In an interview published last week, Juliet Stevenson and her husband are all too comfortable using their connection to the Holocaust to call Israel ‘genocidal’
July 14, 2025 10:05
The best parodies – especially the best self-parodies – work so well because no one involved has any idea that they are parodying themselves or anyone else. Any half decent writer, for example, can send up the caricature ‘luvvie’ actor who thinks their ability to read someone else’s words with dramatic pauses and tonal inflections gives them a special insight into the human condition and world affairs.
But only those who are seeking to write an important piece about how serious people deal with issues can provide a truly great parody. Which is why an interview in Saturday’s Guardian – of course it was in the Guardian! – with the actress Juliet Stevenson (a living, breathing self-parody of the concerned thesp) and her husband, “the anthropologist, film-maker and writer Hugh Brody”, was such a model of its kind.
The interviewer, Nadia Khomami, goes in with unintentional parody guns blazing right from the start, telling us that “the fight for peace and justice in Palestine is something that has defined the couple’s relationship for 32 years, particularly because Brody is Jewish and the son of a Holocaust survivor.”
Let’s leave hanging that first masterpiece of parody - that their relationship is defined not by, oh I don’t know, love, companionship or even a joint mortgage but by the fight for peace and justice in Palestine – and focus on the lower hanging parodical fruit. Because there is no greater parody in existence than the “As a Jew” who thinks their Judaism gives them licence and cover to say whatever they wish about their fellow Jews and Israel, itself brilliantly parodied in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question by ASHamed Jews, an anti-Zionist group which meets fortnightly in the Groucho Club.
But Brody does not just have the licence of being a Jew, he has the AsaJew slam dunk: the Holocaust. His mother “knew the Freuds” in Vienna, he tells us, and in 1938 she left Vienna for the UK. Every AsaJew knows that playing the Holocaust card sprinkles the Free Palestine rhetoric with gold dust. It has become the perfect AsaJew prop: I AM THE SON OF A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR SO YOU WILL LISTEN TO MY SUPERIOR MORALITY. That its use displays, rather, a grotesque willingness to utilise the murder of six million Jews as a political tool is irrelevant; it has now become that tool.
That it is just another means of universalising the Holocaust, decoupling it from antisemitism and the specific historical targeting of Jews for extermination is equally irrelevant. It is a tool.
Khomami then flows straight into this peach: “All of this contributes towards the couple’s commitment to the Palestinian cause. Stevenson and Brody have never given an interview together, but the escalating crisis in the Middle East has compelled them to move beyond artistic power couple and into the far more risky territory of campaigning.”
Are you not as awed as I am by the sheer bravery of Stevenson and Brody? Talking to the Guardian about their support for Palestine. That takes real guts. Of all the audiences she could have chosen she has gone for the really hard option – the Guardian. And not just talking anywhere, but “from her kitchen table in north London, where she’s sitting with her husband” as Khomami writes. The courage! The daring!
Juliet knows how brave she is being, in voicing her support for Palestine. Does she ever fear the repercussions of her activism on her career, the interviewer asks? “I do, as do my kids. But I just don’t feel like I’ve got a choice. Does my career really matter, alongside what’s going on in Gaza?” How can we not be in awe of her risking her career for Palestine. Although perhaps we’d best pass over the very first paragraph of the interview, in which we are told: “When the veteran actor is not gracing screens or on a stage somewhere, she’s out on the streets brandishing a placard or giving speeches about human rights, gender equality and the Palestinian right to self-determination.” So she has spent her entire career campaigning for Palestine, with zero impact on her employability. But heh, the bravery of it!
Oh but it’s worse than you think, what Stevenson and Brody have to think about around their kitchen table in north London. “There have been some very difficult conversations around this kitchen table.” There are, you see – how can it be so? – people out there who think anti-Zionism can sometimes slip into antisemitism. “This equation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has been a very difficult thing for me and many others,” Brody tells the interviewer “It’s an absurdity and an ideological trap. It lays the foundation for a whole new kind of antisemitism. My view of Israel evolves, my relationship to Zionism changes, but my Jewishness hasn’t changed. That’s fixed.” You think?
Hugh shares with us his view – have a guess, go on - that Israel is – yes, you guessed right - now the genocidal state. And remember, he is the son of a survivor so he knows whereof he speaks. “That war has grown into a genocide and a point comes where the silence must be broken. The crimes have to be challenged.” But he is doing this for Israel. Because – thank you Hugh for your concern, the burden of saving Israel from itself must be so heavy – “If we care for the safety and survival of Israel, all the more reason to protest as loudly as possible against its current regime.” He is doing it for Israel. Can’t you people see that?
Stevenson and Brody are, of course, entitled to their views. Their ideas are as valid as anyone’s in a democracy. But when you hawk your genealogy around as ballast to a view that labels a war against genocidal terrorist organisation as being itself genocidal, and which universalises the Shoah to support your politics, then you move from reasoned discussant to purveyor of poison.
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