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At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?
Belu-Simion Fainaru wanted very badly to talk about the water.
The Romanian-born Israeli artist had come to Venice with “Rose of Nothingness,” a quiet, ritualistic installation in Israel’s temporary pavilion at the Arsenale: water dripping into a rectangular black pool in a silent corner of the city’s former armory and shipyard, disturbing the stillness of the reflective surface, inviting visitors to focus on the movement from absence to presence — and back again to nothing.
There’s an explicit link to Paul Celan, above all to “black milk,” the central image of the German-speaking Romanian-Jewish poet’s “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), one of his best-known works. The pool, with its dozens of circular ripples, evokes collective memory, ink and writing in the city where the Talmud was first printed.
Yet by the time I reached Fainaru during the professional preview of the 61st Venice Biennale, he had been forced to defend his art’s right to exist. The Israeli Pavilion had become one of the pressure points of an exhibition that seemed to be losing faith in the structure that had sustained it for more than a century: the national pavilion, that quaintly anachronistic yet oddly durable relic of late 19th century world’s-fair patriotism. Fainaru had been asked, he told me, about Benjamin Netanyahu, The Hague, Vladimir Putin and Gaza, but rarely about the work he had come to Venice to present.
“You are a cultural reporter; I am an artist,” he said. He had not come here as a politician, but this year’s Biennale had treated him as one.
“What I see now,” the 66-year-old artist said, “is total politicization of art.” If this continued, he warned, art would become “very limited, very narrow,” and eventually “a very violent arena.”
The phrase stayed with me throughout the preview. This year, the Biennale has indeed become a violent, chaotic and scandal-ridden arena. There were barricades, strikes, legal warnings, shuttered pavilions, the resignation of the Golden Lion jury, and art performances and actions meant to disquiet and to shock.
L’Esposizione internazionale d’arte di Venezia was founded in 1895. It is now the most prestigious international contemporary art exhibition in the world, although it still bears traces from the era in which it was born, an age of imperial prestige and competitive cultural display. The Giardini, with its permanent national houses (owned by the countries they represent), is not merely a garden. It is a geopolitical map of cultural power and prestige.
This year, it often looked like that map was being torn up before the spectators’ eyes.
The Biennale’s 2026 exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” opened to the public on May 9 and runs through Nov. 22. It was conceived by the late Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh and completed after her death, with 110 invited participants in the central exhibition representing 100 countries. But when I attended, the curatorial project masterminded by Kouoh and implemented by her assistants was eclipsed by a series of interlocking controversies: the participation of Israel and Russia; a €50 million gift to secure Qatar’s arrival in the Giardini with a temporary structure built on the site of a future permanent pavilion; Iran’s last-minute withdrawal; and the anger and bewilderment directed at the American pavilion due to the global havoc the Trump administration is only too happy to unleash.
The Israeli Pavilion was not in its permanent building in the Giardini this year. That structure, built in 1952 by Zeev Rechter, remained closed, officially for renovation. (The pavilion also remained shut during the previous Biennale, in 2024; Ruth Patir, the artist representing Israel that year, installed her work but refused to open the pavilion until a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement was reached).
I had been told about sizable protests outside the temporary Israeli pavilion at the Arsenale, but by the time I arrived, all was calm. Two young carabinieri stood outside looking bored. Inside, I thought I spotted a plainclothes Israeli security guard, though the curators later denied that any such person was present. During my interview with Fainaru and his curators, Rabbi Ramy Banin of Chabad of Venice stopped by; he had supplied the klafim, the handwritten parchment scrolls, for the oversized black mezuzot, engraved with a stylized שַׁדַּי, that Fainaru had designed for the installation.
Fainaru was plainly relieved to be asked about the work. His installation is built around an Israeli irrigation system — technology devised to deliver water in places where it is scarce. In agriculture, he told me, such systems are used “to bring life in places that are not life.” In Venice, he had transformed that apparatus into “food for a spiritual dimension.”
The title, “Rose of Nothingness,” points to Celan’s evocative neologism Die Niemandsrose (“The No-One’s Rose”), the title of a 1963 volume that he dedicated to Osip Mandelstam as well as to the Kabbalistic understanding of nothingness not as nihilism but as a generative source.
“The origin comes from nothingness,” Fainaru told me. Presence emerges from absence; the visible world returns to abstraction.
