Roald Dahl revealed his vile anti-Semitism to my face

'Indifferent': Roald Dahl declined to retract his abhorrent views
‘Indifferent’: Roald Dahl declined to retract his abhorrent views - Ian Cook

In the 1980s when I was writing about theatre for Time Out, Plays and Players, and — hard though it is to believe — Girl About Town magazine, I never thought I’d be hearing my name spoken and my voice acted on the stage of a major theatre. Yet that’s exactly what’s about to happen at the Royal Court, where John Lithgow plays Roald Dahl in Giant, written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner. 

In the summer of 1983 I was asked by the New Statesman to interview the children’s author Roald Dahl. He was known for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and James and the Giant Peach rather than racism and bigotry, but he’d made some extreme comments in The Literary Review about God Cried, a book covering Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He’d written of “a race of people” who had “switched so rapidly from victims to barbarous murderers,” and that the United States was, “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions” that “they dare not defy” Israel.

I arranged an interview, telephoned Dahl, and after a few polite exchanges he decided to quite openly speak his dark mind. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” and “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

I was recently out of university, hardly an experienced journalist, and wasn’t sure I’d heard the man correctly. When he went on to say that during World War Two, he and his RAF friends never saw any Jewish men in uniform,  I realised that, unfortunately, I had. I told him that my father was Jewish, that Jewish soldiers, sailors, and airmen had fought in their hundreds of thousands in the war, and that what he’d said was absurd, insulting, and unworthy of him. He was utterly indifferent. 

The conversation ended, the article ran in the next issue of the New Statesman, and a good number of people were justifiably angry. Dahl was contacted to see if he’d like to retract any of his statements but he calmly declined. No surprise really, and some years later he told another journalist that, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become anti-Semitic... it’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media ­­— jolly clever thing to do — that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.” I can only assume that all of the non-Jewish publishers and editors I’ve worked for over 40 years were also “jolly clever.”

Crossroads: Roald Dahl, played by John Lithgow, and his publicist, played by Elliot Levey
Crossroads: Roald Dahl, played by John Lithgow, and his publicist, played by Elliot Levey - Manuel Harlan

While my interview has been brought out of cold storage on a fairly regular basis, Dahl was never seriously challenged while he was alive, and since his death in 1990 there has been shockingly little coverage of his acid hatred of Jews. His family did eventually issue an apology in 2021, the same year that Netflix purchased his entire catalogue for over £500 million. Saying sorry is of course the hardest thing, but perhaps less so when the world’s largest streaming platform has coughed up a fortune.

Now comes the play, a clever, compelling discussion of Dahl’s prejudices framed via conversations between Dahl and his publisher in the summer of 1983. My article had just been published, and its controversy was threatening the smooth publication of Dahl’s upcoming hit, The Witches. The play interrogates his anti-Semitism, and how those around him reacted to the author’s grim embrace of conspiracy theories and hateful caricatures. I have read the script and my phone interview with Dahl is presented in its near-entirety. 

Mark Rosenblatt contacted me three years ago and asked to interview me about what had happened on that troubling August day. I thought that would be the last I heard but several meetings and emails later my old tormentor will repeat his abuse nightly. Someone asked me if this would open old wounds but I’m not as fragile as that. What does concern me is how audiences will react to it all. Along with condemnation, will there be an unspoken or even explicit ambiguity, or will Dahl perhaps be supported?

Back in 1983 there were apologists who claimed shock and horror at Dahl’s remarks but insisted that this shouldn’t prevent admiration for his work. Thing is, I never argued otherwise, but the alacrity and enthusiasm with which they made their case always left a bad taste.

Giant is set in Dahl's family home
Giant is set in Dahl’s family home - Manuel Harlan

Defending personally or politically obnoxious writers, musicians, and poets from cancel culture is integral to my ideology, but the inconsistency of outrage over Dahl has been inescapable. While statues of obscure nasties toppled, and literary heroes who’d made a racist statement at one time or another trashed from one university to another, Dahl was ‘punished’ with seemingly endless film, television, and theatre adaptations.

Then, on October 7 2023, with the slaughter of 1200 people at Israel’s Nova festival by Hamas, and the war in Gaza that followed, the world changed. The resulting ant-Semitism that has occurred this past year that has stunned me, with much of the vehemence coming from the far Left, and even from moderate socialists, among whose number I count — or counted — myself.

Giant is not a diatribe against Dahl — he is given much time to defend himself — and so it is up to the audience to make up their own minds. But I worry that there will be people listening to what Dahl said, and wondering what all the fuss was about. I hope I’m wrong. Good God, I hope I’m wrong.


Author Michael Coren’s memoir, Heaping Coals, is published next week. His website is michaelcoren.com. Giant runs at the Royal Court until Nov 16; royalcourttheatre.com