‘I just think [the hostages] should be the headline on every single paper, every single day. I don’t understand why it’s not,” said actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, the guest of honor at the , in an interview Friday, at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. Even before she gave a moving speech at the opening of the festival on Thursday night , the American-Jewish movie star, on her first trip to Israel, made time to visit several sites of the October 7 massacre by Hamas, including the Nova festival and Kibbutz Be’eri, and visited Hostages Square in Tel Aviv.
Soft-spoken and low-key but still radiating in chic casual clothes, Leigh sported a dog-tag necklace inscribed with a message about bringing the hostages home, and she spoke passionately about what it means to her to be Jewish after October 7 and why she chose to make her first visit to Israel. “I was very honored to come, especially now,” she said. “It feels good to be here.
But even if you just sign a few letters, even if you just post about antisemitism, even if you just bring awareness, it helps, whatever you can do.” In the past, Leigh has been known for her brilliant acting in a diverse range of roles, not her activism, and given her blond, conventionally all-American-style beauty, many of her fans may not even have realized she was Jewish. She burst into stardom in the 1982 iconic high-school sex comedy, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and throughout her career she has often played crazy, wild, and tough, often .