Jewish actress and playwright Tracy-Ann Oberman, who has suffered waves of antisemitic abuse on social media, has revealed how she hugged one of her online trolls who approached her to make peace after a show.
Oberman, a JC contributor, has long been a powerful voice for the Jewish community and received an MBE for her work combating Jew-hate earlier this year.
Speaking to the Telegraph ahead of her upcoming role starring as Geri Essendine in a new production of Noël Coward's play Present Laughter, Oberman said that one of her online abusers came up to her after a performance in The Holy Rosenbergs earlier this year.
Oberman said: “She was crying. She said, ‘I just wanted to say I’d built up in my head what you were like. We thought you were the enemy’. And I said, ‘I thought you were the enemy…’ I just grabbed her hands and gave her the biggest hug. How healing is that?
“I never want another actor to think they’ve got to hide their Star of David because they’re going to be pinned up against a wall and given a political purity test,” she added.
“We’ve just got to be able to dig deep and accept political differences and get on with making fabulous work.”
Oberman said she had a further positive experience while working on The Holy Rosenbergs, Ryan Craig’s play about a North London Jewish couple whose son has died while fighting with the Israeli Defence Forces.
She said: “I’ll tell you something that was really powerful to me; the actors all came to this piece with very different political views. Some of them were massive Corbynites. Some of them were friends with people who had actively trolled me on social media.
“We are now living in such a binary world where you can’t even be in a rehearsal room any more without it turning into a battlefield. There was a lot of debate about the text. And it turned out to be the most incredible experience for all of us because there was a little foursome of us with very diverse political views, and we just fell in love.”
Speaking to the JC after receiving an MBE in February, Oberman said: “I felt honoured to receive this for the work that I have done trying to combat antisemitism and trying to bring communities together and also, for working alongside the Holocaust Education Trust and others to never let people forget the horrors.”
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