Antisemitism Un-Masked on Broadway

Antisemitism is everywhere nowadays—on college campuses and inside city halls; on podcasts and red carpets; spoken by celebrities and spewed by masked thugs. No matter where one looks, “Nakbas” are concocted and “genocides” are falsified.

Each shares a common purpose: ridding the Middle East of Israel and the world of its Jews.

Until now these grotesque spectacles took place entirely off-Broadway. It was only a matter of time before antisemitism finally had its name up in lights, a marquee moment for the world’s oldest prejudice.

Jew-hatred got itself spiffed up and is making an elegant stage entrance on the Great White Way in “Giant,” starring John Lithgow as legendary children’s author Roald Dahl.

After an immensely successful run on the West End of London (in a city that is having even worse problems with antisemitism), where the play received three Olivier Awards (one for Best New Play), it is now, deservedly, the odds-on favorite to take home multiple Tonys for its American premier.

For those who didn’t already know, Dahl, the author of such titles as “James and the Giant Peach,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” and “Fantastic Mr Fox,” was an unrepentant antisemite who would have made other notable literary Jew-haters like Voltaire, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound feel inferior in his company.

The play takes place in a country house undergoing renovation on a summer afternoon in 1983.  Dahl’s British and American publishers—who both happen to be Jewish, albeit with varying degrees of tribal identification—try to convince him to issue a public apology for a grossly antisemitic article he published in the Literary Review.

He reviewed a book about Israel’s 1982 invasion in Lebanon, a campaign to quell the PLO’s rocket fire into Israel. Does this broken record from Beirut sound familiar? In his scathing criticism of Israel, however, Dahl referred to all Jewish people as a race of “barbarous murderers.”

The timing for his tirade was terrible. His novel “The Witches” was due out soon, and bookstores around the world were threatening to withhold orders. Shelves would suddenly be empty of a bestselling author. Was Dahl the sort of petulant writer inclined to scoff at the retail side of his vocation—refusing to concede to damage control?

Yes, that’s exactly who he was. Dahl is adamant in his bigotry—especially when it involves his indictments against the international Jew. He believes his prejudice to be justifiable; any scorn that Jewry receives is deserved.

Dahl can’t seem to get out of his own antisemitic way. He calls his British publisher a “house Jew.” This former Kindertransport Holocaust survivor managed to elevate himself into England’s posh upper crust. His British accent conveniently obscures any nostalgia for his Ashkenazi origins.

It also makes him more forgiving of Dahl’s insults, which is more than can be said of his American counterpart—a young sales director straight from Barnard College’s central casting—who is emotionally invested in her tribe and the horrors they have experienced.

The crusty, intellectually combative Dahl perks up with each provocative utterance. He serves as his very own antisemitic cheerleader. Act II finds him on a phone interview with a Jewish writer from the New Statesmen. Here is an opportunity to clarify his words and mitigate the damage he caused to his career.

Instead, he shocks both the interviewer, and the audience, by stating, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.”

This play and its urgent, timely message could not have come sooner—in part because it clashes with the antisemitism we see on the news. Today a dandy like Dahl is not the problem. What we are all witnessing now is low-class thuggery prowling city streets. Islamists wearing masks with keffiyeh collars. Qatar-financed pogroms, reminiscent of the Cossacks who chased Jews from those reimagined shtetls in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

The main difference is that Cossacks took their marching orders from Czar Nicholas II, while Islamists deploy the freedoms of Western democracy against itself. The delusional misreading of the First Amendment is only one of many examples. There is no “context” in which “Globalize the Intifada!” is protected free speech—and the literary Dahl would never be found chanting in unison with uncouth morons.

What is being showcased in “Giant” is something equally pernicious but deceptively patrician. Dahl was a practitioner of refined antisemitism—old-school, well-bred, the cultivated elite who happened to hate. They wouldn’t be caught dead marching down the middle of the street, fists pumping, screaming about some imaginary country called “Palestine.” These were cocktail party antisemites, baptized in social niceties and the finest of etiquette.

Dahl was a practitioner of refined antisemitism—old-school, well-bred, the cultivated elite who happened to hate. They wouldn’t be caught dead marching down the middle of the street, fists pumping, screaming about some imaginary country called “Palestine.” These were cocktail party antisemites, baptized in social niceties and the finest of etiquette.

“Giant” is reminiscent of the antisemitism of the film“Gentlemen’s Agreement” (1947), where the exclusion of Jews was handled with a lighter touch—whispered boycotts from boarding schools and country clubs; restricted hotels that always managed to turn away those with Jewish-sounding names or stereotypical faces.

Lithgow plays Dahl as a bookish Archie Bunker, a benevolently avuncular antisemite—well-mannered, silver-tonged, hateful and hospitable all at the same time.

Dahl believes in the dark arts of the Jewish people, their secret, clannish cabal, their agile lever-pulling manipulations. He is quite certain that he is not alone in his convictions; he simply is blessed with a better pulpit and a warrior mindset. What he wrote and says about Jews he believes to be true. He’s merely stating the obvious.

Two hours of repulsive bigotry is almost too much to bear. But the audience sticks with it. Many perhaps are hoping for a happy ending. Perhaps Dahl is playfully standing in for any one of the creepy, sinister characters that inhabit his children’s books. Surely an educated, civilized man of his stature can’t believe in such depraved racialist nonsense.

But then again, this week the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, dropped a bomb of a blood libel that is truly medieval in origins and artifice. This was his scoop: Israeli prison guards train dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Dog trainers the world over are all shaking their heads in laughing disbelief. Sounds like the absurd claims contained in a 2018 book titled “The Right to Maim,” which was honored with three book awards for alleging, without sources or citations, that the Israeli Defense Forces deliberately fire bullets to maim Palestinian children and then harvest the organs of any Palestinian they kill.

Perhaps by comparison, Dahl is actually less dangerous.

If the global eruption of antisemitism these past several years bothers you, then go see the play. If you are, instead, delighted by what has been happening to your Jewish neighbors and classmates, you have even more reasons to sit through “Giant” before it closes.

If the global eruption of antisemitism these past several years bothers you, then go see the play. If you are, instead, delighted by what has been happening to your Jewish neighbors and classmates, you have even more reasons to sit through “Giant” before it closes.

It holds up a mirror so you can see what you look and sound like—with far less intellectual gravitas and blue-blood breeding, of course. But when the audience rises in thunderous handclapping at the final curtain, don’t fool yourself. The applause is most definitely not for you.