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Editors’ Pick

May 15, 2025

On Stage, Roald Dahl’s Anti-Semitism Is All Too Comfortable

Giant.

Having recently debuted on London’s West End, Mark Rosenblatt’s play Giant focuses on Roald Dahl’s turn to public anti-Semitism in the 1980s. The story is sickeningly familiar: in response to misleading reports about Israel’s conduct of the war in Lebanon, the beloved children’s author began expressing his great moral outrage. Soon, Dahl was telling journalists that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [the Jews] for no reason,” and later “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become anti-Semitic.”

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