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Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About Change. Now is a great time to check out my new book about activism, Find Your Fight. You can find Find Your Fight wherever you buy books and you can learn more about it at jayruderman.com.

Today my guest is Tracy-Ann Oberman. Tracy-Ann is a British actress. She gained prominence for her role as Chrissie Watts in the British soap opera EastEnders and has appeared in numerous television shows including Doctor Who, Friday Night Dinner and the Toast of London. Throughout her career, Tracy-Ann has been an outspoken advocate for the Jews of England and around the world. In recognition of this work, Tracy-Ann was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to Holocaust education and combating antisemitism earlier this year.

At the time she said that her recent production of the Merchant of Venice of 1936 is driven by a commitment to Holocaust education and challenging antisemitism through storytelling as well as bringing communities together through shared understanding. These issues Tracy-Ann has tackled her whole career sadly remain relevant today, and I’m so glad to be able to talk to her about it. Tracy-Ann Oberman, thank you so much for being my guest on All About Change. Welcome.

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

Pleasure. Lovely to be here.

Jay Ruderman:

So first of all, I want to start off with a huge congratulations on your MBE, which is well-reserved, and those of us in the global Jewish community are incredibly proud of you and appreciative for the work that you’ve done over the years on our behalf. Looking back on your decades of advocacy for the Jewish community, are there any stories from early on that stick with you?

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

I think the seminal moment of my life was my parents in a mad moment of ’70s parenting when I was really young, about four or five years old, took me to Yad Vashem without any context or explanation, and it was a deeply traumatic moment in my life, I would say a defining moment. Because I remember pretty much being left alone to walk around seeing all these images and I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but seeing bodies being put into what looked like pizza ovens and seeing a pile of children’s shoes and seeing women being shot into a pit.

And I just remember being very young and not really understanding it, but I knew it had something to do with being Jewish and I couldn’t understand. And the images were so strong and I knew it had something to do with being Jewish. And I think even then I could not understand why what was a huge machine was put into place for killing Jews, men, women, and children. And this huge feeling of shame, of why were we hated so much, a huge feeling of impotence, of how did they manage to make this that I’m seeing happen?

And also a huge feeling of pride that we had all survived and that we were there looking at these images and I spent most of my childhood trying to read everything that I could about the Holocaust, how it happened, who were the willing executioners, why it wasn’t stopped, how an industrial genocide happened against one people, and I know others were involved in it, but the Shoah, the final solution was ultimately about the dissolution of Jews in Europe and, had the Nazis taken over, the whole world. So I would say that was the moment of my life of feeling, “Well, if I survived and if we have survived, we have a responsibility, one, to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.” Two, I always felt this responsibility, even though I was quite a shy child, to stand up and have my voice heard, to speak against what I saw as injustice and to advocate for my people.

Jay Ruderman:

How does it feel living in the UK when people compare what Israel is doing to the Holocaust that was perpetrated by the Germans?

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

Well, I look at you in America and I see a huge rise in antisemitism.

Jay Ruderman:

Exactly.

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

The problem we have with Israel, it’s a global… The great late Rabbi Sacks, who was our chief rabbi and sadly passed far too young… He was a great mentor actually because he was so wise. People should read his books. He was a wise man. He was a philosopher of the highest order. But he always said antisemitism is a virus. Two things that we have to acknowledge. One is that any society that allows Jew hate to flourish on its watch, it’s not about Jews. It’s about a bigger sickness in society, and Jews are the canary in the coal mine and the past predicates the future on this. You look at any society that has allowed Jew hate to flourish, all other evils follow.

I just did a play, Merchant of Venice 1936, where I seeped myself in the fascism and the Jew hatred in the 1930s in Great Britain under Oswald Mosley. And I’ve also looked at the Limburg in the 1930s in America and many, many other countries where there was a huge rise in antisemitism. The slogans, the vernacular, the images, the marches against Jews, the tropes, the medieval tropes are very similar to what we see now, and that was long before Israel existed.

And in my work as an actress and a writer and my advocacy, what I try and say is… You can criticize Israel all you want, but when it bleeds into antisemitic, anti-Jewish vernacular, you have to then question what you are actually saying. And I think the problem with a lot of work that is going on about advocacy for the Palestinians is very, very good. And it’s very important for those of us that have worked in Palestinian and Israeli advocacy and trying to bring people together.