This isn’t Fainaru’s first Biennale. In 2019, he represented Romania, a country he left in 1973. He won the Israel Prize in 2025 and is a professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Haifa. He is a founder of the Mediterranean Biennale, which showcases works by artists from Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa; its most recent edition was held in Sakhnin, an Arab city in Israel, where he also helped create the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s impossible to read Fainaru’s résumé and conclude that he’s a lackey of the Netanyahu government.
Avital Bar-Shay, one of the two curators of the Israeli Pavilion, took me aside and told me many Jewish visitors had come inside and said “Kol hakavod,” telling the team they were proud that Israel was exhibiting. Some spoke of antisemitism in London and other cities that have seen an uptick in violence against Jews since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. “They said, ‘You are giving us courage,’” she recalled. For those visitors, the pavilion was not an assertion of Israeli power, hard or soft. Rather, it was a modest sign that Israeli and Jewish cultural presence had not been expelled from the international stage.
The evening I arrived in Venice, I met a Turkish curator who told me he had spearheaded a “massive demonstration” in front of the Israeli Pavilion earlier that day. Fainaru disputed the scale of the protest. “There were perhaps 30 or 40 people shouting loudly” and shaming those who entered the pavilion. “The majority wants to see art,” he asserted, adding that he found attempts to cancel progressive Israeli artists, like the filmmaker Amos Gitai (whom he called a friend) and him not only wrong but counterproductive.
“We totally are against boycotts, not just against Israel, but against any other countries,” he said. “Artist or scientist or academics. And I think we should strive to live in a better world, not a world of dispersion, of hate and exclusion. I mean, there’s enough violence in our world. We have to keep art as an open space for dialogue.”
Though I didn’t doubt Fainaru’s sincerity, I wondered what led him to accept the unenviable job of being Israel’s art ambassador at this point in time. Was it naiveté? Defiance? Although I am staunchly opposed to banning, cancelling and boycotting artists on the basis of nationality, it also strikes me as disingenuous to claim that the Israeli Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is just another gallery space.
Fainaru’s display is the official Israeli representation during a war whose devastation in Gaza has become, for many in the world — and especially in the art world — the defining moral scandal of our time. Whether one calls Israel’s conduct genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes or massacre, no honest account can defend the scale of destruction.
When I asked Fainaru whether he would also defend the participation of artists from Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Qatar, he said yes. Artists from authoritarian or repressive countries, he argued, belong here. “The artists have the right to expose and to try to keep a dialogue with other cultures,” he said. “That’s the meaning of Venice Biennale.”
Clearly, many saw the situation differently.
On Friday, May 8, the final day of the professional preview, a strike for Palestine and workers’ rights brought much of the Biennale to a grinding halt. Roughly a third of the national pavilions were partially or fully shut and some works in the central exhibition were removed from display or covered. Beginning at 4:30 p.m., hundreds — possibly thousands — marched along Via Garibaldi toward the Arsenale with Palestinian flags and banners that read “No artwashing. No genocide pavilion.”
Watching the parade wind its way down the Fondamenta Arsenale, hearing their slogans and reading their signs hammered home the extent to which Gaza has become a devastating emblem of the failure of the liberal postwar order, where international law is invoked yet ignored and American power underwrites destruction, while other nations, especially in Europe, oscillate between guilt and paralysis.
Even before it opened, this year’s Biennale was overshadowed by politics. On April 23, the five-member Golden Lion jury announced that it would not consider pavilions and artists representing countries whose leaders were charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, a position that effectively rendered Russia and Israel ineligible. In response, Fainaru issued legal warnings to the Biennale, the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Italian prime minister’s office alleging antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination after the jury’s initial decision. According to the online art magazine Hyperallergic, the Biennale’s legal department warned jurors they could be personally liable for damages to Fainaru in the event of a dispute.
On April 30, nine days before the opening of the Biennale, all five members of the jury resigned. The Biennale then replaced its traditional Golden Lion with a “Visitor Lion,” to be voted on by ticket holders and awarded in November, at the end of the event, leaving many to wonder “What Did the Golden Lion Die Of?” to quote the title of a widely-circulated essay. Now perhaps more than ever before in the Biennale’s history, people are reassessing how much freedom art can ever claim when it arrives draped in a national flag.
