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A new ‘Color Purple’ adaptation hits theaters, returning author Alice Walker’s history of antisemitism to spotlight
(JTA) – The bright, colorful movie musical “The Color Purple,” which opens in theaters on Christmas, tells a story that has by now become a familiar part of the American canon — of a young Black woman’s self-empowerment and discovery of her own sexuality amid the horrific, abusive conditions of her life in the early-1900s rural South.
It’s far from the first time Americans have heard the story of Celie, the protagonist of Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple.” Walker’s novel debuted in 1982 and received rave reviews, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Three years later, it was adapted into a dramatic film directed by Steven Spielberg. This new version is an adaptation of a 2005 stage musical, which itself was reworked for a successful 2015 revival.
But even as the reputation of “The Color Purple” has soared over the decades, Walker’s own has become more muddled — specifically for her difficult relationship to Judaism and her outright flirtations with antisemitism. Married to a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer when she was younger, Walker in the mid-2010s began promoting works by an antisemitic conspiracy theorist and authored an antisemitic poem of her own.
This combined with her longtime outspoken criticism of Israel has led some in the Jewish community to question her continued stature as a well-regarded figure of American letters and led to her being disinvited from a major book festival just last year.
Despite the fact that Walker’s reputation among Jews has nosedived since their first film together in 1985, Spielberg remains involved in the new “Color Purple” as a producer and walked the red carpet at the premiere with fellow producers Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones (who both worked on the first film as well). Directing duties this time went to Ghanaian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule.
Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s production company, did not return a request for comment for this story.
Here’s what you need to know about Alice Walker right now.
Author Alice Walker with her then-husband Melvyn Leventhal and their daughter Rebecca, August 12, 1970. (Bettmann/Getty Images)
Early life and love
Growing up in a sharecropper’s shack in rural Georgia, Walker married into Judaism when she met Melvyn Leventhal, a young law student and civil rights activist with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, at a soul food restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1966. Walker, whose activism was influenced by her progressive Spelman College Jewish professor Howard Zinn, had returned to the South to join the civil rights movement after transferring to Sarah Lawrence and traveling through Europe.
“I glared across the room at the white people eating in ‘our’ restaurant and locked eyes with a very cute guy. Oy vey,” Walker wrote in her journals at the time, later published in 2022. The two continued their courtship in New York until Leventhal finished law school.
They were married in 1967 after Walker proposed to Leventhal and moved back to Mississippi, a state where interracial marriage was still illegal, to continue their activism. “Can there be any doubt that, no matter what, we will live happily ever after?” Walker wrote at the time. But Melvyn’s mother Miriam deeply disapproved of the marriage, calling Walker a “schvartze,” using a derogatory Yiddish term for a Black person, and going so far as to sit shiva for her son. His brother, Walker later claimed, nailed a giant Confederate flag “over an entire side of his bedroom” in protest of the union.
The two had a daughter, Rebecca, together, who would later become a prominent feminist scholar and is an executive producer of the new “Color Purple” movie alongside her mother. Rebecca Walker’s own autobiography, “Black, White, & Jewish,” describes her feeling of being pulled between the identities of her parents; it was recently pulled from a Florida school district (along with “The Color Purple”) with district officials citing sexual content.
In her journals, Walker called Leventhal “a real Jew” (emphasis hers), elaborating, “He loves justice, like one loves a magnificent misused person.” But their marriage became strained, and the two divorced in 1976, having already been separated for years.
A hard tack against Israel
Walker’s activism around Israel for years was contentious but largely in line with most pro-Palestinian thought.
In 2010, she published a short essay book, “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel,” that originated as an essay in the left-wing Jewish website Tikkun. In the book, she discusses visiting the Gaza Strip with the antiwar nonprofit CODEPINK in 2009, in the midst of an Israeli bombing campaign, and accuses world leaders of showing “indifference to the value of Palestinian life that has corrupted our children’s sense of right and wrong for generations.”
“Most Jews who know their own history see how relentlessly the Israeli government is attempting to turn Palestinians into the ‘new Jews,’ patterned on Jews of the Holocaust era, as if someone must hold that place in order for Jews to avoid it,” she writes, adding that she could never “rationally discuss” Israel with her ex-husband. “He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi, and that he objected to in his own Brooklyn-based family.” She also listed several progressive Jews whom she said were friends of hers also protesting Israel, including Zinn, Muriel Rukeyser, Amy Goodman, and Noam Chomsky.
