Jewish director debuts film version of ‘antisemitic’ UK play as Jew-hatred hits record high

LONDON — The American-Israeli director of a new film version of a controversial “antisemitic” play has strongly defended the production and appealed for people to approach it with an “open mind” and “put aside their preconceptions.”

Omri Dayan told The Times of Israel that British playwright Caryl Churchill’s 2009 play “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza” is a “humanistic political piece of art.”

“I really hope that this film can reintroduce this piece to people in a way that they maybe haven’t seen before,” he said. “I hope that it can help people, like it’s helped me… understand what it means to be Jewish, learn about our history, learn about our humanity and try to improve ourselves, because that’s what art’s about.”

The film premiered in London on March 31 and will be screened elsewhere in the UK and in New York in April.

But campaigners against antisemitism have attacked the decision to produce a film version of the short drama, in which an anonymous Jewish family discusses what to tell their daughter about key moments in Jewish and Israeli history. The play’s seven brief scenes stretch from early 20th century pogroms through the Holocaust, the birth of the State of Israel, the 1967 Six Day War and Second Intifada, and conclude with the 2009 Gaza war.

“I’m not surprised at all,” Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, said of the decision to release the film at a time when antisemitic incidents in the UK are at record levels.

“In an atmosphere in which antisemitism has become thoroughly normalized in progressive politics, we should not be surprised that an antisemitic play, and in particular this antisemitic play, is revived,” said Rich, author of “Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into Our World.”

‘We should not be surprised that an antisemitic play, and in particular this antisemitic play, is revived’

The author of more than 30 plays, 86-year-old Churchill is a long-time patron of the far-left Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Churchill’s original play was first staged at London’s Royal Court Theater in February 2009, just weeks after the end of Operation Cast Lead.

Operation Cast Lead was a three-week conflict between armed Palestinian terror groups and the Israel Defense Forces in 2008-2009 that Israel said was aimed at stopping Palestinian rocket fire into the country. Thirteen Israelis and over 1,100 Palestinians were reportedly killed.

The play immediately attracted fierce criticism from leading British Jews and communal groups, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews. It termed Churchill’s work “horrifically anti-Israel” and claimed it went “beyond the boundaries [of] reasonable political discourse.”

In a letter to the Daily Telegraph, a number of prominent British Jews, including actors Maureen Lipman and Tracy Ann Oberman, businessman and philanthropist Mick Davis, and academic Geoffrey Alderman said the play “demonizes Israelis by reinforcing false stereotypes” and was “historically inaccurate,” noting its failure to reference Israel’s post-1967 offers of “land for peace,” the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza which precipitated both the 2008-2009 war and several later conflicts.

The play also attracted mixed reviews from theater critics.

“’Seven Jewish Children’ isn’t art, it’s straitjacketed political orthodoxy. No surprises, no challenges, no risks. Only the enclosed, fetid, smug, self-congratulating and entirely irrelevant little world of contemporary political theater,” wrote The Sunday Times’s Christopher Hart, accusing Churchill of a “ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness.”

Churchill was given the prestigious European Drama Award in 2022. The decision was later reversed when the Germany-based jury responsible for the decision was made aware of her support for the BDS movement, which the German parliament has designated as antisemitic. A statement at the time explaining the U-turn also cited “Seven Jewish Children,” noting it “can also be regarded as being antisemitic.”

All in the family

Dayan first discovered the play during a visit to Israel in 2022 when members of his family were discussing the controversy surrounding Churchill’s withdrawn drama award. “I felt myself drawn to the piece,” he said. “It has such a concise and poetic and yet deeply understanding and thought-out language, which not only encompasses the historical, but also the collective psychology.”

Filming on the project was conducted in August 2023, and Dayan recruited both his father, writer and director Ami Dayan, and grandmother, actor Rivka Michaeli, to appear in it. He describes their participation as “a joy… a wonderful experience and collaboration.”

“This dialogue between generations and between family members is a huge part of what shaped my life, and it’s also what usually draws me into a story,” he said. “So it felt very natural and almost a given that they should be part of telling the story. It helped me tremendously in creating that atmosphere of a family, of the warmth that we feel, [and] the unconditional love.”

At the time of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror onslaught on southern Israel, the film was in the late stage of editing.

“The terror of that day, the horror of that day… shook me,” Dayan said. “From a personal perspective, I needed to step back from everything at that time. I didn’t want to be reacting from such a raw emotional place.”

‘The terror of that day, the horror of that day… shook me’

Some 1,200 people in southern Israel were slaughtered that day and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, amid acts of horrific brutality that included sexual assault, mutilation and torture.

