Movies are supposed to give their viewers a break from the reality of their own lives and enable them to enter another world.
That didn’t exactly work for me when I saw Wicked, a book and successful Broadway musical that became a blockbuster movie in two parts about the moral relativism between good and evil.
I don’t dwell among Munchkins or flying monkeys, but living in Israel and fighting for the Jewish state as the executive director of the media watchdog HonestReporting, I deal with that unfortunate moral relativism every day.
“The truth isn’t a thing of fact or reason,” the Wizard of Oz says in the film. “It is simply what everyone agrees on.”
That statement alone should have made the characters who heard him say it lose any respect for him and immediately expose the wizard as a fraud.
The second part of the movie, which recently came out in Israel, is called Wicked: For Good, hinting that the line between wickedness and goodness can be hard to draw. But an important lesson from both the film and from Israel’s treatment in the international media is that denying objective truth and making it subjective is what enables evil to thrive.
Wicked, Israel, and the battle for truth over subjectivity
There is plenty for Israel advocates to learn from the movie, even after nearly 800 days of the war on the military and media battlefields that began with the Oct. 7 massacre. They can be inspired by the determination and steadfastness of Elphaba, who has been wrongly vilified as the Wicked Witch of the West, in a smear campaign led by the wizard and his propaganda chief, Madame Morrible.
Elphaba does all she can to clear her name and get her message out to the public. She writes on the sky with her broomstick “OUR WIZARD LIES.” Morrible immediately uses her sorcery to change it to “OZ DIES,” continuing her effort to cast Elphaba as dangerous.
The sky has also been the limit with how the international media has falsely accused Israel in headlines throughout this war. Hamas had its own Morrible in propaganda chief Abu Obeida. When he claimed that Israel killed 500 people in a hospital and other easily disprovable lies, the media bought it, making people throughout the world hate Israel.
Even Wicked stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo fell for the lies and signed anti-Israel petitions. Grande has much to learn about why being progressive should mean being pro-Israel; and Erivo, as a leader of the LGBT community, should know better than to strengthen Hamas, which executes people for their sexual orientation.
The movie’s producer, Marc Platt, comes from a family of Israel advocates. He is married to Julie Platt, who just finished a challenging yet successful three-year term as the chairwoman of the board of trustees of the Jewish Federations of North America, in which she oversaw the organization’s emergency aid to Israel during the war. Their son, actor Jonah Platt, hosts the popular podcast Being Jewish with Jonah Platt.
Jonah asked his father in a fascinating interview on the podcast about the wizard’s definition of truth in relation to Oct. 7.
“How incredibly and sadly relevant that is,” the producer said. “It seems that truth died a long time ago.”
Asked about the responsibility of Jews in Hollywood to stand up for their community and support Israel, Marc Platt told his son: “We’ve learned since Oct. 7 that if we don’t do it, no one else will”; therefore, “we have an obligation to right the wrong.”
That is true for Israel supporters throughout the world, who must fight for the truth, no matter how much the Jewish state has been demonized, delegitimized, and faced disinformation and double standards.
Israel is worth fighting for, just as Elphaba fought for Oz, because there really is no place like home, and if antisemitism keeps spiraling out of control, Jews, who are the world’s most discriminated-against minority, may soon have nowhere else to go,
Authoritarian regimes around the world have made Jews scapegoats in the past to bring their people together against a common enemy. Now they are doing that with the Jewish state, seemingly taking the advice of the wizard, who says “a real good enemy” is the best way to unite people.
Marc Platt told Jonah that speaking truth to power and standing up for what’s right are Jewish values. Just as Elphaba was not afraid to challenge the wizard, we can correct the most influential media outlets, the most worshiped celebrities on social media, and even artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok.
Yes, when your AI gives you incorrect information about Israel, you have a responsibility to argue with it and provide facts from trusted media outlets like The Jerusalem Post and from pro-Israel websites like HonestReporting.com. When you have a conversation with ChatGPT, you are training the model; so if you get answers that are incorrect, push back and ask it to check better sources and re-evaluate its answers.
Even when the entire world reports falsities about Israel’s trying to starve Gazan babies or committing genocide, the truth can still be proven. That has happened throughout the war, even if sometimes it’s unfortunately been only after the damage has been done.
I won’t spoil the ending of the movie, which I encourage you to see for yourselves. But Wicked gives hope that liars can be overcome – or at least they can realize that they must change their ways.
Grande’s character Glinda lets herself be portrayed as a good witch, even though she is very aware that she lacks any real magical powers. But she, too, learns the lesson about the importance of defeating dishonest reporting and lies.
As she says: “The truth has a way of seeping on in beneath the surface and sheen.”
The writer is the executive director and executive editor of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as The Jerusalem Post’s chief political correspondent and analyst for 24 years.