NEW YORK — Susan Sarandon has been making the argument for years. On Thursday, the argument came with plastic zip-ties and an NYPD processing tent two blocks from the United Nations building.
The actress, 79, was among roughly 100 people taken into custody outside the UN in midtown Manhattan as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to address the General Assembly. Hannah Einbinder, star of HBO’s “Hacks” and an Emmy nominee this cycle, was also detained and photographed in zip-ties alongside Sarandon and comedian Caleb Hearon. All three were led away by officers managing a crowd that had grown to more than 400 protesters along First Avenue near 39th Street, where demonstrators blocked traffic in the hours before Netanyahu’s scheduled address.
Present but not detained: Elliot Page, Cynthia Nixon, boygenius members Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Sarah Sherman, whistleblower Chelsea Manning, actress Indya Moore, and comedian Mary Beth Barone. The group represents a segment of the entertainment industry that has maintained its Gaza activism even as the industry’s institutional structures have largely declined to engage.
Einbinder, who is Jewish, did not wait to be out of earshot. As an officer guided her from the demonstration, she turned to a camera: “Free Palestine. Netanyahu out of New York. No bombs on Lebanon.”
Sarandon wore a T-shirt that read “fund people not bombs.”
Two hours after the first arrests, Benjamin Netanyahu walked to the General Assembly rostrum for an address that ran close to forty minutes. He rejected the characterization of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, called the delegates who had walked out when he appeared “moral cowards,” and spent portions of the address on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Qatar, Turkey, and Iran.
Outside, the officers had moved on to the next intake.
Sarandon’s willingness to be in that road is not new and has not been without cost. In 2023, United Talent Agency dropped her after she spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York and made a remark comparing the situation of Muslims in America to that of Jews under National Socialism. She walked back the specific comparison; she did not walk back the underlying position. She has continued to appear at Gaza-related demonstrations since the agency separation, which affected her practical standing in an industry where representation at that level shapes which roles circulate, which producers call, which projects move. Nothing about Thursday morning’s outcome appears to have surprised her.
Einbinder’s situation carries different dimensions. She has spoken publicly about being horrified by Israel’s military conduct in Gaza and ashamed that American tax dollars fund the campaign. The Hollywood Reporter has noted she is Jewish and has maintained this position consistently since 2023. As of Thursday, she is the most prominent active television lead to have been physically detained at a Gaza-related protest in the United States. What that designation means for her standing with Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent company, had produced no statement by Thursday night.
The celebrity contingent drawn to this week’s General Assembly events has been notable in its range. Ed Sheeran called Israel’s actions in Gaza unjustifiable earlier this week, continuing his Loop Tour after every opening act quit on principle.
Emmanuel Macron, delivering his farewell address to the General Assembly on Tuesday, called Gaza a spectacle of shame.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, barred from entering the United States for the second year running by the Trump administration, addressed the session by video from abroad and described the Israeli campaign as genocide. Netanyahu, from the rostrum inside, rejected all of it.
CBS News confirmed the protesters were charged with blocking roadways. Standard civil disobedience processing in New York, a holding period followed by release with a desk-appearance ticket, means none of those detained face significant legal jeopardy. The cost attached to Thursday’s arrests is not the kind measured in courtrooms. It is measured in which agency keeps you as a client, which production company takes your call, which studio declines to comment when asked about its lead actress being walked off a Manhattan sidewalk in restraints. Sarandon has been paying the other kind of cost for two years.
For Einbinder, the quality of her arrest complicates the usual studio and network calculation. Studios and networks generally prefer silence on their talent’s political activity when legal exposure is minimal; the arrest is not a crime, the cause is divisive, and the optics of comment are judged to outweigh the optics of none. The video of Einbinder in custody, her own words attributed in her own voice, does not lend itself to that management approach. “Free Palestine. Netanyahu out of New York.” No press representative is required to interpret it.
A UN commission concluded last year that Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the threshold for genocide, a determination the United States government has not adopted and that Netanyahu dismissed explicitly from the General Assembly podium on Thursday. The people who spent the morning on First Avenue in zip-ties were arguing that this conclusion should carry weight in policy, in culture, and in the positions taken by the institutions that employ them. As of Thursday evening, none of those institutions had said anything.
