Does Mel Brooks Support Israel?

Short answer: As of 2026, Mel Brooks has not made any public statement about Israel, the Israel-Hamas war, or the hostages taken on October 7, 2023, and his name is absent from the 700-plus-signature pro-Israel open letter that circulated through Hollywood weeks after the attack. His connection to Israel runs entirely through a lifelong, proudly-stated Jewish identity and decades of Nazi-mocking, Jewish-inflected comedy, not through any political statement on the Jewish state itself. The honest read: a proud, outspoken Jew who has simply stayed out of the Israel conversation.

What Mel Brooks has actually said and done

• December 7, 2021: In an NPR interview, Brooks put his Jewish pride in his own words: "I'm tribal. I love being a Jew and I love Jewish humor." It remains the clearest on-record statement of how he sees his own identity, and nothing in the years since, including the war, has updated or walked it back. NPR
• March 5, 2023: A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile marking Brooks's comedic legacy describes his Jewishness as "a voice and a language" built from Brooklyn immigrant culture and show business, not synagogue or theology. Published seven months before the Israel-Hamas war began, the piece does not mention Israel at all, a useful baseline for how Brooks talks about being Jewish. JTA
• October 2023: After Hamas's October 7 attack, the industry group Creative Community for Peace circulated an open letter condemning Hamas and voicing support for Israel. More than 700 entertainment figures signed, among them Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Douglas, Gal Gadot, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Brooks's name does not appear on the published signatory list. Creative Community for Peace, Variety
• May 2026: Ahead of his centennial, Brooks donated roughly 150,000 production documents and 5,000 photographs from his career to the National Comedy Center. The announcement generated a fresh round of retrospective press, and no Israel-related comment came with it. NBC News
• June 28, 2026: Brooks turned 100. Times of Israel and NBC News both marked the milestone in pieces that call him a "Jewish icon" and revisit his career-long comedic assault on antisemitism, but neither surfaces a single comment from Brooks on Israel or the war. Times of Israel, NBC News

Mel Brooks's Jewish identity and comedy

Where Brooks is unambiguous is on being Jewish, full stop. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, he has spent eight decades turning Jewish anxiety, immigrant striving, and antisemitism itself into material, on the theory that ridicule beats rhetoric. In a widely cited 2001 interview, he explained the philosophy behind mocking Hitler in "The Producers": "you have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you're one up on him." CBS News That same instinct runs through "Blazing Saddles," "Young Frankenstein," and "History of the World, Part I," all built on a very New York, very secular strain of Jewish humor rather than religious observance. Gabriel Sanders, the Museum of Jewish Heritage's director of public programs, described Brooks's comfort in his own Jewish skin as a kind of "cinematic Zionism" in a 2012 piece tied to a museum film retrospective of his work, a label about cultural confidence, not political advocacy for the Jewish state. Jewish Journal

That is also the shape of his silence on Israel specifically. Brooks has never been a synagogue-and-theology figure, by his own account, and he has never been a foreign-policy figure either. Plenty of his peers, from Seinfeld to Sarah Silverman, spoke up in the days after October 7. Brooks did not, and at 100 he shows no sign of starting. If you want to declare where you stand without waiting on any celebrity to do it first, the Shalom Star of David Necklace says it plainly, worn every day rather than posted once.

The bottom line

Mel Brooks supports Jewish identity, Jewish humor, and Jewish survival with total conviction, and he has said so, on the record, for decades. He has not said anything about Israel, the war, or the hostages, and he skipped the one big Hollywood moment (the October 2023 open letter) when saying so would have been easy. Call it what it is: a proud Jew who has kept Israel itself off the record.

Related

Curious how other comedians and actors stack up? See Does Larry David Support Israel?, Does Sacha Baron Cohen Support Israel?, and Does Meryl Streep Support Israel?

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

Photo: Angela George at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sharongraphics/, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons