Does Billy Joel Support Israel?

Maya Mizrachi Feb 25, 2025 Updated Jul 22, 2026 4 min read

Short answer: As of July 2026, Billy Joel has no record of political advocacy for the State of Israel and no publicized statement about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, so calling him a political "supporter of Israel" overstates the record. What is documented is real and meaningful: he performed three concerts in Israel in March 1980 and defended playing there, and he is openly, proudly Jewish with a strong public stance against antisemitism, most visibly wearing a yellow Star of David onstage in 2017 and detailing his family's Holocaust escape in a 2025 HBO documentary. His connection is cultural, personal, and historical rather than a stated political position on Israel.

What Billy Joel has actually said and done

March 1980: Joel toured Israel during his Glass Houses run, playing Binyanei Ha'Uma in Jerusalem on March 22 and Heichal HaTarbut in Tel Aviv on March 25 and 26, per concert records at setlist.fm. Those in-person shows directly refute the idea that he has no documented ties to Israel.
1982: In a Playboy interview (quoted on the BDS-aligned Reverse Canary Mission page, which lists him as a boycott violator and so confirms he played there), Joel defended the decision: "I played in Israel for the same reason I played in Cuba, to play for the people. We wanted to see what the people in Israel were like instead of listening to the propaganda we get in our country."
August 21, 2017: Days after the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally, Joel wore a yellow Star of David on the front and back of his jacket during an encore at Madison Square Garden, as reported by Aish and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. His spokeswoman offered only an Edmund Burke line as comment: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
August 2017: The gesture drew mixed reactions. Historian Deborah Lipstadt warned that celebrity use of the yellow star risked "making the Holocaust into kitsch," as quoted by Racked, while Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told The Jerusalem Post that if anyone had the right to use it in defiance of latter-day Nazis, "it would be Billy Joel."
July 2025: The two-part HBO documentary "Billy Joel: And So It Goes" (parts aired July 18 and July 25, 2025) gave his fullest account of his Jewish identity and family Holocaust history, as covered by AOL and People and The Hollywood Reporter. He described his grandparents' escape from Nazi Germany ("They got out. A miracle") and explained the 2017 star: "I wore the star, basically, to say, no matter what, I will always be a Jew."

A Jewish identity that is cultural and ancestral

Billy Joel (born 1949, Long Island) was raised in a secular household by Jewish parents and has described his religious involvement as having "peaked at his bris," in the words of JTA. His father, Howard (born Helmut) Joel, came from a well-to-do, assimilated German-Jewish family in Nuremberg. The family's textile factory was forced into a fire-sale for pennies on the dollar under Nazi Aryanization pressure, and relatives were killed in the Holocaust, while his grandparents narrowly escaped. Joel has also spoken about experiencing childhood antisemitism at his Catholic school, where classmates asked if he had horns.

His Jewish identity is therefore cultural and ancestral rather than religiously observant, and it is well documented. On Israel specifically, the public record is thin but not empty: he played three shows there in March 1980 and defended the choice in that 1982 Playboy interview. The BDS-aligned Reverse Canary Mission page lists him as a boycott violator, which is itself evidence that he performed in Israel and did not honor the cultural boycott. Beyond his own words on antisemitism, there is no verified statement from Joel taking a political position on Israeli policy, and no publicized reaction from him to the October 7, 2023 attacks. The record on that is silent, and that is worth stating plainly rather than filling it in.

The bottom line

Billy Joel is a proudly, publicly Jewish artist who performed in Israel in 1980 and defended it, and who has taken a visible, repeated stand against antisemitism (the 2017 yellow Star of David and his 2025 HBO documentary). But that is not the same as documented political support for the State of Israel: he has made no known statement of political advocacy for Israel and no public comment on October 7. The accurate framing is a strong Jewish-identity and anti-antisemitism connection, with a real but decades-old and non-political tie to Israel itself.

Wear your own answer

When Billy Joel put a yellow Star of David on his jacket at Madison Square Garden, he turned an old symbol of persecution into a plain statement of pride: no matter what, I will always be a Jew. You can make that same statement every day. Our Star of David necklace collection lets you carry the symbol openly, and every piece is designed and sold to support Israel directly. Whatever a given celebrity has or has not said, your answer can be one you actually control.

Last updated July 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.