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How Germany’s unusual approach to fighting antisemitism is ensnaring Jews who are critical of Israel
(JTA) — The first time Iris Hefets was detained by German police, she was standing alone on a street corner in Berlin with a sign that read, “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza.”
That was October 2023. Hefets, a 60-year-old psychoanalyst who moved from Israel in 2002, was standing by herself because Berlin authorities had barred activist groups from holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. By carrying a sign alone, she believed she was circumventing the ban on assembly.
But the police said her sign itself was an offense. Since then, Hefets has been detained four more times while protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, all for the language on her signs. The offenses were logged in police reports as hate speech and included on the surging list of antisemitic incidents in Germany since 2023.
For Hefets, the penalties carry an obvious irony.
“It made me feel like a Jew,” she said. “This is the first time in my life that I really felt what it meant to be a Jew, and in the minority being persecuted.”
Germany has cracked down on speech and demonstrations that assert support for Palestinians and accuse Israel of atrocities, even since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in October 2025. Hefets’ detainments were part of a national policy toward antisemitism, defined over decades in the shadow of the Holocaust and sharpened recently under the helm of Felix Klein, the first federal commissioner for combating antisemitism.
Klein announced last month that he will leave his post, which he has held for eight years, this summer to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. He leaves behind a proposal to criminalize chants that could be interpreted as calling for Israel’s destruction, such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The proposed legislation is currently being reviewed by the Ministry of Justice, and its future may rest in the hands of the next antisemitism commissioner, who has yet to be announced.
Whoever is chosen for the role will face down a fraught debate over Germany’s historic allegiance to Israel and the legal boundaries of pro-Palestinian speech. Many Jews say they feel safer under such bans, including the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which recommended Klein for his appointment as antisemitism czar. Some human rights groups and pundits have objected, however, saying the bans limit free speech and criminalize legitimate expressions of support for the Palestinian cause.
The next commissioner will also have to grapple with Jewish intellectuals, artists and activists like Hefets, who say that Germany’s antisemitism enforcers are suppressing Jewish voices that don’t fall in line.
The first swell of dissent from Jews came soon after Oct. 7. In an open letter published in the German newspaper “Die Tageszeitung” on Oct. 22, 2023, 121 Jewish writers and artists living in Germany condemned Hefets’ arrest and bans on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
“Virtually all of the cancellations, including those banning gatherings organized by Jewish groups, have been justified by the police in part due to the ‘imminent risk’ of ‘seditious, anti-Semitic exclamations,’” said the letter. “These claims, we believe, serve to suppress legitimate nonviolent political expression that may include criticisms of Israel.”
Emily Dische-Becker, the Germany director of the international group Diaspora Alliance and a Jewish German-American from Berlin, said Klein’s proposal to outlaw slogans like “From the river to the sea” could cement a sacrifice of free speech, ultimately harming Jews and other minorities.
“I do not think that treating antisemitism as a state of exception to our democratic laws and constitutional rights is going to help combat antisemitism,” she said.
For Klein, there is no contradiction in a German officer arresting a Jewish person for antisemitism. “It doesn’t really matter who is the person who spreads antisemitism,” he said in an interview. “Although it sounds odd at first sight, antisemitism can also be spread by Jews.”
Klein also dismissed efforts to distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
“In Germany, we hardly ever talk about anti-Zionism. The political notion hardly exists,” he said. “We talk about Israel-related antisemitism. When someone says, ‘I’m only anti-Zionist, I’m not antisemitic,’ I think in most of the cases, anti-Zionism is also a form of antisemitism. They say Israel, but they mean Jews.”
Germany’s grip on speech about Israel is rooted in a decades-old effort to expunge the taint of its Nazi past. During the 1980s and 1990s, the country formalized a process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or reckoning with the Nazi era through memorials, education and narratives about German identity. Key to this identity — and to Germany’s rehabilitation — was a special responsibility toward Israel.
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up this bond in 2008. Speaking to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, she said Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or the reason for the existence of the state.
