How ‘Giant’ Reopens the Question of Roald Dahl

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 U.S. 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.”