In March, the Jewish Chronicle gave me one of my favourite assignments of the year. It was the chance to interview actor Adrian Schiller, who was then about to play Shylock at Shakespeare’s Globe. We talked about Shakespeare and his play, The Merchant of Venice, but mainly we talked about the thorny problems beneath a common question raised when actors audition for Jewish roles: “are you Jewish?”
For Schiller, the question is complicated, as it is for me and perhaps for some JC readers. What resonated most for me, however, was the way in which Schiller talked about Jewish family histories as intimate, private stories. “It’s a very intrusive question — ‘are you Jewish?’ It could be, for a man, as intrusive as, ‘are you circumcised?’.” It’s a question that invites disclosures about family, and about stories that may not be our own to tell.
As I’ve written elsewhere, my own maternal grandparents responded to the trauma of the Shoah – they were both born into the Jewish community in Budapest, and readers will know what that meant by 1944 – by suppressing their Jewishness like a psychic wound. Effectively, they went into hiding as Jews, and never came out. Over the years, I’ve discovered that this is not an uncommon story; perhaps inevitable amongst a community for whom the fear of being hunted down is not paranoia but a necessary psychological baseline for survival. But it did mean that for years, notably during their lifetimes, the answer to “are you Jewish?” was for me, not my own story to tell. Schiller, whose relatives relate to Jewishness in different ways according to their own strands of family history, clearly felt similarly.
Yet we live in an era when actors are expected to disclose their “lived experience” of all aspects of life in order to assert credentials to play a particular role. As Schiller noted of the recent TV hit, It’s A Sin: “They were very clear that everybody involved should be homosexual… But it’s perfectly possible that there was somebody who was excluded from being cast in that because they hadn’t quite worked out where they were yet.” In daily life, the rest of us are now also expected to make this kind of disclosure in order to justify expressing an opinion on the slightest of social issues. When I finally wrote publicly about my Jewish roots in 2018, long after my grandparents had passed away and while negotiating it carefully with my family, it was because as a writer in the 21st century, I felt huge pressure to “explain” my credentials when writing on any related issue. Identity politics had outed me.
Of course, not every actor gets interrogated when they audition for a Jewish role. Jews remain amongst the only ethnic groups whose “lived experience” is often dismissed as irrelevant, by the same creatives who twist themselves into knots trying to map impeccably “authentic” performers onto minority roles. Just this week, it was announced that Christoph Waltz (not Jewish) will play the iconic Jewish director Billy Wilder in a new Stephen Frears film – a man whose Jewishness was central to his trademark humour and aesthetic vision.
But when it comes to casting Jewish roles, we have to be careful what we wish for. A culture that officiously polices people about whether they’re Jewish or not – in the creative industries or elsewhere – has very unpleasant antecedents. As Schiller says, it’s not always anyone else’s business. The increasingly intrusive ways in which society demands we define ourselves in public should remind us that identity politics can only offer superficial answers – not encourage us to extend the reach of its minority regimentation.
Jewish identity, in particular, can be messy, fluid and mixed up in private pain. So when the Jewish Chronicle invited me to contribute a new monthly column to this paper, I took a breath. Proud as I now am of my Jewish roots, I’m aware that my family failed to stand proudly as Jews in years when it mattered to the community. I was raised without Jewish ritual. And the religious faith that has seeped into me since childhood and still sustains me is Anglican Christianity.
None of that has prevented my own rediscovery in recent years of what it means to proudly celebrate Jewish heritage. And not just the fun, easy stuff – although my cousin and I did make three different types of charoset this Pesach, with all the zeal of over-enthusiastic novices. Many “returning” or mixed-heritage Jews tell me that the most difficult part of reconnecting with Jewish life is building a relationship with the broader Jewish community, calibrating a way of find space for our messy, imperfectly Jewish selves without intruding on the sensitivities of committed Jews who’ve been doing it right for decades. (There’s no such a thing as a “Jewish Christian”, another JC writer commented recently. Well, I beg to differ – holding a metaphysical faith and honouring one’s ethnic and cultural heritage are different matters. But I appreciate that people like me don’t get the last word on these questions.)
So in many ways, writing for this paper feels like coming home. (And let’s be clear, even when my mother’s family didn’t live outwardly as Jews, they still lived in North London and read the JC. Who wouldn’t? It’s indispensable!) Now that we’ve got acquainted, once a month you’ll find me writing about books, culture, politics and yes, occasionally, issues that “outsiders” face in relating to Jewish communities. But it also feels like a leap of faith. See you next month.
