While fans of the hugely successful Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things are planning watch parties all over the world as the first episodes of its fifth and final season drop on Wednesday night, others are urging a boycott – because two Netflix stars have voiced support for Israel and visited the country.
Noah Schnapp, who plays Will, the pivotal character whose disappearance kicked off the series, has both Russian and Moroccan Jewish roots and reportedly celebrated his bar mitzvah in Israel. In the summer of 2023, he visited Israel and was photographed praying at the Kotel and enjoying Tel Aviv. On his Instagram account, he posted photos during the trip and wrote, “learning so much about my culture. So inspiring,” and “In love with this place.” Later, a month after the Hamas massacre on October 7, video circulated of Schnapp sitting with people who held stickers that said, “Zionism is sexy” and “Hamas is ISIS.”
There was a backlash against the young actor, with anti-Israel social-media accounts calling for him to be cancelled. In 2024, Schnapp responded via a TikTok video he shared with his followers in which he said he stands "against any killing of any innocent people" and that he had "learned a lot" from speaking with Palestinian friends.
"Anyone with any ounce of humanity would hope for an end to the hostilities on both sides," he said.
Brett Gelman, who plays the crazed reporter Murray Bauman on the series, posted many messages of support for Israel on his social media during the war, and visited in December 2023. During that trip, he appeared on a sketch on the comedy show, Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country), in which he played a Berkeley professor present at the birth of Jesus with two of his students; he tries to persuade Joseph and Mary that they are not Jews, claiming there were no Jews in the land of Israel prior to 1948.
Other Jewish cast members include Winona Ryder, who plays Will’s mother, Joyce, and Finn Wolfhard, who plays Will’s friend, Mike.
Schnapp’s and Gelman’s sympathy for Israel was enough to raise the ire of anti-Israel activists, who dismissed Schnapp’s 2024 video and are calling for fans to boycott the fifth and final Stranger Things season because of the presence of the two actors. Guy Christensen, who goes by the social-media handle Your Favorite Guy and has a following of millions on social media, posted on X (Twitter), “The Stranger Things cast has basically turned into a Zionist fan club, with multiple actors now using their platforms to whitewash apartheid and justify war crimes.
Bret Gelman has made it clear he stands with Schnapp’s ‘Zionism is sexy’ post, doubling down while thousands of Palestinians lie buried under rubble. What we’re witnessing is Hollywood being used to launder genocide. Enough is enough.” He posted videos expressing similar statements on TikTok.
Ariana Jasmine, who has a following of over 340k on TikTok, also pleaded with fans to boycott the series and, like many social-media users, seemed to be under the impression that “Zionist” was the harshest insult with which anyone could be branded, not writing out the full word.
Boycotts against Stranger Things, Netflix
Many have commented on these posts to insist that boycotting does nothing, while others say they will find a way to pirate the series (even though the presence of Schnapp and Gelman annoys them). Still others feel that boycotting Stranger Things is not enough, claiming that they have cancelled their Netflix subscriptions, although Netflix still has hundreds of millions of paid subscribers and is available in 190 countries.
This boycott call could be an acid test of how strong the influence of these vocal anti-Israel activists really is. Crowds have been mobbing the Stranger Things preview events around the world – not to protest Schnapp and Gelman, but to get glimpses of their favorite actors. Schnapp has more than 21 million followers on Instagram. Gelman, who has over 830k Instagram followers, has three upcoming projects in the works, including one, Going There, that is set in Israel.
The series has a huge cult following, and while a vocal minority has been calling for the boycott, loyal fans are breaking the Internet as they try to guess at upcoming plot twists, speculating about whether the characters they love will escape the evil world of the Upside Down. The previous season was released in 2022, and viewers have streamed 1.8 billion hours of that season. The final episode of Stranger Things is set to be released on New Year’s Eve in theaters in addition to on Netflix, which is unprecedented for a television series. Campus protesters can spit on any number of kippah-wearing Jewish students, but they can’t keep this fan base away from its heroes.