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Jonah Hill’s cancel culture dramedy makes an antisemitism exception — all about Kanye
Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, is having an interesting April.
Fans are hailing his new album Bully as a return to form. (Critics are more mixed.) He reportedly made $33 million from two sold-out shows in Los Angeles, but he was also banned from entering the U.K. owing to a pressure campaign by Jewish groups over a scheduled headlining performance at the Wired music festival, even as the artist, who recently attributed his antisemitic behavior to a brain injury and bipolar disorder, offered to have “meet and listen” sessions with the Jewish community.
On top of this mixed reception, add a movie premiere. Ye has a memorable cameo in Jonah Hill’s new AppleTV+ film The Outcome, about an A-list actor’s teshuvah tour. And that moment has something to say about what to do with the artist’s outbursts.
Hill’s character, a crass crisis lawyer named Ira, assembles a dream team to protect his client, Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves), who is awaiting the release of an incriminating video. The nature of this video is unknown beyond its potential to derail his comeback after a five-year sabbatical to treat a secret heroin addiction. Among Reef’s potential defenders are a Gloria Allred-style lawyer (Laverne Cox), a Black minister legendary for his work on civil rights (Roy Wood Jr.) and an ambassador from the Asian-American community (Atsuko Okatsuka). Ira notes someone missing from the mix, one “Moshe, from the Antisemitism Committee,” perhaps a poorly-named stand-in for the ADL.
“We ran the numbers,” Ira’s assistant says by way of explanation. “It turns out that hating Jews doesn’t negatively affect a person’s career. In fact, it could help.”
And we cut to a black-and-white headshot of Ye, occupying the whole screen.
Hill explained this choice in an interview with TMZ, saying the scene wasn’t just there to score a cheap shot at Ye, who publicly (and compellingly) apologized in an ad in the Wall Street Journal in January.
“In the midst of all this Jew stuff, he did Instagram a picture of me in the 21 Jump Street poster,” Hill recalled. “And he said something along the lines of ‘I don’t hate Jews anymore because I love Jonah Hill.’”
“Me and him got no beef,” Hill continued.” I just put that in there like, ‘Yo, you’re gonna f—ing put the 21 Jump Street poster up there and say you don’t hate Jews anymore. That’s pretty wild. I’m gonna put a picture of you saying that like, hating Jews helps your career.’”
Clearly a sight gag and a bit of an inside joke. But is it true?
Running my own numbers, and not even accounting for this last week of ups and downs, Ye took a major hit to his net worth when he lost his Adidas partnership, backsliding all the way from billionaire to mere multimillionaire. Fans still turn up for Ye, and some even seem to like what I’ll call his Hitler catalogue. That said, it’s hard to imagine him making a full recovery, once again gracing the stage at the Grammys or headlining a major festival or getting a shot at the Super Bowl halftime show.
The difference between Ye’s transgression and that of others is instructive. There’s plenty of arguable antisemitism in the case of celebrities whose pro-Palestinian advocacy has crossed the line into something unsavory. Rappers Bob Vylan of “death, death to the IDF” fame and Kneecap, who chanted “up Hamas, up Hezbollah,” come to mind. They have had their own brushes with cancellation and been denied visas because of their antics — but also strong support from those who believe they are simply speaking up for Palestinians. The ascendancy of Israel conspiracies, echoing age old canards, has recently produced an odd coalition between pundits on the far-left and far-right, and hasn’t put a dent in their audience.
(Hill, though Jewish, was accused of dabbling in Jewish stereotypes his last film, You People, and he will likely get some flack for this movie, both for his character — a kind of grubby fixer who calls his client “Bubbie” — and for a joke where Man’s Search for Meaning is referred to as “the most lit Holocaust book.”)
Even in this environment, Ye is toxic for mainstream consumption, because when he went “death con 3” on the Jews, his words had no agenda beyond delusion-fueled animus about Jewish control of the media. Ye’s awareness of the Middle East was best expressed on the occasion he used a fish tank net and Yoo-hoo bottle to represent the Israeli prime minister. Vylan and Kneecap’s slogans are more subtle and plausibly deniable than one of Ye’s latest tracks, literally called “Heil Hitler.”
There was no hedging it, try as Candace Owens might. It was Jew Hate Classic, the original recipe. And it wasn’t, in the case of Mel Gibson, a pattern that emerged over relatively wide gaps of time with only one incident widely known to the general public. It was an endless, often marathon torrent of invective and odd tangents care of an unmedicated bipolar insomniac. It went on for months. Then died off. Then came back swinging in the form of an album the concept of which could, charitably, be defined as spiritually Hitlerian.
The sheer concentration of vitriol seems like proof that the outburst was the result of a manic episode, which could afford the rapper some grace. Instead, he now lives in a liminal space between relevance and punchline. This strain of antisemitism doesn’t boost careers — yet — but the man behind it can sell out stadiums in spite of it.
All the while, the question of what to do with Ye’s mental health, and how it factors into his cancellation makes him a conundrum, even if it should by rights be a better excuse than Mel Gibson’s squad car in vino veritas. (Gibson is mentioned in the film, in the context of a poppers-related Weekend at Bernie’s scenario, not his own scandal.) Before we render a judgment, we need commitments he won’t repeat his tirades and so continue to influence looksmaxxers, incels and their overlapping Venn Diagram of Nazi revivalists.
Hill’s belief that Ye’s antisemitic streak was good for business is symptomatic of something fundamentally off with the director’s treatment of cancel culture. It feels out-of-touch even — or maybe because — it draws from experience. Hill himself was the victim of cancellation some years ago, when his ex leaked texts in which he weaponized “therapy talk.” Hill’s project, with a cast that includes Reeves, Van Jones, Martin Scorsese, Drew Barrymore and a rare appearance from Cameron Diaz, is itself proof of how not all cancellations are created equal or indefinite.
The Outcome is in tension with itself, part Hill’s version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” and Seth Rogen’s The Studio, part earnest penance that may or may not be coming from the director-writer himself.
One of the lines, delivered by Reef’s reality star mother (soap opera icon Susan Lucci), as a crew films their rapprochement for Bravo, sums the film up nicely: “Just because it’s performative doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.” We’ll have to take her word for it.
When it comes to Ye, there is some truth that antisemitism alone can’t crater a career — with the exception of lesser talents, it never could. We need not wonder how it has affected Ye’s popularity with Hill, who cited him on TMZ as “probably the greatest artist whoever lived.”
As Ira departs the film, we see his bumper sticker: “Honk if you can separate the art from the artist.” Hill would blow out the horn, and hopes you might too.
Jonah Hill’s The Outcome debits April 10 on AppleTV+.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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