Enough with the gloom, Jewish art should be more joyous

Most of the stories I’ve listed here are productions I’ve seen and loved myself. Of them, Good is the furthest from being an exclusively “Jewish” story — like the many other Holocaust dramas that C P Taylor’s 1981 play helped spawn, its primary focus is the corruption of a man who becomes a Nazi, although it has a key Jewish character. These all are artistic creations of merit — and of course, their stories matter.

But few of these tales show even a hint of Jewish joy. The Orthodox escape tales in particular are misery memoirs, reaffirming for gentiles that Jewish life is full of angst and constraint. In the current artistic climate, this actually creates a knock-on misery effect for Jewish actors.

The principle that only minority actors who share an “identity” with their characters should take on particular roles is becoming more and more entrenched, although as the JC has pointed out, that provision has only slowly been applied to Jews. (Too “white” and too “privileged” to need minority provisions… we’ve heard it all before.)

Slowly but surely, however, that is changing. Increasingly, Jewish actors are being cast in Jewish roles; though sometimes, in the case of unimaginative casting agents who see actors only through the lens of their identity, exclusively in Jewish roles.

As a result, some Jewish actors have told me they feel they’re on a conveyer belt of depressive supporting roles: concentration camp survivor, oppressed strictly Orthodox housewife, ghost from a pogrom. They long to play a role with a little laughter, whether in a role that represents their heritage or not. Jews just wanna have fun.

One answer is to tell more joyous Jewish stories. Pickle is a good example, although Segal’s “happy ending” — finding delight and a place in her community by having fun at a Purim party — felt a little rushed and obvious to me.

There are also great intra-generational Jewish family sagas to be told. Some, if they are stories of families long-based outside Europe, don’t even have to fixate on the Holocaust. In a few weeks, Sam Mendes’ hit show The Lehman Trilogy returns to London. The play pins part of the blame for the collapse of the titular financial institution on the Lehman family’s progressive abandonment of their Jewish religious roots and their immigrant heritage. (I did wonder, when I first saw it, if the playwright was deliberately trying to prevent any contamination by old antisemitic tropes of Jewish financial immorality, with his repeated stress on the moral probity with which the Jewish tradition ethically regulated the early stages of the Lehman business. If so, it worked.)

It’s a great example of a play in which the story of a Jewish family is used to illuminate broader questions about the world that we all share. Now, thankfully, it has been seen by thousands and thousands of non-Jewish audience members.

The ghettoisation of Jewish narratives and Jewish audiences is no good for anybody.

As Dara Horn’s book of the same title reminds us, people love dead Jews. Stories about the Holocaust (good, dead Jews), or stories in which a woman (good Jew) flees from a Chasidic community (bad Jews) avoid confronting gentile audiences with the complex reality of most Jewish lives.

So well done to Deli Segal and all her fellow Jewish artists making change. Here’s to more Jewish joy on stage and screen.