By Melanie Nathan, March 30, 2025.
I had a visceral reaction to Hannah Einbinder’s 7+ minute visibility award acceptance speech at Human Rights Campaign’s Los Angeles gala last week. Several things struck me, pointing mostly to the infringement of the platform, resulting in subpar representation of real life for Queers, couched in the performative and a tired theme: “ Look at me I am that good Jew”.
Given the nature of her award, for VISIBILITY, she succeeded in representing celebrity privilege seeking accolade for her righteousness.
However, because this is such a momentous time in our trajectory as Queers, I was struck:
• As a human rights advocate for the most marginalized among our global LGBTQI+ community, by a speech that ignored this moment in time of momentous desperate Queer plight around the world
• As an aging Queer in the US LGBTQ equality movement, by how little she did with her time to enhance our quest to sustain and gain our rights, including trans erasure, during the most concerning of periods ever experienced by our community during this century
• As an American I was struck by how she failed this moment we find ourselves in, for the severity of the fascism we are enduring as LGBTQI+, women, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and people of color
• As a fellow Jew I was struck by how she fed us Jews like the last scrap of lamb devoured by that lion, to the waiting hyenas, yearning for that final piece of dying flesh.
With the Human Rights Campaign event ticketed at $345 per individual, and up to $50,000 per corporate sponsorship package, supporting HRC programs and the grand salary package of apparently $700,000 + for the CEO’s yearly remuneration, Hannah Einbinder’s award served the exclusive fundraiser, and so thankfully, those who might never benefit from that speech, were spared.
Einbinder spent approximately 2 out of her 7 minutes calling out corporations for hurting the environment, and then the following 5 minutes throwing darts at Israel.
She gave a fleeting nano-second to October 7th which came across as an afterthought, rather than a prime consideration. I would have to listen again to see if she even mentioned the hostages, rape of Jewish women, and the current wave of Gazan protesters calling on Hamas to return hostages and end the war. The way she constructed her narrative fell into lockstep with the complicit nature of all who have failed, since OCT 08, 2023, to call Hamas out for its orchestration of tactical civilian sacrifice and martyrdom, and for citing “we will do it again and again and again.”
Not once did she mention the Aguda, an Israeli LGBTQI+ organization expelled by International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA). The Aguda which embraces all LGBTI+ on Israeli soil, including Muslims and Palestinians, was unjustly expelled for just being an Israeli organization , despite their visibility fighting for Israeli and all Queers in the region (that story here.)
Einbinder also failed to callout our own LGBTI community that has turned on and even abandoned us Queer Jews within the LGBTQI+ community, at a time when so many of us feel isolated and alone.
She gave this speech in the context of the rise of a Trump fascist regime dismantling our democracy and rights in real time, failing the moment when Muslim and Christian victims of Jihad and Evangelical anti-homosexuality attacks are currently caught in an avalanche of violence licensed by new heightened anti-LGBTQI criminalizing legislation, such as the Ugandan “Kill the Gays Bill”, the Family Values Bill in Ghana, and Sharia’s “stone the homos” law adopted into Mauritania’s criminal code, and much more. What a lost opportunity: Einbinder is speaking at a preeminent US Queer event in the face of the implementation of the Evangelical led proponents of Project 2025, targeting foreign soil by exporting homophobia to Africa, now imposing it here at home.
To add insult to this injury, all the while the very victims of this violent persecution who sought out the USA as a place for protection and refuge have their resettlement and asylum rugs pulled from under their feet, with nowhere to go. Since Trump robbed these vulnerable key populations of USAID and USRAP, all so momentous to our communities, and yet not a word!
By the way I do not know a single Jew who is not compassionate about the loss of life in Gaza. We do not need to be called upon to feel! Given the nature of this event, this speech served as a divisive, bordering abusive, rally cry, given so many queer Jews feel isolated and scorned by our fellow LGBTQI+ community, since October 07.
Einbinder, as a public figure, has many an opportunity to spread her Jewish compassion for Palestinian civilian deaths. Perhaps LGBTQI+ Jewish organizations can chime in and explain to her the parts of her narrative that were plain wrong and likely to further fester antisemitism. I am more concerned here with how inappropriate the topic was in general, and her lost opportunity, so glaring that it served only her selfish opportunism.
How someone like Hannah Einbinder cannot see the irony of effectively stroking a pro-Hamas narrative in a queer space, is beyond me. The pro-Palestinian movement certainly did not need a Queer Jew to prop up trampling on Queer lives. Indeed “Queer visibility” does “go beyond, as Einbinder so aptly noted in her opening remark. However, if one cannot prioritize Queer visibility, in this space, for all Queers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. in their greatest moment of need, given very few forums that may grant that opportunity, one denies the very visibility one espouses.
The speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0WuWjdZS_s
By Melanie Nathan
Co-Administrator of Jewish Women ORI
Executive Director African Human Rights Coalition
commissionermnathan@gmail.com
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