JERUSALEM (JTA) — Jewish American actress Mayim Bialik said that her support for Israel has led to calls to boycott her and the popular television show she stars in, “The Big Bang Theory.”
“It hasn’t yet, that I know of, impacted my acting career, but it has impacted the way that I am seen, and that does impact my career in terms of speaking engagements and endorsements,” she said Tuesday night in a keynote address to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem.
Bialik said she has been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks on social media, where she has a high profile. “I’m happy to take that public bullet for the state,” she also said.
She said the internet could become a tool to “make this a more peaceful and compassionate world.” She also said that because of the wide use of the internet “anti-Semitism now has a deep and significant reach in ways it never did, and I’m being touched by it in ways I never was before.”
Bialik, 42, has a doctorate in neuroscience and plays neuroscientist Amy Farrah-Fowler on her show. A divorced mother of two sons, she was raised Reform and now practices Modern Orthodoxy. In many interviews she has described herself as a Zionist and has family living in Israel.
“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be alive and to be able to speak freely about my love for this country, which my grandparents prayed for as they fled Eastern Europe, and to hopefully educate people through my public platform about the truth about Zionism and Jews and the State of Israel,” she said at the biennial anti-Semitism forum, organized by Israel’s ministries of foreign affairs and Diaspora affairs.
Earlier this month, Bialik asked her 2 million followers on Facebook to nominate her to light the torch reserved for a representative of Diaspora Jewry during the opening Israel Independence Day ceremony on Mount Herzl.
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