Remarks by Selma Blair to the ADL State of the Arts Reception
The Jewish Museum, New York
October 1, 2026
In the fall of 2023, I was being celebrated on the South Lawn of the White House, with the President of the United States walking me out, complete with fanfare and the musical military unit playing Hail to the Chief. Honored on the anniversary of the American Disabilities Act and for my work in the disability space. The work I found when multiple sclerosis took the other kind away for a while. I'd spent years clawing my career back, because a career does not wait for you. And standing on that lawn, I thought: this is spectacular.
By that February, I didn't have a career at all.
The ADL asked me to say a few words about why I'm here. I'm not here to talk geopolitics. I don't do that, and I'm not starting tonight. The honest answer is unfinished business.
I've told rooms full of strangers the most private things about my body, my neurology, my illness. My family. My perceived issues. I wrote a book about it. I let a film crew follow me through the worst of it, or the best of it. So, it's strange to admit there was one thing I can't say out loud. Tonight I'm saying it.
In February of 2024, just mere months after October 7, I posted a comment online. It offended people, and I did apologize right away. No conditions, no fine print. I meant it then and I mean it now, and I'm leaving the comment there, because the comment was not the story.
Here's what happened next. I'll try to tell it fast, because it happened fast.
The brands I worked with were gone within a day. A few partnerships I'd spent years building were shelved. My agency was gone. My lawyer was gone. My publicist was gone. My book agent was gone. My book publicist was gone. My social media manager was gone. My son’s godmother was gone – my best friend. While some friends in the business quietly stood by me, most of them were gone. And of course, my manager, my supposed friend of thirty years, and a Jew, was gone too. I still don't know what any of them were thinking. No one returned my calls. I know the phone stopped. Not rang less. Just stopped.
It was year because two months earlier, before this in December 2023, the White House had invited me back for the Christmas party, and this time I brought my son. There's a photograph of the two of us in front of a tree the size of our house. He's grinning. I look exactly like a woman with a career. Two months later, everyone whose job it was to protect me was gone, blocked me, and I was standing in the backyard saying the Shema and wondering whether I'd imagined the last twenty-five years.
I'm not up here for sympathy. I know I’ve had a lucky life, and I'm working again. And of course we know that life is better now than it was then. I have a team now I'd walk through fire with. It’s small, and it is my team. I want you to know that before I tell you the part that isn't better:
It left a mark. I don't use the word trauma loosely, and 2024 was the real thing. The fear got into me, and fear is contagious in a house. The boy in that Christmas photograph watched his mother get scared of the world. A boy who had already watched his mother go through chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, not knowing if she was coming back to him. He's a teenager now. He's supposed to be embarrassed by me, not frightened for me. Careers come back. Years of his childhood do not.
So here's the unfinished business.
I'm a Jew. I was raised in Detroit. I went to Hillel Day School. I could read Hebrew before I could read English or, of course, a script. I feel Israel in my whole being. I have not hidden it a day in my life, and I'm not going to start now. And with two years of distance, I've come to believe the post was the occasion. It was not the reason. Not for a minute.
Because look at how it goes the other way. A couple of weeks ago, of course, a movie star used his platform to push a petition against an artist who has spent more than a decade raising money for children. Her crime was objecting, out loud, when another performer railed against Israel from a stage.
She didn't ask for anyone to lose anything. Not a job, not a stage, nothing. She said what she thought. And for saying what she thought, a movie star spent his week trying to get her cancelled. This is what it looks like when we lose our humanity. A woman who raises money for children stops being a person and becomes a target, and the people cheering can't see her anymore. They only see a side.
Nothing will happen to him. He'll keep working. He'll keep getting applauded. I made one post, apologized right away, and lost, overnight, everything I'd spent my adult life building. I was told by my old team I might have to give back money I'd already earned. Because of a comment. I am not kidding. And for weeks after, one of those brands kept my name and my face in its ad, even though they had stopped payment. The Super Bowl ad.
Apparently, I was too toxic to keep and too valuable to take down.
I'm not comparing wounds. I'm pointing at the scale. One direction gets you a petition and a shrug. The other gets you erased. You don't need a law degree to see which way the erasing runs. I don't have one. I noticed anyway.
I survived it because I was established. Twenty-five years of credits and a name people could spell. And one phone that kept ringing. My best friend refused to let me disappear, and my best friend happens to be a great attorney, which meant he did a lot more than just call. He went to work. Most people don't have those things.
So, think about who this happens to next. An actress with one credit. A songwriter with her first record. A comic six months in. No name. No cushion. Nobody who owes her a phone call, and nobody who knows how to fight for her. One post, one wrong word, one true word, and the door shuts, and there's no one on the other side of it.
So that's why I'm here. ADL is building something for the people in the arts who don't have what I had, so one moment doesn't cost them their whole lives. Someone to call. Someone who knows how to fight. A way back. This is ADL's part.
Two years ago I learned what erased feels like, and I've decided the opposite of erased is making something. So I'm making a film. The last time I let cameras in, it was about my body. This time it's about my people. It's a documentary about antisemitism, and as confounding and confusing as it seems to be because no one wants to talk about geopolitics but it seems to get intermingled completely, but I wanted to make this made for the people who are not in this room. It's called Hineni. Here I am. The thing I couldn't say two years ago, I'm now saying with a camera crew behind me. It goes to Israel, so people can see why that land is not an abstraction to us. And it talks to people who disagree with me, on camera, and keeps the disagreement in the cut, because you don't change a mind by only talking to people who already agree with you.
The rest of my part is less glamorous. We're working collectively with ADL on the research, resources and advising this fight needs. Some of its accuracy and education. A lot of its messaging: the actual words, and real examples of what works. Because this fight is full of people who are right and are losing the argument anyway, because of how they say it. I've watched good people with the right cause lose the room in one sentence and then watched the sentence become the story instead of the antisemitism it was about. Being right isn't enough. You have to be persuasive, and you have to know the difference between fighting antisemitism and handing your enemies a clip.
And that's the part we're working on together.
The next great artist could be Jewish. Given our track record, the odds are pretty good. If we let her get erased before we even hear from her, we won't even know what we lost. And we'll have let it happen.
Antisemitism has to stop. Not be managed. Not be explained. Not be weighed against something else. Stop.
Two years ago the phone stopped. Tonight I'm the one talking, in a room full of my own people, saying the thing out loud. I'm a Jew. I'm still here. Hineni. Thank you.