When cinema emerged as an art form in Edwardian Britain, representations of British Jewry on screen indulged unhesitatingly in Jewish stereotypes.
We can at least expect a degree of euphemism in today’s antisemitism. But the blunt cliché in those silent era skits and sketches is almost as offensive as the racism which depicts Jews as avaricious schemers and undesirable immigrants — a response in part to the tens of thousands fleeing Russian pogroms who arrived in Britain from the 1880s.
As many settled in the East End, they could have done with movies that were a little more empathetic about their circumstances. But it would be 1971 before Topol’s Fiddler on the Roof, directed by the (Protestant, actually) Norman Jewison, arrived in British cinemas.
Instead, the newly-built picture houses springing up and down the land in the first decade of the century would feature such crowd-pleasers as The Robber and the Jew (1908), in which two highwaymen rob a series of passers-by, letting each victim go except old moneybags (he literally has bags of money) who they tie to a tree.
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Jack Rosenthal’s TV play Bar Mitzvah Boy (Photo: Archive)
In the classic A Bad Day For Levinsky (1909) the bearded, hook-nosed anti-hero places a coin into a malfunctioning vending machine at a railway station and is so desperate to get a return he picks up the whole man-sized device and carries it through the city’s streets, chased by police and railway staff.
It was directed by one T.J. Gobbett, who being Stepney-born perhaps resented the influx of Jews into his manor. His film career apparently began in 1908 and ended in 1910. Yet he still has his own page on film and TV’s online bible, Imdb, where he can be found with Jewison, Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen.
In these directors’ films — Fiddler, Schindler’s List and, say, Radio Days (although you could pick almost anything of Allen’s) — can be found representations of Jewish life before, during and after the Holocaust.
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A Kid for Two Farthings, written by East End boy Wolf Mankowitz
Jews in film would later produce some of the funniest material ever known to man. Hilarious to gentiles, it was also comedy that served as a salve to collective Jewish PTSD. One thinks of the open-mouthed Broadway audience watching a chorus line of goose-stepping Nazis in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, or such dialogue as “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can-opener works!” from Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters.
In Britain it took longer before a change in attitudes towards Jews was reflected on screen. David Lean’s 1948 version of Oliver Twist featured Alec Guinness’s hook-nosed Fagin three years after the Holocaust. It was a Fagin that could easily grace a Gobbet film. In this country the sympathetic or merely humane depiction of Jews was a cottage industry by comparison to America.
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Make Me an Offer, also scripted by Wolf Mankowitz
Wolf Mankowitz (also Stepney-born) embodied the best of these efforts. A true Anglo-Jewish writer, he was brimful of Jewish East End and shtetl culture, but filtered it through a Cambridge and Leavis-educated mind. The result was The Bespoke Overcoat, the Petticoat Lane-set A Kid for Two Farthings (both 1955) and Make Me an Offer (1954) which featured the adorable star of British Yiddish theatre Meir Tzelnika.
Mankowitz laid a path for Jack Rosenthal to pipe Jewish life into the nation’s sitting rooms 20 years later with what would become TV classics, The Evacuees (1975) and Bar Mitzvah Boy the following year.
Of course, it is not possible to mention Rosenthal without thinking of his wife Maureen Lipman, any more than it is possible to mention Lipman without thinking of her late husband.
But their individual contributions to Jewish and British cultural life on screen and stage are as significant as anyone mentioned in this piece, and more than most.
Dame Maureen’s includes Roman Polanski’s Holocaust film The Pianist (2002) and is still being forged on TV’s Coronation Street.
It’s difficult to overstate her stage, screen and radio career but to get a sense of the charisma that underpins it you could do worse than seek out a poignant 1968 interview on the British Film Institute’s website in which a 21-year-old
Maureen fields questions about fame after her film debut in Up The Junction (1968), and dwells on what her future may hold.
If film took its time to be fair to Jews on screen, a flick back through the JC’s archive to 13 May 1892 reports with more than a note of surprise that actor Henry Irving, the first to be knighted, delivered a Shylock of “pity and sympathy”.
Whether that performance of Shakespeare’s flesh-exacting Jew had any influence on Irving’s assistant at the time isn’t recorded. But it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Bram Stoker watching his boss’s Shylock as he mulled his forthcoming novel Dracula.
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Roman Polanski’s Holocaust film The Pianist
It was not until after the Second World War that Jewish film and stage practitioners emerged as a real cultural force. The work of Bernard Kops (The Hamlet of Stepney Green) and Steven Berkoff (East) was often rooted in the East End where they were raised, but it was written with a drive that would help them to leave.
Berkoff especially has remained a maverick figure of the stage, while fellow East End Jew Arnold Wesker became unintentionally central to the “Angry Young Men” revolution that toppled the Rattigan-dominated British theatre establishment in the 1950s.
Yet while much of Wesker’s work was steeped in Jewish experience you could argue that the most influential Jewish work transcended it. Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller and later Tony Kushner were all at heart deeply political writers driven by a sense of social justice.
Continue to flick through the archives and as the decades dissolve it’s almost impossible not to land randomly on Jewish writing, acting, directing or producing talent.
Here is the Nicholas Hytner era as Artistic Director of the National Theatre and there is David Lan’s at the Young Vic. From Stoppard to Sondheim the pages are festooned with unforgettable evenings at the theatre.
For me none were more thrilling in my couple of theatre-reviewing decades than the Old Vic’s revival of David Mamet’s Speed the Plow starring the now-fallen Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum, the latter injecting his Hollywood producer with a distinct Jewish inflection and gesticulation that morphed, in one reflex moment, into davening. Take that, Gobbett.
