Natalie Portman has said that her grandfather changed his name from Edelstein to Stevens “to sound less Jewish”.

Talking to The Guardian before her new television series The Lady in the Lake premieres on Friday, the actor said the name change, by her mother's family who immigrated to the States from Austria and Russia, was “initially a survival mechanism, but one that took them, first of all, away from their own identity.”

The theme of assimilation as a survival method is relevant to the Apple TV series, which is based on Laura Lippman’s novel about two real-life murders in 1960s Baltimore, one of which was a Jewish girl and the other a young black woman.

Portman, who plays Maddie, a bored Jewish housewife turned investigative reporter, said in the interview that the complex relationship between the Jewish and black communities in 1960s America was “super-interesting”.

“There were many Jews who marched with the civil rights protests; there were also Jews involved in excluding black citizens from certain institutions,” said Portman.

“That combination of collaboration and adversarial relationship is fascinating to explore – two minority groups that face discrimination and obviously found some measure of unity to face similar problems. But then also had differences because Jews could try to assimilate into whiteness, which many of them did as a survival method, making them part of a group that discriminated against others.”

The facts that the black victim, a hardworking activist and mother called Cleo Sherwood, attracted much less press coverage than 11-year-old Tessie Fine, and that her character was obsessed with uncovering how the lady in the lake died were “interesting” to Portman.

“Namely what happens when oppressed people oppress others,” she said. “It’s possible to be both oppressed and oppressor. And that sometimes when we’re looking for our own freedom, we don’t realise we’re stepping on someone else’s life.”

While antisemitism is depicted in the series, in the desecration of a Jewish cemetery with swastikas which echoes real-life events of recent years in places such as Illinois and Westhoffen, Portman said she had not experienced it first-hand. “I read, like everyone else does, about the rising tide of antisemitism which is disconcerting.”