Hollywood, Gaza, and the Invisible Blacklist

This story was co-edited with The Key. It was also co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

The following is a preview of the summer issue of our print journal, the LARB Quarterly, no. 49: Traffic, out on June 9. Become a member for more essays, criticism, poetry, fiction, and art—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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HOLLYWOOD IS A BUSINESS ruled by uncertainty.

Film and television work is overwhelmingly freelance, governed by informal networks and opaque hiring decisions. People audition, pitch, take meetings, wait—you get a call, or you don’t. Careers advance and stall without explanation. No one tells you why you weren’t hired, nor is anyone required to do so. The machinery that moves work is real—agents packaging projects, managers pushing clients, casting directors sorting submissions, studio executives deciding what gets made—but it is difficult to see from the outside, and often even from the inside.

It is also an industry that runs on reputation more nakedly than almost any other. Reputation is how you get hired, how your name circulates when you are not in the room. Productions spin up and shut down in weeks. Writers’ rooms convene and dissolve. Careers are built on short bursts of employment stitched together over years, dependent on relationships that are rarely formal and almost never transparent. The distinction between inside and outside those networks matters enormously.

The industry has been contracting for years now, battered by the collapse of the streaming boom and the aftershocks of the 2023 strikes. On March 20, Senator Adam Schiff held a hearing in nearby Burbank, where he reported that Hollywood had lost approximately 42,000 jobs in the past two years. Some of these jobs moved to other parts of the country—Georgia in particular—as well as other parts of the world, but there’s no doubt that there has been a massive contraction in US-based film jobs.

And yet, while this contraction, and the accompanying uncertainty, is industry-wide, there is also the sense that some of it is targeted and specific. For those who have expressed sympathy for Palestinians since October 2023, that familiar uncertainty has taken on a sharper meaning. The genocide in Gaza hit Hollywood as a political issue, but it also played out as a labor question: in auditions canceled, projects endlessly stalled, careers ended. In some cases, the answer has been silence. In others, something closer to the opposite.

I approached more than a dozen people for this article, from directors and actors to editors and writers. All of them described a tangible shift in the hiring atmosphere, with many speaking about the sensation of slowly being excluded from a place of which they once felt a part. Some of them would only describe their experiences anonymously. A few declined to speak entirely. No one wants to be known as the person who talks.

In the industry, there has long been a particular taboo around criticizing Israel. Industry figures have spoken publicly about climate change, reproductive rights, police violence, and immigration without the same degree of professional anxiety. By contrast, describing Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide—language used by human rights organizations and international legal scholars for over two years now—still carries a different reputational charge. No one says this outright, but everyone seems to understand it.

Morgan Spector, an actor who has been outspoken against Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, considers Palestine to be a kind of skeleton key “for understanding changes in the industry,” one that clarifies how power is exercised under conditions of precarity and how political boundaries are enforced. As another industry veteran put it, “Nobody knows why they don’t get a job.” As the industry contracts, it’s best not to give employers another reason.

A Contracting Industry Meets a Political Red Line

“I personally had a moment where I was looking around being like, man, I haven’t worked outside of my TV job for a long time,” said Spector. It was late 2025, and he was in Los Angeles for an industry event. His trip to the city that revolves around show business led to a creeping suspicion: “Maybe I’ve really gotten myself into some trouble with my online advocacy.”

Spector’s “TV job” is a lead role on The Gilded Age (2022–), a wildly successful period drama currently going into its fourth season on HBO. This is precisely the kind of work that would usually lead to cascading opportunities—actor and agent flooded with enthusiastic requests. The success and prestige of the show would usually insulate an actor from reputational tremors. In other words, Spector is in many respects a highly employable actor. If he is unsure of his status, the vulnerability extends outward.

“Then I was talking to people in L.A. and they were just like, ‘Yeah, we’re not making anything right now.’”

“There’s so much noise, right?” Spector noted. “It’s hard to find that particular signal.”