And people like myself who has Palestinian friends, we absolutely know what the end game is. But what the end game isn’t is pushing blood libel, throwing all Jews into the mix when you’re criticizing a government, government policy and an army, is throwing Jews into a medieval trope of baby killers and blood libel. It’s effectively blood libel. And there are far too many intelligent people around the world that are pushing these very, very dangerous tropes.

What I think has been a big wake-up call in America and around the world and in Great Britain, and I’m sure in Europe, and it’s going to be an even bigger wake-up call, is that when anti-Jewish hatred, antisemitism comes from the hard left, it’s very, very confusing. Number one, because the left see themselves as good, progressive, in some cases pious. And to quote Jeremy Corbyn, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” But there was vernacular and a blind spot to antisemitism that they either willingly choose not to see, or as they would say, “Oh, it’s an unconscious bias,” but if you keep pointing it out enough to people and they’re conscious of it, then it’s just a bias.

I’m now feeling at times that I’m seeing it real time in front of my very eyes that people have managed to dehumanize us to the point that the ripping apart of the Bibas babies who were taken from their kibbutz didn’t seem to touch the side of many influencers. There was almost a feeling of, “Well, the kids at the Nova Festival, they were Israeli, what do you expect?” That’s what I was getting from a lot of my progressive friends. And that’s really depressing.

Jay Ruderman:

It is depressing. And I see people… I see Jews who are afraid to speak up because of concern about how it will impact their career. How are you so courageous in speaking up? Because you have a career and you’re working and you’re an actress, and aren’t you ever worried about like, “Well, there’ll be backlash against me and it’ll affect me?”

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

Well, it goes back to… I had a long time to think about this. At the time when I was one of the only voices in my industry calling out Jeremy Corbyn and his followers and all the antisemitism that was bleeding out. And I got myself into trouble, I tweeted something which I made a mistake about and ended up having to apologize for that. And that was more about not understanding how social media worked, but on the whole my advocacy… What do they say? “Activists are born, they’re not made.”

And I just felt when I was seeing the abuse and misogyny, particularly on the left towards Jewish women in the Labour Party, such as our very brave Jewish MPs like Luciana Berger and Joan Ryan and Margaret Hodge, there was so much misogyny and I just was looking for the grownups to come in and say something. And the grownups in my industry as well as in the political sphere, and then I suddenly couldn’t keep silent any longer.

I remember sitting and dropping my daughter at school and seeing that the woman who had spray-painted [inaudible 00:09:48] Warsaw Ghetto wall, had spray-painted it with “Free Gaza.” This was years ago. Long before this war. Long before the terrorist attack by Hamas. And she’d been invited to speak at the Labour Party conference, at an adjunct to the Labour Party conference.

And I remember putting out there saying, “Wow, there’s one surviving wall in the Warsaw Ghetto. My family died in the Warsaw Ghetto. This woman has effectively spray-painted the grave of mine and many, many people’s families and has been dignified with a platform at the Labour Party Conference. This is not right.” And the abuse… I got huge abuse from Labour Party politicians, from Labour Councillors, thousands and thousands, “Every member of your family deserves to die to atone for one Palestinian baby. The Holohoax. There was no such thing as a Holocaust. The numbers don’t add up. F*** off you Jewish whore.”

And I could see this misogyny and Jewish hatred that was running alongside Corbyn’s campaign. And I’m not saying that Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite, but he seemed to attract a lot of antisemitic vernacular. So then the next thing I found was that I was suddenly in the middle of a political storm. I was getting phone calls by leading members of the Labour Party, the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats. I suddenly found myself a voice of activism, so I call myself an accidental activist, and it was really brave, I have to say, because at the time nobody else was really saying it, and particularly in my industry. So I was then discovered that I was getting lots and lots of comments behind the scenes from people in my industry saying, “You are so brave. You’re so brave. I believe every word you’re saying, but I couldn’t do it. Keep going.”

And I could have lost my career. I could have lost my livelihood and I could have lost everything. But there was a point where I thought actually what I want to say and acting like a lightning rod for all this Jew hate will be worth it because it means that on my social media timeline, people could actually see real time so much Jew hate coming towards me that it became impossible to deny or say it wasn’t happening. And I just stood firm. And as an actress, they thought that my MO was to be liked and loved and they thought they could frighten me off with sexual threats and physical threats and intimidation and threats of cancellation.

