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Melinda Henneberger
Melinda Henneberger is a RealClearPolitics columnist based in Kansas City. She won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for commentary and was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary in 2021.
Of course you walk into Broadway’s Music Box Theater to see Giant knowing that you are going to see that nice John Lithgow in a show about children’s author Roald Dahl’s howling antisemitism; at these prices, everyone who is there very much wants to be. Yet there are so many little gasps of surprise from the audience that you’d have sworn we did not know anything.
And that’s how antisemitism itself works, isn’t it?
We don’t know anyone who feels like that, and yet antisemitic hate crimes in the US broke records again last year. (They’re also up in New York City so far this year. I tried to find a link to that fact that was not in a right-leaning or Jewish publication and could not, which, as a not right-leaning or Jewish person, I find embarrassing.)
Or how’s this for not knowing: The play is set on an afternoon in 1983, when Dahl, as Giant recounts, actually said this to a reporter, Mike Coren, then urged him to print it in the New Statesman, which he did: “It’s simply a matter of fact, of record, really, that the Jews were always – how does one say it? – submissive, always needed saving.” And also this: “One must be so careful these days, but there is a trait in the Jewish character that provokes animosity. A kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews.”
Asked if he is an antisemite, Dahl said, “Certainly I’m anti-Israeli, no secret – but yes, I do now think I’ve also become antisemitic in as much as you get a Jewish person in another country like England supporting Zionism. So I used to think they were separate things – Israelis, Jews – but now, now I see … no matter what they say, it’s the same bag: the clubbing together, the assertion of influence, the outraged defense: you’re imagining things! It’s in your heads! Then bam! Right there, running rings round us. I mean Hitler, I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
A stinker? That’s what the man said, and there’s more. Much more. Yet when Dahl died, only seven years later, his lengthy obituary in the New York Times included no mention of what even he had called his antisemitism, in this and at least one other interview.
The obit did tell us, however, that Dahl was “a tall, angular figure who often sported a wry grin,” and that he was briefly suspected, then cleared, of having written something that had inspired the man who broke into Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace on a drunken whim in 1982.
“However unjustified,” the obituary said, “the suspicion was characteristic of some of the negative reaction to Mr Dahl’s work. Not a few critics denounced his books as ugly, antisocial, brutish and antifeminist.” Tut-tut.
You would have thought that Dahl’s 1983 book review calling all Jews cowards might have merited a mention, but no.
The play is set at Dahl’s home, where an imagined emissary from his American publisher, Jessie Stone, played by Aya Cash, has been sent to get him to apologize for his review of God Cried, a searingly critical book about Israel’s bombing of Lebanon the year before.
Horrified by civilian casualties, Dahl had called all Jews “barbarous murderers.” And had written that the United States was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that “they dare not defy” Israel.
His novel The Witches is about to come out, and his publisher is afraid that these remarks might hurt sales. His fiancé, Liccy Crosland, played by Rachael Stirling, doesn’t want it to interfere with her lobbying for a knighthood for him. His British publisher, Tom Maschler, played by Elliot Levey, wants someone “Jewish, which helps us, but not JewishJewish, which wouldn’t” to do a softball interview in which Dahl can make the problem disappear by offering a non-apology apology.
Spoiler alert: In real life, they needn’t have worried. The knighthood doesn’t happen. But despite Dahl’s “off-piste” review, as he calls it in the play, and the awful interview that followed, The Witches was still a best-seller. It was made into a movie starring Angelica Huston and Rowan Atkinson and later named by the BBC as one of the 100 most inspiring novels. Dahl collected all sorts of other honors, for the rest of his life and posthumously, too.
The genius of the play, Mark Rosenblatt’s first, which feels like an answer to the Oct 7 attacks on Israel but which he actually started writing in 2018, is that it is not of course only about Roald Dahl.
It’s about all of us, and the ‘conversation’ that really isn’t one, because everyone’s screaming and no one’s listening, about Hamas and Gaza and now Iran and again Lebanon.
So where is the line between justified criticism of Israel and antisemitism? Step by step, we watch Dahl walk across that line and keep right on going. Where do we stop?
He is shown not as a cartoon but in full, as a bully and a baby, someone who has suffered terribly and has a heart, who is capable of compassion, betrayal, and a deep hatred he believes to be rational.
Lithgow is so likeable that he makes it impossible to see Dahl as just one thing, and that’s very much to the play’s benefit, and ours.
The night last week that we saw Giant, one person applauded this line from Dahl, and you better believe I gasped at the sound of that applause: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion.”
Of course, I couldn’t help wondering if that clapping person had continued to relate to Dahl throughout the evening, as he himself turned sympathy into revulsion.
My friend Julie saw the show the night before I did and said that at that performance, there was applause “on the other side” – at this line, from the New York publisher who was trying to talk Dahl into apologizing. From the minute her character appears, Dahl wants to know if she’s Jewish – she is – and taunts her in increasingly horrible ways. “An entire race of people is being blamed for the actions of the Israeli army,” she finally tells him. “What happened in Beirut, Mr Dahl, pains many Jews. Many.”
The Irish diplomat and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien once said that antisemitism is a light sleeper. But does it ever rest? And is there ever any cost? You can tell me otherwise, but if so, I don’t see it.
Now, almost 40 years after Dahl’s death, there’s a legitimate conversation about whether it’s OK to keep reading him.
But that’s such a personal choice. I mean, I love Caravaggio and he was a murderer. I’m glad that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, by Hitler’s favorite composer, is a hit for the Met because they needed one, and I loved spending five hours watching it in a movie theater in Overland Park, Kansas, because of the extraordinary soprano Lise Davidsen.
There are some living artists whose work I can’t watch any more, because now that I know more, it’s just no longer enjoyable: convicted sex criminal Gérard Depardieu, for example, who used to be a favorite. And creepy Woody Allen, long before the Epstein epistles from Soon-Yi.
So to me, whether Dahl should still be read can only be up to individual readers. If we took all the men we know to have been despicable off the shelves we’d certainly have a much more diverse reading list, and fewer obits scolding any who had dared to question the Great Man, yet I’m not for book bans.
What I am for is knowing, and I’m grateful to Rosenblatt, director Nicholas Hytner, Lithgow, and the other fine actors in this play for telling this story, which I could say is particularly important right now, but when isn’t it?
Part of the magic of live theater is that knowing what’s going to happen takes nothing away from what does happen when the lights go down. That’s how Audra McDonald can come along and make Mama Rose in Gypsy someone we’d never met before. It’s why we still see plays that are hundreds and even thousands of years old; between the gutting adaptation of Oedipus that closed in New York in February – I’m still getting my bearings back after that one – and the wild reimagining of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) now playing at the Public, Sophocles is having a moment.
Even after all I’ve told you about Giant, you won’t really know until you’re in the seat gasping.
And if you go, you will be.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