After a break of a few weeks, the young director returned to the editing room.

He says little was changed in the final cut.

“The sad thing is that the last shot of the film is alluding to the fact that there will be more chapters to this story,” Dayan said. “That was a very intentional thing I was doing when we were filming it, but we had no idea that we’d be living through that chapter as we’re releasing [it].”

At the same time, he said, while the film was shot before October 7, “it looks like it was filmed as a reaction to [it], because we’ve been knowing the path that we’re going down for so long, and yet we’re not doing anything to change it.”

Not an attack on Jews, merely critical of Israel

The original play — which Churchill allows to be staged without the payment of royalties if a collection for the UK charity Medical Aid for Palestinians takes place — went from writing to performance in under a month.

“I wrote it last week,” the playwright told The Guardian days after the January 2009 ceasefire. “It’s only a small play, 10 minutes long, but it’s a way of looking at what’s happened and to raise money for the people who’ve suffered there.”

Churchill has staunchly defended the play, arguing in 2022 it was about “families wanting to protect children and wondering what to tell them about terrible things, a pogrom, the Holocaust, finally the bombing of Gaza.”

Churchill claimed: “It is critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians; it is not an attack on all Jews, many of whom are also critical of Israeli policy. It is wrong to conflate Israel with all Jews. A political play has made political enemies, who attack it with slurs of antisemitism.”

Dayan dismissed the notion that rising levels of antisemitism in the UK and internationally make it a poor time to release the film.

“I think that it’s more important now than ever to show the world that we as the Jewish people… [are] not the same as Israel,” he said. “Judaism and Israel… are not the same thing.”

‘I think that it’s more important now than ever to show the world that we as the Jewish people… [are] not the same as Israel… Judaism and Israel… are not the same thing’

But more than that, Dayan believes, it is crucial to “stand up for what we believe as a Jewish people.”

“We’ve gone through these atrocities and we know what it feels like to be discriminated against,” he said. “We’re going through it now. And yet we still stand for humanity because that’s what it means to be Jewish and to have gone through these things.”

The London-based filmmaker argued that art critical of Israel is too often labeled as antisemitic.

“This creates a smokescreen that hides voices of opposition to Israel, both in Israel and outside,” Dayan said, “when there’s real antisemitism happening 1743428841 and we need to put the focus where it deserves and not on a piece of art that’s calling for our humanity.”

‘It’s pure gaslighting’

Critics, however, remain unconvinced by defenses of Churchill’s work.

“I think it is such an important example of the double standard and innate suspicion that the weathermakers of progressive thought bring to their treatment of Jews,” said Rich. “There is no way on earth that Caryl Churchill’s response to Islamist violence would have been to fantasize about what she imagines Muslim parents teach their children, or that the Royal Court would have put on such a play, or that the Guardian would have produced its own version.”

“But where Jews are concerned, we are treated as some kind of alien group to be poked and prodded like some kind of anthropological-psychiatric study,” he said. “And of course, we are then expected to believe that when they say ‘Jewish’ they are just criticizing Israel. It’s pure gaslighting.”

The closing scene, set against the backdrop of war in Gaza, Rich said, features a monologue containing “a combination of antisemitic tropes”:

“Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them,” says a family member. “Tell her I’m not sorry for them, tell her not to be 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 they’re animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out… 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 it’s not her.”

Dr. David Hirsh, chief executive of the London Center for Antisemitism, is similarly critical of the play, saying it “portrays Jews as indoctrinating their children to be indifferent to non-Jewish suffering and it gives the impression that this neurotic practice is the cause of the persistence of conflict between Israel and its neighbors.”

“Jews have long been accused of murdering non-Jewish children,” Hirsch said. “Today, it is considered legitimate to accuse Israel of executing a deliberate plan to murder non-Jewish children by the thousand. The blood libel is back.”

At the time of the play’s first performance in 2009, British novelist Howard Jacobson condemned it as “a hate-fueled little chamber-piece.”

“Once you venture onto ‘chosen people’ territory — feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase — once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over,” he wrote in The Independent newspaper. “This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple.”

Dayan believes the notion that the play contains antisemitic tropes is “completely outrageous.”

“I really encourage people to move past that initial discomfort we all have,” said Dayan. “Unfortunately, anything that touches Israel and Palestine is inherently political nowadays… but it’s also something that we need to challenge. We’re talking about a piece that is all about nurturing and protecting the next generation.”

“It’s talking about the pain that we as Jewish people have gone through and it’s tackling that and I hope that we can learn to use these traumas not to lessen our humanity, but to widen it,” he said.