It’s not a good time to be Jewish and work in the arts

It’s not a good time to be a Jewish creative. It’s very hard to get Jewish stories off the ground at the moment. It was reported recently that half of British publishers are refusing to take books by authors who are identifiably Jewish, with many mainstream publishing houses deeming Jewish books off-limits.

Along with many others, I have experienced the strange responses this year from British broadcasters and production companies to the pitching of Jewish documentary and scripted dramas. It’s never quite an outright “no”, instead feeble excuses such as “it’s not quite the right time”.

Last month, I opened the Jewish Film Festival gala night at the Curzon Mayfair in London with (I hope) a rousing speech saying how important it is to support the festival, as it is a platform for telling our stories (both nationally and internationally) and sharing our experiences with a wider audience – as well as employing openly Jewish actors writers and crews, many of whom fear they are being marginalised.

Michael Etherton, UKJFF’s CEO, has written in the JC of his despair at how many cinemas refused even to get back to him about showing films for the 2024 festival. It is never a downright “no”, just a ghosting, pervasive silence.

Jews have given so much and yet we are slowly being erased. I wonder whether Robert Popper or Simon Amstell would have succeeded in getting Friday Night Dinner and Grandma’s House on terrestrial television these days. I would like to think that the brilliant Simon Schama would still get The Story of the Jews commissioned by the BBC in 2024. But something tells me it’s unlikely. Similarly Simon Sebag Montefiore’s seminal book and documentary Jerusalem: The Biography might not find such a straight move from page to screen.

But in a good news story I’m delighted to say that my Merchant of Venice 1936 is coming back into the West End by popular demand. It wasn’t just Jewish audiences that made it a sellout at the Criterion Theatre in London and around the country on its national tour (there is even talk of a European and international life for it).

It was, rather, the broader message of the play that has cut through. It’s that message I wanted to tell, based on the story of my great-grandmother, an immigrant from the Russian Pale of Settlement. She escaped the pogroms in Mohilev after being sent to England in 1906 as a young girl, and ended up a widow living just off Cable Street in the tenement slums – coming face-to-face with Oswald Mosley at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936.

The production really does speak to people. Seeing a female Shylock for the first time on stage has unlocked Shakespeare’s play for many, with its beautiful language and biting dark heart. But I think the real reason that the play has been such a success is the legacy of the Battle of Cable Street itself, and the production’s setting against the historical backdrop of English upper-class fascism and Jew hatred, where the mounted police protected Mosley and his black shirt militia on the march of intimidation to the Jewish community in London’s East End.

The resonances with what we are seeing on the streets of London today are so clear. Cable Street shows how important unity is in the face of organised hatred, and for people to stand alongside a vulnerable community, forcing a hate march into retreat.

In 1936, the Irish working class, the English working class, the dockers and the small Afro Caribbean community – ordinary heroes and anti-fascists from all over the country – stood with their Jewish neighbours at the entrance to Cable Street where Mosley and his army wanted to pass through. Milk floats were overturned. Barricades were set up.

Children threw marbles from windows and rubbish onto the fascists’ heads. They could not pass.

My grandma always told me that his was the best of England, a British civil rights moment that needed to be recalled again and again (as it was in our family), passed down proudly through the generations.

The British Jewish community is vulnerable today. It finds itself under attack and misunderstood, particularly for those of us who work in the arts or media, healthcare, education or the public sector generally, not to mention students and young people. We find ourselves marginalised and alone.

Film using original news footage runs throughout our production. Watching 4,000 mounted police protecting the huge swathe of Black Shirts shouting “Get rid of the Yids” at the top of their voices, raising their arms in seig heils, is chilling stuff. But today we see regular marches with hateful banners and slogans, spitting faces contorted with hatred. In the recent incident outside the Jewish community centre JW3, elderly pensioners and young families were screamed at and intimidated.

Supposedly, this is all about Israel, but in reality, it often crosses the line into the same vernacular, images and slogans of 1936, with Jewish school buses attacked, school children abused by adults and little girls pelted with glass in the East End of London. And that was just this week’s news.

The message of The Merchant of Venice 1936 is that whatever people’s opinions are of Israel, of the Gaza war and of the Israeli government, they should nonetheless be able to stand up for a marginalised community under threat. The production is a plea for people to stand together. To share a common humanity. To stand against hatred of any sort.

Please come and support us in the West End and on tour. This is our story and it needs to be told.

This Thursday, the JC is hosting a panel discussion about Jews in the arts. For tickets and to find out more, click here.