In Britain, Jewish Actors Fear Blacklisting

During the recent war between Israel and Hamas, the British actors’ union issued a statement of “solidarity” with Palestinians, condemning Israel’s “disproportionate actions,” and called on members to attend a London demonstration—where Israeli flags were burned and protestors displayed and chanted anti-Semitic slogans. Dame Maureen Lipman, a prominent actress and staunch defender of the Jewish state, resigned in protest. But Jewish performing artists in the UK face greater problems still, writes Jenni Frazer:

The actress Tracy-Ann Oberman . . . said Jewish actors were beginning to hide their Stars of David at auditions. “We are terrified of being thought of as Zionists,” she said. “One actor was turned on when it was found that he had family in Israel.

One young actor told [reporters]: “It was the first day of a Zoom read-through for a possible new theatre show. We all introduced ourselves online, which is standard practice—who we are, where we are from, what we have been up to professionally. When it was my turn, . . . I explained that I had been working on a treatment, hopefully for TV, based on my own family’s experience and history of fleeing pogroms in Russia.

“In front of the whole cast and director, an actor sneered on the screen and told me, ‘look what you’re doing in Palestine. That’s a pogrom.’”

The agent Emma Engers said: “I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for 25 years and for the first time in my experience, Jewish actors are telling me that they’re frightened of identifying as being Jewish upon joining a new cast or in the rehearsal room. Young Jewish drama students are terrified . . . of repercussions.”

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Anglo-Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Theater, United Kingdom

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society