THE EQUALIZER Team on the Importance of Pushing Back Against Antisemitism in ‘Never Again’

THE EQUALIZER team takes on a different kind of case on the Sunday, March 12 episode of the CBS drama, when they’re asked to look into an antisemitic hate crime.

For co-showrunner Adam Glass and writer Ora Yashar, who penned “Never Again” together, the decision to bring this kind of topic to the series came early in the planning of season 3.

“Both Ora and I are Jewish, and it was something that really came up early on,” Glass tells Give Me My Remote. “The minute we started talking about this, we knew it was something we wanted to do. And something that we wanted to do together.”

“Our people are not a monolith—we all come from different places and shapes and forms,” he continues. “I’m probably more of a traditional Ashkenazi Jew, but Ora has a completely different story of how her people got here. And yet we’re all Jews. And we feel what’s happening in the world. And we had the support not just of the room, but my co-showrunner, Joe Wilson, right from the jump: We have to talk about this and we have to sort of shine a light on it. And the great news is we have the perfect show to do that with.”

With the recent rise in hate crimes, “it’s just, in general, a scary time,” Yashar notes. “There’s kind of a joke, ‘Well, it’s never a good time for the Jews.’ But it feels just especially [true] right now. One of the things we talked about a lot is these fears that our parents and our grandparents had and we always thought, ‘Well, time is gonna pass, it’s gonna be different for us. That’s how it was for you. It’s not gonna be like that for us.’ And yet, here we are.”

“For me, this is the worst that I felt antisemitism,” she continues. “Where even my own friends are saying things, very comfortably, that maybe five, ten years ago, they wouldn’t be saying. So that really signaled to me how much things have changed and are getting worse, unfortunately.”

As the team investigates the case, Harry (Adam Goldberg) realizes this hits much closer to home than he expected.

“There’s an antisemitic attack on a synagogue,” Goldberg previews. “It starts out as some hate graffiti and it’s in Harry’s old neighborhood…He goes back to his old neighborhood, and it brings up all this stuff. He runs into his old rabbi and then [the man] ends up getting assaulted.”

Goldberg acknowledges the state of the world also led him to be more interested in telling this kind of story. “Five years ago or six years ago, I might have been somewhat more reluctant to do this, only because I kind of feel between SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and THE HEBREW HAMMER, I’ve explored this as much as I sort of need to as an actor,” he says. “But having been on the receiving end of just an insane amount of Nazi spam in social media in the last several years, in addition to the fact that there have been obviously these really heinous hate crimes committed, that I think really don’t kind of get as much attention as they deserve…I felt like it was pretty important to do it.”

“Trying to thread the needle between doing a procedural television show, and also authentic and keeping it as grounded as possible, that really just was my main sort of objective,” he continues.

The hour ends up also shedding light on Harry’s background. “What we discover about Harry is that his mom had abandoned him—that’s how he sees it—when he was young,” Goldberg previews. “And his mom was Jewish. And so he went off with his dad who was the Keshegian in the Harry Keshegian. Having disowned his mom, and feeling sort of betrayed by his mother, he ends up kind of disowning that whole kind of landscape in his past.”

In the crafting of “Never Again,” “Ora was really great about reminding us that [Harry] has two backgrounds,” Glass says. “That was something that we wanted to keep a close eye on, this other side of him—which, by the way, also has suffered a holocaust of their own.”

“He sort of makes a joke of it, which I think Harry would do,” he continues. “Which is like something I think Jews do—you sometimes have to laugh. And that’s a whole theme that’s running through this, which is like, you gotta keep your spirits up…when you’re trying to survive something…we try to find the humor in it, because it keeps happening to us.”

The team was also on the same page about having Harry’s religious sensibilities be, frankly, complex. “[The original script] had it that the rabbi hadn’t seen me since my Bar Mitzvah, and I said, ‘It might be more interesting if he didn’t have a Bar Mitzvah,’” Goldberg recalls, noting he didn’t partake in one, either. “Over the years, I’ve always felt at odds with feeling very culturally Jewish and also honoring my mother, who’s not Jewish, and that whole sort of cultural side of my family. But also keeping myself as much of a blank slate as I possibly could, as an actor. And it’s a slippery slope to sort of disowning your cultural heritage.”

“I found my way back, albeit, having been dragged through the mud a little bit in the current landscape in the last several years,” he continues. “But I think in many ways, I chose to sort of own it a little bit more and that’s what the Harry character is doing in this episode.”

Yashar has had a similar journey: “I went to Hebrew school from fifth grade through 10th grade,” she says. “I had my Bat Mitzvah; I did all those things. And at the end of the day, I didn’t feel very tied to the religious part of it. I went through this period of time when people would ask me, ‘Oh, so you’re Jewish?’ And I would say, ‘Oh, well, I’m Jewish, but I’m not religious.’ Or I would always try to add some caveats to it.”

“But I really do get to a point where I realized, no, Hitler’s Germany would make no distinction,” she continues. “They wouldn’t care. And so me saying yes, I’m Jewish actually became my way of honoring all those who had lost their lives because they were Jewish. So I made a decision [that I just say,] ‘I’m Jewish.’”

Glass, who regularly wears a Star of David, acknowledges the changing world has made him pause. While he’s never been concerned about outwardly acknowledging his Jewishness—”I’m a big guy, I’m from New York,” he jokes. “No one really messes with me.”—he does worry about his kids’ safety when they are outwardly displaying Jewish symbols and has seen others struggle to figure out how and where they fit in.

“I think that speaks to a lot of Jews who are now getting older: there’s cultural Jews, there’s religious Jews,” Glass says. “But like any group of people who don’t identify or see themselves [in a certain way], as [these real-life attacks are] starting to happen, they’re going, ‘Oh, wait, maybe I should turn around and identify more.’ Or, ‘I should find my Judaism.’ And I think Harry is on that journey.”

But the episode isn’t trying to pretend they can magically change the way the world works.

“The thing about this, of course, is that in some of these episodes, you solve a crime or you crack a case,” Goldberg notes. “In this particular instance—and some of the others that deal with more racial matters—you’re playing whack a mole. You’re just catching the people that did this particular thing; it’s a drop in an ocean of hate. Ultimately, what the episode ends up being more about is Harry’s personal journey back to kind of understanding his mom and then what I think he learns about his own Jewishness.”

One additional tease? With Robyn (Queen Latifah) now faced with losing custody of her daughter, “she’s gonna put it all on the line,” Yashar previews. “There’s nothing that will stop her. She will do whatever she can to keep Delilah with her.”

THE EQUALIZER, Sundays, 8/7c, CBS

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