“I suspect a lot of that stuff is happening behind the scenes,” he said. “There’s no reason to engage in conflict when you can choose not to work with someone for ostensibly other reasons.”

Israel’s genocide collided with Hollywood at a moment of exceptional vulnerability. The pandemic disrupted production, throwing the majority of the workforce into sudden, unexpected unemployment. The streaming boom had already begun to unwind, with investors no longer willing to ply the industry with money in hopes of replicating Netflix’s success. The checks had come due, with demands to turn a profit leading studio executives to pull back on the bonanza of new projects known as “peak TV”: in 2023, the number of scripted series on air finally declined, from a whopping 600 in 2022 to 516 in 2023. The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, a response to the streaming era’s thinner paychecks and less stable employment—changes caused by streamers’ shorter television seasons, smaller writers’ rooms, and the loss of residual payments that accompanied reruns on linear televisions—accelerated the cost-cutting decisions studios were already preparing to make. By late 2023 and into 2024, thousands of workers across film and television found themselves unemployed or underemployed, with no clear sense of when—or whether—work would return.

As Variety put it, studios entered “recovery mode” after the strikes, cutting projects and shrinking development slates. The return of production continues to be uneven and halting. When everyone is working less, it becomes harder to tell whether a vanished opportunity reflects political retaliation or simply an industry in free fall. It also becomes harder to tell where the limits actually are.

“If there is retaliation, how do you know?” wondered James Schamus, a screenwriter, film professor at Columbia University, and the former CEO of Focus Features. “It’s not like there’s some published blacklist.” There are, he added, “examples that have been made,” and “those examples tend to be younger women of color.” But in a labor market that has already lost a vast amount of work, the disappearance of any particular job is hard to parse. “It may well be that the reason you’re not getting gigs is the same reason that 40 percent of your peers are not getting gigs: because there’s a 40 percent reduction in production.”

Reputation and Silence

Film industry denizens rarely discuss politics at work, at least not in ways that feel structurally confrontational. Over the past decade, Hollywood has become adept at absorbing movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter into its public-facing identity. Those interventions were often framed less as political disputes than as matters of inclusion or ethics. Conversations about US foreign policy, by contrast, are treated differently. Hollywood is a globalized industry, and yet the subject simply isn’t discussed; people can collaborate for months without ever knowing what the person next to them believes.

That changed after October 7. Suddenly, a conversation about a controversial global issue was front and center within the industry. One Palestinian producer who requested anonymity to speak freely described an unmistakable shift in the tone of meetings—some colleagues would even bring up their support for the Israeli Defense Forces, a topic she could not help but think was meant to provoke her. “It’s all very sneaky,” she said. She recalled a casting meeting where an actor was rejected by other producers: “People were like, ‘Oh, we can’t work with this person.’” When she pushed her co-workers for clarification, the language was more pointed: “‘They’re not safe,’ or ‘That person’s antisemitic.’” She had not seen any evidence of either being true. The change was atmospheric: “There’s a vibe,” she said, “and everyone understands it.”

Multiple workers—including actors, producers, and below-the-line workers—described experiences they understood as blacklisting, even while none had seen a literal list (though rumors abound). Interest followed by withdrawal. Relationships that quietly dissolved. Hiring decisions explained vaguely, or not at all.

The producer I talked to described being actively recruited for a consulting role and going through multiple enthusiastic meetings: “I went through three rounds of very long conversations in which they said ‘We love you. You’d be a dream.’” She hadn’t sought the job, but the project needed her, and it felt like a done deal. “So as a test with the last person, I mentioned in passing that I was Palestinian,” she said. “I never heard from them again.” Spector told me of a Palestinian actor who had learned that a casting agency would not even allow him to audition.

This is, as the producer called it, a “vibe” that warns against revealing one’s opposition to the genocide. But in a freelance industry, these kinds of ruptures rarely leave a paper trail. If a producer simply stops calling, there is no formal termination and no contract violation to grieve. The union cannot compel an employer to hire someone for a future project.

