Not one of the 40 leading U.S. art museums evaluated by the Anti-Defamation League includes Jewish identity in its diversity commitments, according to a new report the group released on Thursday.

At the report’s launch event, held at the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, actor Selma Blair, who is Jewish, said she has felt a similar exclusion in Hollywood. After the “Legally Blonde” and “Cruel Intentions” actor publicly backed Israel in the months following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, “the brands I worked with were gone within a day,” Blair said as she addressed a crowded room of Jewish leaders, philanthropists, artists, influencers and reporters. “A few partnerships I built were shelved. My agency was gone. My lawyer was gone. My publicist was gone. My book agent was gone. My social media manager was gone. My son’s godmother was gone — my best friend.”

Blair, whose acting career spans more than 25 years, said her situation has improved in the nearly three years since Oct. 7. But the ADL’s research finds that many other Jewish and Israeli artists have not fared as well.

The report, titled “State of the Arts: Advancing Jewish Inclusion in Arts, Entertainment and Culture,” is what the ADL called a first-of-its-kind effort to document what it describes as the systemic exclusion of Jewish and Israeli artists across three sectors: museums, publishing and live entertainment. Released by the ADL’s Ratings and Assessments Institute, it is paired with an investigation by the group’s Center on Extremism into activist networks the organization says are pressuring cultural institutions to shut out Jewish and Zionist artists.

The museum report, “Behind the Frame,” graded 40 institutions on their policies, artist representation, partnerships and programming. Just one, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, earned the ADL’s top “Gold Standard” rating, while 12, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Broad, were rated “Critically Deficient,” the lowest category. Only 23 of the 40 museums took part in the ADL’s pre-publication review of their assessments. The report found that only one of 40 museums demonstrated recognition of Jewish American Heritage Month in 2026, even as 24 of 40 museums continued actively recognizing other heritage months during the same period.

The publishing report, “Missing Chapter,” draws on secondary research and interviews with authors and industry professionals to identify seven trends it says have reshaped the field since Oct. 7. Authors reported being pressured during acquisition to cut Hebrew words, Israeli settings and Jewish-sounding names, while some agents explicitly rejected them as “too risky” due to their Jewish or Zionist identity.

In response, some Jewish writers and publishing professionals have begun building their own publishing houses. At the launch event, author Alyssa Rosenheck pushed back on that trend. 

“Some say the answer is to build our own publishing houses, and there may be a place for that but it’s not the only answer,” said Rosenheck. “We cannot abandon the institutions we helped build and continue to contribute to and shape.” Over the summer, Bell Bird Books in Nashville, Tenn., canceled Rosenheck’s book launch for White. Blonde. Jew. following online anti-Zionist backlash. The store owner attributed the cancellation to safety concerns. 

The entertainment report, “Dark Stage,” catalogs 65 cases across 41 U.S. locations, the most recent from August, in which Jewish, Israeli or openly Zionist performers faced protest, disruption or cancellation across music, comedy, dance, film and campus programming. 

Repeated demonstrations targeted artists including Matisyahu, the Batsheva Dance Company and the Israel Philharmonic. The ADL describes a “security veto,” in which the prospect of protest alone, rather than a specific threat, is enough to cancel an event, as it says happened to musicians Mikey Pauker and Raviv Kaner. Comedian Judy Gold was told, “You’re a Jew” during two shows in a single weekend in April and singer-songwriter Regina Spektor was heckled mid-performance, according to the report.