And I just stood firm and courage calls to courage everywhere, and I found more and more people through seeing what was going on on my timeline and seeing the kind of hate that was coming my way, a lot of people joined the fight. And I have to say, as horrible as it has been… When I was doing the Merchant of Venice, which was in the West End, but it was touring around the country and at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the time of October the 7th, I had to have security 24/7 because of threats. And I have always now when I’m doing a public facing thing, there has to be security. It is so normalized to me. But it’s crazy that it has become normalized. I ended up becoming that Jewish voice that said, “I’m not going to be silenced.” So I know I wasn’t canceled. My career has gone from strength to strength, and I think that I now work with people who may not agree with me, but definitely admire my courage for carrying on doing what I’ve done.

I try and work with people who I align with, not on a political level, but on a courage level. And I think the work that I do has to have some meaning, one for the meal, one for the real, and I try and do one for the real, which has meaning. I try and do work at least a couple of times which brings in my activism with being able to write about what matters to me and also about bringing communities together. And I found that there’s now… I have a huge number of allies and a lot more people are standing up. And my bubba always said, “When they’re coming to burn your village and the neighbors aren’t going to come and help you, you have to stand for yourself.” Because if we don’t stand for ourselves and we don’t advocate for ourselves, nobody else is going to do it. And we have to be brave enough to say, “That is hypocritical. That is wrong. And that is dehumanizing us. And that is antisemitic.” Because we’re not all… All Jews are not white, and all Jews are not rich, and all Jews are not globalizing colonialists.

Jay Ruderman:

But I have dealt with a friend of mine, Julianna Margulies, who does TV and movie and theater. There was an attempt to cancel her which was not successful. But I know because she’s a friend of mine that it was a traumatic experience for her. And many people who speak up, Debra Messing, Jerry Seinfeld, have gone through traumatic incidents where they’re-

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

Amy Schumer.

Jay Ruderman:

… heckled at public events. Exactly.

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

But you see, this is the point that we shouldn’t… You wouldn’t heckle an LGBT actor who is speaking up on LGBT rights. Nobody should be heckling a Chinese actor holding them responsible for the Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs. We shouldn’t be holding our Iranian actors to account for what the theocracy and the Ayatollahs are doing. So therefore, when we advocate very understandably for our people who were murdered, our hostages who were taken, and most of the people who are advocating come from a left-wing progressive background, we should not be canceled. And there should be a great big arm… Susan Sarandon should be throwing her lovely feminist sisterhood arm around Julianna Margulies and Amy Schumer and Debra Messing saying, “I hear your pain. I understand your pain. We are all on the same side.” Yeah, I feel sorry for the American Jews because you didn’t see it coming. I think we’ve always had it slightly surrounding us, and we know it, particularly since the Corbyn leadership of the Labor Party. We saw what it was like on the left amongst our progressive friends.

Jay Ruderman:

I think we’re learning… I think it is shocking because I think we lived in the golden age of Jews in America. I want you to talk a little bit about Merchant of Venice 1936 and what that play is about and how you were able to take the character of Shylock and make it into a character that is a woman. And then how you based that decision and where you drew your inspiration.

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

Merchant of Venice, I think has been the moment in my career, I think of my life because it managed to pull together my activism, my childhood trauma about the Holocaust, antisemitism, and my desire to bring people together and turn it into a very potent piece of theater that was punchy, sexy, short, and very accessible. I have always hated the Merchant of Venice. I think it’s responsible for… There are two tropes in English literature about Jews. One is Fagin out of Dickens, and one is Shylock, the money-grabbing Jew who loves his money more than his daughters and wants to take a pound of flesh off the good Christian. So it’s a difficult play. When I was taught it at school, and it was taught very, very badly back in the Jurassic Age, and I don’t think it’s changed today, we were never taught it through the prism of anti-Jewish hatred or prejudice.

