Why Did Wallace Shawn Liken Israelis To Nazis?

This past weekend, a deplorable minute-long video appeared on my X feed. In it, the instantly recognizable actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, most famous for his role as Vizzini in the classic 1987 film The Princess Bride, delivers a hateful rant belied by his grandfatherly demeanor and dulcet tones. He says,

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. 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. For some reason, Hitler didn’t want people to know he was doing these things to the Jews. It was a secret. The Israelis are almost proud of it and don’t keep it a secret. And it’s demonically evil.

Shawn’s analysis of the situation in Israel and Gaza is a moral inversion of the truth. The only party in this conflict to have committed an act of genocidal intent was Hamas. It was Hamas whose members recorded their savage rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023, their house-to-house massacring of Jewish civilians so gruesomely evoking the behavior of the Nazis eight decades earlier. It was Hamas whose insatiable lust for Jewish blood was blocked only by force of arms. And it’s Hamas that boasts about the murder of innocent people—Palestinian and Israeli.

The Shawn video, which comes from a 2025 interview with the podcaster Katie Halper, resurfaced at a time when rhetoric accusing Israel of “genocide” is at a peak. Representative Ro Khanna, a likely Democratic presidential candidate; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont; and the Young Democrats of America are just some of the voices on the left that have accused Israel of “the crime of crimes.” The sudden prominence of this wholly unfounded allegation, and the casual way in which so many people are hurling it, underscores the degree to which progressives have been radicalized since the 2023 Hamas attack.

[James Loeffler: The hatred that broke American politics]

Shawn is a longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization that attributes “all” of the violence of October 7 and in the preceding decades to “Israeli apartheid and occupation—and United States complicity in that oppression.” A growing number of celebrities, several of them Jewish, have expressed similar ideas. The reemergence of Shawn’s video happened to coincide with the publication of a GQ interview with the actor Adam Brody, who plays a rabbi on the Netflix series Nobody Wants This, the third season of which is coming out next month. Brody, who has been canvassing for Democratic candidates in the run-up to the midterm elections, was asked about Gaza. “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide,” he answered, as if he were ordering a cheeseburger. (He also said that, although he hadn’t previously spoken publicly about the issue, “I have spoken a lot about it privately.”)

The willingness to declare the war in Gaza a genocide has become a litmus test on the left and is likely to play a significant factor in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. The purpose of the claim is not to establish the facts about an undoubtedly horrific conflict but to increase the stakes in a decades-long effort to delegitimize the Jewish state. Israel’s actions in Gaza lack dolus specialis—the legal term for “specific intent,” which, according to a precedent set by the international tribunal that investigated the Rwandan genocide, means that the perpetrator acted “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Whatever the extreme rhetoric of some Israeli political leaders, Israel has not attempted to use its abundant military superiority to exterminate the Palestinian people. If it were bent on doing so, it would not have sent ground troops into Gaza and incurred hundreds of fatalities; nor would it have worked with the World Health Organization to vaccinate Palestinian children against polio after an outbreak. Some critics of the Jewish state have been accusing it of genocide since its founding, in 1948; others began making the charge only days into its military response to the Hamas attack—as if nothing the Israelis do short of surrendering their country is permissible.

Early in the interview, Halper refers to Shawn—son of the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn—as a “recovering liberal,” a term usually used to denote an older conservative looking wistfully on their younger, left-wing past. But Shawn, who accepts the label, places his opposition to Israel in a broader rejection of liberalism—the very tradition that has allowed Jews to achieve so much in America.

Until the age of 40, Shawn was a “fairly typical American liberal centrist,” he tells Halper, according to a transcript. “Basically, I believed in the good intentions of Americans, and I believed in the American democratic constitutional system, and I thought many of the Democrats were good people.” Shawn’s views began to change, however, once he realized that “the United States tried to suppress movements for greater liberty in other countries in the world, the goal of that was to benefit the privileged class of my own country, and I was a member of that class. So I actually turned very much against myself and people like me, and I certainly went through a period of extreme nausea and self-hate.”

