The colorful film musical “The Color Purple,” hitting theaters this Christmas, tells a story that has now become a staple of the American canon – of a young black woman's self-empowerment and discovery of her own sexuality in the face of horrific, abusive conditions of her life in the rural South in the early 20th century.
This is far from the first time Americans have heard the story of Celie, the protagonist of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple. Walker's novel was published in 1982 and received rave reviews, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Three years later it was adapted into a dramatic film directed by Steven Spielberg. This new version is an adaptation of a 2005 stage musical, which was itself reworked for a successful revival in 2015.
But as The Color Purple's reputation has grown rapidly over the decades, Walker's own has become increasingly confusing – particularly because of her difficult relationship with Judaism and her open flirtations with anti-Semitism. When she was younger, Walker was married to a prominent Jewish civil rights attorney. In the mid-2010s, she began promoting the works of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist and wrote an anti-Semitic poem herself.
This, coupled with her longstanding outspoken criticism of Israel, has led some in the Jewish community to question her continued standing as a respected figure in American literature and led to her being banned from a major book festival just last year became.
Although Walker's reputation among Jews has plummeted since their first film together in 1985, Spielberg remains involved as a producer on the new “Color Purple” and screened at the premiere alongside fellow producers Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones (both of whom also worked on first film). This time the direction was taken by Ghanaian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule.Alice Walker (Source: Portal)
Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg's production company, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
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Early life and love
Walker grew up in a sharecropper's shack in rural Georgia and married into Judaism when she met Melvyn Leventhal, a young law student and civil rights activist with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, at a soul food restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1966. Walker, whose activism was influenced by her progressive Jewish professor at Spelman College, Howard Zinn, had returned to the South to join the civil rights movement after attending Sarah Lawrence and traveling through Europe.
“I stared across the room at the white people eating at “our” restaurant and looked into the eyes of a very cute guy. Oy vey,” Walker wrote at the time in her diaries, which were later published in 2022. The two continued their relationship in New York until Leventhal graduated from law school.
They married in 1967 after Walker proposed to Leventhal and moved back to Mississippi, a state where interracial marriage was still illegal, to continue their activism. “Can there be any doubt that no matter what happens, we will live happily ever after?” Walker wrote at the time. But Melvyn's mother, Miriam, deeply disapproved of the marriage, calling Walker a “Schvartze,” using a derogatory Yiddish term for a black person, and even going so far as to sit shiva for her son. Walker later claimed that his brother had nailed a giant Confederate flag “across the entire side of his bedroom” in protest against the union.
The two had a daughter together, Rebecca, who later became a prominent feminist scholar and, alongside her mother, is an executive producer of the new film “Color Purple.” Rebecca Walker's own autobiography, Black, White, & Jewish, describes her feeling torn between her parents' identities; It was recently removed from a Florida school district (along with “The Color Purple”), with district officials citing sexual content.
In her diaries, Walker called Leventhal “a real Jew” (emphasis hers) and stated, “He loves justice as one loves a great, abused human being.” But their marriage became strained and the two divorced in 1976 after had been separated for years.
A hard blow to Israel
Walker's years of involvement in Israel were controversial but largely consistent with most pro-Palestinian thought.
In 2010, she published a short book of essays entitled “Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters the Horror in Rwanda, Eastern Congo, and Palestine/Israel,” which originated as an essay on the left-wing Jewish website Tikkun. In the book, she talks about a visit to Gaza with the anti-war nonprofit CODEPINK in 2009, in the midst of an Israeli bombing campaign, and accuses world leaders of “showing indifference to the value of Palestinian life.” has corrupted the legal consciousness of our children.” has been wrong for generations.”
“Most Jews who know their own history see how relentlessly the Israeli government seeks to make Palestinians into 'new Jews' after the Jews of the Holocaust era, as if someone had to take that place for Jews to avoid She writes, adding that she can never “talk rationally about Israel” with her ex-husband. “He does not view the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought so nobly against in Mississippi and that he objected to in his own family in Brooklyn.” She also listed several progressive Jews , who she said were friends of hers who also protested Israel, including Zinn, Muriel Rukeyser, Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky.
