So my mom was on the kitchen iPad this morning. This is her thing. She’s got the full Jewish content circuit going: Kveller, Hey Alma, back to Kveller, maybe My Jewish Learning if she’s in a learning mood. She came to Judaism the way a lot of Millennials and Gen Xers did, which is to say late, and with vibes (olds: general energy and atmosphere). You spend your twenties completely secular, something shifts, and suddenly you want to feel connected to your heritage, but like, from a comfortable distance. Hey Alma is built for exactly that. It’s Jewish, but not too Jewish. Warm. Feminist. Pop-culture-forward. It asks literally nothing of you. You can scroll it on an iPad in your kitchen and feel Jewishly engaged without lighting a single Shabbat candle. No cap (olds: not lying, for real). I get the appeal.
Anyway. She’s calling me over because Hey Alma has a whole piece up about Hannah Einbinder wearing a J. Hannah Star of David pendant on Hacks this season. The costume designer confirmed that Einbinder personally gravitated toward it, that it “had personal meaning for her,” and there is, I am not kidding, a buy button at the bottom. $360 to $960. As a mitzvah, ya know. It’s giving (olds: it has the energy of) extremely targeted Jewish commerce.
Here’s the thing. Hey Alma is absolutely down bad (olds: helplessly, embarrassingly obsessed) for Hannah Einbinder right now. On their current homepage you’ve got the Star of David necklace piece, a piece about Robby Hoffman’s mom writing a Yiddish line in Hacks, an 18 Things on Robby Hoffman that name-drops Hacks, and an 18 Things on Spike Einbinder, Hannah’s brother, whose claim to Hey Alma fame is that his family “includes Hacks star Hannah Einbinder.” A quarter of the homepage is Einbinder content, one way or another. Hacks is a good show. But this is unhinged behavior. The obsession goes hard (olds: is extremely intense).
The problem is that Hey Alma’s coverage treats Hannah Einbinder as though she is simply a Jewish actress who wears a Magen David and has nice vibes about her identity. She is not that. She has a very specific, very public, very well-documented political position and a track record to match. Let’s actually look at it, because the lore (olds: backstory, history) here is substantial.
Her Instagram has no post about October 7. Not one. But she has been very busy since. At the 2025 Emmys, Einbinder closed her acceptance speech with “Free Palestine.” Backstage, she elaborated that it is her “obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel,” calling Israel an “ethno-nationalist state” that is “really separate” from Jewish religion and culture. At the Human Rights Campaign dinner she said she was “horrified by the Israeli government’s massacre of well over 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza” and “ashamed” it was funded by American tax dollars. She signed the Film Workers for Palestine pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions. She got arrested at a Jewish Voice for Peace sit-in at Senator Chuck Schumer’s office alongside Chelsea Manning and Linda Sarsour, which is giving a very specific type of political energy. Then she went on BDS Barbie Simone Zimmerman’s podcast, live in front of 700 people at Riverside Church, co-organized by Columbia SJP and Columbia/Barnard JVP, to go deeper on all of it. At that event she said it “pisses me off” that Hollywood peers won’t call what Israel is doing a “genocide,” and that celebrities who stay silent “cannot utter a single word” and she “cannot understand it.” Bestie (olds: friend, also deployed here as “are you hearing yourself right now”) understood the assignment (olds: fully committed to the bit) and then some.
Genocide. Apartheid. We will come back to those words, because they are doing a lot of heavy lifting here and they deserve scrutiny.
First, let’s talk about JVP, because Einbinder chose to put her body on the line for this organization and the lore is not cute. Jewish Voice for Peace is not a peace organization in any meaningful sense. The ADL calls it “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group in the United States,” whose explicit strategic goal is to “shake the U.S.-Israel alliance” by driving a wedge through the American Jewish community. JVP responded to October 7 by blaming Israel on the same day, releasing a statement saying the “source of all this violence” is “Israeli apartheid and occupation,” and adding that “oppressed people everywhere will seek and gain their freedom.” Read that last sentence twice. JVP has partnered with Samidoun, which called October 7 “a brave and heroic operation” and has been designated by the US and Canada as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist designated terrorist organization. And in January 2025, JVP paid the DOJ $677,634 to settle fraud allegations for lying on their COVID relief loan application, claiming they were not “primarily engaged in political activities.” The DOJ said: actually, yes you are. This organization is not based (olds: admirable, principled). It is a front, and not even a subtle one.
And BDS Barbie Simone Zimmerman, the podcast host? Co-founder of IfNotNow, star of the 2023 documentary Israelism, now running “Beyond Israelism” for Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan’s independent pro-Palestinian news outlet, produced alongside Tikkun Olam Productions, the nonprofit filmmaking collective behind Israelism, Columbia SJP, and Columbia/Barnard JVP, the chapter suspended by Columbia in 2023 for “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The whole operation is giving a very well-funded pipeline from Jewish identity into anti-Zionist activism. The fig leaf is immaculate (olds: extremely convincing cover for something else). The rizz (olds: charisma, ability to pull people in) is real. The politics are a disaster.
Now here is where it gets, no other word for it, unhinged. While Einbinder has been publicly passionate about exactly one geopolitical issue for the past year and a half, specifically how awful Israel is, she has mad LVMH drip (olds: impeccable fashion sense courtesy of the world’s largest luxury conglomerate). Louis Vuitton shows. Valentino moments. Front row. Posting the looks. Slay behavior (olds: impressive performance) across the board, in a sartorial sense at least.
