Children’s entertainer Rachel Griffin Accurso, known to millions of young viewers as Ms. Rachel, says she will not work with people she considers “privileged” if they stay silent about civilians in Gaza. The comments, made in a recent interview with The Guardian, have drawn a sharp rebuke from the advocacy group Campaign Against Antisemitism, which accused her of imposing a “political purity test” on potential collaborators.
Accurso told The Guardian she would make an exception for people whose livelihoods could be jeopardized by speaking out publicly, but not for those in comfortable positions.
“I’m going to work with people who aren’t in a privileged position, because that’s not fair to them if they could lose the ability to put food on the table. But people who are privileged who don’t say anything? Yeah, I’m not interested in working with them. Because I feel like maybe if we all said something, the genocide would stop,” Accurso said.
Campaign Against Antisemitism, which has criticized Accurso’s Gaza activism before, told Fox News Digital that her standard ignores the possibility that colleagues, including Jewish colleagues, may simply hold different views on the Israel-Hamas war.
“Ms Rachel’s comments on who she is willing to work with are patently hypocritical. Acting as an adjudicator is a privileged position in and of itself, and subjecting people to political purity tests is by definition exclusionary,” a spokesperson for the group said. “One would have thought that someone who has admitted to having – apparently accidentally – liked a comment online saying, ‘Free America from the Jews’, Ms Rachel would be taking care to avoid these sorts of topics entirely.”
The spokesperson added: “Evidently the temptation to ostracize those with differing views on the war in Gaza, many of whom will be Jews, is too strong for her to resist.”
The remarks follow a string of public challenges Accurso has issued to wealthy entertainers over their silence on Gaza. Appearing on comedian Ilana Glazer’s podcast “It’s Open,” she asked why celebrities secure enough in their careers to avoid being “cancelled” wouldn’t speak up.
“If you are so famous, and you’re uncancellable, and you’re so famous, and you won’t even say like, ‘Kids in Gaza should have schools, people in Gaza should have hospitals.’ Like you won’t say something so basic and like why can’t you risk something to help save lives?” Accurso said.
She has also pledged to match rapper Macklemore’s $1 million donation to Palestinian aid organizations and has called on “every wealthy White celebrity” to do the same, according to Fox News Digital.
Accurso has repeatedly framed her advocacy as concern for children regardless of nationality or religion, and pushed back on criticism that her focus on Gaza reflects indifference to Jewish children.
“I was confused and devastated that people said because you care about children who are starving, and whose food is being blocked, you don’t care about these [Jewish] kids,” Accurso said. “I was like, oh my gosh, I have a deep love for, a deep care for, all children.”
Accurso has also faced scrutiny over her relationship with Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza after a 2025 video resurfaced in which she introduced him to her young audience as her “friend.” That clip resurfaced days after Azaiza said in a podcast interview that he had filmed Israeli hostages being beaten by a crowd in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, but chose not to release the footage.
Accurso’s platform continues to grow. Her YouTube channel has more than 21 million subscribers, and her children’s programming has been streamed more than 69 million times since she signed a deal with Netflix in 2025, according to The Guardian.
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