{"id":193,"date":"2026-05-31T11:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=193"},"modified":"2026-05-31T11:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T11:14:08","slug":"the-scariest-monster-on-broadway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=193","title":{"rendered":"The Scariest Monster on Broadway"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The malefactors in Roald Dahl\u2019s fiction are easy to spot. \u201cIf a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face,\u201d the author writes in The Twits<\/em>. \u201cAnd when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.\u201d Miss Trunchbull, the abusive headmistress of Matilda<\/em>, is a \u201cgigantic holy terror\u201d with \u201can obstinate chin, a cruel mouth and small arrogant eyes.\u201d Augustus Gloop, the greedy glutton of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em>, is a \u201cbig fat boy\u201d who is likened to a dog and a pig. In James and the Giant Peach<\/em>, the protagonist is oppressed by his \u201cenormously fat\u201d Aunt Sponge, who resembles \u201csoggy overboiled cabbage,\u201d and the \u201cbony\u201d Aunt Spiker, with her \u201cscreeching voice and long wet narrow lips.\u201d In Dahl\u2019s children\u2019s books, evil is self-evident and announces itself in crude, stereotypical terms.<\/p>\n

Giant<\/em>, a play about Dahl running on Broadway through June, is anything but childish. And although the celebrated writer might be construed as the villain of the production, he is nothing like the villains of his own work. The play dramatizes a debate between Dahl and his associates over a book review he published in 1983, which began with criticism of Israel\u2019s recent military campaign in Lebanon but swerved into negative generalizations about \u201ca race of people\u201d\u2014Jews. Dahl is pressed by his publisher to walk back some of his more incendiary assertions, but instead he doubles down, telling a dumbstruck journalist at the end of the play that \u201cthere is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity\u201d and that \u201ceven a stinker like Hitler didn\u2019t just pick on them for no reason.\u201d (Although the play itself is fiction based on true events, this exchange is genuine and reenacted verbatim.)<\/p>\n

Giant <\/em>could have taken the same approach to Dahl as Dahl took to his own characters, clearly telegraphing the author\u2019s ills and reducing him to them. But as written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner, Giant <\/em>doesn\u2019t caricature its subject. Instead, the play does something much more difficult: It shows how Dahl excels at many things\u2014including anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

As embodied by John Lithgow, Dahl is incisive, avuncular, irascible, acerbic, and always entertaining. He has deep compassion for the suffering of innocents, an irresistible sense of comic timing, and considered critiques of the state of Israel. He also engages in casual misogyny, narcissism, and anti-Semitism. He repeatedly casts Jews as cowards, claiming that he never saw any engaged in combat in World War II\u2014more than 1 million in fact\u00a0 served in the Allied armies\u2014and derides the Jewish victims of the Nazis as submissive in the face of their aggressors. By the end of the play, one understands why this otherwise impressive man was\u2014according to his own daughter\u2014once expelled from a social club that he\u2019d complained had too many Jews in it.<\/p>\n

By presenting Dahl in all his maddening and flawed humanity, Giant <\/em>explores an uncomfortable truth: Bigots do not present themselves for easy identification as they do in children\u2019s stories like Dahl\u2019s. \u201cThere was such a courtesy and an intelligence in the way he framed his answers to me that it was very disarming,\u201d Michael Coren, the journalist who elicited Dahl\u2019s Hitler remarks, told me. \u201cPlus, he came with this heroic baggage, the way he had dealt with tragedy in his life, and he was such a gifted writer. So, yeah, it was very jarring to hear it from him.\u201d<\/p>\n

As history shows, and Giant<\/em> demonstrates, prejudice is often sustained not by the casual intolerance of the unwashed masses, but by the sophisticated justifications and permission structures devised by educated elites. Anti-Semitism is built on conspiracies and contradictions that take time for an observer to unravel. In fact, the very term anti-Semitism<\/em> was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist who sought to distinguish his anti-Jewish ideology from the crass bigotry of the common folk by dressing his hate up in pseudoscientific terms.<\/p>\n

Giant<\/em> illustrates how prejudice can coexist with intelligence, talent, refinement, and even empathy. Shakespeare\u2019s genius is as evident in The Merchant of Venice<\/em>, which is pervaded by anti-Semitism, as in his other work. <\/em>The technical and business acumen of Henry Ford, the music of Richard Wagner, and the heroic feats of physical endurance by the likes of Charles Lindbergh all thrived alongside their anti-Jewish activism.<\/p>\n

Dahl was a polymath. He was a war hero and a literary virtuoso, responsible for both best sellers and Hollywood blockbusters. He even invented a valve to drain fluid from the brain of his injured infant son after contemporary remedies proved inadequate. \u201cHe was a pathological fixer of problems,\u201d Rosenblatt, the playwright, told me. And \u201cone of the most illusory tools for fixing problems, because it simplifies the world so much, is a conspiracy theory or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dahl\u2019s achievements would not have been possible without immense self-confidence. But such self-regard also made him obstinate, immune to correction, and prone to hubris\u2014as well as prejudice. \u201cAny person who is greater than another,\u201d the Talmud declares, has a greater \u201cevil inclination.\u201d Or as a different giant of children\u2019s literature, Albus Dumbledore, once put it: \u201cBeing\u2014forgive me\u2014rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many struggle with this idea. They want to believe that those responsible for great deeds or good art are uncomplicatedly great and good themselves. And they want prejudiced people to be readily identifiable, defined by their shortcomings, and easily expunged from our collective canon and society. Put another way, they want bigots to be like the villains in Dahl\u2019s books, not like Dahl himself. But Giant<\/em> refuses to indulge this soothing fiction about human nature.<\/p>\n

Whether the subject is Dahl, Israel, Palestine, or Lebanon, the play wants audiences to sit with reality in all its knottiness, contradiction, and brokenness. And it reminds them that the most frightening monster of all is not the sensational stuff of children\u2019s stories, but the propensity to monstrosity that lives within all of us.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new play about Roald Dahl and his anti-Jewish prejudice captures uncomfortable truths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Scariest Monster on Broadway - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=193\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Scariest Monster on Broadway - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A new play about Roald Dahl and his anti-Jewish prejudice captures uncomfortable truths.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=193\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-31T11:14:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Scariest Monster on Broadway\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-31T11:14:08+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193\"},\"wordCount\":1038,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/ce78b3203c14e1387c66f7c2547f4e9a.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=193\",\"name\":\"The Scariest Monster on Broadway - 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