Portia was the heroine, sort of the Christian Jewish woman that dresses as a man and saves Antonio from the evil Jew. And I always wondered what would happen to this play if, rather than taking it out of the canon… As people like Juliet Stevenson and others were saying, “It’s a very problematic play, therefore let’s not perform it anymore.” I think rather than taking things away from our history that we don’t like, we have to contextualize it. And I was thinking, “Well, it’s a horrible play, but what could make it accessible?” And I’ve always wondered if you turn Shylock into an immigrant woman with her one daughter, it becomes a very different relationship to a controlling father and his one daughter, Jessica, who he doesn’t want to marry a non-Jew. And then I was thinking about all the tough, strong Jewish matriarchs that were in my family.

My bubba, my great-grandmother, Annie Donoff, came over here at 14 on the boat. She lived in the east end of London. She slept on the floor of a factory. She lived in the slums of the east end of Cable Street. She was a communist. She was a very strong activist. Her and her husband, who was also a Russian émigré from the village next door, they were part of forming the Labour Party. Her Judaism was so important to her, but she loved her adopted country. She called England the Golden Medina, and she stood in 1930s on the front line at the Battle of Cable Street against Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists who marched on the Jewish entity as his great friend Hitler had taught him to do with his own private army of his black shirts.

And my bubba stood there with all the other neighbors, the working-class Irish, the working-class English, the Somali sailors, the small Afro-Caribbean community and these ordinary heroes from all over the country came together and said, “If you come for the Jews, you come for us all.” And they stood together, 30,000 of them on the front line. And my bubba was there overturning milk floats, and they were throwing marbles at the fascists and the police that were protecting the fascists. And it was a civil rights moment.

So I thought, “What happens if I take Shylock and I turn her into an amalgam of these tough, strong women lending money under the table of her pawn-broking business on in Cable Street in 1936 on the eve of the Battle of Cable Street? And I turn my Antonio into a Oswald Mosley upper-class acolyte, and I turned my Venetian aristocrats into these upper-class followers who loved Oswald Mosley and actually loved Hitler and sort of found the idea of blaming the Jew for all the fact that their houses were crumbling and the international Jew for everything very attractive?”

And then I thought, “Well, what happens if I also take our Porsche and I turn her into the Diana Mitford character, the upper class beautiful Diana Mitford who married Oswald Mosley at Goebbels’s house where Hitler was a witness who was an outright fascist and antisemite till the day she died?” And this became a very potent brew, and the RSC allowed us to workshop it. So I was able to reclaim my family history of a tough, strong immigrant woman who faced a lot of antisemitism and misogyny, and I put her in her little home on Cable Street, and I put the Venetian aristocrats as part of the English aristocrats that supported Mosley, and were going down into Cable Street and beating up the Jews and [inaudible 00:21:27]. And through this production, we cut a film together… I found a film and lots of footage where we showed real-life footage that went all the way through of headlines and footage of fascism and anti-Jewish hatred during that play.

And together it made a very potent brew and it worked. And I’m very proud to say that we sold out all over the country twice. I think the word “130% of the box office” was thrown my way, although I’m not a proper producer, but it did very well. But most importantly, I was able to use this production to tie it in with an organization called Stand Up to Racism, where we went into a lot of schools and a lot of communities with the RSC’s help. We made an online world that explained the background of the Merchant of Venice, the antisemitism of the Merchant of Venice, because it’s a play that pushes antisemitic tropes, the story of the Battle of Cable Street. And there’s this incredible… If people want to go and have a look at it, it’s merchantofvenice.com. Go online and you’ll see this world explode for you.

And I was able to hold many, many Q&As around the country to predominantly non-Jewish audiences, to many, many Muslim audiences. We did a lot of work with the Roman Egyptian community. We did a lot of work with, like I say, with schools where I was able to go in and say, “Take the word Jew out of this play.” “Hands up, who comes from an immigrant background?” “Who’s got a strong mother, daughter, sister, auntie?” Hands would go up. “Imagine this was your grandmother standing up for you in the court case and desperate to give you a better life.” And it just managed to bring about the discussion that our communities of immigrants, and I think it would do very well in America, which is a country built on immigration, is that our experiences may be slightly different, but our stories are the same.

It takes a strong mother to bring a family out of a country and to keep that family together and able to adapt to a new country. It takes a strong mother to keep the values of that family alive. And it takes a tough, strong, maybe dislikable woman… Because Shylock isn’t particularly likable. But you understand the way that she is. And it’s not just a Jewish story in our version. It can speak to lots of immigrants. And I think it brought communities together. And I think that this production did a hell of a lot of good of explaining what antisemitism looked like long before Israel and explained what misogyny looked like to other communities. And an outsider, tough, strong woman is not always the adopted country’s most favorite woman. And I think that’s why I got the MBE.

