Actress Emmy Rossum posted scathing comments to Twitter blasting the “bigotry” that “pervades our industry,” in response to Winona Ryder’s recent revelations regarding Mel Gibson’s alleged anti-Semitic comments.
By Ezra Stone, United with Israel
Multi-talented actress and musician Emmy Rossum took to Twitter this week to blast anti-Semites in the entertainment industry, referring to Mel Gibson’s alleged use of the word “oven-dodgers” to refer to Jews as “disgusting” and “sad, but “not a surprising or unique experience.”
Rossum posted the comments in response to revelations made by award-winning actress and film-producer Winona Ryder in a recent Sunday Times interview. She recalled an exchange with Gibson in which, she says, he asked her at a party whether she was an “oven dodger,” a slur popular with anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers that refers to the ovens the Germans used in World War II to cremate the bodies of the Jewish victims they murdered during the Holocaust.
Rossum continued in a follow-up tweet, “On multiple occasions I’ve had people — both in the industry and not — be surprised to learn that I’m Jewish. They usually react with ‘Oh! Wow. You don’t really LOOK Jewish.’ And when I offer no response and let the statement linger they continue with some kind of defensive qualifier like “I mean that in a GOOD way!’ As if ‘looking Jewish’ — whatever that means to them — is something I should want to avoid. This makes me sick.'”
On other occasions, Rossum explained she has been told she looks “too ethnic.” She said she has been passed over for roles and has been told directors preferred actresses that are “more ‘American’ looking,” “ideally a blonde with blue eyes, someone that just looks nicer.”
Rossum is not the only Jewish Hollywood insider to speak up in the wake of Ryder’s revelations about Gibson.
Comedic actor Seth Rogen tweeted, “I’m only surprised by Mel Gibson’s ‘oven dodger’ comment because it acknowledges the Holocaust actually happened.”
Rogen’s tweet referenced Gibson’s history of anti-Semitism and the fact that his father, Hutton Gibson, was an avowed Holocaust-denies who once commented, “[The Jews] claimed that there were 6.2 million in Poland before the war, and they claimed after the war there were 200,000 — therefore he must have killed 6 million of them. They simply got up and left! They were all over the Bronx and Brooklyn and Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles.”
An ABC report on the Gibsons noted, “Mel Gibson has refused to say whether he agrees with his father’s views. ‘My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me,’” Mel Gibson told Reader’s Digest in 2003. “The man never lied to me in his life.”