Non-Jewish actor abused for playing Jew
BRITISH actor Eddie Marsan has responded to what he said was “relentless” abuse he has been facing online apparently for playing a Jewish character in BBC-TV’s four-part series Ridley Road.
Not Jewish himself, Marsan plays Soly Malinovsky, the leader of an anti-fascist underground movement known as the 62 Group. The series is set in Britain in the early 1960s and presents a fictionalised version of a real surge in fascism in London at the time, and the young Jewish men and women facing down the extremists.
Marsan shared screenshots of several tweets addressed to him, including one from a user who wrote, “Facts are facts Eddie, you are a crap actor and I’ll never watch sh**e with your Apartheid loving bake in it.”
“Why does the BBC do so many programmes favouring the Zionists ‘return’ and so few favouring Palestinian’s Right of Return? Just asking,” another user wrote to Marsan on Thursday.
“F**k me, this is relentless, all I did was play a Jew, I dread to think what would’ve happened if I was actually Jewish,” Marsan tweeted, noting the series was “about British Jews facing antisemitism, nothing to do with Israel or Palestine”.
He added, “But if you think they’re linked you probably think one justifies the other and the irony is, that’s exactly why Ridley Road got commissioned.”
Marsan has been outspoken against antisemitism on social media in the past.
“Antisemitism gives the myth that it’s punching up to some mythical all-powerful Jewish elite … so quite often, young people are taken in by antisemitic tropes on social media,” he said earlier this month. “They don’t see it as racism, they see it as anti-capitalist, and they feel more inclined to support it.”
Among Marsan’s other credits are Gangs of New York, Deadpool 2 and Entebbe, in which he played Shimon Peres.
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