The blatantly anti-Semitic 10-minute play “Seven Jewish Children” by Caryl Churchill was first produced at the Royal Court in London, and is now making its way to Canada, with a production in Montreal. Below is a National Post article on the issues the play stirs up, including an interview with the CIC’s Sara Saber-Freedman.
‘A Play for Gaza’: A debate on hatred
Graeme Hamilton,
National Post, May 1, 2009
The play is just 10 minutes long, its script a tight 1,300 words. But since its London debut in February, Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children has generated epic debate on both sides of the Atlantic, attacked as anti-Semitic and defended as legitimate criticism of Israel. This weekend, the controversy spreads to Canada, as the play gets its Canadian premiere in Montreal.
The city’s major Jewish groups have decided against organizing protests of tomorrow’s production, but that has not stopped their leaders from condemning it. Incoming Quebec Jewish Congress president Adam Atlas told the Canadian Jewish News this week that the play is “anti-Semitic and full of hatred,” while Sara Saber-Freedman of the Canada-Israel Committee said in an interview that it revives the ancient blood libel against Jews.
There is no question that Ms. Churchill, described by The New York Times as “one of the most critically acclaimed playwrights in the Englishspeaking world,” intended to provoke strong reactions when she wrote Seven Jewish Children during Israel’s winter military offensive in Gaza.
“If it makes people feel angry about what happened in Gaza, I think that is a good reaction,” she wrote in March. “It is hard to think about what happened without anger and grief.” The play is subtitled “A Play for Gaza,” and Ms. Churchill has advised theatre groups they are free to perform it provided no admission fee is charged and donations are collected for a specific Palestinian charity.
What has angered supporters of Israel are the words and evocative imagery she employs, particularly at the play’s climax. The script, which is available online at royalcourt theatre.com, features a cast of adults discussing what to tell children during pivotal moments in modern Jewish history. Divided into seven scenes, it begins with a child in hiding, apparently from the Nazis. Subsequent scenes include the founding of Israel, the Six Day War and the first intifada, before concluding with the war in Gaza.
It is one character’s anti-Palestinian rant in the final scene that has attracted the greatest attention: “Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her we’re the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can’t talk suffering to us. Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them until we’re safe.”
The same character calls Palestinians “animals” and concludes: “Tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.”
Ms . Saber-Freedman, executive vice-president of the Canada-Israel committee, said the play is an example of anti-Israel sentiment merging seamlessly into anti-Semitism.
“If that’s not a resuscitation of the blood libel, I don’t know what is,” she said of the final monologue. (The blood libel is the false accusation that Jewish rituals require the blood of non-Jews, usually children.) “It is absolutely clear that the character who is speaking those lines is saying that the killing of children is a deliberate act by the Israeli government.”
She also took exception to the implicit parallel drawn between the Jews’ suffering during the Holocaust and the plight of Palestinians today. “It is an inversion in which, if the victims of the Holocaust today are the people of Gaza, then the Israelis are the Nazis,” she said.
When Seven Jewish Children ran for a month at London’s Royal Court Theatre, critics were divided but many took offence. “Quite simply, in this wantonly inflammatory piece, the Jews drop in on somewhere they have no right to be, despise, conquer, and at last revel in the spilling of Palestinian blood,” Howard Jacobson wrote in The Independent. Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times called the play “straitjacketed political orthodoxy” with an “utterly predictable lack of even-handedness.” The Guardian’s Michael Billington, on the other hand, applauded the play for capturing “the transition that has taken over Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter.” It has since stirred similar controversy in Washington and New York.
In her defence of the play, Ms. Churchill has rejected the charge of anti-Semitism. In a letter to The Independent she also addressed the “blood-libel” accusation.
“I find it extraordinary that, because the play talks about the killing of children in Gaza, I am accused of reviving the medieval blood libel that Jews killed Christian children and consumed their blood,” she wrote. “The character is not ‘rejoicing in the murder of little children.’ He sees dead children on television and feels numb and defiant in his relief that his own child is safe.”
Rose Plotek, who will direct tomorrow’s two staged readings at Montreal’s Geordie Theatre, said she did not hesitate when approached about the Churchill play by the Mont-real branch of Independent Jewish Voices. “She’s a writer I’m very familiar with and that I have great admiration for. This seemed like a great challenge,” Ms. Plotek said.
A recent graduate of Montreal’s National Theatre School, she will also be directing staged readings of Seven Jewish Children at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, from May 15-17. The Toronto readings will include Ann-Marie MacDonald, R. H. Thomson and Rosemary Dunsmore in the cast.
Ms. Plotek, who is Jewish and teaches drama studies at York University’s Glendon College, said she disagrees with critics who detect anti-Semitism in the script.
“It’s not a piece of fluff entertainment. It’s a piece with substance and it does provoke ideas and thoughts,” she said. “I hope that it promotes an opening up of debate.” She added that the attention given the play is proof of the vitality of the theatre: “It’s not a dead art, and it can still have impact and immediacy.”
Abby Lippman, a member of Independent Jewish Voices who helped bring the play to Montreal, said the play is about, “What do we tell our children?” She said the criticism of Israel contained in the play should be fair game in an open society.
“We have all these truth and reconciliation commissions going on all over the place. Why can’t we have truth and reconciliation about Israel? Why can’t Israelis acknowledge that there are other people suffering right now, not just Israelis? One doesn’t erase the other,” she said. “What happened in December and January in Gaza was just beyond belief.”
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SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN
A brief excerpt from the play Seven Jewish Children, written by Caryl Churchill. The lines are spoken by an adult actor.
“Tell her we need the wall to keep us safe
Tell her they want to drive us into the sea
Tell her they don’t
Tell her they want to drive us into the sea.
Tell her we kill far more of them Don’t tell her that Tell her that
Tell her we’re stronger Tell her we’re entitled
Tell her they don’t understand anything except violence Tell her we want peace Tell her we’re going swimming.”
National Post
You can see a performance of the play and read the entire script on the Guardian website.
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