On the latest episode of Hollywood Actors Who Truly Get It, I present to you Tim Blake Nelson:
He didn’t experience Jew-hate until he went to college on the East Coast. Now, he says, “because my name is Nelson, and because I play so many American rubes, most assume I’m a gentile, and therefore, over the years, I’ve heard antisemitic remarks from at least one person on almost every set I’ve been on.” These have ranged from “Of course he didn’t want to pay the overtime, he’s a Jew,” to calling Hollywood “the synagogue of the performing arts”, which amused him, and someone claiming that Israel was behind the coronavirus.
“It hasn’t bothered me in the past because I think that we are generally tribal,” he says. “And it’s so ingrained in us that we say stuff against others often simply out of boredom and laziness. So, as the son of a Holocaust refugee, it’s always been hard for me to get too exercised over antisemitic remarks that come more from lassitude than conviction. That said, I think there’s more antisemitism out there right now than I’ve ever seen. And mostly it’s in the form of antizionism.”
While he doesn’t think Zionism and Judaism are the same thing, he thinks there’s “a lot of overlap”.
“So, when you say that there’s intersectionality between colonialism and racism, and therefore that Israel is a colonial vestige in the Middle East, so therefore the Jews are racist, and Israel is inherently racist, you’re up to a rewriting of history that is antisemitic. Because while there’s an argument for the Palestinians having predated the Jews in Israel pre 1948, or 1917, there’s also an argument for the Jews having predated everyone before the other Abrahamic religions even existed.”
I just wish his common sense would wash off on to many of his colleagues.
