By some estimates, the American Jewish community is currently spending some $600 million a year to combat Jew hatred. Now, a new play on Broadway seems destined to further enflame passions, spark alarm, and raise questions about what motivates the antisemitic surge—as well as debate how Americans, and intellectuals, in particular, should respond to it.
Giant, starring the incomparable John Lithgow, opened on March 23 on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre after a wildly successful run in London's West End, where it sold out every show at the Harold Pinter Theatre for 14 weeks. The play focuses on the scandal surrounding Roald Dahl, one of England's most celebrated and successful children's authors. Dahl's inexpiable sin was writing an antisemitic review of a book in 1983 about Israel's invasion of Lebanon a year earlier.
Though it may seem odd or perhaps quaint in the age of the internet and social media that a book review could spark such vehement controversy, Dahl was a god in the world of children's literature. Some 300 million copies of his books had been sold worldwide when the furor over his book review erupted. A generation of children had grown up reading his best-selling books—James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Big Friendly Giant, and more.
Mark Rosenblatt, the play's British author, was among them. "I adored him," the author told The New Yorker. "He was the wallpaper of my childhood."
Rosenblatt, who is Jewish, was prompted to write his play—his first—after reading about the controversy sparked by the review that Dahl had written for the Literary Review—a small but influential British monthly known mainly for its annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. The book, God Cried, by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy, is an avowedly pro-Palestinian account of Israel's invasion of Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization's operational bases there. "God Cried is not objective and could never have been," Clifton wrote of the book he coauthored.
In the review, Dahl wrote that Israel's invasion of "what used to be Palestine" and its "mass slaughter of the inhabitants" led him and others to change their view of Israel. "We all started hating the Israelis," he wrote. "Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers." The review also assailed "American Jewish bankers" and "Jewish financial institutions" for supporting Israel's invasion of Lebanon and called upon Jews everywhere "to follow the example of the Germans and become anti-Israeli." (Subsequently, a review editor confessed that the magazine had sometimes substituted "Israelis" for "Jews" to make the review slightly less antisemitic.)
The play focuses on a single afternoon in Dahl's country house, then under construction, in which his British and American publishers—both Jews—try to persuade the then 66-year-old author to retract or "clarify" the odious views in his review, fearful that the scandal will depress sales of his forthcoming book, The Witches.
Lithgow, six feet three, gives a riveting, pitch-perfect performance as Dahl, the six-foot, six-inch "BFG," or the Big Friendly—or, in this case, Fractious—Giant. Seated at his makeshift writing table as the play opens, he complains to his British publisher, Tom Maschler (subtly played in his Broadway debut by two-time Olivier Award winner Elliot Levey), and his fiancé and future wife, Felicity "Liccy" Crosland (Rachael Stirling), about his editors' addition and movement of commas in his manuscript. The dialogue is telling: Dahl pays obsessive attention to detail, negating the possibility that his book review might have been carelessly dashed off or simply the result of a poor choice of words.
The drama ramps up with the arrival of the play's only fictional character, Jessie Stone, a representative of Dahl's then American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. When Stone, powerfully portrayed by Aya Cash (also making her Broadway debut), presses Dahl to retract or apologize for his review, Dahl refuses. What begins as not-so-good-hearted British banter rapidly descends into ugly exchanges in which the author demands to know if she is Jewish, whether she is observant, and why she appears to be so indifferent to Israel's carnage in Lebanon. Has she not seen the photographs of the dead babies, the blood-splattered wounded?
"They laid claim, they maneuvered, and they took," Dahl says, denouncing Israel's creation and subsequent expansion. "Because you see what you need to see: a sanctuary—not another's home."
Dahl is unmoved, or perhaps enraged, by Jessie Stone's defense of the Jewish state, founded, she notes, by a United Nations vote and forced to defend its very existence since its creation. "Israel invaded Lebanon in self-defense," she reminds him. "What would your government do if militants constitutionally committed to wiping Britain off the map started firing rockets into Kent from the French coast?"
