The British NGO Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) called for actress Miriam Margolyes, known for her role as Professor Sprout in Harry Potter, to be stripped of her OBE and BAFTA awards after she compared Israel's actions in Gaza to Nazi Germany's in an interview this week.
In her interview with the British magazine The Big Issue, she explained she felt passionate about the war in Gaza "particularly because I am Jewish."
"Because I know how much wickedness and cruelty were meted out to Jews in my lifetime,” she added.
“I was born in 1941, during the height of the Holocaust. And I cannot bear to think that my people are doing exactly the same thing to another nation. And the nation they are doing it is the Palestinian nation. They were not responsible for the Holocaust; it was a European pleasure.”
“The terrible thing I face is that Hitler won, he changed us, made us like him.”
The CAA qualified Margolyes comments as “the end of the road,” saying that she “has to be shunned by the showbiz world that has fawned and bowed until now. That includes stripping her of her BAFTA. We will be writing to the Honours Forfeiture Committee to ask that her OBE be removed.”
“The fact that she was born Jewish does not give her a license to use her immense platform to spread anti-Jewish venom,” they added.
Margoyles's history of antisemitic remarks
This is not the first time that the CAA has denounced Margoyles’s remarks as antisemitic. The NGO wrote a piece talking about how Margoyle tried to push the narrative that antisemitism in the Labour Party of the UK was “exaggerated.”
“I don’t think there is the extent of antisemitism in the Labour Party that people seem to imply. It’s to do with trying to stop Corbyn from being Prime Minister,” she said in an interview given to the Radio Times.
The NGO also said: “Ms Margolyes has a history of making appalling remarks about Jews. In 2016, she was caught on film, appearing to suggest that ‘Jews and blacks are stingy.' The previous year, in an interview in The Telegraph, she asserted that ‘nobody likes Jews’ and claimed that ‘People understandably and correctly associate Israel with Jews and Jews are killing people. Innocent people’”.
In an October 2024 interview with the BBC, when asked for her favorite Charles Dickens’ character, Margoyles said: “Oh, Fagin without question. Jewish and vile. I didn’t know Jews like that then. Sadly, I do now.” The BBC received criticism for airing the comment, eventually conceding and editing it out, despite ruling that it did not breach their guidelines. Responding, the NGO slammed the broadcast, saying that Margoyles’s Jewishness does not grant her “her free rein to spew her repugnant sentiments in the guise of ‘comedy’.”
The Telegraph has reached out to a representative of Margoyles for comment, but as of publication, has received no response.