How to Face a Giant

How to Face A Giant

By Rabbi Angela Buchdahl

This week, John Lithgow won the Tony for best actor for his brilliant portrayal of renowned children’s author Roald Dahl and his well documented antisemitism, in the play Giant. I saw Giant several weeks ago and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Dahl was so convinced that Jews and Israel were despicable, and Lithgow was so convincing as Dahl, that I could hardly bring myself to applaud him when the curtain fell. 

You’ve got 2 weeks left to see it, GO if you can.

The play admirably represents Dahl’s emotional complexity and contradictions. He wrote timeless classics–Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and of course, The BFG, The Big Friendly Giant – masterful children’s books that weren’t afraid of darkness and horror – with tyrannical headmistresses, hideous witches and cannibalistic giants.

These stories captured how frightening it can be to feel small when everyone else is big.

And no one was bigger than Dahl. As his character says in the play, “I’m not not a Giant.” Not only was he 6-foot-6inches tall, but his reputation was deservedly outsized: He sold over 250 million copies of his books and was known as “The World’s No 1 Storyteller,” – a towering figure in every way.

Dahl’s stature is what made his antisemitism so frightening. Dahl wasn’t a traditional antisemitic villain, a tattooed brute carrying a tiki torch and spewing hate. He was someone we admired – a brilliant author, an entertaining raconteur. He described his empathy for Palestinians as forged, in part during his brief military service in British Mandate Palestine during WWII, where he formed an idealized picture of the land and remembered the horrors of war.

It was disorienting to see Dahl’s compassion slide into familiar, insidious antisemitic tropes, laid bare in his 1983 book review of God Cried, a photojournalistic account of Israel’s bombing of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war.

Dahl did not merely criticize the Israeli government or the war itself, but instead Jewish control – claiming America became involved because it was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions.”

He blurred Israeli government actions with all “Jews,” claiming:“Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers…”

A race of people. Barbarous murderers. His point was not subtle. Jews were now the Nazis.

In case you’re wondering if he knew he was crossing the line, the play ends with Dahl speaking the verbatim words he told a magazine reporter: “I’m certainly anti-Israel, and I’ve become antisemitic ... 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.”

Whether this Giant was an antisemite is not remotely in question. 

The question is: what is the appropriate Jewish response?

And this morality play has a striking parallel in this week’s Torah portion, Shlach L’cha.

God commands Moses to send 12 spies, to scout out the land of Canaan, one leader from each tribe. When they return, all of them attest that the land flows with milk and honey and luscious fruits. And – that the land is inhabited by giants.

For ten of these spies, the astonishingly great size of the people in the land posed too great a threat.

They warned the Israelites that they could not expect to prevail against them. The ten spies cried out: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”

The last two spies, Caleb and Joshua, came to another conclusion. They saw the richness and beauty of the land –and, yes, the giants. But Caleb assured them of their rightful inheritance, knowing that God had promised this land to them: “Let us by all means go up! We shall surely overcome it.”

The 12 spies all share the same facts: both the promise and the perils of the land. But they respond in two very different ways.

Giant takes place on a single day in Roald Dahl’s house, where he is visited by two Jewish guests: his British publisher and editor, Tom Maschler, a real-life figure, and Jessie Stone, a fictionalized American publishing representative – both there to do damage control over Dahl’s antisemitic book review.

Neither Jewish character disputes the facts. But their disparate instincts and responses parallel those of the spies. Tom Maschler, was one of the most celebrated publishers in Britain, fostering the careers of over a dozen Nobel laureates and creating the Booker prize.

He was born in Berlin in 1933 to Austrian-Jewish parents and survived the Holocaust on a kindertransport, though 3 grandparents were murdered by the Nazis.

Tom was a Holocaust survivor, but refuses the identity. When it comes up, he dismisses it: “I was a boy. I got on a f—ing train.” 

Tom’s strategy for survival was Jewish self-erasure and minimization.

Van’hi v’eyneynu ka’chagavim — “we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes.”

And it informs Tom’s response to Dahl’s ugly antisemitism: manage optics, preserve the relationship, protect sales.

Dahl, in response, calls him his “House Jew” —  a term of contempt that Tom initially absorbs without protest.

Tom was shaped by fear into a particular kind of Jewish smallness, and internalized this so deeply that it no longer appears to him as a choice.

The other, fictionalized Jewish character, Jessie Stone is initially deferential — she was raised on Dahl’s books, her teenage son is a huge fan. But as she pulls out a book for Dahl to sign  and her marked up copy of his book review falls out, his interrogation begins. “Are you Jewish?” "Is it Stone? Was that Stein once?"  "Would you buy an Israeli avocado?  Or... would refusing to buy it be 'anti-Semitic'?"

Her demeanor changes from discomfort to disgust as Dahl’s antisemitic loathing becomes more and more apparent.

Dahl becomes increasingly trapped by his own defense, self-righteously justifying his hateful views until he admits: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity…Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

Unlike Tom, Stone does not allow this giant to cower her. Her admiration for his literary brilliance does not blind her to his monstrosity. It becomes clear that she is risking her job by pressing him, but she ultimately demands an apology, not just to Jews in the abstract but to her — personally.

Two dramatically different Jewish responses to the Giant.

And our Torah is unequivocal on which response is right. The two spies who reported back with faith and courage – Caleb and Joshua – are the only ones to enter the land. But the ten spies who report back in fear were struck down by a plague and cause the Israelites to wander for 40 years in the wilderness.

What was their sin? They let the giants determine who they were.

That is the danger we Jews face in every generation when confronted by hatred: not only that others will try to make us small, but that we might begin to believe them. That we might mistake caution for wisdom, silence for survival, appeasement for peace.

Our tradition requires something else of us. Not denial. Not blindness to danger – Caleb and Joshua saw the giants too.

Our tradition asks us to refuse smallness. To refuse to become grasshoppers in our own eyes. To stand, with dignity and faith, before every giant — ancient or modern — and say: we know who we are. We know the truth of our people.

We know the promise we carry. And we refuse to allow anyone to diminish us.