Jennifer Jason Leigh becomes an advocate for Israel

‘I just think [the hostages] should be the headline on every single paper, every single day. I don’t understand why it’s not,” said actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, the guest of honor at the 41st Jerusalem Film Festival, in an interview Friday, at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. 

Even before she gave a moving speech at the opening of the festival on Thursday night [see related article], the American-Jewish movie star, on her first trip to Israel, made time to visit several sites of the October 7 massacre by Hamas, including the Nova festival and Kibbutz Be’eri, and visited Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. 

Soft-spoken and low-key but still radiating movie-star glamour in chic casual clothes, Leigh sported a dog-tag necklace inscribed with a message about bringing the hostages home, and she spoke passionately about what it means to her to be Jewish after October 7 and why she chose to make her first visit to Israel. 

“I was very honored to come, especially now,” she said. “It feels good to be here. But even if you just sign a few letters, even if you just post about antisemitism, even if you just bring awareness, it helps, whatever you can do.”

In the past, Leigh has been known for her brilliant acting in a diverse range of roles, not her activism, and given her blond, conventionally all-American-style beauty, many of her fans may not even have realized she was Jewish. 

She burst into stardom in the 1982 iconic high-school sex comedy, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and throughout her career she has often played crazy, wild, and tough, often not conventionally likable characters, such as the psycho roommate from hell in Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female; a reporter returning to her small-town home to help defend her estranged mother, who has been accused of murder, in Dolores Claiborne; and a prostitute who falls in love with a customer in the gritty, Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Born into a show-business family, she lost her father, actor Vic Morrow, in a horrific accident on the set of the movie, The Twilight Zone, and her mother was actress/screenwriter Barbara Turner. 

In her four-decades-long career, she has broken many of Hollywood’s unwritten rules about the roles serious actresses should play and has been rewarded for her daring, notably receiving her first Oscar nod when she was in her 50s – an age when many actresses’ careers are winding down – for her role as an ornery outlaw in The Hateful Eight by Quentin Tarantino. 

Other high-profile directors with whom she has worked include David Cronenberg, the Coen brothers, and Robert Altman. She can currently be seen on television in the latest season of Fargo, and fans of the series Weeds remember her fondly as Jill, a discontented housewife dying to live life on the edge with her drug-dealing sister. Leigh’s work will be celebrated with a retrospective, running throughout the festival.

SHE IS happy to talk about her movies, but her life has changed since October 7, when she felt that she urgently needed to speak out against the antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment that has flared up around the world in recent months, inspiring her to come to Israel.  ]

Asked about her initial response to the massacre that led to the outbreak of the war, she said, “It’s incomprehensible. I think it will take me my entire life to come to terms – if one can ever come to terms with it. It’s just so far afield of the imagination even, the horror, and what people are still living through, and the bravery to have that much hope and courage just to get through the day.”

Referring to a Jerusalem Post article by Lilac Sigan which presented data that analyzed The New York Times coverage of the war, contrasting the outpouring of empathy expressed for Gazans harmed during the war with much more muted sympathy for the victims of October 7, among other issues, she said, “It was nice to see that because that was my experience reading The New York Times and my frustration, what I was experiencing as a reader. The article, not just what I’m feeling, the coverage is slanted, it is biased. I can’t even remember, the first time The New York Times stopped referring to Hamas as terrorists, that was really upsetting to me. And if you don’t know the facts, and you don’t know the history, then that is going to be your perception, and you don’t need to wonder why there are so many protests that are literally pro-Hamas.”

She spoke about seeing disturbing images from the pro-Hamas protests at UCLA: “It’s so upsetting that that is allowed to happen. The things that they’re setting up, like the paper mache pig [a statue featuring antisemitic imagery], that doesn’t happen in two seconds, that takes time. So that’s being allowed.”

While many Jews in Hollywood have preferred to stay under the radar, not commenting on antisemitism or supporting Israel, she has been very outspoken. 

Asked whether she worried that her career would be harmed because of her stance, she said, “I didn’t. First of all, I’m just an actress and I’m not a public persona. I only joined Instagram because of this. [Social media] is the last thing that I’m interested in. I’m very introverted. It’s really all about combating antisemitism for me. And it just seemed clear in the face of what was happening, for me anyway, it was so clear.” 

Referencing the plight of the hostages often throughout the interview, she said, “It’s not a political thing, everyone should not be afraid to say that [the hostages should be released], but I think some people are and that tells you something about the society we’re living in, right now. You know, people can lose their followers, people can lose their speaking engagements, people can lose work. But I feel like the more people that can just do it, it doesn’t have to be in a huge way, they can just take small steps...  just saying, ‘Say no to antisemitism’ or ‘Bring the hostages home,’ for example. Then maybe people will start to feel less afraid, the more people that do it and see that nothing actually happens to them.”

Speaking about her willingness to play women who are free, quite wild, even difficult and dangerous, she said, “In life, we’re always trying to be so likable. I’m always so aware of other people, I’m self-conscious, I don’t like to rock the boat. I like playing people who are very different from me, who are much freer than I am in a certain way, who don’t care about being liked at all. There’s something very freeing in that. I know how to play it, I just don’t know how to be it in my real life but there’s something that I do gravitate toward, and I’m trying to – I don’t know – understand it. I mean, even the worst person, they don’t think they’re a terrible person, right? So seeing it from their perspective is really interesting.”

Is her propensity for playing difficult characters connected to her fearlessness about speaking out against antisemitism?

“It’s an interesting hypothesis. The truth is in my life, I’m  now!scared of everything regular. I avoid confrontation almost at all cost, I’m not good at advocating for myself, I really try just to be very quiet most of the time, but I feel with this, it’s different... I don’t make posts where I’m talking to the camera because I can’t, I’m just not good at that. I get very self-conscious about that.” But making posts about the hostages, she said, “Something like that, I can do. I think there are a lot of people who feel the same way, maybe not as many as we’d like, but hopefully there will be more and more.”

A festival employee brings her a package she asked for and she smiles and thanks her. Most stars might ask the staff for some special food or souvenirs to bring back to Los Angeles, but what she wanted were a dozen dog-tag necklaces. As Leigh headed into a screening of her movie, Georgia, with a script by her mother, she said, “Maybe speaking out is a risk, but it didn’t feel like one... It feels too important to not speak out about something you feel so strongly about and that is so clearly right. There’s no ambiguity.”