(Jewish Group) In London, an antisemitism scandal has sparked a play about antisemitism.

[Behind the Aegis]

In London, an antisemitism scandal has sparked a play about antisemitism. Is it helping?

If you linger outside the Royal Court Theatre after a performance of Jonathan Freedland’s “Jews. In Their Own Words,” you’ll hear some ordinary post-theater chatter. Friends compare notes and ask after each other’s families. People discuss whether they ought to grab a drink.

But, almost inevitably, there’s also someone in the crowd speaking quietly, just to a friend, about the antisemitism they’ve experienced in their lives.

After one preview, a group of women in their 70s or 80s approached Freedland, 55, a journalist by trade. One embraced him. When she was 11, she said, she was playing a sport at school and scored a goal.

“Suddenly a girl, who she thought was a great friend of hers, turned on her and called her a ‘dirty Jew,’” Freedland said. “She hadn’t told that story before. Her friends — old friends — hadn’t heard it.”

After several years of bruising high-profile battles over antisemitism in the United Kingdom, Freedland said over an early dinner in Sloane Square, the posh West London plaza on which the Royal Court sits, he’s seen the play give Jews the sense of being in a space where it feels safe to “trade stories of antisemitism.” For some, like that older woman, that experience has proved “quite cathartic.”

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