In 2022, Russia’s curatorial team pulled out of the Biennale following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After skipping the 2024 event, Russia staged a bizarre and largely symbolic comeback this year with a pavilion that was only open during the professional preview and which has led the European Union to freeze a €2 million grant to the Biennale.
On opening day, the scene in the Giardini outside the Russian Pavilion was far more openly confrontational than anything else I witnessed at this year’s Biennale. There were riot police and carabinieri, demonstrators waving signs and trying to block people from entering the pavilion. Pussy Riot and members of the Ukrainian feminist group Femen protested with colored smoke, pink balaclavas and slogans like “Blood is Russia’s art” and “Disobey.” A Brazilian artist milled out outside with a toilet lid over his head that read “NOW, EVERY SHIT IS ART.”
When I squeezed past the protesters and entered the pavilion, I found very little going on: a few elaborately tangled clusters of flowers (“Why do flowers no longer smell?” the wall text queried forlornly), a man standing like a bodyguard and wearing a bunny mask, a DJ spinning records and a couple half-heartedly dancing.
By far the most shocking act of protest I witnessed was on Friday morning, when Danila Tkachenko, a Russian artist who is a political refugee in Italy, entered the Scuola Piccola delle Zattere and used a scalpel to carve the word ART into his upper abdomen.
The 18th century palazzo houses a cultural institute that is funded by the Russian oligarch Leonid Mikhelson and owned by his daughter Victoria. Tkachenko’s grisly performance was intended to call attention to how, in the words of the journalist and curator Konstantin Akinsha, “money stained with Ukrainian blood feeds contemporary art in Venice.”
While Tkachenko stood next to a mechanical flower sculpture by Rachel Youn, blood trickling down to his belly, flummoxed ushers half-heartedly tried to clear the gallery. From a corner, a poker-faced Victoria Mikhelson looked on. She instructed the museum guards to do nothing. She clearly wasn’t going to give Tkachenko the satisfaction of being arrested.
And then there was the United States. In a year when Israel and Russia were treated as agents and emblems of world disorder, America remained oddly peripheral as a target, despite, well, everything. The U.S. Pavilion did not become a magnet for protest, although some artists and curators told me that they refused to enter on principle. For the most part, however, the art world’s revenge on America’s presence at Venice was limited to ridiculing this year’s Trump-approved artist, the sculptor Alma Allen.
Venice has always asked nations to appear through art. This year, they arrived damaged, accused, defensive, wealthy, frightened and enraged. The Biennale’s traditional structures — its garden of nations, its prizes, its diplomatic courtesies — did not collapse entirely. But they trembled.
And in the Israeli Pavilion, beneath the sound of black water falling into a pool, one could hear the tremor.
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The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’
Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.
Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.
Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.
The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.
To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.
In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?
From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”
When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”
A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.
That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.
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Aristotle, Jewish ethics and the vexing case of Graham Platner
In last Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, nearly three quarters of voters decided that Graham Platner — Iraq War veteran, oysterman, Reddit misogynist and SS tattoo bearer — was their best hope to defeat the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, come November. While the result was wildly cheered by his supporters, other Democrats and independents were left deeply uneasy.
There are good reasons, philosophical no less than political, for this disquiet. For some Democrats, the winning approach to the election is not necessarily one that leads to victory, but instead one that leads from virtue.
Much attention has been given to the political issues raised by Platner’s candidacy. His embrace of economic populism and excoriation of our country’s oligarchy, his denunciation of forever wars and defense of the common man were and remain compelling stances. That Platner speaks his own mind, and does so simply but rarely simplistically, rather than from a script bolted together by handlers, is clearly a plus as well.
But the matter of his character also raises a serious ethical issue not just for Platner, but also for those who voted for him this spring and plan to do so again this fall. It is less a matter of achieving a good result, than of affirming the good itself.
Moral philosophy comes in three flavors: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. For reasons of space, let’s focus on the first and last. As the name suggests, consequentialism focuses not on the means but instead on the ends. But this does not mean, as some think, that any end can justify any means. Instead, philosophical consequentialists argue that acts must be judged by a simple measure: seeking the greatest good at the least moral cost.