Blair McClendon, a film editor whose work includes The Assistant (2019), Aftersun (2022), and The Last Showgirl (2024), placed these experiences in historical context. “Hollywood doesn’t get enough credit for, if not inventing, at least perfecting the blacklist,” he said.

“As with any job dismissal, they can fire you for whatever reason,” he said. “But you wouldn’t know if the reason is that we have a different sense of how cinema works or we have a different sense of what genocide is.”

The Cold War blacklist operated through spectacle—highly publicized government hearings, subpoenas, trade-paper denunciations. Today’s version requires none of that. In a predominantly freelance industry that has acknowledged and supposedly learned from the mistakes of that era, people don’t need to be publicly denounced; they just stop getting hired.

“I am trying to behave in a way that allows me to be invited into the conversation,” the producer said. At times, she admitted, that calculation makes her feel like “a traitor,” staying silent in rooms where colleagues voice support for a war that is killing her own people, swallowing anger so she can keep getting hired.

“How much shit can you eat so you can fight to get a certain story told or a certain person cast?” she asked, invoking “qahr”—an Arabic word for a kind of slow, consuming anger on a profound level.

Union Politics and Their Limits

These dynamics have played out sharply within Hollywood’s unions. While entertainment unions rarely take positions on international conflicts, SAG-AFTRA issued an October 2023 statement expressing sympathy for Israeli victims while remaining silent on the rapidly mounting Palestinian death toll. The decision to speak swiftly about Israeli victims while remaining silent about Palestinian deaths sent a clear signal about the industry’s priorities. “When you release a statement like this that says that one kind of person deserves to be mourned,” actor Amin El Gamal said, “and then tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered and you’re not saying anything? You’re signaling that some people deserve to be mourned and others don’t.”

The SAG-AFTRA statement also showed how differently Israel is treated inside the industry—close to off-limits in ways other issues are not. Even an acknowledgment of the people Israel had killed could be construed as somehow controversial. The silence was both public-facing and internal. At the time, El Gamal served in elected leadership as chair of the union’s Middle Eastern/North Africa Committee. He reached out repeatedly to union staff and leadership to request a meeting. He received no response.

“I was really disappointed that no one even had a filler meeting with me,” he said, by which he meant a chance to be heard, even if it resulted in no action. “I was ignored. As a unionist, I was sort of brokenhearted.”

“We kept encountering people who had the same experience,” he added—members who were “disillusioned with the union’s stance” and who had tried, unsuccessfully, to raise concerns internally. If internal pressure was not going to work, he concluded, organizers had to look elsewhere. “We realized that at the time, at least, SAG-AFTRA didn’t care about anything except stars.”

Requests for comment were sent to SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America regarding whether members had raised concerns about retaliation for public speech on Gaza and how the unions understand their role on questions of free speech. Neither union responded by time of publication.

Visibility Without Power

Hollywood is used to letting people say things publicly while keeping hiring decisions somewhere else. Statements, red-carpet gestures, and even protests can be absorbed into the industry’s self-image as politically engaged and morally serious. What matters is not whether dissent exists but whether it interferes with production, financing, or institutional relationships.

This distinction helps explain why public protest has coexisted with quieter forms of enforcement and discipline. When internal meetings went nowhere, El Gamal and other organizers took the issue outside formal union channels. They helped organize a protest that briefly delayed the 2024 Academy Awards telecast.

The action drew coverage in The Hollywood Reporter, documenting the organized opposition to Israel’s genocide in the industry’s own paper of record. The protest did not change union leadership’s minds, but it made visible what had otherwise been treated as marginal.

Moments of visibility carry their own risks. Award campaigns, festival premieres, press tours—these are moments when attention can translate into leverage.

One actor nominated for a high-profile award, who requested anonymity, described “grappling with how and if to talk about the genocide amidst the sort of parade of press.”

“I kind of feel like I can’t live with myself if I don’t just make it very clear where I stand on this issue,” she said. But the calculation never stopped. “I’m also an artist, and I want to work.”

