Playwright Caryl Churchill has stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy with her 10-minute, highly charged play.
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
Prior to its New York staging last week, the blogosphere was abuzz with claims that Caryl Churchill’s play “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza” was anti-Semitic. Critics argued that the playwright’s eloquent verbal sophistry just put a sophisticated gloss on age-old Jew-hating canards. The blood libel, chosen-ness, and a grotesque sort of schadenfreude — that Jews took pleasure in the Palestinians’ pain — were the most disconcerting attacks given air.
“It’s associating Jews with the spilling of innocent blood,” wrote The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, in a spirited online exchange with the director Ari Roth, who also staged the play last week at the JCC in Washington, D.C. The playwright “knows what that means and I think it kind of feeds into, obviously,
the very worst and most dangerous stereotypes about Jews. How they revel in non-Jewish blood.”
It’s not impossible to have these views. The play — which caused a similar uproar in England where it was staged last month, with the BBC now refusing to broadcast a filmed version — has a loose, poetic structure that invites a wide array of interpretations. In the script (which can be downloaded free online), Churchill makes no indication of how many actors are needed, nor which lines each should speak. And the only explicit direction is that the actors who read them be adults.
That matters, and not only because it implies audiences should be mature enough to handle the material. The central motif revolves around how Jews might explain their history to their children, beginning with the Holocaust. It moves to a discussion about the foundation of Israel, its wars and concludes with a final scene addressing the recent campaign in Gaza. In 10 short minutes, “Seven Jewish Children” attempts to dramatize how individuals with complex minds and differing points of view choose to remember, forget and interpret their past in light of the present.
Now you might think I’m justifying Churchill’s position, but I’m not. I disagree both with her views on Israel and her choice of dramatic device, which is to show, through the arc of the play, how a people that were once the oppressed can become oppressors. She’s made clear that that is her point: In another online exchange with Roth last week, she was asked to respond to the claim that her play turned Jewish history into a “terrible historical irony.” She saw no problem with this, replying: “I’m not sure why this is a charge. It seems a fact.”
Churchill’s comparison of Nazi oppression to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is, for me, misguided. The Nazis had the expressed aim to annihilate an entire people; the Israelis have, to me, carelessly addressed a dire political problem. When it comes to the recent war in Gaza, they were clearly provoked, though their campaign there led to an ugly war with far too many casualties. But to put it in the realm of genocide is another thing entirely. Churchill was not going for that. She didn’t want to depict Jews as ruthless bigots, but instead tried to dramatize her views on Israel. You can disagree with them all you want, but it is not anti-Semitic.
Take these lines, which have pricked several critics’ ears: “Tell her they’re terrorists / Tell her they’re filth / Tell her we killed the babies by mistake.”
No one wants to be represented as indifferent towards human suffering, which these lines do. But it’s worth noting that the lines are countered by the one-word line — “Don’t” — which significantly blunt and color their effect. And still, the most damning charges of anti-Semitism come from a reading of the final soliloquy, which is worth quoting in bulk:
“Tell her there’s dead babies, did she see babies? Tell her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of, tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people feel 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, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals living in rubble now, 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 that it’s over.”
How do we explain this? Simple: it’s an outburst. When one is yelling, hollering, it does not necessarily express one’s truest self. Can one person not experience both anger and sympathy, compassion and rage? Moreover, the character who does the yelling is one among many who hold different views. In an early scene, she even contradicts the lines she speaks here.
Churchill’s characters are complex and conflicted, though none of them adequately air a favorable view of Israel. There are a few token lines of defense — “Tell her they set off bombs in cafes,” for instance, or “Tell her they want to drive us into the sea” — but the scales are heavily weighed in the other direction, which Churchill has every right to do.
The overall impression one gets from “Seven Jewish Children” is of a Jewish community that is confused, not one in collusion. Churchill’s play does not fail because it’s anti-Semitic, or even uninteresting; it fails because she refuses to subject her own political views to the same ruthless scrutiny she has given to Israel.
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