In 2012, Walker made her positions clear when she declined an offer to publish a new Israeli edition of The Color Purple. In a letter, she told publisher Yediot Books that she did so because she believes Israel is “guilty of apartheid and the persecution of the Palestinian people” and supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement – a tactic that Irish best-selling author and BDS supporter Sally Rooney's persecution would resonate in 2021. (An earlier Hebrew edition of The Color Purple was published in the 1980s.)
In 2013, the University of Michigan's Center for the Education of Women withdrew an invitation to Walker to speak at its 50th anniversary celebration. Walker later claimed this was due to her views on Israel. However, the university never gave a clear reason and actually invited her to speak again the following year without incident.
Full of ick
By 2017, Walker's tone had hardened — not just toward Israel, but toward Jews in general. This year she published a poem on her website called “It is our (terrible) duty to study the Talmud,” in which Walker writes: “Are goyim (we) destined to be slaves of the Jews, and not only that? but to enjoy it?”
The poem, a sharp criticism of Israel and what Walker sees as a Jewish drive to dominate non-Jews in accordance with the Talmud, further describes: “What can be done / With impunity and without conscience / By a chosen people, / To the vast majority of.” People / On the planet / Who were not chosen.”
Walker also describes being “accused of being an anti-Semite” by a “friend / a Jewish soul / who I thought understood almost everything / or could learn to understand / almost everything” – an obvious reference to her ex-husband. The poem contains a link to an interview she conducted with controversial Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Miko Peled.
Walker's problems with anti-Semitism became public knowledge the following year when the New York Times Book Review asked her to list her favorite books for a regular column. Her selection included “And The Truth Shall Set You Free” by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke. The book purports to explore the secret forces behind global power and includes numerous accounts of Israel, the Jews and well-known conspiracy theories such as the Rotshchild family.
“I believe that researchers who over the years have attributed the entire conspiracy to the Jewish people as a whole are seriously misguided; “Similarly, it is equally naive for Jewish organizations to deny that any Jewish person is working for the New World Order conspiracy and to allow dogma or worse to blind them to reality,” Icke writes at one point in the book. Later, discussing the events that led to the Holocaust, he says: “I believe that this was all coldly calculated by the 'Jewish' elite.”
Walker had nothing but praise for the book, telling the Times: “In Icke's books there is the entire existence on this and several other planets to ponder. “A curious person's dream come true.” It wasn't the first time, that she praised Icke, whom she also praised on her website and in other writings; She soon suggested that her critics were simply angered by her pro-Palestinian activism.
Walker's open love for Icke has led to a broader examination of her belief in Jews. Last year, she was banned from a major event at a book festival in Berkeley, California, because, according to the festival's statement, she “supported anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke.” Walker had been promoting “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire,” a newly published collection of her diaries. The theatrical performance of The Color Purple began with the release of statements discussing Walker's ties to anti-Semitism.
A new “color” with well-known nuances
The new “Color Purple” markets itself as a “bold” reimagining of the novel, replacing its dour, punishing prose with sprightly, elaborate choreography. As in the first Spielberg adaptation, it also features an all-star black cast: in this case with Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, Halle Bailey from The Little Mermaid and musician HER
Studio Warner Brothers Discovery is also positioning the film as a major awards contender – notable since the Spielberg-directed version was famously excluded from all ten Oscars for which it was nominated. Then-film critic Roger Ebert, who named Spielberg's film the best of the year, suspected that this was due to the racism of an almost entirely white academy.
Amid Israel's ongoing war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Walker continues to advocate for the Palestinians. Last month, she appeared in a webinar hosted by Socialist Action called “Palestine Becomes Free from River to Sea,” which also featured an editor from the anti-Zionist website Electronic Intifada.
Meanwhile, Spielberg's Shoah Foundation has launched an initiative to collect testimonies from Israeli survivors of the October 7 Hamas attacks. Spielberg himself, although not directly involved in the project, has endorsed it, saying: “I never thought that in my life I would witness such unspeakable barbarism against Jews.”
Spielberg has made no public comments about Walker or the new “Color Purple” this year, although both walked the red carpet at the film's premiere.