Eddie Marsan is an actor who played a Jewish character on British television. He is not Jewish. But he was attacked, vilified, and virtually hunted down because in a fictional world, he pretended to be one of us.

Eddie Marsan was never meant to become a hero fighting hatred and antisemitism. But here we are, and Eddie Marsan is still not a Jew.

One would expect the fact that Eddie Marsan is not actually Jewish would protect him from disdain, hatred, threats, intimidation, and bullying. It did not.

Jew hatred is more than skin deep. It is seeking and pervasive. It is limitless. It now seeks even the fictional Jew.

In the world of the fictional Jew, all the worst misperceptions, accusations, and justifications for hatred against us can become real. In the mind of the antisemite, we can become a perversion of Nietzsche’s ubermensch, and Platonic ideals of hate and evil. The fictional Jew can be anyone’s abomination.

Let us talk, then, about the fictional Jew. He is the hook-nosed banker, the crooked politician, the crippling oppressor, and the master of the fate of all who feel victimized. The fictional Jews are the makers of media, and the powerful, influential, privileged, dominant majority. The fictional Jew is the Hollywood elite. They control what you see, hear, watch, and believe.

As much as Eddie Marsan is actually Jewish are the true Jewish people any of those things written above.

But to the antisemite, that doesn’t matter. All of the worst lies about Jews become true. And either Marsan was believed to be Jewish because he played one on TV — which means people will buy any story they are told — or the world can no longer distinguish between reality and twisted, hateful fantasy. Either way, it’s bad for the Jews.

Now let us talk truth — about the factual Jew.

The factual Jew is a minority. A minority beset by enemies. A minority with millennia of attempted genocide by those with rabid blood lust. A minority wrestling with intergenerational trauma so pronounced that it makes it difficult for us to walk this earth without seeing monsters under the bed and within the shadows. The factual Jew lives in a world where parents must have “the talk” with their children, and where every major Jewish institution believes they must now have armed guards and metal detectors.

The factual Jew seeks to work within the Black, Brown, LGTBQ, and indigenous communities — but is denied being part of the liberation movement. We are a minority simply struggling to survive. We are common folk with common goals — health, hope, peace for their children, serenity — but are struggling against an uncommon denial of those rights by those who are most loudly proclaiming it for themselves. This is not a right or left issue, this is a human issue — denying humanity to one group for a multitude of competing and pernicious reasons.

Attempting to understand the vast gulf between truth and lie is not impossible. Consider the obvious irony that if the accusations against Jews were true, those anti-Jewish lies couldn’t spread.

If the Jews controlled the media, they would never portray themselves in the harsh, negative light we see now. Clearly, we would do a better job of hiding our proverbial fangs and horns. To ignore this laughable irony is to believe that within antisemitism there is hope. There is not.

We say, “If only the haters were educated, if only they knew our history, if only they understood our suffering, if only we reached our hands out further…”

The problem is that the majority of those who hate us know all these things — or, at the very least, have heard them. The problem is, they don’t believe them or are willfully blind. They do believe that we are capable of playing a fictional role, whereby we exaggerate our historical suffering for favor; we hide our control behind a fiction of powerlessness; and we do, indeed, dominate the world.

In the current world, the factual Jew is discredited and the fictional Jew becomes the dominant perception, and the killers become the authors of our fate.

Jews are told that we don’t count as a minority — despite chants of “Jews will not replace us” and overwhelming evidence to the contrary — and told in Hollywood and elsewhere that our stories are no longer worth telling — that they will be told about us, told purposefully to ruin all that we have achieved, and to minimize all we have helped. It’s just another version of the fictional Jew, but in today’s world, that fiction is still being accepted as truth, perhaps more vigorously than ever.

Craig Dershowitz is the Executive Director of Artists 4 Israel.

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