Does Malcolm Gladwell Support Israel?

Shelly Zimmerman Feb 24, 2025 Updated Jul 27, 2026 4 min read

Short answer: As of July 2026, Malcolm Gladwell has not made Israel a defining public cause, but the documented record leans sympathetic rather than hostile. In October 2023 he publicly rebuked a fellow author for signing a letter accusing Israel of "grave crimes against humanity" on the eve of a 92NY (92nd Street Y) appearance, invoking Hamas attack victims in the audience, and he kept his own 92NY talk after several peers withdrew in protest. In August 2024 he drew an on-record parallel between the 1936 Berlin Olympics' Jewish-athlete controversies and the safety threats facing Israeli athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics, while arguing individual athletes should not be made "symbols" of Israeli government policy.

What Malcolm Gladwell has actually said and done

2013: Gladwell publishes David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. Contrary to a widely repeated claim, the book is not about the modern State of Israel: per its Wikipedia summary, it uses the biblical duel only as a framing device for unrelated case studies, a dyslexic lawyer, an oncologist, a WWII French pastor who hid Jewish refugees, civil rights-era Birmingham, and a girls' basketball team, with no discussion of Israel's geopolitics, economy, or technology sector (confirmed by his broader Wikipedia biography as well).
October 18 to 23, 2023: 92NY (the 92nd Street Y) canceled a Viet Thanh Nguyen appearance after he signed an open letter accusing Israel of "grave crimes against humanity," and several authors, including Roxane Gay and Jelani Cobb, boycotted the venue in protest. Gladwell kept his own scheduled 92NY talk three days later. Asked about it, he told New York Magazine: "I love his books, and he has every right to speak out on whatever issue he chooses. But this wasn't about free speech. It was a question of manners... there would be people in the audience who had loved ones killed in the Hamas attacks." The episode is also documented on 92NY's Wikipedia page.
June 27 to August 22, 2024: Gladwell releases a nine-episode Revisionist History season, hosted on Pushkin Industries, examining the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the debate over Jewish athletes' exclusion and inclusion under Nazi Germany.
August 14, 2024: Discussing that season with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Gladwell says the 1936-era debates "echo contemporary conversations about the participation and safety of Israeli Olympians," who faced death threats and disqualification calls at the 2024 Paris Games. He argues athletes should not be treated as political symbols: "If someone's spending the last 10 years of their life training for the long jump, what do the foreign policy goals of the current Israeli administration have to do with that? Nothing." The Forward covered the same interview independently. JTA also notes, in an aside, that "Gladwell and others who worked on the show have Jewish ancestry."

Jewish identity and the industry-Israel intersection

Gladwell's own biography, per Wikipedia, is Christian: his family attended church in Southampton, UK, and Presbyterian services after moving to Canada, and he grew up in a Mennonite community in Elmira, Ontario. He has described rediscovering his faith later in life while writing David and Goliath. There is no public record of a Jewish upbringing, conversion, or self-identification as Jewish, despite the JTA aside about ancestry, so that detail is noted here without being treated as settled fact.

Beyond these two episodes, this research turned up no record of Gladwell visiting Israel, donating to Israeli causes, or taking a formal political position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What exists instead is incidental but consistent: when the subject has come up, at a Jewish cultural institution under boycott pressure and in a podcast about Olympic history, his instinct has run toward defending Israelis from being singled out or symbolically punished, rather than joining criticism of Israel.

The bottom line

Malcolm Gladwell has never made Israel advocacy or criticism a signature cause, and there is no record of him visiting Israel, donating to Israeli organizations, or taking a formal political stance on the conflict. But on the two occasions the subject has surfaced publicly, October 2023 at 92NY and August 2024 around the Berlin Olympics podcast and its Paris Olympics parallel, his instinct ran toward defending Israelis from being singled out or symbolically punished rather than joining boycotts or criticism of Israel. That puts him closer to sympathetic than adversarial on the available public record. A previous, widely repeated claim that David and Goliath is about Israel's transformation into a "powerful entity" is not supported by the book's actual contents and should be set aside.

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