An old play and old attitudes - The Jewish Chronicle

A ten minute play and now, 13 years later, a two paragraph letter defending it.

In a way the play was a lament for the Palestinians, many of them children, killed by Israeli forces during the war with Hamas in 2008/9.

Called Seven Jewish Children it was staged at the Royal Court in 2009, written by that theatre’s most revered playwright Caryl Churchill and directed by one of its most successful artistic directors Dominic Cooke.

On stage, however, there were no Palestinians or Israelis. Instead there were Jews. Crucially, as the playwright and director are at pains to point out in their recent Guardian letter, these Jews were played by Jews.

The letter was written in response to Jonathan Freedland’s article (also in The Guardian) about his own play which explores antisemitism on the progressive left. In the work, which has just opened at the Royal Court, Churchill’s play is presented as an example of this phenomenon.

The playwright and director are particularly outraged by those critics of Seven Jewish Children who have noticed similarities between sections of the play and the Blood Libel which for centuries has accused Jews of spilling the blood of non-Jewish children. To make a connection between “actual deaths of [Palestinian] children and an antisemitic tract is outrageous”, says Cooke and Churchill.

Putting aside my beefs with Churchill’s play, which were less about the blood libel than how the play does what progressive antisemitism so often does, which is to implicate all Jews in the actions of Israel, and also portraying Jews collectively as the victims of atrocity and then, just as collectively, perpetrators which is a different kind of libel (I seem not to have put my beefs aside after all) there is a really very odd disconnect between accusation and answer in the Cooke and Churchill's letter.

Because it is they – Churchill and Cooke - who made the connection (wittingly or not) between the deaths of Palestinian children and the blood libel by depicting Jews and Jewish psychology as justifying the deaths. All the critics did was notice.

None of them, to my knowledge, have said this was deliberate. Indeed much of Freedland’s play is precisely about how antisemitic tropes are unwittingly used by writers in this country. "Even if they don’t know the tropes?" asks one character. “But they do,” another replies. “They just don’t know they know...”

The fact that Cooke and Churchill highlight the Jewish cast is also problematic. It is a very thin argument. Jewish actors want to work with top writers and directors as much as any other actor. It is easy to imagine a slight suspension of critical faculties in such illustrious company. Even if that is not the case, Jews can be caught in a moment of high emotion too. Unlike the Jews in the play, many were hugely upset by the death of so many Palestinians.

It is possible however that Churchill and Cooke just hadn’t realised that what they created chimes with so much antisemitism. Their letter reads like something written years ago, like their play, and acts as a reminder of how dismissively the discomfort of minorities who feel unjustly represented were swept aside.

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Theatre