Does Larry David Support Israel?

Short answer: As of 2026, Larry David has never made a direct public statement backing or opposing Israel, and he did not sign the 2023 Hollywood letter condemning Hamas and supporting Israel that his own "Seinfeld" co-creator Jerry Seinfeld put his name to. What he has done, repeatedly and on the record, is put Jewish identity front and center in his work and his public disputes, including a 2025 New York Times op-ed that used a Hitler dinner analogy to attack a friend's meeting with Donald Trump. The honest verdict is that David is a proudly, publicly Jewish entertainer who has stayed almost entirely silent on Israel itself.

What Larry David has actually said and done

• October 12, 2023: Creative Community for Peace published an open letter signed by more than 2,000 entertainment-industry figures, including Jerry Seinfeld, Gal Gadot, Michael Douglas, and Mayim Bialik, condemning Hamas's October 7 attack and voicing support for Israel. Larry David's name does not appear anywhere on the published list of signatories, a notable absence given how many of his peers and collaborators signed.
• February 4, 2024: The season 12 premiere of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" had Larry's character propose a trip to Tel Aviv with his housemate Leon, musing that "a Black man going to Africa is like a Jew going to Israel." As JTA reported, the season had finished filming months before October 7, so the line was a coincidence of timing rather than commentary on the war.
• April 9, 2024: The series finale reunited David with Jerry Seinfeld and leaned into Jewish material, including Yiddish dialogue, a Holocaust-museum shoe-theft callback, and a synagogue donation-plaque dispute. JTA wrote that "so much of the show has revolved around Judaism" across its run, pointing to that final season's Yiddish dialogue, Holocaust-museum material, and the synagogue donation-plaque argument as examples.
• April 21, 2025: David published "My Dinner with Adolf" in The New York Times, a satirical first-person account of dining with a warm, personable Adolf Hitler in 1939. The piece was aimed at Bill Maher's real dinner with President Trump weeks earlier, arguing that personal charm can mask political danger.
• April 24, 2025: Maher hit back on Piers Morgan Uncensored, calling the essay "insulting to 6 million dead Jews" and saying invoking Hitler "should kind of be in its own place in history."
• December 23, 2025: Maher told The Free Press that David "certainly is not really my friend anymore" and that the two had not spoken since the op-ed, per the Hollywood Reporter. Notably, the fight was about Trump and civility, not Israel or antisemitism, even though Holocaust imagery was the flashpoint.

Two absences stand out as much as anything he has said. David did not sign the 2023 pro-Israel Hollywood letter, and there is no verified record of him signing any of the later Hollywood letters or boycott campaigns on the other side of the issue either. Across three years of a war that split the entertainment industry into public camps, Larry David has not joined either one.

Larry David's Jewish identity, on screen and off

David's connection to Israel has always run through Jewish identity rather than politics. Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents, he built "Seinfeld" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on a very specific, very Jewish sensibility, and critics have long called him, as The Nation put it in April 2024, "the last of a certain type of entertainment-industry Jew: the Brooklyn-raised, acid-tongued, and side-splittingly funny Jew who used to occupy center stage in mainstream comedy." "Curb" repeatedly mined Jewish and Israeli material for comedy, from the 2011 "Palestinian Chicken" episode, which staged a culture clash between a Palestinian restaurant and its Jewish regulars, to the final season's Yiddish, Holocaust references, and synagogue subplot. None of it amounted to a policy position on Israel; all of it made clear that David sees his Jewishness as inseparable from his voice as a comedian. That is a distinct thing from being politically pro-Israel, and it is the part of the record that is actually well documented. For shoppers who want to express that same pride more plainly than David ever has on the record, a piece like the Shalom Star of David Necklace makes the statement in a way his public comments never quite do.

The bottom line

Larry David has not endorsed Israel, criticized it, or engaged with the Israel-Hamas war in any direct public statement through 2026. His most Israel-adjacent moment, the "Curb" Tel Aviv joke, predates the war and was pure comedy; his most talked-about political moment since, the Hitler-dinner op-ed, was about Trump and Bill Maher, not Israel. What is genuinely on the record is a comedian who built a career on loud, specific Jewish identity while staying conspicuously quiet on Israel itself.

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