Corbyn’s trolls drove me to quit the Party my Jewish family thought would always protect them
Her forebears fought Mosley’s Blackshirts in Cable Street. Eight decades on, in a devastating interview, ex-EastEnders star Tracy-Ann Oberman reveals...
CONFRONTING social injustice, says Tracy-Ann Oberman, is hardwired into her very being. Consider her family history, laced as it is with campaigns fought in defence of cherished freedoms, and it is easy to understand why. Tracy-Ann is a successful actress, probably best known for her dramatic scene in EastEnders in which her character, Chrissie Watts, clubbed her villainous husband Dirty Den to death with an iron doorstop in an episode watched by more than 14 million people. There have been many stage and TV roles since.
But she has also bravely taken centre stage in the battle to tackle antisemitism on social media, to face down what she calls ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s army of hate-filled trolls’.
A lifelong Labour supporter, the 53-year-old turned her back on the party two years ago when it failed to revoke Ken Livingstone’s membership after he caused outraged by saying Adolf Hitler supported Zionism ‘before he went mad’.
Today, in a heartfelt interview with The Mail on Sunday, she says she believes that past generations of her Jewish family, all ideologically wedded to the Labour cause and who spoke of Britain as a land of fantastic tolerance, would be ‘horrified by what the party has become under Corbyn’.
Much of the daily abuse TracyAnn endures on Twitter is appalling. Everyone expected her to back down and withdraw as others have done. She refused.
‘ Someone has to stand up to them,’ she says. ‘I have been told on Twitter by Labour supporters that I am a rich Jew with a castle in the Dordogne where I hide my tax-evading money. Apart from anything else, I have never been to the Dordogne.
‘It was also suggested that if all my family died in the Holocaust, “why are you still alive?”
‘Another person said that every member of my family had to die in the Holocaust to atone for one Palestinian baby.’
Tracy-Ann also watched with dismay as Labour MP Luciana Berger was bullied on Twitter – experiencing both antisemitism and misogyny – and ‘hounded out of the party’. Ms Berger has since joined the Liberal Democrats, led by Jo Swinson, who Tracy-Ann is watching closely.
All this, in truth, is comparatively mild. There is much that is unrepeatably vile. Along with Countdown presenter Rachel Riley, who has accused Mr Corbyn of ‘giving a legitimate voice to Holocaust denial’, she is now taking legal action against 70 people for libel and harassment.
If at times Tracy-Ann is brought low by it all, she has only to draw succour from the past, and, in particular, from the doughty matriarchs that loom over her family story.
Her great-grandmother, Annie, for instance, remains a huge inspiration. In 1905, aged 14, Annie escaped the terrifying antiJewish pogroms in Russia and made her way to England.
On the boat to Liverpool, she met her future husband, a spirited young socialist called Isaac Donoff. He, according to family legend, was a friend of the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and fought with him against the Tsar’s oppression. Later Isaac became a cabinet-maker and high-profile trade unionist in London.
Britain at this time, Annie was fond of saying, was a ‘ golden medina’, a place where Jews could live and worship without fear. And even when they did face threats – during the 1930s, for instance, when fascism spread across Europe – the family could always rely on the Left’s support.
During The Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when East London Jews and Irish labourers forced back the march of Sir Oswald Mosley and his hated Blackshirts, the Donoffs were on the frontline. Even Annie and Isaac’s daughter Fay, then aged 14, played her part, flinging marbles under the fascists’ jackboots from the window of their tenement flat. Fay’s older brother Alfie was pushed through a shop window by one of Mosley’s men.
Tracy-Ann says: ‘Jewish people were drawn to Labour because it protected minorities – it put a protective arm around them. It was the party of tolerance, of unity and equality. But sadly that’s no longer the case.
‘Annie and Isaac would find it unfathomable to think that in 2019 I am having to fight such hatred and intimidation – and from the Left, not the far-Right.
‘ They would be horrified by some of the Nazi-like tropes and Left-wingers’ vitriol, lies and misogyny was beyond imagination language used. The politics of the Left has become so confused that I don’t know who or what it represents any more.’
Labour is under investigation by t he Equality and Human Rights Commission over claims of institutional antisemitism and that it unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish. In an open letter last week, leading figures, including writers and actors, said they would refuse to vote Labour because of it. To Tracy- Ann, their intervention came as a boon. She feels momentum is building, ‘that we are now standing shoulder to shoulder, just like in Cable Street’.
‘The support we are now getting from people in my industry – producers and casting directors, as well as fellow actors – has been magnificent,’ she says.
‘They know this comes from my heart, that I have nothing to gain from it.
‘Young people, too, stop me in the street and thank me. Some say that what I have done has made them braver. I am an actor and writer, not an activist or politician, and the fact that I am right out front and that my name has
become synonymous with this fight shocks me. Actors are meant to shut up and be decorative and get on with their jobs – you’re not meant to put yourself on the line as vocally as I have done.’
So why put herself through it? What she calls a seminal moment in her life came at the e age of four when she visited d the Yad Vashem Holocaust t memorial in Israel with her r parents. Perhaps they assumed d she was too young for any of it t to make much of an impact, but t she recalls a traumatic day and seeing a ‘mound of children’s shoes and images of bodies being put into ovens’. Over time, the memory of what she absorbed that day crystallised into something tangible: a lifelong quest to understand how it all happened.
She says: ‘That day disturbed me. It set up a lifelong desire to say never again on my watch. But not just to Jewish people, to anybody.’
Growing up, she listened awestruck to her great-grandmother Annie’ s stories of Cos sacks beheading people in her homeland and rounding up young boys for t he Russian army. Later she learned of family members murdered in the Holocaust.
Gena Turgel, who became known as the Bride of Belsen after marrying one of the soldiers who liberated her camp, was a family friend. Tracy-Ann remembers her coming to dinner and hearing stories of how she tended a dying Anne Frank.
Like so many others, her greatgrandparents came to Britain as dirt-poor immigrants who found work in the East End in the rag trade. Before her marriage, greatgrandmother Annie was forced to sleep on a factory floor. ‘So when I get these tropes about rich Jews thrown in my face, it turns my stomach,’ says Tracy-Ann.
As a student in Manchester, she was proud to support the miners’ strike. She was vaguely aware around this time that the militant wing of the Labour Party spoke of a rich cabal of Jews controlling the world. ‘This was the stuff that was mumbled into pint glasses in the corner of pubs by people who didn’t have a platform and knew that what they were saying wasn’t really acceptable,’ she says. ‘ Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, he has taken these people out of the pubs and given them a platform and allowed them to say these things without censure.’
Their bile finds expression on Twitter – a medium that TracyAnn, initially at least, seized upon with gusto. ‘It was a small, witty, fun village. For many years I never received a single piece of negativity. Then I started speaking out about antisemitism and received from Left-wing people vitriol, lies and misogyny that was beyond imagination.’
At first she assumed that these were lone voices. ‘But what we now realise is that these people are often mobilised into groups and told what to pump out. They target high-profile people like myself and Rachel in the hope that we reply to them and amplify their message.’
Politically, Tracy-Ann says she is now ‘totally homeless’.
She says :‘ This is a crucial moment for this country. It’s not just about Brexit but the future heart and soul and ethos of Britain. A vote for Jeremy Corbyn would be an endorsement of a man who has allowed so much racism to fester on his watch and who has done so little to tackle it.’
The fight goes on. Meanwhile, Tracy-Ann’s career flourishes.
She is working on a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Merchant Of Venice set on Cable Street in the 1930s and will play Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, as a matriarch based on her redoubtable great-grandmother, Annie.
Who else?