Jewish Hollywood actor Jesse Eisenberg has revealed that a trip to Poland to visit a second cousin Holocaust survivor changed his perspective on the Shoah and inspired his second play.
Speaking to The Open Ears Project podcast, Mr Eisenberg said the visit twelve years ago gave him a sense of guilt about his “own kind of privilege in America”.
He said upon meeting his second cousin, who survived the Second World War and still lives in Poland, that he “just had this revelation juxtaposing my own kind of privilege in America and the lucky life I had compared to what she had gone through.
“That’s probably very similar to a lot of American Jews in my generation, which is that you’re kind of too far removed to have some kind of like survivor’s guilt from the war, but it’s such a part of your history and if you choose to engage with it you’ll realize that you have a lot more engagement with it than you expected.”
Eisenberg added the meeting inspired him to write his second play, The Revisionist, about a writer with writer’s block who travels to Poland to reconnect with his 75-year-old second cousin.
