In the latest round of this saga Caryl Churchill has a new self-justifying plea. Her play wasn't anti-Semitic because it featured individuals, rather than Jews as a category:
Ant[h]ony Julius... quotes more lines from my play Seven Jewish Children to bolster his claim that it is antisemitic. What he doesn't seem to realise is that these lines are not spoken as he suggests by "Jews" in general but by individual Israelis... It should be possible to pillory the defensive self-righteousness and racism of some - not all - Israelis without being called antisemitic.
And this is a playwright, with some knowledge of cultural matters! One is bound to wonder why anyone ever had a worry about Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Apart from the fact that it is Churchill who chose to give her wretched little play the title 'Seven Jewish Children', she wants us to overlook the fact that its villains are Jews and its Jews are villains, and this in a region - her play's context - where there are a few other people than Jews with racist attitudes, precisely towards Jews, and there have been others who have killed children, Jewish children. But, hey, in case you didn't realize it, the narrow-of-focus Caryl was just interested in a few 'individual Israelis'. (Thanks: Av.)
