British Jewish Lives Matter: Jews. In Their Own Words @ Royal Court Theatre, London
Everyone should watch this. In the UK, we like to think our ourselves as an accepting tolerant nation. And yet, so many incidents are showing us a different narrative. We can be and yet…. However, to be anti-semitic, loudly and proudly anti-Israel is very fashionable, acceptable and yet almost hidden, as it’s so normalised in some parts of British society. The ugly and overlooked history of British anti-Semitism staged from 12 interviews by Jonathan Freedland with 12 British Jews. Directed by Vicky Featherstone and Audrey Sheffield, so there’s jokes and singing and dancing too. Even Fiddler on the Roof gets a mention.
The colloquy uses projected words at the back of a pared down stage and smartboards on wheels to show us Tweets, trolling, headlines and media storms, as well as microphones a la Girl From the North Country, we examine the stereotypes held against Jewish people — money, blood libel, power, murderers of Jewish children, Christ killers, Christian haters, the original hate crime committers, manipulators of nations and politics and the unrelenting, unwarranted hatred, still being projected at actors, politicians, in Student Unions and political boycotts.
An hour and 40 minutes without a break, I didn’t notice as the actors chat with us, hold conversations and interviews and act out the horrors of medieval society — against Jewish people. I loved hearing from Abraham Phillips — a working class East End Jewish man, who was prepared to call out the conspiracy theories (i.e. Jewish people are apparently spreading Corona Virus through Coca Cola, along with the giant lizards no doubt) as well as the very real racism experienced by Jewish children playing (playing!) in the 1970s and how their headmaster told them to fight back. Also, how he overtips to challenge the idea of Jewish miserliness and is constantly fighting the idea that all Jewish people are rich (or know another Jewish person who is). His business is needful, not a hobby!
Sweet too was the Iraqi Jewish man, Edwin Shuker, who described how he and his family escaped the horrors of death, rape and persecution — purely by being Jewish (and existing), and as a great thinker, expressed that all Jewish people are Zionists, for what is Zion but Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the ultimate homeland and so in longing for home, all Jewish people are Zion-ists. It’s not a bad thing framed like this. He also described creating cultural confusion as he can speak Arabic and his encounters with anti-semitic Arab speakers.
The same interviewee also described a horrible attack by a man riding a bike — who hit his ear causing him to crumple down and fracture bones. His recollections of working out what happened were horrible, as is his dealing with the trauma and PTSD now. And yet, he is thankful that it happened to him — he is already used managing pain and illness, so this is more so. But a peaceful older man, going about his business. Anyone going about their business peaceably. He was just walking!
Be warned though — this play will have you in tears. The vile abuse and accusations hurled at Margaret Hodge, Tracey-Ann Oberman, a pregnant Luciana Berger, MP (racist sexual and death threats combined unrelentingly); the everyday insults encountered by Phillip Abrahams (i.e. the word Jew being used as a verb almost to describe greedy grasping misers without thinking), social worker Victoria Hart (things said in passing as fact that no-one challenges although there are self-declared anti-racists and anti-sexists in the room!) This too linked into a discussion of the pain of the Jeremy Corbyn years and betrayal of the Labour Party’s equality routes, in failing to report death threats against Luciana Berger and in racist language used, such as Margaret Hodge being described as an Oppenheimer (i.e. moneyed Jewish person) by Red Ken Livingstone of all people. As a Gentile, the Labour Party’s failure to deal with the racist, anti-semitic rot in its core broke my heart — a convinced Leftist I couldn’t vote for them anymore. It’s left me feeling politically homeless because where else is there to go? But I can’t stay in such an environment either.
In being pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, the Left (the play and interviewees suggest) easily slip into anti-Semitic language. Yet as the play assessed — what has a ‘foreign’ war to do with me? There was a lot of critique about the political stance of Israel — yet Phillip Abrahams hit it I think when he said about how Israel changed from victim to winner after 1967. No-one likes a winner and now the media seek to pull down Israel at every turn. For a country the size of Wales, it gathers a lot of attention. But it does deserve political critique too — in bulldozing people’s homes (and yet it is the most democratic of the Middle Eastern countries, which no-one seems to like either, on the Left).
As a Brit and a Christian, the abhorrent history of medieval pogroms against Jewish people needs to be spoken and discussed more. In York we can still see the evidence today — the burnt-out Clifford's Tower where Jewish people were sheltering from rioters, choosing to die (Masada style) than let their captives get hold of them. Imagine that choice that is no choice at all — to kill yourself rather than be killed by a mob. Promised safety if they came out and converted to Christianity, the people killed them anyway and burnt their records of debts owed. Was it about the Jews, or the debts?
Through a nasty policy Jewish people were kept out of mainstream society and by being made the tax collectors for the Crown and those who financed the Crown, became doubly hated figures. In Norwich, Jewish people were accused of killing a Christian child because of its pious songs (jealousy?) and so the only thing to do was to kill the local Jewish people. As I watched these mystery style play incidents, all I could see was that England invented pogroms, concentration camps (in the Boer War) and went as far as banning Jewish people from England. Given our faith (and the fact that both the Jewish and Gentile peoples killed Christ — we’re all guilty, which is why we need a Saviour) and the fact that Jesus was Jewish, I struggle to see how the blood libel myth, the false accusation of murderous desire of Jewish people to kill Gentile children and use their blood in matza or secret religious rites escalated so wildly and madly (and was believed as truth, as fact). Apart from people in debt wanted a quick way out of their debts and someone to blame — as was said, were Jews not ‘other’, not weird enough? Could they slip into society too easily? What I do know (now) is that English people invented these heinous myths and in a reverse Brexit exported them to Europe where they were replayed again, and again and again with murderous results. We invented blame culture and pogroms. Shame on us and I’m not sure we’ve dealt with it yet — is a statue in Winchester of a prominent Jewish lady from the Middle Ages enough?
