Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman has been having quite the month.
A couple weeks ago, she shared a video of a Florida pastor calling Silverman a “God-hating whore of Zionism” and saying he hopes that “God breaks her teeth and she dies.” A few days later, she was fired from from a film project over a resurfaced blackface clip from her old Comedy Central show The Sarah Silverman Program. The sketch was supposed to prove a point about who faces more discrimination, Jews or African Americans. In an interview with GQ last year, Silverman said she doesn’t stand by the blackface sketch: “I’m horrified by it, and I can’t erase it. I can only be changed by it and move on.”
And now, the Jewish comedian is the face of “self-hating Jew.” Literally.
Twitter user Jordan Weissmann discovered that if you Google “self-hating Jew,” the Wikipedia definition is accompanied by Sarah Silverman’s face. We double checked it, and the wild rumors are true.
“Good grief,” Silverman replied on Twitter. “On Wikipedia???”
Good grief. On Wikipedia??? https://t.co/qPLenretB9
— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) August 21, 2019
This discovery follows President Trump’s outrageous claim on Wednesday that any Jew who votes for a Democrat is “being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel.”
We don’t know how long Silverman has been the face of Wikipedia’s “Self-hating Jew” entry, but she is one of the most politically active Jewish comedians right now, and has made her Democratic allegiance clear. Wikipedia defines the pejorative term as “used for a Jew who is alleged to hold antisemitic views.”
We didn’t think this needed to be said, but Sarah Silverman is not anti-Semitic. Her humor often incorporates tidbits from her Jewish upbringing, she calls out actual anti-Semitism on her Twitter feed all the time, and she literally gave us the first Jewish Disney princess as the voice of Princess Vanellope Von Schweet in Ralph Breaks the Internet. “She’s feisty, she says what’s on her mind, she’s a little pushy,” Silverman explained to Yahoo Entertainment (wait, was Silverman describing herself or an animated cartoon?).
Silverman is far from an anti-Semite. Wikipedia, get your act together.
UPDATE: Several readers pointed out to us that the image was associated with Google Images, not Wikipedia. As of 9 a.m. on August 22, the image has been removed.