Now deeply ingrained in German politics, that concept has become a tool in the prosecution of pro-Palestinian protesters accused of antisemitism. Last year, immigration authorities ordered the deportation of three European nationals and one U.S. citizen over their alleged activity at pro-Palestinian protests. Three of the orders cited “Staatsräson,” although the protesters’ lawyer said the word had no legal standing.
Disputes over Israel recently erupted at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, as both Israel’s critics and its defenders claim the Holocaust for their terrain. The anti-Zionist group Kufiyas in Buchenwald announced a demonstration at Buchenwald on April 11, the anniversary of its liberation, in protest against a German court’s decision that the site could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh.
The court said it was “unquestionable” that wearing a keffiyeh to send a political message “would endanger the sense of security of many Jews, especially at this site.” Meanwhile, the protesters argued that their campaign encompasses the “descendants of Holocaust survivors,” including Buchenwald inmates, and said the site has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.”
The group also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel, including the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, who was slated to give a commemoration speech at Buchenwald last year. Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, was disinvited after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
The planned Buchenwald protest was condemned by the European Jewish Congress, and Klein said it marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
Klein’s office, titled in full the “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” was created in 2018. Germany has since produced a web of antisemitism commissioners, with 15 installed at the state level and others assigned to universities and cultural institutions. The only Jewish state czar, Stefan Hensel of Hamburg, resigned at the end of 2025. (Hensel, who cited rising antisemitic threats in his decision to step down, converted to Judaism shortly before he started the job in 2021.)
According to Klein, the chief target of this antisemitism-fighting bureaucracy is clear: the pro-Palestinian movement. “The most common and most dangerous form of antisemitism in Germany, like in other countries, is Israel-related antisemitism,” he said.
Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office records the political origins of antisemitic crimes. In 2024, it said that antisemitism driven by left-wing extremism rose a dramatic 172%, from 40 incidents the previous year to 109. Another category titled “foreign ideology” was reported to spur 1,940 incidents, a 63% increase from 2023.
But by far, right-wing extremism drove the most antisemitic crimes, a total of 3,016. Though that figure fell slightly from 2023, the office said that right-wing extremism also constituted the majority of offenses “in every previous year.”
The publicly available statistics do not break down responsibility for different types of antisemitic incidents, from hate speech to property damage to violence, and how many were reported to have Jewish victims.
Nevertheless, Dische-Becker criticized Klein’s office for “decoupling” its focus from far-right activity. She noted that the nationalist Alternative for Germany party or AfD, which has welcomed neo-Nazis to meetings, is rapidly becoming one of the country’s most popular parties and could win in some state-level elections this year.
Klein has support from the Central Council of Jews in Germany, a representative body whose 100,000 members comprise about half of the total Jews living in Germany. The group has said that “From the river to the sea” means “the annihilation of Israel and the expulsion and destruction of the Jews living there,” adding that Germany has an “urgent duty” to clarify that definition. The Central Council did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
Israel is an “existential concern” for many German Jews, according to A. Dirk Moses, a scholar of genocide, memory studies and modern Germany at the City College of New York. The Central Council emphasizes that it views the well-being of Jews in Germany as “dependent on the robustness of the Israeli state,” Moses said.
Even when German Jews do not fully align with the Central Council’s platform, he added, they often weigh language about Israel against the risk of undoing Germany’s progress in confronting the Holocaust.
“It’s the fear that you will give ammunition to antisemites in Germany, who will say, ‘Ah, the Jews are committing genocide too, just like our grandparents did, so we don’t owe them anything,’” he said.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany represents a population of Jewish families who largely arrived as refugees from Soviet countries and rebuilt Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust. Many came in poverty and depended heavily on community structures, including the Central Council, which is state-funded. Today, Jewish retirees still depend on basic social security at 10 times the rate of the average German, said Dische-Becker.
Many of these Jews also carry the memory of Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns, which employed antisemitic propaganda, shut down Jewish life and targeted Jews as ideologically suspect.
