No Jews, Please, We’re British
Reader Martino alerted us to this “theater review” in the WSJ yesterday:
Here’s a sketch for a racist play about “moral decline” in black America since the civil rights era.
Act I: Heroic protestors gather at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to march in defiance of a segregationist state. Act II: The scene moves to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where the radical politics of the Black Panthers quickly give way to robbery and murder. Act III: A New York City crack house, circa 1985. Act IV: the trial of O.J. Simpson. Act V: The present, in which a black man on a prison furlough goes on a murder spree.
Appalled? I hope so.
Now substitute the word “Jewish” for “black” and change the scene to Europe and Israel and you have, roughly, the plot of celebrated British playwright Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” which debuted last month to some controversy and much acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater. It is now in the U.S., playing in small but respectable venues to sophisticated audiences that — judging from the performance I attended in New York last Thursday — are overwhelmingly disposed to like it.
Well, of course they were. Americans are dumb enough to fall for anything under the heading of British Drama. Stick a little baroque music in front of it, and you can call it a mah-sterpiece.
And I couldn’t be more stunned that a member of the British intelligentsia libels Jews and celebrates Gazans—never heard of that before! Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill—do they teach this stuff at RADA?
A biased reviewer, perhaps, but John Nathan in the Jewish Chronicle wrote:
For the first time in my career as a critic, I am moved to say about a work at a major production house that this is an antisemitic play.
I do have this to say in the play’s favor—it’s only ten minutes long. My arm gets tired if I have to throw rotten fruit for much longer than that.