian club on the Columbia campus, and they put signs up that said, ‘No Jews allowed.’” (The president of LionLez, a group for queer women and nonbinary people of color at the university, had emailed, “Zionists aren’t invited,” The Columbia Spectator reported.) Margulies said that to Hamas and its ilk, members of that student club would be “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?”
Margulies added that she was offended 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, to be honest with you.”
In her statement on Friday, Margulies said that she usually seeks to “forge a united front against discrimination.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
