Culturally attuned Jews are differing in their responses to Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza,” which opened last month at London’s Royal Court Theater and has since been imported to America.
The slender piece is composed of seven scenes, altogether totaling around ten minutes. Each purports to portray a group of Jewish elders trying to determine how they will explain a number of events, all having to do with the State of Israel, to a young daughter; every line begins with the words “tell her.” The culmination is a bloody, vitriolic speech, defending the Gaza war of this past winter. The intended effect is clearly alienation from the speaker: Churchill has allowed the play to be distributed freely, so long as money is gathered at performances for relief work in Gaza.
The play’s predictable reception demonstrates how anti-Semitism haunts efforts to find a productive way of responding to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jews often play the anti-Semitism card too quickly when criticism is leveled at Israeli policy. But critics often fail to recognize when their criticism fits into longstanding patterns of Western culture’s abuse of Jews.
Churchill’s play is motivated by earnest, if doctrinaire, anger and grief at the carnage created by the Israeli incursion, and the suffering endured under prolonged occupation. But, as a non-Jewish playwright expressing this grief through a series of appropriated and simplified Jewish voices, playing up the bloodthirst, and offering it to a London in which Jews feel increasingly embattled, she is open to charges of having crafted a contemporary Passion Play. (This does not seem to have been her conscious intention, however, and she has addressed the charges of anti-Semitism in an email to a Jewish-American director.)
The most interesting reaction, to my mind, is represented by those Jews who have chosen to court controversy by appropriating the appropriation, participating in staged readings of Churchill’s play in Jewish settings. The Jewish Community Center in DC held one such event last week. Playwright Tony Kushner, a champion of “Seven Jewish Children,” will moderate a reading with scholar Alisa Solomon at the New York Theater Workshop, to be attended by representatives of the Israeli and Palestinian communities.
The Jewish world, in light of the horrendously disproportionate body count of the last war, the number of victims who were women and children, and the latest allegations being voiced by soldiers returning home from the front, could do with some soul searching—even if for some the result will only be further ratification of Israeli policy.
If Churchill’s play serves as instigation for this inquiry, it will have served a worthwhile purpose. If it functions only to reaffirm what right-thinking people think they already know about Jewish cruelty—another objectification of those who reject the light, fit to be the warm-up act at Oberammergau—it will be fair to ask why Churchill did not just choose to express her grief through Palestinian voices, or in her own.
Tags: anti-semitism, caryl churchill, gaza, israel, palestine, theater, tony kushner
Criticisms have been leveled at the play "Seven Jewish Children" on the grounds that it is anti-Semitic.
After WWII, many Jews felt the need for a country of their own and were persuaded that they had a right to wrest that country from the Palestinian people, whose land it was, and to dispossess them. The recent war in Gaza, like the 40-year occupation, is part of the on-going continuation of this act of dispossession.
I am unable to believe that every person who is homeless (or whose mortgage has been foreclosed) has a right to seize the house of another -- just because she has a need for a house, real as that need undoubtedly is.
Those who criticize "Seven Jewish Children" suggest that a non-Jew should not write a play in which Jewish characters think critically about the human-rights-related actions taken by Israel (which declares itself to be the State of the Jewish People).
Is such a play described as anti-Semitic because it criticizes Israel? May not a play criticise Israel? Or must any critical play be written by a "Jew"? In that case, what kind of Jew? Orthodox? Observant? Israeli? Zionist? And who should decide this question? After all, many Zionist Jews hurl the rather odd-sounding accusation of "self-hatred" against Jews who criticize Israel. According to this double-whammy, no-one may properly criticize Israel, because whoever does so is either an anti-Semite or a self-hater.
All of this suggests some similar questions.
May a non-Muslim criticize what she perceives as human-rights violations by Iran? by Saudi Arabia? May a non-Christian criticize perceived human-rights violations by the USA (assuming for this question only that the USA is a Christian country)?
Since when, exactly, may only members in good standing of the tribe criticise the tribe? I am not a German. May I properly criticize the Nazi regime?
Assuming, as I do, that criticism of Israel by non-Jews is permissible, how can anyone suggest that criticism is impermissible when couched in the form of a play about Jews asking "What shall we tell our daughter" about perceived Israeli human-rights violations. Is it impermissible for one person to put herself in another's shoes? If this were so, we should have no plays and no literature except for memoirs and autobiographies.
Jewish criticism of "Seven Jewish Children" must arise either from pain, with which we should sympathize -- or from cold-blooded political calculation, which we should condemn.
The pain that some Jews feel when Israel is criticised may arise because the wound which opened most widely in 1948 is still open -- the wound created when the Jewish Palestinians dispossessed the non-Jewish Palestinians in order to gain political supremacy and a place to live.
The armed insurrection (against the British and the non-Jews in the Palestinian Mandate in 1945-48) by Jews, at the time an aspiring state, was, like many actions upon the international stage, in the nature of a criminal act. That is, it was a violent and illegal act undertaken to deprive other people of their rights.
Some Israelis and their supporters are comfortable about the nature of the creation of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians and are comfortable about every violent event in the on-going continuation of the war of 1948. 'We wanted it, we needed it, and we took it. We will keep it. We will make it grow.'
Other Jews are hurt very much when forced to confront these facts and also when forced to ask themselves whether one need be a Zionist to be a good Jew (or a good person). Jews who think they must be Zionists in order to be good Jews are required to question that idea in direct proportion to the strength of the arguments made in the play.
Your large-scale arguments against the existence of the State of Israel are obviously familiar, and I'm sure you can find people to argue them with you in a more suitable forum if you'd like. I am only going to object to the fact that you did not seem to read my post very carefully, but, after what seems to have been a cursory reading, used it as an opportunity to launch a pre-fabricated opinion. Please look back at what I said, and take the time to notice
a) where I suggested that Jews do indeed cry anti-Semitism when it is unwarranted
b) indicated that non-Jews such as Churchill have every right to express their opinions, grief, anger, horror over the carnage and oppression inflicted on innocent Palestinians
c) praised, rather than condemned, those Jews (certainly "self-haters" according to some) who are engaging with Churchill's play as a means of instigating a conversation within the Jewish world that gets beyond a knee-jerk recitation of rationalizations and justifications
Here is my discomfort with Churchill's play: I am not convinced that what it really does is try to see things from a Jewish perspective, as you suggest, and if that's not what it is doing than we have a right to ask why she phrases it in only Jewish voices at all. As a protest play about Gaza that chooses as its form the dramatization of simplified Jewish voices, excerpting only one part of the discourse that exists within the Jewish community around Israel--and not suggesting anything of the more profound degree of commitment and concern that Jews (though certainly not all Jews) around the world have for Israel--I do think it verges on caricature and I am distressed at the thought that non-Jews might see affirmed in Churchill's portrayal their worst stereotypes and suppositions about Jews--much as the medieval Passion Plays rehearsed Jewish villainy for Christian audiences.
I believe I was pretty clear that I don't think this was her intention, and I even linked to an email she sent a Jewish director of her work in which I think she fairly convincingly refuted the charges against her. I am certainly not advocating that her play be banned--if anything, I am hoping that those who see the play will do so tempered by the awareness that it might be striking some pretty profound anti-Semitic tropes, even if it is thoroughly valid and non-anti-Semitic.
I do think that anti-Semitism and the history of anti-Semitism play into the Israel-Palestine conflict, and its world reception, in some pretty significant ways, and that one of the tasks of those trying to work for a resolution of this conflict need to devote some of their energy to untangling this part of the dilemma.
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