In the new Broadway play “Giant,” John Lithgow has received glowing reviews for his portrayal of the truculent children’s book author Roald Dahl. At the heart of the story is the most problematic aspect of Dahl’s legacy: his antisemitism.
“Giant,” Mark Rosenblatt’s playwriting debut, was inspired by the anti-Israel and antisemitic remarks that Dahl made in the early 1980s, first in a book review and later in an interview with a reporter. The show depicts a heated discussion — more speculative than factual — about whether Dahl should apologize for his incendiary comments about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
As he prepared this spring to return to the role, for which he won the 2025 Olivier Award in London, Lithgow, 80, told The New York Times: “You wait forever for a role like this, full of sadism and monstrosity and hideousness.”
So what is factual? What is speculative? In the play, there is an implication that Dahl, who wrote popular titles like “Matilda” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” could suffer some sort of consequence — from booksellers, in particular. But what, if any, ramifications did Dahl actually face during his life for his antisemitic views? Here’s what to know.
What did Dahl say?
In the August 1983 issue of Literary Review, Dahl reviewed “God Cried,” a photo book by Tony Clifton that was critical of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which, the U.N. said, nearly 30,000 people, mostly Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, were killed in the first two months of fighting. Israel’s move followed years of deadly rocket attacks on northern Israel by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which operated in southern Lebanon.
Dahl wrote, in reference to Jewish people, that “never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” He implied that all Jewish people supported the actions of the government of Israel, and he blamed them collectively for the war. He compared Israel to Nazi Germany and called for its destruction.
He then doubled down in an interview with Michael Coren of The New Statesman, after being asked to clarify his remarks.
“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” Dahl said. “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.”
A few months before his death, in 1990, Dahl told an interviewer for The Independent that “I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become antisemitic.” Rosenblatt incorporated all of this into his script for “Giant.”
How does ‘Giant’ portray Dahl?
The play is set on a summer afternoon in 1983 at Dahl’s home in Buckinghamshire, England, with his latest book — “The Witches” — about to come out. He’s reluctantly hosting a crisis meeting called by his British publisher, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), and his American publishing sales director, Jessie Stone (Aya Cash), who are both Jewish and want him to apologize for his book review comments about Israel’s invasion.
Rosenblatt, the playwright, said in a phone conversation that the real Maschler “was probably more alpha than the Tom Maschler in the play.”
“Partly because I would have found it hard to write something where there were two alpha males at loggerheads — it probably would have self-destructed much quicker,” he explained. “So Tom is a bit more accommodating than he might have been in real life.”
The exact words the men exchange in the meeting, which quickly becomes heated, are also not verbatim, Rosenblatt said.
“There is some perhaps occasional spillover of language from the verbatim stuff — the phone call and the book review — that has landed in the play in the spirit of some of those ideas,” he said. “But ‘house Jew’ is not a phrase that I’m aware that Dahl ever used.”
Did the meeting actually take place?
The specific meeting and the American publishing executive character are fictional. Maschler, who died in 2020, not only fostered the career of Dahl (as well as Gabriel García Márquez, Doris Lessing and other literary giants) but also conceived of the Booker Prize. Rosenblatt said he was not aware of how Dahl’s American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reacted to his comments in 1983.
“I made the New York response to the outcry around this article a bit more than perhaps it was,” Rosenblatt said. “Dahl really valued the American market, as most British authors did, for obvious reasons. It was huge and lucrative, and so it felt like a natural place to add some jeopardy.”
What has the New Statesman reporter said about it?
When Coren interviewed Dahl, he wrote in a 2021 retrospective in The New Statesman, he was “just out of journalism school.”
“I think I was more confused than anything,” Coren wrote. Was this phone call “some sort of deep irony that was over my head, or a satire that he was about to explode or explain?”
In 2024, after seeing “Giant” in the West End in London, Coren produced another piece for The New Statesman. He wrote that the play, in which his interview with Dahl plays out onstage, was “a vital discussion of antisemitism, a wound more open now than at any time in my life.”
“I expect reactions to it will say a great deal about the bitter reality of it all,” he added. “That, frankly, isn’t entirely reassuring.”
Did Dahl ever apologize?
At the end of the play, Dahl seemingly agrees to back down but he clearly doesn’t intend to. And he never did.
What has Dahl’s family said about his views?
In 2020, Dahl’s family apologized for the “lasting and understandable hurt” caused by antisemitic comments he made during his lifetime.
“Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories,” the Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company wrote in an online statement.
Earlier this year, a spokesperson for the company told The Jewish News, a weekly British newspaper, that, since its original apology in 2020, the company had “engaged in listening and learning from experts in tackling antisemitism.”
“As part of this work, we are supporting organizations within the Jewish community that work to combat antisemitism and educate people about Jewish life and culture,” the statement continued.
What consequences did Dahl face during his life?
At the time, the state-owned Israel Television canceled programs of Dahl’s works, including the “Tales of the Unexpected” series, which included dramatizations of Dahl’s short stories of the same name.
But in general Dahl was not — and has not been — canceled. His books sold millions of copies during his lifetime, and continue to be read and adapted for the stage and screen. As for Maschler, he and Dahl “were in each other’s orbit at the moment these things were said, and he continued to work with him.”
How have modern publishers handled the controversy?
There has been increased scrutiny of Dahl’s personal views in recent years and whether they can be separated from his work.
In 2023, Puffin Books, the children’s label of Penguin Random House, was criticized for publishing new editions of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Matilda” to remove language related to gender, race, weight and mental health that modern readers might find offensive. (After a backlash to the revised editions, the company later published “classic” uncensored versions of the novels.)
Has there been any backlash to the play?
“Giant,” which Rosenblatt began working on in 2018, has become more timely in light of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Rosenblatt told The Times that he had worried there might be walkouts and protests during the play’s West End run in 2024, but that “there was actually just a real engagement from the audience in a conversation with the play, which I hope takes in many sides of the argument.”
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
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