In 2012, Walker made her positions explicit when she turned down an offer to publish a new Israeli edition of “The Color Purple.” In a letter, she told publisher Yediot Books that she did this because she believed Israel “is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people,” and endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement — a tactic that bestselling Irish author and fellow BDS backer Sally Rooney would echo in 2021. (An earlier Hebrew-language edition of “The Color Purple” was published in the 1980s.)
In 2013, the University of Michigan’s Center for the Education of Women rescinded an invitation for Walker to speak at its 50th anniversary celebration; Walker would later claim that this was due to her views on Israel. But the university never gave a clear reason, and in fact invited her to speak again the following year without incident.
Full-on Icke
By 2017, Walker’s tone had hardened — not only against Israel, but also Jews more broadly. That year on her website, she published a poem entitled, “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty To Study The Talmud,” in which Walker writes, “Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only / That, but to enjoy it?”
The poem, a harsh critique of Israel and what Walker suggests is a Jewish urge to dominate non-Jews in accordance with the Talmud, continues, to describe “what may be done / With impunity, and without conscience, / By a Chosen people, / To the vast majority of the people / On the planet / Who were not Chosen.”
Walker also describes being “accused of being antisemitic” by a “friend / a Jewish soul / who I thought understood / or could learn to understand / almost anything” — an apparent reference to her ex-husband. The poem includes a link to an interview she conducted with controversial Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Miko Peled.
Walker’s troubles with antisemitism would break into public view the following year, when The New York Times Book Review asked her to list her favorite books for a regular column. Among her choices was “And The Truth Shall Set You Free,” by antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke. The book purports to explore the secret forces behind global power, and contains numerous screeds on Israel, the Jews, and familiar conspiracy theories like the Rotshchild family.
“I believe that researchers over the years who have blamed the entire conspiracy on the Jewish people as a whole are seriously misguided; similarly, for Jewish organizations to deny that any Jewish person is working for the New World Order conspiracy is equally naive and allowing dogma or worse to blind them to reality,” Icke writes at one point in the book. Later, discussing the events that led up to the Holocaust, he states, “I believe that all this was coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite.”
Walker had nothing but praise for the book, telling the TImes, “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.” It wasn’t her first time praising Icke, whom she has also boosted on her website and in other writings; she soon suggested that her critics were merely upset over her pro-Palestinian activism.
Walker’s outspoken love of Icke has prompted a more widespread reckoning with her beliefs on Jews. Last year, a book festival in Berkeley, California, disinvited her from a major event over what the festival said was her “endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke.” Walker had been promoting “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire,” a newly published collection of her journals. Playhouses staging “The Color Purple” started publishing statements addressing Walker’s links to antisemitism.
A new ‘Color’ with shades of old
The new “Color Purple” is marketing itself as a “bold” reimagining of the novel, swapping out its dour, punishing prose for splashy, elaborate choreography. Like the first Spielberg adaptation, it also features an all-star Black cast: in this case headlined by Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, “The Little Mermaid”’s Halle Bailey and musician H.E.R.
It is also being positioned by studio Warner Brothers Discovery as a major awards contender — notable as the Spielberg-directed version was famously shut out of all 10 Oscars it was nominated for. At the time, film critic Roger Ebert, who named Spielberg’s film the best of the year, suspected this was due to the racism of a nearly entirely white Academy.
In the midst of Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Walker has continued to advocate for Palestinians. Last month she appeared in a webinar hosted by Socialist Action entitled “Palestine Will Be Free From the River to the Sea“ that also featured an editor of the anti-Zionist website Electronic Intifada.
Meanwhile, Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation has launched an initiative to collect testimony from Israeli survivors of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. Spielberg himself, while not directly involved in the project, has endorsed it, saying, “I never imagined I would see such unspeakable barbarity against Jews in my lifetime.”
Spielberg has made no public comments about Walker or the new “Color Purple” this year, though the two of them both walked the red carpet at the film’s premiere.
