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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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Palestinian Authority’s Abbas Offers to Work With Trump to Broker Peace Deal With Israel
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas holds a leadership meeting in Ramallah, in the West Bank, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has offered to work with US President Donald Trump to broker a comprehensive peace deal with Israel, praising the American leader for brokering a ceasefire between the Jewish state and Iran and calling for an end to the war in Gaza.
In a letter sent to Trump, Abbas expressed his “deep gratitude and appreciation for [Trump’s] successful efforts in reaching a ceasefire between Israel and Iran,” the official Palestinian Authority (PA) news agency WAFA reported.
After 12 days of conflict between the two Middle Eastern adversaries, Trump announced a “complete and total” ceasefire on Monday, just hours after Iran launched missile strikes on the Al Udeid US airbase in Qatar in retaliation for American attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend.
The US joined Israel’s airstrike campaign against the Islamist regime by launching a large-scale military strike against Tehran, destroying three key nuclear enrichment facilities, including the heavily fortified Fordow site.
Although the fragile ceasefire appears to have since held, Tehran initially broke it within minutes, with Israeli officials reporting that three Iranian missiles were launched within the first three hours of the truce.
In his letter to Trump, Abbas called the ceasefire a “necessary and important step to defuse the crises plaguing the world, which will have a positive impact on the security and stability of the region.” He then turned his attention to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“A ceasefire in Gaza would constitute an additional step to [Trump’s] crucial efforts to achieve a just and comprehensive peace between the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the entire world,” the Palestinian leader wrote.
In an effort to earn trust within the international community, Abbas expressed his willingness to work with Trump, Saudi Arabia, and other global partners “to fulfill the promise of peace.”
The Palestinian leader said he was ready “to immediately negotiate and implement a comprehensive peace agreement within a clear and binding timeframe that ends the occupation and achieves security and stability for all, a just and lasting peace.”
Although Trump attempted a peace deal with the PA during his first term, he ultimately bypassed it and instead pursued the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries.
“With you, we can achieve what seemed impossible: a recognized, free, sovereign, and secure Palestine; a recognized and secure Israel; and a region that enjoys peace, prosperity, and integration,” Abbas wrote in his letter.
Given the PA’s long-standing lack of credibility and widely known support for terrorism against Israel, Abbas has been making promises of change as he seeks to secure international trust and position the PA to play a leading role in the Gaza Strip once the current Israel-Hamas war ends.
The PA, which has long been riddled with accusations of corruption, has also maintained for years a so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis.
Under this policy, the PA Martyr’s Fund makes official payments to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and injured Palestinian terrorists. Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget is allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
Earlier this year, Abbas announced plans to reform the system, but the PA has continued issuing payments, with top officials stating they will not deduct any of the funds.
Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005, has also promised to hold elections soon — the first the PA will hold since then.
Even with his commitment to long-promised administrative reforms, the PA lacks public support among Palestinians, with only 40 percent backing its return to govern the Gaza Strip after the war.
Abbas has also promised the demilitarization of his rival Hamas, while condemning the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — an attack he had previously celebrated.
In the past, Abbas praised Hamas for achieving “important goals” with the Oct. 7 onslaught, describing the attack — the deadliest single-day massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — as one that “shook the foundations of the Israeli entity.”
Other PA officials, including Mahmoud al-Habbash, Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs, have similarly praised Hamas’s atrocities, describing them as “legitimate resistance.”
The post Palestinian Authority’s Abbas Offers to Work With Trump to Broker Peace Deal With Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York City Jews Sound Alarm After Anti-Israel Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins Democratic Mayoral Primary
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
Following Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, local Jewish leaders are expressing deep apprehension about their future status in a city facing the prospect of being led by a man who has been accused of antisemitism and made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career.
Mamdani, the 33‑year‑old state assemblymember and proud democratic socialist, defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other candidates in a lopsided first‑round win in the city’s Democratic primary for mayor, notching approximately 43.5 percent of first‑choice votes compared to Cuomo’s 36.4 percent.
Voters in New York City rank their choices in order of their preference. While Mamdani declared victory and Cuomo conceded defeat, the race’s ultimate outcome will technically be decided when every vote is tallied, taking into account the ranked choice count. Mamdani’s victory is all but assured.
Some observers have speculated that Mamdani’s win over an older, high-profile Democrat signifies growing frustration with the party’s status quo and represents a generational change.
The election results have also alarmed members of the local Jewish community, who expressed deep concern over his past criticism of Israel and defense of antisemitic rhetoric.
“Mamdani’s election is the greatest existential threat to a metropolitan Jewish population since the election of the notorious antisemite Karl Lueger in Vienna,” Rabbi Marc Schneier, one of the most prominent Jewish leaders in New York City, said in a statement. “Jewish leaders must come together as a united force to prevent a mass Jewish Exodus from New York City.”