Jay Ruderman:

I have to, again, get back to your fortitude because as you were doing this play, you had to take extra security to leave the theater. There were groups waiting for you outside the theater, and yet you didn’t cower, which I think is a character in activism that is needed. And I think that not everyone has that.

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

I think with activism, I didn’t feel I had a choice and I didn’t just have security when I was leaving and coming into the building, we had to have security all around the stage because part of our play is we were reenacting a bit of the Battle of Cable Street at the end, and it was possible to access onto the stage. So we had security all the way around the theater, everywhere we went.

And I did keep having to pinch myself saying, “I’m a Jewish actress, putting on the Merchant of Venice, trying to fight antisemitism in 1923, 4, and 5, as opposed to Berlin in 1938.” It was crazy. The meta-ness of it was mad. I don’t know why I’ve got the fortitude. I think it just comes back to that early trip to Yad Vashem of just saying, “Not on my watch.” And I feel like there’s a whole army behind me of Jews and non-Jews alike who’ve been incredible allies because people have to recognize what is legitimate criticism and activism and what bleeds into antisemitism. And that is my bottom line.

Jay Ruderman:

I would just tell you in Twitter… A lot of people have fled Twitter. They’re like, “It’s out of control. There’s antisemitism.” And yet you stick to Twitter and you don’t shy away from it. So I think that there’s something that you’re doing that you’re like, “To hell with the trolls and what I’m going to get. I’m strong enough and I believe strong enough in my position and my ability to speak out that I’m going to stay there and I’m going to fight.”

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

I think you are right. I think that’s exactly it. Back in the day, people were saying, “Well, why are you staying on Twitter?” And it was like, because it’s a battleground. Because it’s an echo chamber battleground and it needs to have dissenting voices. My industry is… I wouldn’t say that the entertainment industry is full of courageous people. I think it’s full of a lot of lemmings that follow the crowd that are very nervous to make autonomous decisions and they look to see where the group is heading and what the group think is telling them. And they get very nervous of people that don’t follow the group think and similarly on Twitter, but it’s still a battleground nonetheless, because journalists are lazy and news cycles are often dictated by what is trending on social media. And I still maintain that Twitter is still a strong place where news people will go to see what is trending and what the debate is.

Unfortunately, the debate is mainly led by trolls, bots and organized, paid-for propaganda. But I think it’s important that we stay on social media and that we fight because it is still a place where the voice can be heard and it can cut through and it can cut through in numbers. And I would beg Julianna and many and the others to do whatever they can to stand strong to who they are because I can sleep at night despite the threats and despite the fears of… Actually I don’t fear being canceled anymore. I actually think I’ve gone beyond that and I think I work enough and I do the work that I want to do and I’m able to create my own work. And it’s made me a better performer, a better writer, a better everything.

But I would beg you, don’t they want us to be silent? They want us to be frightened, and they want us to be full of shame. Don’t let them. If our background has taught us anything, if we do not advocate for ourselves, no one else will do it. We teach them how they can treat us.

Jay Ruderman:

So powerful. And Tracy-Ann, I really want to thank you for your advocacy, for standing up, for what you’ve done in terms of talking about antisemitism being courageous to be out there. And I wish you to go from strength to strength because I find that you are unique and powerful and I’m proud to have had this time with you.

Tracy-Ann Oberman:

Thank you. Really enjoyed it.

Jay Ruderman:

Thank you for being part of the All About Change community. We aim to spark ideas for personal activism, helping you find your pathway to action beyond awareness. So thank you for investing your time with us, learning and thinking about how just one person can make the choice to build a community and improve our world. I believe in the power of informed people like you to drive real change. And I know that what we explored today will be a tool for you in that effort.

All right, I’ll see you in two weeks for our next conversation, but just one small ask. Please hit subscribe and leave us a comment below. It lets us know that you value this content and it supports our mission to widely share these perspectives. If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out this next video. I chose it for you and I know you’re going to enjoy it. I’m Jay Ruderman. Let’s continue working towards meaningful change together.

Today’s episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation.