Sean Baker became the first director to win four Oscars for the same film when he won for writing, editing, directing, and Best Picture. Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images

By Louis Keene March 4, 2025

In the days since Anora‘s big night at the Oscars, a long-simmering grumble about its director’s politics has turned into something bordering on cancellation: Sean Baker, people are saying, is a Zionist.

Baker has never made public statements about the Middle East, mind you. His religious background is something other than Jewish — whatever it is does not figure prominently in his public persona. And none of his movies, including Anora — about a sex worker in Brighton Beach who elopes with the son of a Russian oligarch — touches on Israel.

Instead, the evidence for the claim consists mostly of Baker’s engagement with pro-Israel accounts on social media. On Instagram his follows include the Israel on Campus Coalition, a group that reportedly collects information on pro-Palestinian college students, and the pro-Trump account Jewish Breaking News; on Twitter he follows IDF Babes, which is what it sounds like. He also liked a tweet from Gal Gadot, shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, grieving the loss of innocent Israelis.

Never mind that Baker follows some 3,500 accounts on Instagram and another 3,000 or so on X — or Zionism’s seeming lack of relevance to his oeuvre. And disregard that the meaning of liking a tweet is hardly universal. In a culture where a person’s perceived attitude toward Israel has become a referendum on not only their morality and integrity, but also the validity of their work, Baker was officially over. (Meanwhile, to at least one of my Instagram mutuals, the revelation made Baker a hero of the pro-Israel resistance.)

Pro-Palestinian accounts on social media discarded their old feelings about Baker and the movie in light of the new information. One X user said she couldn’t enjoy Anora anymore because Baker was a Zionist. He was labeled a “pro-Israel freak” and a “literal Zionist conservative libertarian creep.” “Sean Baker is an awful human being and doesn’t deserve any awards,” wrote a third.

Soon, though, people began marshaling new evidence to debunk the claim. Baker’s review of Operation Thunderbolt, a movie about the IDF’s 1976 rescue operation in Entebbe, called it “overtly nationalistic” and said a different film by the same Israeli director was “offensive.”

“OK maybe Sean Baker really is following those fucked up social media accounts for research lol,” one person wrote. (Picking up on the yo-yoing, an X user joked that Baker following right-wing and Zionist accounts “without saying a single cancellable thing” during awards season “has driven thousands of people insane.”)

But even the people trying to disprove Baker’s alleged Zionism were affirming a litmus test that has emerged out of (mostly American, mostly young) people’s frustration with the Israel-Hamas war. While Baker has quite literally zero influence on that war or discourse around it, rejecting him — or, for that matter, championing him — gives anguished protesters and supporters of the war a feeling of agency that American politics may not currently offer them.

Perhaps just as importantly, bringing up Zionism — the scourge of online progressivism — allowed people to rain on a newfound celebrity’s success. As long as social media exists, that impulse will never go out of style.

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