OPINION: Mandy Patinkin went from hero to hypocrite
The Broadway star once moved me to tears, but now ignores Hamas and the hostages in Gaza
In November 2023, with the visceral shock of 7 October still tangible, I sobbed in a West End theatre as Mandy Patinkin, star of Hollywood and Broadway, ended his London concert by singing Over The Rainbow in Yiddish. Cushioned in the diaspora, we had been spared the bloody realities of the pogrom that had been rained on southern Israel a month earlier (albeit antisemitic hate marches were already becoming a London occurrence), and Patinkin’s performance served as a powerful statement of Jewish identity.
This week, however, that powerful statement appeared to be little more than a performative superficiality as I howled at Patinkin again, only this time in a guttural rage. In a podcast recorded for The New York Times and accompanied by his wife and son, Patinkin had delivered a blisteringly biased assault on the Israeli government.
There is a quote famously attributed to Golda Meir: “Peace will only come when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate the Jews.” Recent months have seen a timelier alteration given to those words, suggesting that “antisemitism will only end when Jews start to love their children more than they hate Netanyahu”. Apoplectic in his unhinged and unbalanced rage against the Israeli Prime Minister, the 72-year-old Patinkin was the very definition of that more recent phrase, displaying one of the most asinine manifestations of useful idiocy since 7 October.
We all know the old joke – two Jews equals three opinions (at least). And since when have all Jews been expected to sing from the same hymn sheet (or siddur)? But in their broadcast, the podcasting Patinkins dropped all pretence of reasonable and balanced debate, their barbed and blinkered criticisms of Israel ultimately offering no more than coded permission for antisemites around the world to attack Jews on account of Netanyahu’s words and actions. “Mandy Patinkin said so, didn’t he?” will be their justification.
Patinkin wore a dark top for the televised podcast that I studied, in vain, freeze-framing the recording on a number of occasions to try and catch a glimpse of a yellow ribbon pin in support of the hostages. I needn’t have wasted my time; there was no pin. Nor was there any mention of the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.
I may have just mentioned Hamas. Patinkin did not. And that in turn prompted me to Google for any traceable comment that he may have made about Hamas since 7 October. To my unsurprised disappointment, I drew a blank again. During the podcast Patinkin offered up the cod wisdom of a comment on revenge as spoken by his character in the 1987 film The Princess Bride. That a scripted extract from the movies was as serious or as profound a comment as the man could offer defined the shallowness of his morality.
For a prominent Jew to criticise Netanyahu on the subject of Gaza is a matter of his own opinion. But for that same prominent Jew, in the same conversation, to say nothing about the plight of the hostages or the evil of Hamas is a shaming disgrace.
Patinkin went further, spouting the antisemitic trope that likens Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Holocaust by describing them as a genocide. Perhaps he and his brood have not yet seen the IDF’s 45-minute compilation of Hamas’s self-taped actual genocidal horrors of 7 October? Maybe they are unaware of the terrorists’ acts of murder and despicable cruelty, recorded alongside scenes of jubilant Gazans who beat the living Israeli hostages and desecrated the Israeli dead as they were driven through the crowded streets?
Unsurprisingly Patinkin’s outburst landed well with the audience that he was playing to, with the most cursory search of social media reactions to his podcast revealing that it is being celebrated by those who would wish him dead alongside the entire Jewish people.
Patinkin should step back from his tragically misguided activism and leave The Princess Bride on the shelf where it belongs. Instead he should watch Tom Shoval’s humbling and devastating movie from earlier this year, Letter To David, a film dedicated to David Cunio, an actor with whom Shoval had worked in 2015 and who, together with David’s younger brother Ariel, was taken hostage from Kibbutz Nir Oz on 7 October. After 650 horrific days, the brothers are still held captive in Gaza.
Two Jewish actors, albeit relatively unknown, David Cunio is a man of unimaginable strength and integrity. By contrast, Mandy Patinkin, who has known the highest reaches of global fame and recognition, is found to be little more than a fool.
- Jonathan Baz is a theatre critic and broadcaster.
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