There was a time when we didn’t always talk about antisemitism

Secretly perhaps, we wonder, when is it too late to go? And go where? The feeling is that whatever we do or say, our time has come round again. No matter how much good we do in the world, the pitch gets redesigned with a slope and all the goalposts are moved to one end only. We can’t win.

Fact remains that, these days, if four Jewish people are in the same room the talk will drift in minutes to Jewish students being excluded and bullied on campus, and then to medics being overlooked for promotion and actors missing out on film or TV work.

I resent being engineered into a tribe. Proud and upfront as I am of my heritage. I’m British born, as were my parents and grandparents, and I mourn the me who could tell self-deprecating anecdotes and loved being in large and diverse companies and moved in circles where my Jewishness was about as important as my blood group.

I resent the question that will always come up in any interview and the worry that if I join a demo or write an opinion piece I might be targeted. I’d like to visit my parents’ grave without taking a key and a hammer or visit my synagogue without saying “Good Shabbos” to three security guards.

I am conscious, mind, that this is an “Eyeore point of view” and that others can say – “what’s she got to moan about, Dame Entitlement of NW3?” – this from the “Yes, I’m Jewish, but I’m not political” brigade.

I’d like to be just good old Maureen again, talking about my grandkids and couscous and clematis and the price of a bottle of good plonk.

I am conscious on walking into a roomful of producers and actors that nine-tenths of them will be, if not Corbynites then marching with the Palestine lobby or sporting keffiyehs discreetly beneath their Lacoste jackets. You see, even aside from prejudice, we are also just plain unfashionable. That’s aside from the fatigue of running the international media seven days a week and doing such a great job that nobody’s got a good word to say for us.

I say this with authority and yet… and yet we are everywhere. We are this year’s Oscar winners and Nobel nominees and always in the news and always on the TV in sitcoms – old ones, new ones, sad ones, blue ones – there are the names, the Kaufmans and the Goldsteins and the Kohans.

The fourth wall opened with Shtisel and I ground my teeth with UnOrthodox and, this year, Nobody Wants This gave us a primetime rabbi who falls in love with a Gentile woman because obviously, all the Jewish ones are heinous dragon women.

We are miracle workers because somehow, we are wearing high-viz jackets while remaining invisible.

Before you write to our new editor demanding I be taken off my own byline and made to drink vinegar until I stop doing this, one further whinge. I am currently reading Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell and it is a rare and wonderful read. It covers the question of a Jewish homeland by using only the quotations, newspaper articles and talking heads of the time.

Theodore Herzl is magnificently conjured alongside the quixotic Israel Zangwill and the philanthropist Charles Schiff, as well the author’s own great-grandfather David Jochelmann, something of an unknown hero who masterminded, in 1907, the immigration of 10,000 Russian Jews into the port of Galveston on the south-eastern coast of America.

Seafaring Jews? “There is no greater anomaly,” mused Jackie Mason, “than a Jew on a boat.”

Jewish cowboys? Horsepower… mmm… OK... but what colour is the upholstery on the saddle?

At one point during the dazzling, unimaginable annual Jewish conferences in Basel we were offered by the magnanimous, map-carving British government, a nice dry plateau in Uganda. It doesn’t bear thinking about what pleasant solutions Idi Amin would have offered up for his resident Jews.

Finally, my personal experience recently at the very efficient JW3, where I mounted an evening celebrating the life and work of my late husband, screenwriter Jack Rosenthal.

It was an evening filled with love. A testament to kinder days when a Play for Today was a talking point for a year. I assume the two meshuggenah women who managed to unfurl a Palestinian flag before the event were fans of series rather than plays.

They were efficiently shown the door, but I am wondering whether they might like, perhaps with the alumni of SOAS and the LSE, to carry a placard for my late partner, Egyptian-Jewish Guido Castro, demanding back the ravishing Art Deco house on the Nile and successful business importing US cars and selling agricultural pumps, both of which were colonised during the “peaceful” pogroms of 1956 that removed 850,000 Jews from the Middle East, creating apartheid in seven or eight Middle Eastern countries.

I will happily point them in the direction of the relevant embassies.