Mayim Bialik’s ‘Big Bang Theory’ on Jewish pride

When Mayim Bialik discusses her outspoken support for the global Jewish community, she does so with her ancestors peering over her shoulder. Behind her during our video call is her “Wall of Trauma”, the backdrop of the Los Angeles podcast studio in which she records Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown.

“We put those photos up when we started the podcast, since we were going to talk so much about mental health,” she says. “We’re all a product of where we come from. Behind me is my grandmother as a little girl in her Hungarian village and my Ukrainian grandmother – it’s all there on the wall.”

You might know the five-time Emmy nominee as the precocious 11-year-old version of Bette Midler in Beaches (1988) – Midler last year credited her young double’s “star quality” for the film’s success. Mayim also appeared in Michael Jackson’s Liberian Girl video and starred as the cartwheeling heroine of 1990s sitcom Blossom. Or perhaps you know her from her second phase.

After leaving Hollywood aged 19 to earn a doctorate in neuroscience – searching, she says, for a world that “valued me more for what was inside my brain than what was inside my bra” – she returned as neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler in The Big Bang Theory. Since then she’s starred in Call Me Kat (the US Miranda) and, in 2021, became the first female host of game show Jeopardy! in its almost 60-year-history.

But if you are one of her nearly five million followers on Instagram, it is just as likely that you know Mayim Chaya Bialik for her unashamed Jewish content – from her Yiddish Word of the Day to her signing of open letters, including calling out the Toronto International Film Festival for pulling its only Israeli documentary (after asking its makers for copyright approval from Hamas).

Although Mayim – who turns 50 on December 12 – has long been known for declining to take the path of cautious celebrity discretion, it is tempting to assume there was a moment after October 7 when she resolved to become even more outspoken, not less.

“You know, the answer to that is no,” she says. “Because I had been actively posting my support for Israel on social media, since the Big Bang days,” and aeons before what she calls the “global technological assault on conversations about Jews”.

She says she had become accustomed to being “accused of being a Zionist long before October 7, as if that were an accusation”. Of putting her head above the digital parapet, she concludes: “I guess it didn’t really feel like there was an option.”

But Mayim’s motive for agreeing to be Life’s cover star – without even the customary demand to plug a project – is closer to this magazine’s home.

“I mean, honestly, the reason I wanted to talk to you was because of what’s been going on, in particular in the UK,” she volunteers. “Living in this golden age of post-Holocaust Jewish life, many of us have felt very safe in the diaspora. But I’ve been following the happenings over the past two years, and it’s exceptionally alarming for those of us who are in North America, because we think of the UK as that other English-speaking place across the sea, and there’s so much we have in common.

“So to see such horrendous hatred against the Jewish community,
against Israel, has been particularly disturbing.”

Illustrating how small and connected the Jewish world is, she mentions the terror attack on the Crumpsall synagogue. “I was, sadly, not surprised,” Mayim says. “It’s a terrible camaraderie – hearing Manchester voices saying, ‘We told everyone. We kept tugging at the coat: listen to us, we’re drowning in antisemitism.’” When we talk, it is only three days after the Trump-initiated ceasefire deal delivered all 20 living hostages back to Israel, and I ask how she has felt, processing the relief and trauma over Simchat Torah.

She hesitates, calling it “a tremendous holiday season” for the community, before adding softly: “I’m just an ordinary Jewish citizen – I don’t have any proprietary ownership over how we should collectively feel.” Yet many of her co-religionists have long regarded Mayim as a kind of spokeswoman, for there has always been something irrepressibly out-and-proud about her flavour of Jewishness.

The great-great-great niece of Israel’s national poet Hayim Nahman Bialik refused to change either her nose – mocked on Saturday Night Live by an actress in a prosthetic – or her name, which means “water” in Hebrew and honours her grandmother Maryam, her “Bubbe Mayim.”

Yet joy in Yiddishkeit doesn’t soften the blows. Last year, when Mayim hosted the PEN America launch of comedian Moshe Kasher’s memoir, protesters called for cancellation, with two authors quitting the organisation (that exists to protect free expression) calling her “a hugely influential racist who has incited ongoing slaughter”. Others turned up to disrupt.

Has she ever been personally lobbied either by critics or by those worried for the consequences to her own career? “Yeah. Mostly my mother is worrying,” the daughter of teachers quips without missing a beat.

