Jewish actor Wallace Shawn says Israeli actions in Gaza are worse than Nazis

Wallace Shawn, American character actor of The Princess Bride and Clueless said during a podcast appearance this week that Israel is “doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did.”

Speaking via Zoom on a podcast, hosted by Jewish writer Katie Halper, Shawn, 81, said the Israelis “invaded somebody else’s territory, they took people’s homes, and they did many of the things that the Nazis did to the Jews.”

“You can’t be more evil than what they’re doing,” Shawn said. “They are doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did and in some ways, it’s worse because they kind of boast about it. Hitler had the decency to try to keep it secret... the Israelis are almost proud of it, and it’s demonically evil. You can’t be more evil. And anybody who doesn’t recognise that it’s evil, I can’t properly communicate with that person.”

The New York-born actor and playwright, who is Jewish, has been outspoken in his criticism of Israel since long before the Israel-Hamas war that launched on October 7. A member of the advisory board of the left-wing anti-Zionist organisation Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for over a decade, Shawn expressed his support for Palestinians during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict and in 2023 signed the Artists4Ceasefire campaign urging then-President Joe Biden to push for a ceasefire.

In a 2009 interview with the JC, he said: “I find it horrifying that Jews are seen ... as victimisers who are very self-righteous about what they do,” he says. “From a moral point of view it was better when we were victims.”

He added during the Katie Halper Show appearance that “the whole world knows” Israel’s actions in Gaza are “evil.”

“The whole world knows that they are starving people, preventing children from getting medicine on purpose, and bombing hospitals,” he said. “If you don’t see that it’s evil to do those things to other human beings, then you’re in a different universe for me.”

Shawn was born in New York to a Jewish family in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and is the son of longtime New Yorker magazine editor William Shaun.

He also told the JC in 2009 that he and his wife Deborah Eisenberg, a professor at Columbia University, do not lead particularly Jewish lives: “I live in an American world, a New York world and a world world. But not particularly in a Jewish world.”

Wallace Shawn has been approached for comment.