For a hypothetical example, say I have a student who is floundering in one of my classes. They are doing their best, but for various reasons their best will probably not help them avoid a failing grade. Afraid to disappoint or depress the student, I allow them to continue in the class. Consequently, the student sinks rather than swims by semester’s end. Or, instead, I can sit down with the student earlier in the semester and suggest that they withdraw today and try again a later day when they are better prepared. The result is the least cruel and most good: some suffering in the short term rather than greater suffering in the long run.
Yet, consequentialism can be complicated. Consider the election of John Fetterman to the Senate in 2022. Faced by the prospect of voting for the Republican candidate, Democrats and independents gave Fetterman the winning margin despite a stroke he suffered during the campaign, one that raised serious questions about his capacity to hold the office. For reasons that are hard to parse, Fetterman has since broken with his fellow Democrats on several vital issues.
Rather than realizing the greater good, some Pennsylvania voters may now realize their reasoning was misplaced.
This brings us to virtue ethics, which is now enjoying a second wind among moral philosophers. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, virtue ethicists are less concerned with actions than they are with character. As the philosopher Todd May writes in his book The Decent Life, the key question for consequentialists (and deontologists) is “How should I act?” But for those who promote virtue ethics, the question is “How should I live?”
By this, they mean what Aristotle seems to have meant: how can we live a happy or flourishing life? The answer is by living that life in accord with virtue.
Simply put, virtues are those traits of character — think bravery and constancy, sagacity and generosity—crucial to human flourishing. And to flourish as humans requires a deep disposition to see and feel, choose and respond to the world and others in ways that align with those virtues. In the words of the late Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher who reintroduced virtue ethics to modern readers, “The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man.”
Inevitably, just as with the other ethical theories, there are problems with virtue ethics. But there are also advantages, principally that it seeks to build character rather than build a calculus of the highest good. This brings us back to Graham Platner. What is at issue with his campaign is not just the character of the candidate, but the character of the nation we wish to realize. The unavoidable question is not whether the ends justifies the means, but whether the means justifies the end—in this case, a nation dedicated not to winning a Senate majority, but to one dedicated to reversing the waning of virtue. Even if this means giving Susan Collins 6 more years.
Modern Jewish thinkers find ties between pagan and Jewish ethics. Yonatan Brafman, who teaches at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points to fascinating parallels between the writings of Aristotle and the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides. The latter, Brafman suggests, sought various ways to encourage the practice of generosity. “Fulfilling the commandment of matanot le-’evyonim (gifts to the poor) and even prioritizing it over other commandments both expresses and fosters the virtue of generosity,” Brafman writes. “Moreover, in Maimonides’ view, this virtue is central to human flourishing. Generosity enables an individual to achieve divine joy.”
Of course, the exercise of generosity should apply to Platner, a man who insists that he has changed. Come November, we will learn whether this is true for our nation. As for Platner, who insists he has changed, it may take much longer for all of us to know.
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What does it say that Gwyneth Paltrow is advertising luxury Israeli real estate?
What does Gwyneth Paltrow have to do with a new luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya?
Not much, it seems, judging from a new ad that dropped this week. It features Paltrow going on a morning jog in the city — New York City, that is. She wakes up, voices some pat complaints about why “mornings have to be so early” and how her “coffee needs a coffee,” before she heads to Central Park. She comes home, showers, then asks her driver to take her to 51 Park.
Her driver asks if she means New York. “Herzliya, Israel,” she clarifies, smiling into the camera, as though the black SUV can drive across the ocean.
The ad makes so little sense that my first instinct was to think that it must be some sort of AI rendition of Paltrow. But a LinkedIn post about the project, from Gabi Attal, the CEO of the ad agency Why Worry, which made it, says that they did indeed shoot the ad in real life, in New York City, and that Paltrow is the face of the ad campaign behind a luxury apartment building called 51Park in Herzliya.
51Park is the name — though seemingly not the address — of an enormous new apartment complex that does not appear to exist yet; the website for the building is written in future tense. In renderings, two 51-story glossy towers, with — depending on which part of the website you read — either 636 or 733 apartments total, shine over a park. The neighborhood, it promises, is about to become the beating heart of Herzliya, bounded by highways, the light rail and Herzliya Park.
Paltrow, who is Jewish, has hawked a lot of weird products in her time — vagina-scented candles, anyone? And in some ways, the luxury building makes sense as a product for the actress, who has often flaunted her wealthy lifestyle. But everything else about the 51Park campaign places it back into Paltrow’s stranger offerings.