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As Gaza War Continues, Hamas Calls for Global Protests While Israel Marks Breakthroughs in Medical Innovation
A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
As the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas calls for global protests amid stalled Gaza ceasefire talks, Israel has broken new ground despite the ongoing conflict, achieving a major medical breakthrough in synthetic human kidney development.
The contrast illustrates a stark contrast between the priorities of Hamas, an international designated terrorist group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, and Israel, the lone democracy in the Middle East that has long been a leader in tech and medical innovation.
On Wednesday, Hamas urged worldwide protests in support of Palestinians, calling on the international community “to denounce Israel’s genocidal war and starvation policy in Gaza.”
“We call for continuing and escalating the popular pressure in all cities and squares on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday … through rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins outside the embassies of the Israeli regime and its allies, particularly in the US,” the statement read.
The Palestinian terrorist group also called to expose what it described as “the terrorism of the Zio-Nazi occupation against defenseless civilians.”
Hamas’s latest move against Israel comes amid stalled indirect negotiations over a proposed 60-day ceasefire and hostage release deal, which collapsed last month after the group vowed it would not disarm unless an independent Palestinian state is established — rejecting a key Israeli demand to end the war in Gaza.
In its statement, Hamas demanded the opening of all border crossings to allow immediate aid into the war-torn enclave and urged a global condemnation of “the international community’s inaction on the Israeli crimes.”
Amid mounting international pressure to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel announced new measures to facilitate the delivery of aid, including temporary pauses in fighting in certain areas and the creation of protected routes for aid convoys.
Israeli officials have previously accused Hamas of diverting aid for terrorist activities and selling supplies at inflated prices to civilians, while also blaming the United Nations and other foreign organizations for enabling this diversion.
Hamas’s statement also emphasized that the “global resistance movement must continue until Israeli aggression on Gaza ends and the siege on the coastal strip is lifted.”
Meanwhile, as Israel faces escalating hostilities and the heavy toll of war, the Jewish state continues to push the boundaries of innovation and resilience, achieving new medical breakthroughs while confronting ongoing challenges.
In a major medical breakthrough, scientists at Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University have successfully grown a synthetic 3D miniature human kidney in a lab using specialized stem cells derived from kidney tissue — one of the most promising advances in regenerative medicine.
Dr. Dror Harats, chairman of Sheba’s Research Authority, described this achievement as a reflection of Israel’s leading role in global medical innovation.
“Despite growing efforts to isolate Israel from international science, breakthroughs like this prove our impact is both lasting and essential,” he said.
In a landmark study, a team from Sheba’s Safra Children’s Hospital and Tel Aviv University’s Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine created synthetic kidney organs that matured and remained stable for 34 weeks — the longest-lasting and most refined kidney organoids developed to date.
Nearly a decade ago, the research team became the first to successfully isolate human kidney tissue stem cells — the cells responsible for the organ’s development and growth.
Previous attempts to grow kidneys in a lab using general-purpose stem cells were short-lived, typically lasting only a few weeks and often producing unwanted cell types that compromised research accuracy.
However, this Israeli research team used stem cells taken directly from kidney tissue — cells that naturally develop into kidney parts — allowing them to create a much purer and more stable model with key features found in real kidneys.
This medical breakthrough could have far-reaching implications, redefining the current understanding of kidney diseases and advancing the development of innovative treatments.
Researchers believe the model could help assess how medications impact fetal kidneys during pregnancy and move science closer to repairing or replacing damaged kidney tissue with lab-grown cells.
The discovery came days after researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and international partners discovered a way to boost the immune system’s cancer-fighting ability by reprogramming how T cells, which are white blood cells critical to the immune system, produce energy.
The researchers explained in a study published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications that disabling a protein known as Ant2 in T cells greatly enhances their effectiveness against tumors.
“By disabling Ant2, we triggered a complete shift in how T cells produce and use energy,” Prof. Michael Berger of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine, who co-led the study with doctorate student Omri Yosef, told the Tazpit Press Service. “This reprogramming made them significantly better at recognizing and killing cancer cells.”
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Netherlands to Push EU to Suspend Israel Trade Deal but Won’t Recognize Palestinian State ‘At This Time’
Netherlands Foreign Affairs Minister Caspar Veldkamp addresses a press conference, in New Delhi on April 1, 2025. Photo: ANI Photo/Sanjay Sharma via Reuters Connect
The Netherlands is spearheading efforts to suspend the European Union-Israel trade agreement amid rising EU criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, while simultaneously refusing to recognize a Palestinian state, contrasting with other member states as international pressure mounts.