“I’m always approaching it from a humanitarian perspective,” she said, “but I am careful. I’m very careful.”

“To speak up about something that every aid group has said is a humanitarian catastrophe and feel like you’re being penalized for doing so makes you feel crazy.”

That disorientation is built into how this works. If punishment were explicit, it could be challenged. Unions built to bargain over wages and working conditions are structured around violations that can be documented. If a contract is breached, there is a grievance. If a meeting simply never materializes, there is nothing to file.

“Ultimately, our concerns were considered really fringe, at best, if not problematic,” El Gamal said.

When Collapse Produces Defiance

Fear has not produced uniform silence. For some, even small or private gestures of solidarity have created opportunities for community and creative freedom.

Khalid Abdalla, an actor on The Crown (2016–23) who wrote “Ceasefire Now” on his hands at the show’s final season premiere in November 2023, described stepping into that moment expecting isolation. “I felt very alone,” he said. As an Arab actor, Abdalla noted, he already works within an industry that has long constrained people of his background. “I sit within a context in which I am structurally and culturally embattled,” he said. He did not know whether he would be “immediately, you know, canceled, destroyed, never able to work again.” What followed was something else.

“On the whole, my experience has been positive,” he said. “What I found was a warmth that was far wider and bigger than I expected.”

“People—the general public wherever you are, even many of the people in Hollywood—are way more radical than anyone would like to believe,” actor, director, and musician Boots Riley told me in a 2023 interview, shortly after the genocide began. “And one of the ways [the higher-ups] instill fear is by making people think that they are the most radical people in the room. They make it seem like what you’re saying is something that very few people will believe, and so you think that sort of a blacklist could work rather than backfire.”

A few months before we spoke, Variety had reported on an email circulated by one of Riley’s fellow Directors Guild of America members that included a blacklist of sorts, warning fellow union members against electing 10 supposed radicals, Riley included, into guild leadership (no matter that Riley was not running for a position). But it hadn’t worked: when the email leaked, few film industry denizens defended it; the more common response was ridicule. When I relayed Riley’s quote to Abdalla, he agreed with the sentiment. More people had shared his view than he had realized before the Crown premiere, and speaking up helped prove that.

“We’ve grown up in a culture where it is undoubtedly the case that there was a really problematic silence around Palestine, and it’s hard to move beyond the nature of that taboo,” Abdalla explained. But evidence is accumulating that the taboo is lifting. He heard, through the grapevine, a conversation in which someone raised concerns that an actor had spoken publicly in support of Palestine. Someone else responded, “Well, that’s hardly a fringe position anymore. We’ve moved on from there.” The comment is secondhand, but that is also how reputations move and judgments circulate, or how a position that once felt risky can begin to feel ordinary.

“My people have been able to find me,” he said of his outspokenness about Palestine, and the process has opened onto projects that he expects will extend well beyond this moment. “I keep seeing people emboldened politically and so emboldened creatively too.” Several of the people I spoke with expressed similar experiences. After all, in the film industry, a community all but inevitably becomes a professional network too.

There are signs that these smaller-scale community networks have begun to affect the broader Hollywood culture. An organizer involved with Film Workers for Palestine described being surprised not by fear but by resolve. Workers who signed the organization’s pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions implicated in genocide and apartheid were quickly faced with public condemnation, notably by studios including Paramount Pictures, which has been accused of blacklisting signatories (although they have denied it). This raised concerns that some would quietly withdraw their names. “We fully expected that we would start getting requests for people to take their name off,” the organizer said. “But of more than five thousand signatories, there’s only been one person.” The response, they said, suggested that for many workers, silence was no longer worth it.

According to Hamza Ali, co-founder of Watermelon Pictures, there has been a noticeable shift in the industry.

“In the beginning, I’m sure they were trying to cancel everybody. Now it’s like the more people are speaking up, the more they can’t silence everybody. People are less and less afraid, and it’s time to drop that fear,” he said.