Because this is New York, and not London, Stone's defense of Israel drew spontaneous, if scattered applause from the audience the night I attended the play. But Dahl's description of the deaths and the destruction in Lebanon—at a time when Israel was once again maneuvering in Lebanon after having decimated much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians (the total number is still in dispute)—seemed to stun the audience into embarrassed, uncomfortable silence for much of the play.
In the second act, Dahl's disdain grows for Stone, whom he calls Stein, suggesting that her family had changed its name to appear less Jewish. If nothing else, his belligerent diatribes show how anti-Israel rhetoric often masks antisemitism or casually slides into it.
When Maschler, Dahl's British publisher, tries playing mediator and to calm him down, Dahl turns on him, too, calling him a "house Jew." In an eloquent, understated soliloquy, Maschler downplays the importance of the beatings he took in prep school, the bullying racism of his classmates, and even the condescension of his author and ostensible friend—all for the greater good of quality literature and, of course, a Jewish publisher's pride in promoting it. Britain is his home; he feels more British than Jewish, he says. But his efforts to make peace between Stone and Dahl come to naught.
Because the playwright is British, and because this is a very British play, some of its subtexts—such as Dahl's intense class snobbery and his use of his housekeeper and gardener as little more than props for his bruised gargantuan ego—may be lost on an American audience.
At some points, Rosenblatt appears to try to make Dahl more sympathetic by referencing the many tragedies that shaped, or misshaped, his life—the death of his father and sister when he was three; his plane crash in Libya when he was a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II, which smashed his body to bits, and the series of operations to repair the damage that left him forever in pain; the shattering of the skull of his infant son, Theo, hit in his pram by a New York City taxi driver; the multiple surgeries, which nonetheless left him brain-damaged; and the death of his seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, from measles two years later, a tragedy that turned him into a passionate advocate for vaccines. The play also contains a passing reference to Dahl's first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, who suffered severe brain aneurysms while pregnant and required years of recovery. The Times of London quotes his second wife, Felicity, as saying that Dahl had ardently managed her rehabilitation, but Neal's friends say that he also treated her and virtually everyone else he lived or worked with horribly. Even Neal at one point had nicknamed him "Roald the Rotten."
The play about a 40-year-old scandal raises fundamental questions that are equally relevant today: What caused his virulent antisemitism? Can one separate the behavior of a nation-state from its people? How could this bigoted, often loathsome man write such wonderful books? Can we separate artists from their work? Or as Dahl asks Stone, whose own son he learns has a disability, "Can you no longer read my books to dear Archie?" he says to her, referring to her son. "If it's in me, then it's surely in the books, too."
But is it? And should we boycott Dahl's work given his racist views? Lithgow, interviewed on radio by David Remnick, The New Yorker's editor in chief, argues that cancellation would be a grievous error. While his publisher dropped him—not for those views, but for acting in a way that his late editor Robert Gottlieb called "unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility"—Dahl soon found another outlet. His books have continued to sell.
We should, of course, continue reading Dahl's stories, just as we continue reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline, an antisemite and Nazi collaborator. Last week at New York's Metropolitan Opera, I attended a thrilling performance of Tristan und Isolde, composed by Richard Wagner, another antisemite and Hitler's favorite. The new production was staged by Yuval Sharon, the gifted American opera director, a Jew.
But cancel culture eventually touched Roald Dahl, albeit 33 years after his death, sparking more controversy. In 2023, Puffin Books, Dahl's publisher, sparked a massive uproar by hiring "sensitivity readers" who made hundreds of changes in Dahl's original texts, altering his references to his characters' weight, mental health, gender, and violence. After prominent writers and politicians condemned the changes as "absurd censorship," Puffin agreed to publish the original, unedited versions along with the revised editions.
Much to Rosenblatt's credit, his play does not weigh in on whether readers should boycott Dahl's work. Though his play was finished only weeks before Oct. 7, it was not a response to it. In interviews, he has said that he wants audience members to draw their own conclusions and recognize the complexity of human nature. That it does—a rarity on Broadway these days.