When we were asked ‘are there any good Jews?’ I wanted to shout out Jesus. Deeply embedded in UK Church culture is the idea of Israel bad, Church good. Very often (especially in evangelical reformed Christian circles who like to pride themselves on getting everything right and correct) we ignore our Jewish roots, that Jesus and his disciples were Jewish, that none of them were white British blokes but Middle Eastern (and some of the disciples were Middle Eastern and Greek women!) Though it also easy to swing the other way and because Jesus came from Israel and is coming back there some day, that everything Israel does is right (politically and socially) as a state. We read the Greek but forget the nuance of the Hebrew and Aramaic in the Bible. We lose a lot by turning Jesus into a blonde haired, blue eyes cricket playing Brit, fresh out of a Timotei advert — Israel got it wrong we smugly say as 21st century Christians, look at us getting it right. And yet all through the Bible, God as a tender parent won’t forget Israel — cherishing and correcting them. How then can we as the Church forget them, seek to replace and despise them? Is the blood libel myth showing us that Christians think that Jewish people hate them or really that we are the jealous ones, remembering that we are grafted in, not the ‘first born’ — although we get equal inheritance and equal rights before God?
Sadly, some modern-day Jewish people expressed the need to feel ready to flee at any stage, to have portable trades which could be done anywhere (like a doctor). And yet through these interviews, I saw and heard people wanting to serve, to give back to British society, to live their lives in peace — to take things better, such as being an MP with a portfolio for the supporting of Mental Health. The idea that things might turn bad so you need to plan ahead and be ready to leave really shocked me.
There are also the comments (about whether to declare or hide Jewishness), such as Tracey-Ann Oberman taking a stand and using her family name, finally. Also, about those who don’t look ‘Jewish’ using their power and influence to help those who don’t have a choice, who can’t hide. It sort of feels like Inter-War Vienna all over again. And let’s not even get onto being black and Jewish as one interviewee mentioned — the ‘new third thing’ — Stephen Bush.
As well as Britain’s shameful and unexplored history of anti-Semitism, the other thing which made me weep was a Cabaret style song and dance number about how the Jews are to blame for everything. How too to challenge anti-semitism, when whatever you do just confirms conspiracy theorists' sense of all-consuming Jewish world domination? And yet the song showed how stupid these ideas are (and vile — blood libel directly goes against Jewish cultural practices and the Torah’s sense of hygiene). I couldn’t clap (although it was well done) because the song words were so ugly, complete lies, so wrong. However, the play ends well as Jewish people declare who they are (and what they aren’t). Nor is it all despair and gloom as there are stories of overcoming, hope, triumph, humour.
The Shoah is touched upon too — how an old lady, a grandmother, refused to leave as everyone else did during World War Two occupation (she was old, how could the Nazis think to touch her?), how her house was occupied, and she fined to live in her own home; how her family tried to find the rent. She was marched, put in a trench, murdered because she was old. The letter asking her son to not forget her completely. Her death was never mentioned by mother to daughter. How the silences, pain and trauma carry on into later generations — of not forgetting and yet being ready to run or walk. Of Tracy-Ann Oberman’s ‘obsession’ as a 10-year-old with World War Two — just trying to understand the incomprehensible and her teacher’s perspective, almost wanting her to forget about it. The past is past, surely? As in dramas, we are almost encouraged to ‘boo the Jews’ (Howard Jacobson’s quote): yes, we know you suffered, yes it was terrible — but was it really 6 million and it wasn’t just you, we always seem to be trying to turn the Shoah into a bland message about wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice message. And look at how Israel is behaving to the Palestinians? Even in History we are trying to take away from Jewish people — their pain, suffering and triumph in surviving the unsurvivable. Hanging in my thoughts is a comment from one speaker about the Russian side of her family being disappeared — to lose a whole side of your family, generations — how can that even be possible, a thing?
Nonetheless, this play should tour, everyone needs to hear and see it and get some dialogue going to challenge our acceptable racism against Jewish people. It should go across the country, get some dialogue going! We should also follow ‘Jewish’ Twitter accounts and be the people to speak up, against trolls online and in the room. That’s what I’m taking away — that things were said, in everyday conversation and ‘no-one in the room spoke up’.
Could have done without the Finkel meets ‘creator at the beginning — it seemed like the ultimate Leftish fantasy the god not God was obviously female and Herschel Finkel kind of Adam like as he encounters the world. I think though this was a rebuke to the Royal Court (as Howard Jacobson) mentioned for putting on obviously anti-Jewish plays, (but all of this was lost on me at the time!) Ignore the sniffy reviews and go and see it — powerful, though provoking work about what it means to be British and Jewish.
For Jonathan Freedland’s original inspiration for the play — https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/sep/21/once-even-jews-would-utter-the-word-jew-in-a-whisper-now-it-is-up-in-lights