Take, for example, this year’s Oscars. Javier Bardem said “No to war and free Palestine” before presenting an award during the ceremony. Ali, who was there, said that no video could capture the level of thunderous applause that followed the actor’s declaration.

“The room completely erupted in applause,” Ali said. “That room represents the industry.”

Compare that to the scene during the 2024 Academy Awards, where filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, hands shaking, read his carefully worded acceptance speech condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza. The tension in the room was palpable, and there was hesitation in the applause and cheers that came in response.

“What is really promising is that the tide is turning,” Ali said of pro-Israel efforts within the industry. “Not even [just at] the middle [level]—[it’s also] executives throughout the industry, and actors. They’re all seeing the light.”

“I’m not seeing the scale of punishment that warranted the silence,” said Abdalla. “I want to believe that by standing up, you gain more than you lose.”

And yet, a cultural shift does not always translate into changes in infrastructure, let alone the actual financial or labor practices of the industry.

“We have a lot of people who are like, ‘We are with you … [but] our hands are tied,’” Ali said of some of the conversations he has had about distributing Watermelon Pictures’ films.

“We are currently releasing a film that actually has ‘Palestine’ in the title, and it’s unfortunate that we had to have a discussion around whether or not that would impact our solicitations,” he continued, referencing Annemarie Jacir’s new film, Palestine ’36. “We’re also well aware that right-wing extremist groups attempt to pressure exhibitors into not playing our films.”

After all, the structure of the industry remains the same. But that structure creates room to maneuver. To illustrate this point, Schamus compared Hollywood to the fine art market. In the fine art world, he explained, “the people who are using the art market and art patronage for their [own] capital, both social and actual, as speculators” can act much more directly, enforcing their views through auctions and sales. It is relatively easy to exclude anyone they deem unacceptable. Film and television operate differently. Productions require large crews, draw from a wide labor pool, and ultimately have to reach mass, global audiences. The pressure, when it comes, tends to be “more diffuse, a little more paranoia-inducing for everybody, but also a little less draconian.”

That diffuseness makes consequences harder to prove, but it also makes them harder to enforce cleanly. This is a system in which no single person controls hiring across projects, production depends on assembling hundreds of workers for short periods of time, and the final product can be independently distributed to audiences. For Ali, it is that last step of the process that has proven useful in evading some of the political pressure. As he described it, efforts to limit the reach of Palestine ’36 have partially failed thanks to theaters that “believe in freedom of artistic expression.”

“We’re trying to shift Hollywood. We’re trying to shift the conversation. When we get pushback from within the industry, we’re constantly pushing the boundary. You’re not comfortable? Let’s talk about it,” Ali said of Watermelon Pictures’ efforts to break through in the industry.

Although the industry’s current climate presents “a huge challenge across the board” when it comes to pushing for independent cinema, including projects related to Palestine, Ali is cautiously optimistic about the future of film workers who have spoken up about the genocide.

“I don’t envision, in a year or two, a scenario where you say ‘free Palestine’ and you can’t get a job—it might be the opposite.”

Documentary filmmaker Brett Story, whose work includes The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and Union (2024), expressed a similar point of view: “In a time of contraction, you’d think there’d be more self-censorship. I’m wondering if actually the opposite effect is happening. People aren’t taking it anymore.”

Her hope was underscored by a sense of resignation about the industry at large: “They’ll screw you no matter what,” she said, describing a network of studios increasingly run by executives hostile not only to labor but also to art itself. For some workers, as El Gamal put it, there is simply “nothing left to lose.” For others, the calculus is more complicated, shifting from project to project, moment to moment. For almost everyone, the next job is always uncertain.

Yet under those conditions, the calculation begins to shift. If the next job is never guaranteed, silence stops guaranteeing anything either. Speaking about Palestine can function less as a liability than as a point of alignment. As Story put it: “It reveals who’s the real deal.” In an industry built on uncertainty, that may be the more durable change.