Does Meryl Streep Support Israel?

Short answer: As of 2026, there is no public record of Meryl Streep personally advocating for or against Israel. She has not signed either side of the two dueling Hollywood letters that split the industry over an Israeli film-industry boycott in 2025, and she has made no statement about the October 7, 2023 attack or the war that followed. The most concrete data point cuts the other way from "hostile": in November 2025 she signed on to co-star with Sigourney Weaver in a new thriller directed by Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar, putting her name next to an Israeli creative team at the exact moment thousands of her peers were pledging not to work with one.

What Meryl Streep has actually said and done

• January 2017: Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes, Streep ran through the birthplaces of several actors in the room, Amy Adams (Italy), Ruth Negga (Ethiopia), Dev Patel (Kenya). When she reached Natalie Portman, she said only "Jerusalem," leaving out the country. The backlash was immediate: the Algemeiner reported social media accusations that the omission was deliberate, and Portman's own representative confirmed to reporters that yes, Portman was born in Israel.
• October to December 2023: The Academy Museum's annual gala, which was set to give Streep its Icon Award, was postponed within days of the Hamas attack on Israel, "out of respect for the devastating conflict and loss of life happening overseas," per The Hollywood Reporter. The event and Streep's award went ahead on a rescheduled date that December; Streep made no comment tying the postponement to the war itself.
• 2023 to 2025: Streep made no public statement about the war, the hostages, or antisemitism in the years that followed, a silence Ynetnews specifically noted, grouping her with Tom Hanks, George Clooney, and Julia Roberts as A-list stars who stayed off social media on the subject entirely.
• September 2025: Hollywood split into two open letters over calls to boycott the Israeli film industry. One pledge, covered by the Times of Israel, drew more than 4,000 signatures from names like Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo. A counter-letter organized by Creative Community for Peace, also reported by the Times of Israel, drew over 1,200, including Liev Schreiber and Mayim Bialik. Streep's name has not surfaced in coverage of either list.
• November 8, 2025: The Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel both reported that Streep would star opposite Sigourney Weaver, marking the first time the two actresses have shared a film, in "Useful Idiots," a New York-set thriller directed by Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar ("Footnote," "Beaufort").

Where the industry's own letters leave her position an open question, some shoppers prefer something that reads as an answer on its own. Pieces like the Opal Israel Necklace exist for exactly that: worn support, no ambiguity required.

Streep's long, complicated tie to Jewish stories, without being Jewish herself

Meryl Streep is not Jewish. For most of her life, though, she believed her father's family carried Sephardic Jewish roots by way of the Netherlands, a family story she had repeated for years. When she sat down for Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS genealogy series "Faces of America" in 2010, DNA testing traced her father's line instead to the Streeb family of Loffenau, Germany, with Swiss and Quaker branches further back. No Sephardic ancestry turned up. The same research did turn up a shared ancestral line with her longtime director and friend Mike Nichols, who was Jewish and cast her in several of her defining early roles.

That personal story sits alongside a career full of Jewish and Holocaust-adjacent parts, according to the Forward: her breakout in NBC's 1978 miniseries "Holocaust," a rabbi delivering the opening funeral eulogy in Mike Nichols's 2003 HBO adaptation of "Angels in America," and an Upper West Side Jewish therapist in 2005's "Prime." She has also been willing to name antisemitism directly when she saw it. At a January 2014 National Board of Review dinner, she called Walt Disney a "hideous antisemite" for his ties to a 1930s anti-Jewish Hollywood lobbying group, a comment the Times of Israel covered as part of the wider fallout.

The bottom line

Meryl Streep has not taken a public side in the Israel-Hamas war, and one word choice from a 2017 awards speech is not a reliable verdict on where she stands. What is verifiable is more telling than a soundbite would be: she stayed off both of 2025's boycott letters, and by November 2025 she was set to headline a new film for an Israeli director, a quieter answer than any statement could have given.

Related

Curious how other actors compare? Read Does Helen Mirren Support Israel? and Does Larry David Support Israel?. Or explore the meaning behind the pieces themselves in Top Jewish Symbols and Their Meaning.

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