(Jewish Group) How should we feel about Non-Jews taking Jewish roles?
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.
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