{"id":184208,"date":"2026-04-03T05:11:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T05:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/184208\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T05:11:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T05:11:10","slug":"elliot-levey-on-the-giant-gulf-between-london-and-new-york-when-it-comes-to-being-a-jewish-actor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/184208\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliot Levey on the Giant Gulf Between London and New York When It Comes to Being a Jewish Actor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Elliot<\/a>Elliot Levey
(\u00a9 Emilio Madrid)<\/p>\n

Elliot Levey is fascinated by the contrast between London and New York, and the way each city sees him. Back home in the UK, Levey says he\u2019s most often viewed, first and foremost, as a Jewish actor. In New York, however, where he is making his Broadway debut in Giant<\/a> at the Music Box Theatre, he\u2019s struck to find himself seen simply as an actor.<\/p>\n

That distinction marks an unexpected turning point for Levey, who has won two Oliver Awards for playing Jewish men in vastly different circumstances but who are united by the way the world responds to them. In Rebecca Frecknall\u2019s revival of Cabaret, he played the fictional Herr Schultz, the German-Jewish fruit vendor whose faith in assimilation ultimately leads to his doom. In Mark Rosenblatt\u2019s Giant, Levey plays Tom Maschler, the real-life literary titan tasked with keeping the peace during a contentious meeting with his anti-Zionist, allegedly antisemitic client, Roald Dahl. Through these roles, Levey has theatrically explored how Jewish identity is perceived, understood, and misconstrued, both onstage and off.<\/p>\n

Levey says the otherness he experiences in New York is a lot less prevalent than it is in the UK, where the Jewish community is small enough (0.5 percent of the population) to seem almost exotic. Levey recalls being in a play called Monkey at the Young Vic in 2001, \u201cand most of the reviews referred to my Judaism,\u201d he says. \u201cI was the monkey, and they\u2019d say things like \u2018the Semitic Simeon.\u2019 As a young actor, when you think you can play anything, I thought, \u2018Oh, my God, I\u2019m the Jew.\u2019 And I\u2019ve embraced it. It\u2019s paying for my electricity and my food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here in the Big Apple, it has proved to be another story. \u201cAfter the show last night, I was signing something and somebody said, \u2018Are you Jewish?\u2019 and I burst out laughing. I\u2019ve never been asked this question, I think, in my life. It\u2019s so\u2014I don\u2019t want to say thrilling because I don\u2019t want to sound like I\u2019m some self-hating bastard\u2014but this is a Jewish town.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"[L<\/a>Aya Cash, John Lithgow, Elliott Levey, and Rachael Stirling in Giant
(\u00a9 Joan Marcus)The contrasts in perception date back to his youth. Levey grew up in the 1970s in an \u201cuncharacteristically orthodox family\u201d in Leeds, a distinctly un-Jewish town (the current Jewish population there numbers roughly 6,000). He went to boarding school at Clifton College in Bristol, which, at that point, still maintained a dedicated Jewish living facility (it has since closed, but Clifton remains the only non-Jewish school in the UK to have its own onsite synagogue and Torah scrolls). \u201cOn its charter, it was described as a boarding house for Englishmen of Hebraic descent, which is the most brilliantly English euphemistic way of saying posh Yids. Basically, we may as well have worn yellow stars. It was nuts.\u201d He found a similar atmosphere at Oxford, where he studied philosophy.<\/p>\n

During those years, Levey encountered what Americans might be tempted to call a wave of antisemitism but what was merely a product of the culture. \u201cI had an English master that would openly call me the Jew when we were studying Oliver Twist. At Oxford, in my first week, I was in a three-person tutorial, and the professor said, \u201cAh, you must be Levey, judging by your facial features.\u2019 I\u2019m embarrassed to say it, but at the time, it was sort of affectionate. I know that Americans just think that\u2019s crazy, that it\u2019s some form of self-hatred, and it really wasn\u2019t. But I\u2019m not sure New York Jews would take those bantery comments on the chin without a fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

His lived experiences echo through the roles that Levey has taken on in recent years. Between Cabaret and Giant, he appeared in the West End revival of C.P. Taylor\u2019s Good as Maurice, the Jewish best pal of a German literature professor who becomes an SS officer and ignores his friend\u2019s plea for help to leave the country.<\/p>\n

Thematically, you can connect these three characters, though the real-life Tom Maschler is perhaps the luckiest: he survived. Born in Berlin in 1933 to Austrian-Jewish parents, the Maschlers fled from Vienna to the United Kingdom after the Anschluss. As an adult, he would go on to acquire and publish works like A Movable Feast, Catch-22, and One Hundred Years of Solitude as head of the publishing house Jonathan Cape.<\/p>\n

\"Elliot<\/a>Elliot Levey as Maurice in the 2022 West End revival of C.P. Taylor\u2019s Good at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
(\u00a9 Johan Persson)<\/p>\n

In Giant, Maschler finds himself navigating a volatile confrontation between client Roald Dahl and Jessie Stone, a fictional Jewish-American book sales rep played by Aya Cash, over comments Dahl made about Israel after it bombed Beirut in 1982. While Stone confronts Dahl directly, Maschler opts to sidestep the bigotry he has historically encountered to avoid the consequences of challenging it. \u201cYou just ignore it,\u201d say Levey\u2019s Maschler. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be friends with someone who \u2026 Fundamentally hates me.\u201d John Lithgow\u2019s fire-breathing Dahl snarls, \u201cIf I\u2019m an anti-Semite, then what are you, Tom? A house Jew, I suppose.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Levey, his characters are echoes of people he knows in real life, the \u201cfellow kvetching Jews\u201d who make up his WhatsApp chat groups. \u201cMaschler is there. Herr Schultz is certainly there on some of them. At the moment in England, Maurice from Good is the one saying, \u2018I\u2019m not mad here. This is going very, very wrong.’\u201d<\/p>\n

But his conversations in other groups evoke the tensions that Rosenblatt explores in the play: if you\u2019re against the existence of a Jewish state, does that automatically make you an antisemite? And if not, why have the two become inextricably linked, especially in 2026? Levey notices that several of his relationships are deteriorating because of it. These are \u201cfellow left-leaning, liberal people whose despair and, let\u2019s face it, hatred of Israel is becoming incredibly compromising for friendships. You and I both know of many people who have just gone down the rabbit hole with a fixed idea: there\u2019s some goodies and there\u2019s some baddies, and goodbye, Elliot. It\u2019s hugely depressing. I\u2019m not asking you to defend Israel. Pursue your views. Let\u2019s all just be more rigorous in checking our facts than we ever have been in our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the glowing reception of Giant in New York, and especially the lack of descriptive anthropology about his performance, are deeply personal for Levey. \u201cLook, I was very happy at school to have my special ghetto tie, but it\u2019s really nice when the ghetto is the greatest city on earth. I\u2019m getting handshakes like I\u2019ve just done my Bar Mitzvah piece and I\u2019m walking off the bima. I feel\u2026well, I could cry. There\u2019s no other way of saying it.\u201d In New York, he\u2019s seen not as a Jewish actor, but an actor who is Jewish\u2014a giant distinction.<\/p>\n

\"5629\"<\/a>Elliot Levey in Cabaret as Herr Schultz
(\u00a9 Marc Brenner)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elliot Levey (\u00a9 Emilio Madrid) Elliot Levey is fascinated by the contrast between London and New York, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184209,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-184208","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-headlines","10":"tag-new-york-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184208\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}