Mayim Bialik recalls parking lot confrontation over Israel views, says she feared for her children
by The Washington Times AI News Desk · The Washington TimesActress and neuroscientist Mayim Bialik said she was approached in a Los Angeles parking lot by a man wearing a “Zionism is racism” shirt while she was with her children, describing the encounter as one of several frightening episodes she has faced since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.
“A big dude coming up to me as I’m getting into my car — what is happening?” Ms. Bialik said in a recent episode of “Second Thought,” a Free Press podcast co-hosted by Suzy Weiss and comedian Dan Ahdoot. “That’s terrifying.”
She said her immediate instinct was to protect her sons. “I said, get in the car. Get in the car.”
Ms. Bialik, best known for her roles in “Blossom” and “The Big Bang Theory,” said the incident crystallized a fear she had been living with since the Hamas attacks — that her children, one of whom she called her “doppelganger,” could be targeted simply because of their last name and appearance.
“My older one is a doppelganger,” she said. “That was terrifying to me.”
The actress, who identifies as a liberal Zionist, said every part of her hesitated before speaking out publicly after Oct. 7. She said the backlash she had faced online for years — including death threats, curses and accusations of being a “Zionist” used as a slur — intensified sharply after the attacks. She eventually turned off comments on her social media accounts, telling the host she grew tired of seeing the phrase “baby killer” on her Facebook page when she was “just trying to tell people about the benefits of breastfeeding or about the loveliness of Shabbat.”
She credited actor Sacha Baron Cohen with presciently warning the Jewish community about what was coming.
“It was actually Sacha Baron Cohen who said, ’We’re about to see the largest campaign of antisemitism we’ve ever seen in history,’” she said. “And I was like, what’s he talking about? That’s what happened.”
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Ms. Bialik said she was grateful to others in the entertainment industry who spoke up, singling out actor Ben Stiller for a piece he wrote in Time magazine.
“That was brave,” she said, describing his argument that secular Jews should not be hunted down and held responsible for the policies of the Israeli government. She also cited actress Debra Messing as among the first in Hollywood to publicly take a stand.
Ms. Bialik pushed back on efforts to redefine “Zionist” as a slur.
“I don’t know any other minority group who would allow people who dislike them to determine the moniker that they use for their self-identity,” she said. “Would you tell a Black person, ’No, no, no, that’s not racist?’ Would you tell a gay person that wasn’t homophobic?”
She said she remains a self-described bleeding-heart liberal who does not believe in the death penalty and supports a range of left-wing causes, but said she no longer feels fully at home in the Democratic Party she was raised to support.
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“I don’t feel part, in many ways, of the Democratic Party that I knew,” she said. “And I don’t want that to be true.”
Ms. Bialik also suggested she may have been dropped from a major feminist organization’s campaign because of her views on Israel, stopping short of naming the group directly.
“Do I blow this up? Do I take one of the largest, most prominent feminist organizations that everyone donates to and say I was eliminated from a campaign because of investor needs?” she said.
On her departure from “Jeopardy!” — she left after refusing to cross a writers’ strike picket line and was subsequently told her services were not needed — she suggested her outspokenness on Israel may have been a factor.
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“I don’t shut up about injustice,” she said. “And I don’t especially cower about anything relating to the Jewish people or the state of Israel. And I would not be surprised if that theoretically might not have been a good fit.”
This article was constructed with the assistance of artificial intelligence and published by a member of The Washington Times' AI News Desk team. The contents of this report are based solely on The Washington Times' original reporting, wire services, and/or other sources cited within the report. For more information, please read our AI policy or contact Steve Fink, Director of Artificial Intelligence, at sfink@washingtontimes.com
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