Luxury Activists, Volume 1
Hannah Einbinder and Boots Riley have been hard at work.
This is going to be a new column where I point out the absurdity of Hollywood “luxury activism,” in which people make big political statements while taking money from the people they claim to loathe.
For our inaugural column, we have two stars:
Hannah Einbinder, of Hacks fame. Einbinder has been a prominent Pro Palestinian advocate, saying it at the Emmys and elsewhere. She also signed a petition to not work with Israeli film institutions last year “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” She ended up paying a $10k fine for it, which went to a boy and girls club, not Palestine.
For her recent Cannes-premiering Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, she was placed in a real pickle.
Mubi, Miasma’s funder, was embroiled in a scandal last year, in which they lost 200,000 subscribers to protests over its acceptance of $100m from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Activists had discovered Sequoia’s ties to the Israeli military, in particular a defense start up called Kela, founded by four veterans of Israeli intelligence units in response to the terror attacks of Oct. 7, whose express long term goal is…
to convert Israel into a defense tech hub for Western militaries—a source of strategic advantage for NATO and the U.S. as they seek to deter their adversaries.
An open letter protesting MUBI’s acceptance of the investment soon followed, signed by art house luminaries like Joshua Oppenheimer and Aki Kaurismaki, claiming Mubi’s financial growth is “tied to the genocide in Gaza.”
Mubi, of course, still ended up accepting the investment, but CEO Efe Cakarel “compromised” by creating an “Ethical Funding and Investment Policy and an Artists Advisory Council,” as well as a “Artists at Risk Fund,” which presumably could be funded with Sequoia money.
For Einbinder, who signed boycotts of the Israeli film industry and shouted “free Palestine” at the Emmys, this would theoretically create a conflict with her pro Palestine activism, taking money from an organization that funds Israeli military startups, who conduct “research” on Palestine.
But, unfortunately, right around the time Mubi entered its Sequoia scandal, Einbinder had just wrapped a movie with them! Rather than, say, donating her profits from the film to suffering Palestinians, she simply told them that she would still say “Free Palestine” on the red carpet.
“I unfortunately think there’s a lot of dark money in Hollywood. We, as artists, as individuals, don’t make those decisions," she says when asked about the controversy over the film's distributor Mubi taking funding from Sequoia Capital, which has ties to the Israeli military.
"But what I can tell you is that I can and have and will continue to speak and advocate for a free Palestine. And Mubi knows that about me and they’ve been supportive of all us."
So in the end, everyone’s happy. Einbinder gets to sound moral on the red carpet, keep her money, and move on to the next project.
Einbinder’s not the only one finding it difficult to not take Israel-connected money.
Boots Riley, a self-described marxist who recently declared that:
