By Humanizing the Children of Gaza, Miss Rachel Is Following in the Footsteps of Her Hero Mr. Rogers

The popular children's entertainer is courting controversy but also channeling of America's greatest figures

An altar to Mr. Rogers, America’s most storied children’s entertainer. Photo credit: "Mr. Rogers Ofrenda Detail" by carmichaellibrary is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Rachel Anne Accurso, the American YouTuber known as “Miss Rachel” who has regaled millions of millennial parents with her toddler and baby-focused videos, has found herself the target of criticism after drawing attention to the plight of children in Gaza.

Rather than dive deep into political and historical debates about Israel-Palestine, Accurso has used her sizable platform to highlight the impact of the war on her target audience: young children.

A couple months ago, for instance, she posted an Instagram video of two Palestinian toddlers watching one of her videos as they sat amongst rubble.

“My friends Celine and Sila in what used to be their home in Gaza,” she captioned the video. “They deserve to live in a warm, safe home again. They deserve to be children.”

Earlier this month, she invited a 3-year-old double amputee from Gaza named Rahaf to dance alongside her in studio. She explained what it was like to meet Rahaf, who still has family living among the Gaza envelope, in a post on Instagram:

One minute I was pretending to be bunnies with Rahaf and the next minute I was video chatting with her two adorable, young brothers in Gaza, as her mom, Israa, held the phone up for me. I watched Israa look at them proudly, like I look at my son. It was a drastic snap back into reality. I imagined myself holding the phone in the US with my daughter, now a double amputee from an airstrike, away from my son in Gaza, unable to help him. I felt like I was going to throw up and came back into the moment. “I hope to meet you one day!” I happily said, in my classic Ms Rachel voice but with tears in my eyes.

Anyone familiar with the discourse about the Middle East in this country would not be surprised that there’s been a backlash to Accurso choosing to humanize the children of Gaza. The New York Times covered that backlash earlier this month, noting that some advocacy groups and individuals aligned with Israel have attacked her for posting about Gaza’s children, and one fringe organization even baselessly accused her of being financed by Hamas.

“RADICAL NURSERY RHYMES: Ms. Rachel just went from nursery rhymes to Hamas-tied headlines,” read one Fox News social media post. A New York Post column warned that Accurso is “coming for our kids.”

In her response to the NYT, Accurso remained defiant.

“I’ve spent my life committed to the learning and well-being of children,” she said. “I have always believed that safety and security are a basic human right for every child — so you see, caring about children in Gaza is a direct continuation of the work I’ve been doing most of my life. We don’t care about only some of our students because of where those students were born, we care about every one of them.”

But even celebrities are human beings. Last year, she confessed to the emotional toll of being the target of thousands of angry comments since she decided to support a fundraiser for Gaza’s children.

She posted an emotional Instagram video where she wiped away tears talking about the impact of the venom directed towards her.

“The bullying is so bad. It’s so bad,” she told her audience. “But I can handle this.”

Walking in Mr. Rogers’s footsteps

An image of Fred Rogers alongside François Clemmons from his program Mr. Rogers. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this month, Accurso’s husband gifted her with a composition sketch from the storied children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, moving her to tears.

“I’m crying right now as I type this. I was holding something my hero had held and wrote music on. I felt the strength to push on for kids no matter what,” she said in an Instagram post.

It’s poetic that Accurso has made Rogers her hero, and not just because they both hosted a children’s program. The late host of “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood” once stuck his neck out just like she did.

In 1969 the country was going through a tsunami of social upheaval. In the past decade, Americans had lived through the Vietnam War, multiple high-profile assassinations of leading politicians and civil rights leaders, enormous nonviolent protests, and massive riots that rocked America’s inner cities.

Those riots were tied to frustration about the pace of racial progress in the country, but they struck a special fear into the hearts of White America. Many looked at the ashes of entire communities in Detroit and Newark and asked themselves: How in the world could we possibly be expected to integrate with these people? Not only are they burning down their own cities, they’re burning down their own neighborhoods! Was the liberal dream of integration really a dream of societal suicide?

But that’s not what Rogers believed. Although he was a lifelong registered Republican, he was a minister first and foremost, trained at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He believed, more than anything, that children everywhere deserved the dignity bestowed upon them by their creator — whether those children happen to be black, white, blue, or green.

That’s why on one day in May in 1969, he decided to use his platform to take a stand.

All across the country, segregationist local officials had continued to bar African Americans from sharing the same waters as whites. In much of the American South, some white communities simply filled their pools up with concrete or dirt and abandoned them altogether rather than share them with black Americans.

Rogers thought this was nuts. So he filmed an episode where he asked Officer Clemmons — a black police officer played by the actor François Clemmons — to join him in a wading pool. When Clemmons replies that he doesn’t have a towel, Mr. Rogers offers him his. You can see an image from the episode above, and you can also watch the moment here.

The episode sparked discussions in living rooms from coast to coast and helped contribute to the massive decline in racial hostility in the coming decades.

Years later, Clemons explained how people would come up to him and explain what that moment meant to them:

And many people, as I've traveled around the country, share with me what that particular moment meant to them, because he was telling them, 'You cannot be a racist.' And one guy or more than that, but one particularly I'll never forget, said to me, ‘When that program came on, we were actually discussing the fact that black people were inferior. And Mister Rogers cut right through it,’ he said. And he said essentially that scene ended that argument.”

You don’t need to know much to know that hurting children is wrong

Photo by Larm Rmah on Unsplash

If you’re online enough, you probably either listened to or heard about the now-infamous Douglas Murray/Dave Smith debate on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” The pair debated not only Israel-Palestine but the nature of political debate itself, with the British polemicist Murray insisting that it requires a certain level of expertise to discuss topics like Gaza or Ukraine and that Smith and Rogan and their fellow travelers just didn’t have it.

(Murray speaks no Arabic or Hebrew dialects and rarely travels to these places without government handlers who tell him exactly what he ends up writing, but maybe that’s a point for another post.)

I’m sure that’s one category of complaint that will be aimed at Miss Rachel. She’s not a Middle East expert. Why is she talking about a war that’s part of a conflict that’s gone on for decades? She needs to stick to nursery rhymes, just like the Dixie Chicks should shut up and sing and LeBron James should shut up and dribble.

The problem is that the argument is not really being made in good faith. Did anyone who argued that comedians like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith shouldn’t have a strong opinion about what’s being done to the people of Gaza — because they haven’t traveled there or extensively researched the history of the conflict — also argue that people around the world shouldn’t have condemned the atrocities that took place in Southern Israel on October 7th? Have you even been to a kibbutz, how are you qualified to say anything about the attack? I can’t think of any such person probably because they don’t exist.

And, honestly, that would be a pretty bad argument. You don’t have to know the ins and outs of the last 60 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to know that widespread attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of noncombatants by Hamas and other militant groups was wrong. The same thing applies to the starvation and siege of the Gaza Strip.

You don’t have to have a 200-page diplomatic solution to bring about the end of the conflict to know that denying children access to critical food and medicine is wrong. It is widely recognized as a war crime and no modern or civilized country takes part in behavior like that. It’s the territory of the Bashar Al Assad and Vladmir Putins of the worlds, and we now know it’s also the territory of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even Donald Trump, the right-wing president of the United States, thinks it’s wrong and is privately pressuring Israel to lift its blockade (along with other Western powers who have been more public in their pressure, it might finally be starting to pay off as aid trickles back in).

The other big criticism hurled at Miss Rachel is that she is being dismissive towards the feelings of Jewish viewers.

“Ms. Rachel seems to be someone who is really, really good-hearted, but in the context of everything that’s going on — she says, ‘I care about all children,’ but really she’s talking about the children of Gaza,” a teacher at a London-based Jewish school told The New York Times. “That has left a lot of Jewish parents feeling quite isolated.”

I’m not sure how widespread this sentiment is among Jewish viewers. As I wrote last year, Jewish public opinion is far more diverse than conventional wisdom would have you believe. An increasing number of Jews in the West are opposed to many of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, even if they believe that Israel has a right to defend itself. I’m sure many have no problem with Accurso supporting the welfare of Gaza’s children.

But there probably are plenty of people like that teacher in London. See this post on the Jewish subreddit from four months ago:

For all the parents out there, do you have recommendations on quality educational programming that isn't Miss Rachel? With her current disinformation of the situation in Gaza, and silencing of Jewish voices on her platform, I really don't want to support her.

My baby is only just turning 1 and we haven't introduced screens just yet, but I would like some ideas on what would be good if we did start introducing them. It feels like Miss Rachel is the end all, be all for babies and toddlers, but I'm sure that's not the case.

Thank you for your recommendations!

Is Miss Rachel “silencing” Jewish voices? Are Jewish people “isolated” by a children’s entertainer pleading for Israel to stop starving Gazan children? Of course not.

Without indulging in any ugly stereotyping, anyone who has worked in media and entertainment — I’ve spent fifteen years in that industry — knows that Jewish people are not underrepresented in any way, shape, or form. They have many platforms and ways to argue for their beliefs. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

The problem is that for a very long time, Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular have not had a way to do the same. For decades, the only role an Arab actor could get in a Hollywood movie was as Terrorist #4. The news was full of stories about Arab violence or Arab extremism but rarely did viewers see stories about ordinary people just trying to live their lives the same way you or I do, which is the vast majority of the actual Arab population in the United States and around the world.

In the past few years, that’s started to change. There are Arab American and Palestinian American actors starring in major films and who have Netflix programs (I recommend watching “Mo,” if you like entertainment that’s both heartfelt and hilarious.) While they’re still not quite on equal footing with everyone else, they’ve started to overcome the media blackout they were under for decades.

If that’s threatening to someone, whether they’re Jewish, Christian, or Zoroastrian, my guess is because they’ve built an unhealthy and antagonistic psychological relationship with Palestinians; their personal identity is built on a negative image of Palestinians and an uncritical view of Israel’s government and society.

When someone comes along and says that Palestinians have children who are just like ours, and maybe they just want all the same things we do and the Israeli government is not justified keeping bread and painkillers away from starving and injured kids — well, that starts to chip away at your worldview and nobody likes that. That feeling sucks.

But maybe building your identity on the hatred of another group also kind of sucks. You can oppose Palestinian extremists like the militants in Hamas without building your personal identity on contempt for millions of people. That’s certainly a lesson ten of millions of White Americans had to learn after the introduction of civil rights, and we shouldn’t be shocked that positive social change takes a little bit of discomfort.

What Miss Rachel is doing is not teaching some kind of graduate level class about the Middle East. Not to sound too much like Douglas Murray, but she wouldn’t be qualified to do that.

But that’s not what Fred Rogers did all those decades ago, either. He didn’t come up with some 500-page report about how to prevent the urban race riots that had terrified white people into the suburbs, integrate communities through the thorny use of policies like school busing, or end racial divisions in America once and for all. He wouldn’t be qualified to do that either.

What both of them did is far simpler.

They took a member of a stigmatized minority group and told their audience: not every Palestinian is some kind of murderous terrorist. Not every black person is an antisocial criminal. In fact, most members of both groups are just like you and me. And they deserve to live good lives, just like we do.

Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or racial tensions in America was never going to be an easy task. But it starts by treating every child as if they carry a spark of divinity, whether they’re black or white, Israeli or Palestinian. And in pursuing that mission, Accurso is eminently qualified.