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who along with her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt co-founded the Altneu, an Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, suggested that Mamdani’s political ascendance indicates that antisemitism might actually be a political “asset” these days.
“Perhaps soft antisemitism is not a liability for a NYC politician. It’s an asset,” Chizhik-Goldschmidt wrote. “Perhaps New York City is not the city we thought it was.”
Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who later founded the organization Americans Against Antisemitism, similarly repudiated Mamdani and encouraged New Yorkers to consolidate behind a single candidate to oppose the presumptive Democratic nominee in the general election in November.
“Mamdani has won the Democratic primary,” he said in a video posted to social media. “It is pathetic, it is sick, it is painful for people who care about the future of New York and in particular the Jewish community.”
Hikind added in a written post accompanying the video: “NYC must unite to defeat the dangerous antisemite Mamdani.”
A little-known politician before this year’s primary campaign, Mamdani is an outspoken supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
Mamdani has also repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, falsely suggesting the country does not offer “equal rights” for all its citizens, and promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York.
Most recently, Mamdani defended the phrase “globalize the intifada”— which references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israels and has been widely interpreted as a call to expand political violence — by invoking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II. In response, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum repudiated the mayoral candidate, calling his comments “outrageous and especially offensive to [Holocaust] survivors.”
The same week, an old X/Twitter post from 2015 by Mamdani resurfaced online showing him appearing to threaten that a “third intifada” was coming.
New York City, which is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, has experienced a major spike in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, with police data showing Jews were targeted in the majority of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City last year.
Concern among Jewish leaders over Mamdani’s victory amid rising antisemitism extended well beyond New York.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, warned that Mamdani’s victory represents a well-known pattern that starts with hatred of Israel and ends with violence targeting Jews.
“Zohran Mamdani’s win in #NYC feels deeply familiar to #Europe’s #Jewish community. We’ve seen where radical politics — especially cloaked in ‘justice’ rhetoric — can lead. It starts with slogans. It ends with violence,” Goldschmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow, posted on social media.
“In Europe, we’ve learned the hard way: when far-left ideologues and radical Islamists turn Israel into a symbol of absolute evil, it quickly becomes a weapon — not against a state, but against Jews. ‘Anti-Zionism’ becomes the mask. Exclusion and incitement follow,” the rabbi continued. “This isn’t about legitimate critique of Israeli policy. It’s about obsession. Israel becomes a dog whistle — a coded target on synagogues, schools, and Jews in public life.”
Europe, like New York, has experienced a surge in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, with antisemitic incidents often liked to animus against Israel.
“The safety of all New Yorkers — including Jewish New Yorkers — is the single greatest responsibility of the mayor of New York,” said Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union.
“That safety has been deeply impacted by the rhetoric and actions of those whose opposition to Zionism has driven them to work to instill fear and intimidation in Jews who support Israel,” he added.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), called for Jews in New York to immigrate to Israel.
“As an American Jew and as a human, I am truly frightened that an antisemitic communist Mamdani has actually promoted murdering Jews by supporting and legitimizing the antisemitic rally cry ‘globalize the intifada,’ refuses to accept the Jewish state of Israel as a Jewish state, states he will arrest PM Netanyahu if he comes to NYC, and is friendly with Israel bashing Jew-haters – and yet has been mainstreamed in the most important Jewish city in America,” he posted. “Is it time to make aliyah to Israel.”
The post New York City Jews Sound Alarm After Anti-Israel Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins Democratic Mayoral Primary first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Teen Threatened at Knifepoint in France Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
A Jewish teenager was threatened at knifepoint and called a “dirty Jew” in an antisemitic attack in France — the latest in a growing wave of hate crimes targeting the country’s Jewish community.
Last week, a 15-year-old boy was violently attacked in Colomiers, southwestern France, after attending a meetup arranged with a girl over social media, French media reported.
When the boy arrived at the meeting point, two men were waiting for him at the entrance to a basement. They held him at knifepoint, humiliated him, and shared the assault on social media.
One of the attackers, armed with a knife, forced him to remove his shirt and dance, then grabbed him by the neck and forced him to kneel.
Then, the attacker reportedly told him to “beg and pray,” repeatedly calling him a “dirty Jew” because he attended a private Jewish school. He also threatened to kill him if he tried to contact the police.
The following day, the teenager found out that the assault had been filmed and circulated on social media. Using the attackers’ TikTok accounts, the victim was able to file a formal complaint.
On Friday, local police arrested one of the suspects who posted the video, according to the French broadcaster Europe 1. He was taken into custody on charges of aggravated assault motivated by religious hatred.
As of this week, the investigation is ongoing, with authorities actively searching for the remaining suspects.
The brutal assault is the latest antisemitic incident amid a troubling surge in anti-Jewish violence sweeping the country since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews.
The total number of antisemitic outrages in 2024 was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
The post Jewish Teen Threatened at Knifepoint in France Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.