“I mean, there are a lot of conversations we just don’t share,” she admits. “But it’d be naive to think speaking out doesn’t affect your career or endorsements. I’ve felt that and it’s painful.” What stings most is being branded with a political stripe with which she has never identified. “I’m a bleeding-heart liberal – kind of a hippie,” Mayim proclaims.

“To be grouped with people who don’t support, for example, the rights of Palestinians, that’s especially disturbing. I’ve always advocated for peace and for honest discussion about Palestinian treatment within Israel and the Middle East. The cynic in me is pretty certain what that kind of campaign is about – it’s about Jews, not politics. Because while I have total respect for people who are politically conservative or voted for Trump, you can’t group us all together simply because we’re Jewish.”

After our interview, Mayim says she’ll record her podcast with partner Jonathan Cohen, then spend “too much time on social media, monitoring everything that’s going on”. She adds that her mammoth online profile has insulated her from the friendship fallouts many have suffered since 2023.

“I think I have the potential to lose friendships if we were to engage. Because I’m so clear in my social media presence, friends who are not part of that world honestly don’t really engage– which is its own kind of sadness, especially friendships I’ve had for 20, 30 years.”

The Venice Film Festival in August should have been a professional pinnacle. Her new film, the Jim Jarmusch-directed Father Mother Sister Brother – in which she plays Tom Waits’ daughter and Adam Driver’s sister – won the Golden Lion. Yet the moment was bittersweet: the festival opened amid pro-Palestinian protests and calls to withdraw invitations from actors branded pro-Israel.

“It does feel very hostile to be in Europe right now,” she says. “I was in Venice 25 years ago, and while it doesn’t change very much, there’s now very graphic graffiti throughout the city. A swastika spray-painted on a church felt like a particularly eerie kind of image.”

This was counterbalanced by visiting the synagogues of the Venice Ghetto with her son. “I wanted some grounding, knowing it would be
a complicated time. Celebrating this incredible film, but also touching base with the community that is mine, kind of eternally, right? As a citizen of the Jewish world.”

For Mayim, it was about compartmentalising. “Which I think, unfortunately and fortunately, Jews have been able to do for thousands of years.”

Mayim’s longevity – she has worked since she was 11 – has meant four decades of grappling with others’ preconceptions about her identity. She has written about the pain she felt reading printed dissections of her face aged 14. One critic “said my features did not seem to match one another. I was essentially being described as a Frankenstein of a teenager,” she wrote in Variety.

Aside from the lashings of misogyny, how much of the commentary was based on perceptions of Jews? Mayim smiles. “That’s a great question – and one I’m not sure I’ve been asked. We’re a collection of backgrounds. I’m Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Russian. Also, Jews can look like everything and anything, and they do. It used to be very common for people to say, ‘Well, I love Jewish women. Like, I love Natalie Portman and Gal Gadot.’ And those are obviously beautiful women, but there’s a tremendous variety of ways that Jews look.”

Also multifarious are the ways Jews practise. Raised in a Reform community in LA, she has since identified as “aspiring modern Orthodox”. It is not just (the non-Jewish) Amy Farrah Fowler who is known for her modest dressing; Mayim once described her attempt to find a tznius Emmy ceremony dress as “Operation Hot and Holy”.

I know she has lit Chanukah candles in her dressing room, studies weekly Torah texts, once blew the shofar at her rabbi’s invitation after he saw her play trumpet on TV, and sings the Shema to her sons – Frederick, 17, and Miles, 20 – before bed. But I ask if a particular ritual has brought her solace during these torturous times.

There is a deep exhale of breath. “I don’t know why that makes me emotional,” says a near-tearful Mayim on a day when many of the released hostages are still in hospital and many of the deceased are yet to be returned home.

“I have trouble sleeping – some of it’s age, hormones… But often, lying awake, I’d think about the hostages. And then I’d remember the Hashkiveinu.” The blessing during the Maariv service “when we’re grateful for the night and the rest we can get” – took on new resonance in the wake of testimony from men and women buried in airless tunnels for months on end.  “It is a prayer basically asking God to protect us, to spread over us a shelter of peace,” she says.

Mayim may have “no proprietary ownership over how we should collectively feel”, but I think we can all say amen to that.

Father Mother Sister Brother is released  24 December