“The communities that are part of this umbrella organization are overwhelmingly older, post-Soviet migrants,” said Dische-Becker. “They have an experience of Soviet anti-Zionism that was antisemitic, and oftentimes they lean very right-wing.”
Johanna Vollhardt, a social psychologist at Clark University affiliated with the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, grew up in Germany’s Reform Jewish movement. She experienced the marginalization of Reform Judaism, which was born in Germany in the early 19th century and destroyed there by World War II, only gaining formal recognition by the Central Council and state funding in the early 2000s.
She viewed the Reform movement as part of a vast, diverse ecosystem of Jewish ideas that was stamped out, and remains stifled by policies like Klein’s proposal.
“To me, it’s important to emphasize this pluralism that was destroyed in the Holocaust and not allowed to rebuild,” said Vollhardt. “This is part of the lack of support for the expression of anti-Zionist Jewish thought, or any other non-Zionist, non-mainstream Jewish thought.”
Over recent decades, younger, richer and more politically liberal Jews have moved to Germany, particularly Berlin. Among them are up to 30,000 Israelis, including some who left Israel out of frustration and anger at their government.
Many of the Jewish artists and intellectuals who came from outside Germany have been caught in the clampdown on alleged anti-Israel or antisemitic expression.
According to data compiled by Diaspora Alliance, Jews were involved in 25% of the performances, exhibits and artistic expressions canceled in 2023 for allegations of antisemitism — despite making up less than 1% of the country’s population. (Palestinian, Muslim and Arab communities were penalized the most.)
Candice Breitz, a Jewish South African artist who has lived in Berlin since 2002, had an exhibition canceled by the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery in November 2023. The exhibition centered on sex workers in Cape Town and was unrelated to Israel. Organizers said she had signed a letter from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and had not condemned the Oct. 7 attack.
Breitz denied both claims. She said she was not a supporter of BDS, and wrote on Instagram before the museum’s decision, “It is possible to fully condemn Hamas (as I do, unequivocally), while nevertheless supporting the broader Palestinian struggle for freedom from oppression, discrimination and occupation.”
Deborah Feldman, the Brooklyn-born ex-Orthodox Jew and author of the bestselling book “Unorthodox” who moved to Berlin in 2014, said she saw invitations to promote her latest book canceled in 2023. The book, titled “Judenfetisch” or “Jew Fetish,” argued that Germany’s guilt over the Holocaust had distorted its relationship to Jews and Israel.
Other Jewish intellectuals who don’t live in Germany say they have been shunned from coming. The Russian-American writer M. Gessen had a prestigious award from the Heinrich Böll Foundation pulled in December 2023, following an essay in The New Yorker comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era Jewish ghetto (and criticizing Germany’s constraints on pro-Palestinian views). Gessen ultimately received the award after the original ceremony was canceled.
In 2024, Nancy Fraser, a philosophy professor at the New School in New York, was disinvited from a visiting position at the University of Cologne over her signature on a letter titled “Philosophy for Palestine.” The university said that Fraser’s job offer was rescinded because the letter called into question “Israel’s right to exist as an ‘ethno-supremacist state’ since its foundation in 1948.”
Iris Hefets is a founding member of Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), a pro-Palestinian organization roughly comparable to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States. It is much smaller, with membership in the hundreds, and counts only Jews as members, unlike the U.S. group. But membership surged after Oct. 7, 2023, said Hefets.
In 2024, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution declared Jüdische Stimme an extremist organization. (The same agency designated the AfD as an extremist group in 2025.)
As a result, newer Jewish immigrants have peeled off from Jüdische Stimme. They don’t want to risk being questioned about their role in an extremist organization while applying for citizenship, said Hefets.
She called it “perverse” to see “Jews being accused of antisemitism by Germans who have Nazi grandparents.” Through her detainments, she believes, German officers were signaling that their “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” was complete; they had finished reckoning with the past.
“What Germany is saying now is actually that Germany worked through its past, and now Germany can go back to business as usual,” said Hefets. “‘We were punished by the Allies, but now it’s over, we are good again, because the Jews forgave us.’ And the Jews, for them, that’s Israel.”
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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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