Here is the tea (olds: the facts, the receipts, the information you need). LVMH’s owner Bernard Arnault personally invested in Wiz, the Israeli cybersecurity company, starting in 2021 and again in 2023, through his family’s venture arm Aglaé Ventures. Wiz was acquired by Google in March 2026 for $32 billion, the largest acquisition of an Israeli-founded company in history. Arnault got paid. LVMH Luxury Ventures also invested in Lusix, an Israeli lab-grown diamond company, in 2022. The man bankrolling the runway shows that Einbinder has been front-row for is deeply, financially entangled with Israeli tech and Israeli industry. Meanwhile, Valentino’s entire fragrance and beauty line has been produced under license by L’Oreal since 2019. L’Oreal is on the BDS list, has operated a factory in Israel since the 1990s, and BDS activists describe it as a “warm friend of Israel.”
So the math here is: Hannah Einbinder boycotts Israeli film institutions while wearing LV to shows bankrolled by a guy who has invested in Israeli tech multiple times. She attends Valentino presentations whose fragrance profits flow through L’Oreal Israel. This is what we call a rent-free (olds: living in your head without it costing you anything, i.e. not applying your stated principles to your actual behavior) situation. The word for this is not activism. It is aesthetic. It is lowkey (olds: quietly, without drawing attention to it) one of the most spectacular examples of performative politics we have seen in a minute, and that is a competitive field.
Now let’s talk about language, because this matters and nobody is saying it loudly enough.
Hannah Einbinder and her crowd are not just wrong about the politics. They are also absolutely cooked (olds: finished, done, beyond saving) when it comes to the English language, and the damage is real. She calls what is happening in Gaza a genocide. JVP and the broader movement she has affiliated herself with call Israel an apartheid state, throw around fascist comparisons, treat every military operation as extermination. These words are not interchangeable with whatever they currently disapprove of. They have specific meanings. Stripping those meanings out is not speaking truth to power. It is being so chronically online (olds: so deep in internet discourse that you’ve lost contact with how language works in the real world) that you are actively making the world worse.
Genocide has a legal definition under international law. It requires documented intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The Rwandan genocide killed 800,000 people in 100 days. The Holocaust killed six million Jews across Europe in an industrialized, state-sponsored extermination program. The ongoing Uyghur genocide involves forced sterilization, cultural erasure, and mass detention of an entire people by the Chinese state. What is happening in Gaza is a devastating, bloody, complicated war that has caused enormous civilian suffering and that reasonable people can and should critique. It is not the same thing. When you call everything genocide, actual genocides become harder to name, document, prosecute, and stop. The International Criminal Court’s credibility collapses. The word stops meaning anything. Ask the Rohingya, who watched the world yawn because the outrage budget was already spent. This is not a semantic complaint. It has body count implications.
Apartheid was a specific, legislated racial hierarchy in South Africa, designed by a white minority government to permanently subjugate a Black majority in their own country, enforced by pass laws, forced removals, bantustans, and systematic terror over decades. The Israeli-Palestinian situation involves real injustices, real occupation, and real suffering that merit real scrutiny. It is not the same system. Calling it apartheid does not help Palestinians. It helps people feel righteous at Riverside Church events. The distinction matters because the solutions for actual apartheid and the solutions for a territorial conflict are completely different, and if you misdiagnose the problem you cannot fix it.
And fascism. Actual neo-Nazis. Actual eliminationist ideology. These exist right now, organizing in Europe and America, winning elections, burning synagogues, mainstreaming exterminationist rhetoric online. When “fascist” becomes a synonym for “Republican voter” and “Nazi” means “person who supports Israeli military operations,” the words become useless precisely when we need them most. We are going to need those words. We need them to be sharp. Einbinder and her ilk are out here running them through the dishwasher on the heavy cycle until they mean nothing. That is not a slay (olds: impressive accomplishment). That is an own goal (olds: accidentally scoring against your own team, harming your stated cause).
The position she is promoting is not a fresh moral stance. It is recycled Soviet-era anti-Zionist propaganda that the USSR developed in the 1950s and 60s to delegitimize Israel during the Cold War, rebranded for American campuses through pan-Arab nationalist and Islamist frameworks, turbocharged after October 7 by organizations like JVP that have been utterly unable to say clearly that murdering 1,200 people at a music festival was wrong, full stop. This playbook has been running for 75 years. It has produced zero days of improvement in Palestinian lives. Zero. BDS has been running for twenty years. Palestinian GDP is lower. Palestinian freedom is more constrained. Hamas still controls what remains of Gaza. These positions make activists feel main character (olds: the protagonist of the story, the one whose moral clarity matters most) at Riverside Church events. They change nothing on the ground for actual Palestinians. That is not solidarity. That is a lifestyle.
If you actually want a free, prosperous, safe Palestinian future, coexistence, the things Einbinder’s Hebrew school presumably taught her, this is not the road. This road ends with Hamas still in power, Israelis permanently convinced that any territorial concession leads to mass murder, and Palestinian civilians still trapped between both. No cap.
Which brings us back to Hey Alma. My mom’s generation deserved better. Their Jewish institutions did fail to give them the full picture, and that failure was real and costly. But the answer to shallow pro-Israel hasbara is not shallow anti-Israel hasbara with better aesthetics and a Magen David pendant that costs up to $960. The answer is actually engaging with complexity, which is hard, requires knowing things, and does not generate as many clicks as a necklace piece with a buy button.
Hey Alma covering Hacks is fine. Covering Jewish identity in pop culture is their whole thing. But running a quarter of your homepage as Hannah Einbinder content right now, her necklace, her brother, the Yiddish line in her show, while she is actively in the news for getting arrested at a JVP sit-in alongside Linda Sarsour, without once engaging with any of it? That is not Jewish media. That is Jewish fan fiction. And the slay is nowhere near the necklace.
I love my mom. I did not know what to say.
- JVP Isn’t After My $20. It’s After Us. - 7/3/2026
- F*ck Your Bagels, Zohran - 6/22/2026
- Hey Hannah! - 6/17/2026
