By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, September 02, 2026
Good for Maureen Lipman.
The Jewish actress is hitting back at a fellow actor who
announced he won’t work on any project in which Lipman is involved, because
Lipman is an outspoken advocate for Jewish rights in the Holy Land. Much of her
industry sided against Israel in its defensive war against Hamas and many have
now simply made themselves opponents of Israel’s existence. The wider arts
world has done the same, abandoning artistic freedom and free speech for a
crackdown on Hamas’s vocal critics.
Maureen Lipman is one of those critics. She is 80 years
old and quite successful, and therefore she doesn’t fear repercussions for her
stubborn belief that Israel exists and will continue to do so.
And that is the real value in her comments: The easy
thing to do—the empty act with zero consequences—is to pile on Israel. Nothing
takes less courage than being a Mark Ruffalo or a Javier Bardem—or, in this
case, Gerard McCarthy.
McCarthy was slated to be in a performance of the stage
play Right Before I Go in London’s West End. Then Lipman joined the
cast. So McCarthy quit.
“Following the announcement that Dame Maureen Lipman
would be joining the company, I privately explained that, because of views she
has publicly and repeatedly expressed regarding Israel and Palestine, I did not
feel comfortable personally promoting her involvement,” McCarthy posted on
Instagram.
The Belfast-born McCarthy’s discomfort with sharing a
stage with a proud Jewess is unfortunate, but it won’t cost him much. As Bardem
himself has boasted recently, times are good for the Hollywood Hamasniks.
McCarthy may very well have even improved his odds of getting future parts by
stomping out of a production in protest of a colleague’s religious beliefs.
Such is the current state of the arts.
For her part, Lipman says she once, 40 years ago, refused
to share a dais with Margaret Thatcher and has regretted it ever since.
McCarthy, she suggested, would do well to learn from her mistake: “I could have
sat with her and we could have talked about what we had in common as working
women. I did not have to scurry out and leave, but I did. Even now, more than
40 years on, I think about it a lot.”
Lipman encourages McCarthy to change his mind but
Palestinianism is a closed-minded ideology. McCarthy isn’t thinking
independently; he’s afraid of being part of a show that might be protested by
anti-Semites, which would therefore cast him as being on the Wrong Side of
History.
Yet while McCarthy’s opinions on the conflict are a dime
a dozen, Lipman’s aren’t. So the value in this whole incident is not that
perhaps McCarthy will become a better person and next time agree to work with a
proud Jew. One doesn’t have high hopes for the kind of person always seeking
the easy route. Instead, the value is in Lipman’s refusal to be quietly put in
her place.
“There are a lot of Jewish actors who won’t speak up for
Israel,” Lipman writes
in response. “They keep quiet. That is up to them. But I will not countenance
juvenile, immature posturing.”
Lipman “will not be bullied, nor will I allow anybody to
tell me what to think. If that affects their ability to work with me, as
opposed to convert me to their point of view, then they are lily livered.”
Indeed, cowardice can be contagious. A healthy society
needs to be able to muster a fair amount of contempt for the Peter Pannish
manboys who cannot handle behaving like an adult. It is important to say it
straight out: McCarthy is a coward and a fool. And it is just as important that
Maureen Lipman, a proud Jew being targeted by a whiny bigot, is the one to say
it.
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