On Thursday, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp announced that the Netherlands will push the EU to suspend the trade component of the EU-Israel Association Agreement — a pact governing the EU’s political and economic ties with the Jewish state.
This latest anti-Israel initiative follows a recent EU-commissioned report accusing Israel of committing “indiscriminate attacks … starvation … torture … [and] apartheid” against Palestinians in Gaza during its military campaign against Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
Following calls from a majority of EU member states for a formal investigation, this report built on Belgium’s recent decision to review Israel’s compliance with the trade agreement, a process initiated by the Netherlands and led by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas.
According to the report, “there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations” under the 25-year-old EU-Israel Association Agreement.
While the document acknowledges the reality of violence by Hamas, it states that this issue lies outside its scope — failing to address the Palestinian terrorist group’s role in sparking the current war with its bloody rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israeli officials have slammed the report as factually incorrect and morally flawed, noting that Hamas embeds its military infrastructure within civilian targets and Israel’s army takes extensive precautions to try and avoid civilian casualties.
In a Dutch parliamentary debate on Gaza on Thursday, Veldkamp also announced that the government would not recognize a Palestinian state for now — a position that stands in sharp contrast to the recent moves by several other EU member states to extend recognition.
“The Netherlands is not planning to recognize a Palestinian state at this time,” the Dutch diplomat said.
“This war has ceased to be a just war and is now leading to the erosion of Israel’s own security and identity,” he continued.
This latest decision goes against the position of several EU member states, including France, which has committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood in September.
The United Kingdom has likewise indicated it will do so unless Israel acts to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and agrees to a ceasefire.
For its part, Germany said it was not planning to recognize a Palestinian state in the short term, and Italy argued that recognition must occur simultaneously with the recognition of Israel by the new entity.
Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia all recognized a Palestinian state last year.
Israel has been facing growing pressure from several EU member states seeking to undermine its defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
On Thursday, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera strongly condemned Israel’s actions in the war-torn enclave, describing the situation as a “grave violation of human dignity.”
“What we are seeing is a concrete population being targeted, killed and condemned to starve to death,” Ribera told Politico. “If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning.”
Until now, the European Commission has refrained from accusing Israel of genocide, but Ribera’s comments mark one of the strongest European condemnations since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
She also called on the EU to take decisive action by considering the suspension of its trade agreement with Israel and the implementation of sanctions, while emphasizing that such measures would require unanimous approval from all member states.
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Graduate Student Unions Promoting Antisemitism, Reform Group Says
Students listen to a speech at a protest encampment at Stanford University in Stanford, California US, on April 26, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
Higher-education-based unions controlled by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) are rife with antisemitism and anti-Zionist discrimination, according to a new letter imploring the US Congress’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce to address the matter.
“Tracing its roots to communism in the 1930s, the UE is a radical, pro-Hamas labor union that has a long history of antisemitism,” the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), one of the US’s leading labor reform groups, wrote on July 30 in a message obtained by The Algemeiner. “The UE openly supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is designed to cripple and destroy Israel economically. Today, the UE furthers its antisemitic agenda by unionizing graduate students on college campuses and using its exclusive representation powers to create a hostile environment for Jewish students. The hostile environment includes demanding compulsory dues to fund the UE’s abhorrent activities.”
NRTW went on to describe a litany of alleged injustices to which UE members subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University. At MIT, the letter said, “union officers” aided a riotous group which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the BDS movement. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
The situation requires federal oversight and intervention, NRTW said, including Congress’s possibly clarifying that student-employees are not traditional employees and are therefore afforded protections under sections of the Civil Rights Act which apply to the campus.
“These continuing patterns of antisemitism are illegal, immoral, and must be stopped,” the letter continued. “We encourage you to do all that is in your power to investigate and help bring an end to the UE and its affiliates’ nonstop harassment and intimidation of Jewish students … The Trump administration can also use tools available to it under Title VI and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against colleges who work with unions to create a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
July’s letter is not the first time NRTW has publicized alleged antisemitic abuse in unions representing higher education employees.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.