A couple of weeks ago, I went along to see Jews. In Their Own Words at the Royal Court. I was optimistic. Here was a play promising to skewer the antisemitism — including on the Left — that has spread through so much contemporary discourse. Written by the sophisticated Guardian and JC columnist Jonathan Freedland, it would be a knowing take on a vital topic — Jews — that can easily go wrong. Indeed, it was the Royal Court that staged Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play For Gaza, a play that many saw as antisemitic and even, according to the Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, a blood libel.
Yet as Jews. In Their Own Words went on, I found myself welling up with disappointment. As Jew after Jew — real-life Jewish people in media, politics and the arts (played by actors) who had been interviewed by Freedland — said their piece, I realised that this was not Jews in their own words at all, but actually anti-Israel Jews in their own words. Every time a character mentioned Israel, they instantly crowded their statement with caveats, clearly terrified of being seen as actually supporting the state and, of course, the perennially decried Israeli “government”.
Saying you don’t agree with “what the government is doing” has long been mandatory for any non-right winger mentioning Israel in public, however weakly, without trashing its existence.
I had hoped a play pushing back on the double standards facing Jews, which includes socially enforced caveats that only Jews have to obey, like denouncing Israel before being able to discuss it, would have had the guts to sidestep this. It didn’t.
The reason is clear. The play was created by and for the new Left. This is a club to which the author wants (still) to belong, and is rightly aggrieved that being Jewish in the current climate keeps him from doing so. And yes, this is a play about the daunting tide of rubbish — including, in the case of a Charedi man walking in London, traumatising violence — that Jews, imagined broadly, have to put up with. But it seemed to only want to explore this in relation to “good” Jews, namely those who either disavowed any special connection or allegiance to Israel, or Jews who, like Margaret Hodge, one of the testifiers, had come to loathe the Jewish state. I found it ironic that one of the main themes of the play concerned the alleged antisemitism of the assumption that Jews are automatically connected to Israel, even though one could argue that this is one thing that antisemites get right: post-1945, Jews are all connected to Israel, even if they are not responsible for what goes on there.
Because the play was unable to explore the elephant in the room, that expressing pro-Israel views in polite society is uniquely dangerous because of antisemitism, it ended up hoisted by its own petard; unable to move the debate onto new territory, or to find new clarity, because it fell into the very traps it set out to illuminate.
It’s not hard to call out egregious instances of anti-Jewish language or attitudes; such tropes, insults and insinuations are ubiquitous and shockingly constant, and this play calls out many such instances. There’s Tracy-Ann Oberman recalling being bullied into explaining what it was that was “different” about her in auditions as a young actress, the Turkish man in decorator Philip Abraham’s local shop informing him that “the Jews” spread Covid by putting it in Coca Cola, and plenty more. The most extended treatment goes to Luciana Berger’s final days in Labour, when Corbyn and his acolytes refused both to move swiftly on an apology for the antisemitic mural Corbyn had formerly endorsed, or to do anything about the slew of antisemitic abuse and threats raining down on Berger. It was a grim rehash of what happened, but firmly within the framework set out by the play: Berger is a “good” Jew.
Staging an excoriation of leftist double standards towards Jews in a theatre prone to just such double standardry was a good start. But Freedland ended up making exactly the conceptual mistake that David Baddiel did in his own otherwise blisteringly good Jews Don’t Count — and it’s a mistake the Left will always make so long as it insists on believing, either out of fear of seeming right-wing or out of genuine belief, that Israel is fundamentally cruel, whatever the present government happens to be. It will, in other words, agree with at least some of the antisemites it wants so badly to condemn, that Jews should be a certain way, or hold certain beliefs in order to be acceptable.
In featuring no proudly Zionist Jews whatsoever, the play, no doubt unintentionally, left open the suggestion that when those Jews experience antisemitism, they deserve it.
However sadly ironic, the idea that Jews have to be good — either on Israel or in general — was central here. There was an excruciating scene at the end where all the interviewees say what they are not, negating antisemitic stereotypes one by one; denying that they control the world, or are thieves, or are rich, or powerful and so on.
But Jews are people and, like other sets of people, some are thieves, some rich, some powerful and some, God forbid, argue on behalf of Israel, policies and all. None of them deserve to be reviled for being Jews.
