Yesterday, at the ADL’s Never Is Now Conference, Gal Gadot was awarded ADL’s International Leadership Award by the organization’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. She wore a dark suit on which she pinned a yellow ribbon for the hostages to accept the award. At the event, Gadot, who has been an outspoken advocate for the Israeli hostages, her country and the Jewish community since October 7, gave a speech about what defines her as a Jew and how she dealt with the aftermath of the attack, and also spoke about the Jewish lessons she’s teaching her four daughters.
Of course, the crowd at the conference was excited to see Gadot, who is known for her roles in countless movies, most famously for portraying Wonder Woman. Her latest movie, “Snow White,” is coming out later this month and has already drawn controversy in part because of co-star Rachel Zegler’s vociferous pro-Palestinian opinions.
“My name is Gal. I’m a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, an actress. I am Israeli and I’m Jewish,” Gadot opened her speech with, then repeated, “I’m going to say it again. My name is Gal and I’m Jewish.”
“Isn’t it crazy that just saying that, just expressing such a simple fact about who I am, feels like a controversial statement?” the actress, who is currently working on a project about Jewish Hollywood legend and inventor Hedy Lamarr, wondered aloud. “But sadly, this is where we’re at today.”
Gadot, who hails from Rosh Haayin in Israel, told the audience about her Jewish origins — both her deep roots in Israel and her family’s history of Holocaust trauma.
Her mother, she shared, is the daughter of a survivor. Avraham Weiss, Gadot’s maternal grandfather, was born in what was Czechoslovakia and is the only member of his family who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. His father died while fighting with the Czech army when the Nazis invaded their homeland; his mother and brother perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
“He came to Israel with nothing and built a life for himself, and despite the horrors he endured, he always taught me the values of love, compassion and tolerance,” Gadot recalled. She added that he often told her growing up that one doesn’t earn anything with anger and hate. Gadot has written about her grandfather on multiple occasions and is also working on making a movie about a Holocaust hero, Irena Sendler.
On her father’s side, Gadot proudly announced, “I’m the eighth generation to be born in the land of Israel. One of my ancestors was the very first chemist in the Shaarei Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem.” The hospital is Jerusalem’s largest teaching hospital and was established over 120 years ago in 1902.
“I’m very proud of both sides of my family,” Gadot boasted, saying they show the two facets of her homeland. “On the one hand, a country that provided a life raft for refugees fleeing the horrors of persecution, pogroms and the Holocaust, and on the other hand, the historic homeland of the Jewish people, where our roots run deep and where we are an indigenous people.”
Like many of us, October 7 was a watershed moment for Gadot. Not only was it one of the first times in her life that the secular Israeli star found comfort at a synagogue, going to a local temple in Los Angeles where she said she felt “at home among family, and for those few precious moments, the chaos and violence of the outside world felt just a little bit easier to deal with.”
It also made her realize suddenly how central her Jewish and Israeli identities are to her life. Gadot spoke about how she was always proud of being Jewish and Israeli, but until that fateful day, didn’t really feel like those identities defined her. Despite run-ins with antisemitism and anti-Israel hate when she shared things about her country and faith, as she often does on social media and in interviews, “I regarded myself as a citizen of the world, an equal among equals,” she professed.
Then October 7 happened, and the actress was shocked by the magnitude of destruction and death. “Never did I imagine that on the streets of the United States and different cities around the world, we would see people not condemning Hamas but celebrating, justifying and cheering on a massacre of Jews,” she said.
October 7, she felt, showed her how interwoven our Jewish communities are, and how what happens in Israel affects Jews everywhere and vice versa, which was why she felt it was important to be in a room here in America, calling for the release of “every single one of our hostages. We have to bring them home.”
Gadot has spent the last few months watching hostage testimonies in horror. “Every minute for them is hell,” she asserted, reminding us that their lives are in constant danger and talking about the need for the hostages and their families to know how much the Jewish community has their backs and that wherever they go in the world, “where there’s a Jewish community, they will always find people who campaign for them, who love them and who will never let them walk alone.”
Gadot then spoke about how she and her husband Jaron Varsano are raising their four daughters, Alma, Maya, Daniella and Ori, to be strong independent Jewish women who are proud of who they are, and who stand with other women, decrying the fact that women who were “sexually terrorized, raped, murdered and kidnapped by Hamas” and their Jewish allies were “hoping to hear support from our sisters around the world and too often heard silence.”
The former Miss Israel is done waiting for other people’s support, quoting the Sage Hillel — “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I’m only for myself, then what am I?” She believes that as Jews, we need to be here for ourselves, speak up in whatever ways we can and immerse ourselves in our history and our community, support each other, and also “never stop reaching out to the world.”
“We have to keep speaking up for ourselves and reaching out our hands to everyone to join in,” she urged those listening.
The future “Cleopatra” star tells her daughters to first learn to love themselves, who they are and where they’re from, and that the rest will follow. “It’s time to pass on to our children a love of who they are,” she declared.
“So who are we?” she preached to the room. “We, the Jewish people, are an ancient people with an ancient story in an ancient homeland. We are the people that celebrate life. We work to see a better and more peaceful future. We challenge hate when we face it, but we do it with love while always striving to make the world a better place.”
“And who am I? My name is Gal, and I’m Jewish,” she repeated before ending with an “Am Yisrael Chai!”
In an interview from last month, Gadot also talked about her hopes for the region she was born and grew up in, saying that she dreams of a “diplomatic agreement that allows all parts of the table to live a good and prosperous life.”
“I know it sounds cliché, but just as they are teaching us to hate, growing antisemitism, we can also teach us to love,” she told Spain’s Harper’s Bazaar. “I want to believe that love is the force that moves the world. War is a defeat for everyone. Hatred is horrible. It’s toxic to the outside and to the one who hates.”