First off, of course, is the simple setting of the ad, which is nowhere near the apartment building Paltrow is lending her face to.
“To bring this architectural masterpiece to the Israeli audience, we needed a figure who effortlessly embodies international elegance, a premium lifestyle and uncompromising quality,” Attal wrote in the LinkedIn post about the ad.
No one behind the ad responded to my questions about how Paltrow was selected except the director’s agent, Tal Nathan, who said that he couldn’t comment beyond saying the actress “looks absolutely fantastic.” Still, Paltrow certainly embodies a certain kind of “premium lifestyle” — her lifestyle brand, Goop (tagline: “beauty as wellness”), sells such wealth signifiers as a $425 black tank top and a $55 “sex oil,” and also partners with other luxury brands to market expensive jewelry, clothing, and wellness accessories via Paltrow’s own website as “Gwyneth’s picks.” (These include a $225 “eyelift bioremodeling peptide matrix” and a cream for “mindfulness and intuition.”)
The actress has made her name, at least since her Oscar win in 1999, by defining an ideal of minimalist, luxurious perfection — one with little care for qualities like accessibility, approachability or reality. (She had to pay a fine after Goop sold bespoke jade eggs promising questionable health benefits for one’s “yoni.”) In fact, part of her allure is her lack of those values. Her aesthetic seeks to soar above plebian concerns like pragmatism or cost. Who cares if that $491 pewter cocktail strainer requires regular polishing to maintain its silver sheen? It’s covetable. Similarly, who cares where your luxury building is, the 51Park ad seems to say; the important part is the luxury.
Still, it seems odd to market the building to Israelis via an ad filmed in New York City, in English. Sure, New York might signify wealth and luxury in the international market. But the ad doesn’t highlight the amenities 51Park actually offers, such as proximity to Herzliya Park; it shows Paltrow in a luxury apartment in New York with convenient access to a different, and more famous, park: Central Park.
Instead, it feels as though the ad is directed at Americans, selling the idea that New York City and Herzliya are the same. That’s patently absurd though — even if we were to equate Tel Aviv and NYC, which are really not very similar outside of being their respective countries’ most cosmopolitan cities, Herzliya is neither; it’s a separate, much smaller city. Which means Herzliya is, at best, Hoboken. Perhaps that’s why Paltrow didn’t even bother flying to Israel to film the ad.
Marketing an Israeli home to Americans, however, is a controversial proposition. Over the past couple of years, Israeli companies selling homes and land to Jewish Americans, often at fairs held in synagogues, have been a target for protests. Sure, Herzliya is not in the West Bank. But for an actor to wade into obvious controversy like this, especially when she has a new major project coming up — starring as Belle Burden in an adaptation of the heiress’ best-selling memoir Strangers — is a confusing choice.
The ad was reposted by viral celebrity gossip account PopBase, leading to thousands of retweets and comments accusing her of supporting, as many commenters put it, “gwynocide.” Others said it was tone deaf to market luxury apartment buildings only a few hundred miles from razed apartments in Gaza, and compared her to the Nazi wife who enjoys her garden outside Auschwitz in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
Yet, in the ad, Paltrow seems blissfully unaware of all that, or at least doesn’t betray the slightest political statement. It’s not the first time Paltrow has been impressively out of step with public opinion — for example, saying that being a mother while working on movie sets is harder than being a “regular” working mother who is not extremely wealthy and famous, or that she would rather die than let her child eat a “Cup-a-Soup” and would rather do crack than eat cheese out of a tin.
Paltrow’s serene smile in the ad implies she can just float above the political realities tied to Israel without touching them. The idea that one can move to Israel and live a life indistinguishable from the one you once had on Park Ave in NYC, is fundamentally a political statement, of course; not everyone has that freedom of movement, whether due to financial or political realities. But Paltrow has not responded to criticism online or to journalists reaching out to ask what she meant to say with the ad. Though she voiced support for the hostages after Oct. 7, she hasn’t implied that her ad for 51Park is any kind of statement. In fact, she’s carefully avoided making one.
Instead, Paltrow — as is so often the case with the actress famed for her snobbery — has demonstrated that she is not as interested in Israel, Gaza, the war, or Judaism as she is in the disembodied ideal of luxury. As she once said, she “can’t possibly pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year.” The rest isn’t important; she can ignore it.
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