![]() ![]() ![]() Around that time, his name was featured on a white supremacist website, which in the late 1990s was a single page. In “Saving Private Ryan,” Goldberg’s Jewish soldier character taunted Nazi prisoners by waving his Jewish star at them. ![]() “I think in many ways I’ve been sort of forced, and then sort of proudly have come to own my Jewish identity,” he said, “and in the last several years and I’ve been on the receiving end of just an incredible amount of hate on social media.” Goldberg added that he has a photo album on his phone titled “Nazis,” featuring “screenshots of just the most horrific shit you can imagine.” And the reactions he has gotten have not always been as positive. But he’s mindful of the idea of being typecast as a “neurotic Jew” or “nice Jewish boy,” both of which he sees as tropes. Goldberg said he has gotten mostly positive reactions over the years from people who recognize him from his Jewish roles. “Grappling with all that as an actor has made that all the more confusing, how to balance all of that,” he added. “I think this is the thing which I grappled with, and I think many Jewish people grappled with - which is how they see themselves, and where they fit in in a world where people have so many different ideas about what it is to be a Jewish person.” “I certainly thought of myself as a Jewish person,” Goldberg said. Goldberg, like his character, has one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent he describes his mother as a “hardcore disavowed Catholic.” He went to Jewish day school in Los Angeles from first through sixth grades, and like his character Harry, he drifted away from Jewish education prior to having a bar mitzvah. ![]() “Particularly having explored this terrain in the past.” “I found myself being much more sort of moved affected by it than maybe I thought I would,” Goldberg said. At the same time, she added, they wanted to get right the way Harry would behave, as someone who hadn’t been inside a synagogue or the Jewish community for many years. “I think one of the things that we wanted to just be mindful of is when we’re actually in a synagogue that we were getting things correct,” Yashar said. The episode was shot at a synagogue in Brooklyn - for security reasons, the team’s publicist would not identify which one - and the team consulted with a rabbi about getting the Jewish touches right. “Given just the unbelievable horrific uptick in hate crimes at large, and antisemitism in particular, it just felt like certainly my duty to go there, and also just keep it as grounded as possible,” he said. In 2017, he attempted to put together a crowdfunding campaign to produce a “Hebrew Hammer” sequel inspired by the spike in online antisemitism at the time.Īdam Goldberg in character in a video promoting a crowdfunding effort for a planned sequel to “The Hebrew Hammer.” (Screenshot from YouTube) Image by Goldberg, 52, whose extensive list of credits over the last 30 years also includes “Dazed and Confused” and a memorable guest arc on “Friends,” told JTA that, earlier in his career, he might not have been as comfortable with this sort of storyline, since it’s subject matter that he has explored before in other high-profile Jewish roles. “And obviously antisemitism is one of them.” In working on the show, “we’re really lucky and fortunate that we not only get to entertain, but we get sort of tackle… subject matters that are in the news, and, unfortunately, are part of our society,” Glass told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The episode was co-written by Glass and Ora Yashar, who are two of several Jewish writers on the show’s staff. In dealing with a rabbi (played in the episode by veteran Jewish actor Richard Masur), who tries to react to the horrific events with humor, Harry gets some surprising answers about his family’s past and reconnects, to some degree, with his mother’s faith. Harry later describes himself as “someone who’s got a history of genocide on both sides of my family.” And like a lot of Jewish Americans, he was of the belief, at least until recently, that antisemitism in everyday life was mostly a problem of the past. ![]()
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