Spies, Crooks and Prime Ministers: strange Zionist connections in the family and career of Helen Mirren
Controversial Anglo-Jewish actress and Zionist propagandist Maureen Lipman has ignited a row over ‘integrated casting’ – the 21st century practice of often deliberately casting actors of a different race to the characters they play.
Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle, Ms Lipman objected to Helen Mirren – a non-Jewess – having been chosen to play the part of Golda Meir, the former Israeli Prime Minister, in the new film Golda which started shooting in November 2021.
“With that I disagree,” Lipman insisted, “because the Jewishness of the character is so integral. …Perhaps you need to have some sort of panel of people who say this is not acceptable, this is acceptable.”
It’s not clear what parameters Ms Lipman expects, or whether anyone other than a Jew is allowed to define ‘acceptability’. Does she expect only religiously observant Jews to be cast as Jews? Or does the faith aspect no longer matter to a ‘modern’ Jew like Lipman? Is it a matter of culture? Or dare we suggest, a matter of race?
Ms Lipman presumably realises that not every Jewess looks as Jewish as she does. Even in Israel, some academics have argued that many ‘Jews’ are not racially Jewish at all. This dispute goes back decades and has embroiled prominent Jewish authors such as Arthur Koestler and Shlomo Sand.
By contrast even Ms Lipman might have to admit that casting an African as a Shakespearean Queen or a Wagnerian God is visibly interfering with the drama, sometimes to an absurd degree: for example when it’s important to the story that two characters are close relatives, but the director has for the sake of political correctness chosen to have them portrayed by a Negro and a Chinaman.
For most viewers, a heavily made-up Helen Mirren can be more easily made to resemble Golda Meir than a Nigerian can be made to resemble Anne Boleyn.
That’s if we assume that some degree of physical verisimilitude is an important aspect of casting. Perhaps Ms Lipman isn’t worried about that at all, and is more concerned with some less easily definable essence of Jewishness. Das Judentum im Drama, as Wagner might have put it?
Does it all come down to ancestry? Does Ms Lipman believe that in order to play the part of a Zionist ‘heroine’ such as Golda Meir, an actress should herself come from a line of similarly ‘heroic’ Jews?
In which case, we have a surprise for Ms Lipman. For it turns out that while Ms Mirren comes from a family of Russian gentiles, her close relatives had a record that Ms Lipman and her ilk might regard as ‘righteous’, even though H&D readers might have a different opinion on their merits.
At 12 noon on Monday 20th May 1940, senior MI5 officer Maxwell Knight, accompanied by a US Embassy official and two officers of Metropolitan Police Special Branch, raided a flat at 47 Gloucester Place, London. As they kicked down the door they found the flat’s occupant – US Embassy cypher clerk Tyler Kent – “in a state of undress” with a female friend, Mrs Irene Danischewsky.
Mrs Danischewsky was born Irene Mironoff in Moscow: her niece is the actress Helen Mirren.
The purpose of the raid was to discover incriminating documents that Tyler Kent had secreted in his flat, including the membership ledger of the Right Club, a secret organisation of prominent Britons who were opposed to war with Germany.
MI5’s Maxwell Knight had carefully timed his raid so as to obtain documents that would justify the immediate arrest of the Right Club’s founder, Conservative MP Capt. Archibald Maule Ramsay. MI5 feared that Ramsay and his allies were about to expose the treachery and double-dealing of Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister just ten days before the raid on Tyler Kent’s flat but whose grip on power remained weak.
Capt. Ramsay and several other anti-war politicians both in the House of Commons, House of Lords and other influential positions, had worked with Tyler Kent to obtain copies of secret communications between Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt. The point was that these coded cables proved Churchill had treacherously plotted against his predecessor Neville Chamberlain. If used wisely, this evidence could destroy Churchill’s premiership before it even began, and lead to his replacement by a more pro-Chamberlain figure who might pursue a peace settlement with Germany rather than a mutually destructive war.
The pro-war faction had to act quickly and they did. Tyler Kent’s flat was raided while Capt. Ramsay was taking an ill-advised fishing holiday in Scotland. The key members of the Right Club and allied groups were rounded up and interned without trial, including Ramsay himself. The raid also helped to embarrass (and politically cripple) US Ambassdor Joe Kennedy (father of the future US President) by obtaining evidence of his improper financial dealings. Kennedy was another important figure supporting peace with Germany and was a potential rival to Roosevelt, but the Tyler Kent raid and its consequences soon ended his political ambitions.
It’s now known that Maxwell Knight’s section in MI5 had deployed a small group of young female agents to infiltrate the network of anti-war activists that included Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff, the daughter of a former Czarist Russian naval attaché.
While I cannot yet present the full story here, I have good reason to suspect that Irene Danischewsky (Helen Mirren’s aunt) was another of Maxwell Knight’s agents. Moreover though her own father (Helen Mirren’s grandfather Pyotr Mironoff) was a Czarist diplomat who was stranded in London by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Irene had married into a very different family.
Tyler Kent’s lover Irene Danischewsky was in fact married to a Jew whose family business was suspected of acting as a front for the Soviets. By 1940 these old Bolshevik networks had become complicated. As with the ‘British Jews’ discussed in my article yesterday, some of these had at best a ‘dual loyalty’, and were fundamentally loyal to International Zionist Jewry rather than to Moscow.
The short answer is that Irene Danischewsky’s involvement with Tyler Kent at this pivotal moment in the Second World War was not a coincidence.
In this context it’s also curious (to say the least) that Helen Mirren’s other aunt – Irene’s sister Olga Mironoff – married another shady character involved in international frauds and arms deals carried out not just for profit but for the benefit of the nascent Zionist state.
This was George Dawson, a notorious figure in London organised crime during the 1940s and 1950s.
Since both her aunts were involved in some of the most mysterious and complex events of the 1940s related to Zionist criminal and intelligence networks, perhaps it’s not inappropriate that Helen Mirren has ended up portraying on screen the notorious Golda Meir, former arms dealer for Zionist terrorists and eventual warmonger Prime Minister of a terrorist state.
Maureen Lipman has her own arguably ‘racist’ objections to a Gentile being cast as a Jewess, but if she knew the full story of Helen Mirren’s family she might agree that Ms Mirren has the right pedigree for this role.