Shawn’s political epiphany occurred during the early years of the Reagan administration, and his views about U.S. iniquity were solidified by his time living in Central America. “I loved being in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas,” Shawn said in a 1991 interview with the Los Angeles Times of the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninists then running that country. “I personally felt a deep contentment there based on the feeling that maybe things could be done better.” The Sandinistas were peacefully ousted in a democratic election but returned to power in 2007 under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, who canceled this year’s election and has banned the opposition from participating in future ones. If Shawn has criticized Ortega for these genuinely tyrannical actions, there is no public record of it.

[David Frum: Anti-Semitism is becoming mainstream]

Part of what’s so chilling about Halper’s interview with Shawn is that a man of such refined aesthetic tastes and with such a humane demeanor, as exemplified in his critically acclaimed 1981 picture, My Dinner With Andre, could embrace such brutal, uncompromising politics. Exquisitely nuanced in conveying human motivations and emotions in his performances, Shawn is Manichaean and maximalist in his politics. “If you don’t see that it’s evil to do those things to other human beings, then you’re in a different universe from me,” he said of Israeli actions in Gaza, according to the transcript of the Halper interview. “I don’t know how to communicate with you.” There is nothing defensible motivating Israelis; they are driven by an infernal delight in “killing the innocent” and “bombing hospitals.” The notion that Jews might have an equally valid claim to the land, or that the land ought to be divided between the two peoples, is anathema to Shawn. President Woodrow Wilson “was wrong to say that each people should have their own state,” he says. “That hasn’t turned out to be that great, this idea that each ethnic group should have its own state.” And yet, Shawn’s supposed opposition to ethnic-based statehood makes a curious exception for Palestinians, whose right to self-determination he supports.

If one accepts the proposition that Israelis are acting like Nazis, there’s no way of avoiding at least a partial justification of October 7. “Even in talking about the horrible attack on October 7 on the Israelis, it’s a little absurd to pretend that that came out of nowhere,” Shawn told Halper. At the same time, he insists that he is “in no position to judge the Palestinians” and is “more of a pacifist as time passes.” Shawn and Halper pride themselves on their expansive empathy, but it’s an empathy that doesn’t extend to Israelis. “I have a lot of hate in my heart,” Halper tells Shawn. “Not to sound corny, but it is based, I think, on the flip side of love. The reason I hate the people I hate is because I love the people that they are killing, oppressing, maiming, torturing.”

Shawn’s moral myopia is most fully on display when he blames other Jews, and not anti-Semites, for anti-Semitism. “What Netanyahu has done is unimaginably horrible for Jews, and let’s hope that nobody associates Israelis or Netanyahu with Jews, with you and me,” he tells Halper. “I hope nobody blames me for what they’re doing. But gee.” Few on the left would blame anti-Black racism on the behavior of African governments, and many spoke out forcefully against the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated in China. But Jews whom they deem to be behaving badly can be held responsible for attacks on other Jews.

Shawn was remarkably candid about his motivations in 2009, when he told a British Jewish newspaper, “I find it horrifying that Jews are seen—particularly by a young generation who do not know the history—as victimisers who are very self-righteous about what they do. From a moral point of view it was better when we were victims.” This is the position Jews were in before the creation of Israel: stateless and at the mercy of the powerful. Anti-Semites throughout history have preferred to see Jews cowering before their oppressors. Shawn is entitled to express “self-hate,” but there’s no reason the rest of the world’s Jews should subordinate themselves to this point of view.

Whatever moved Shawn to make his remarks last year, they have reappeared at a time when anti-Semitism is flourishing in America like never before. That his comments received so little notice at the time they were spoken shows how routine casual accusations of genocide had already become, and how thoroughly knowledge of history had depreciated. Today, such calumnies are uttered as flippantly as if they were items on a menu, perfectly encapsulating the moral derangement of our times.