Roald Dahl died in 1990. So why does it matter today that he was an anti-Semite? Why has his family apologized 30 years on? And should his work be canceled as a result? Or, to paraphrase the Bible, should the sins of the author be visited upon the third and fourth generations who profit from his work?
In September 1983, Israeli TV stopped broadcasting Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected to avoid paying royalties to an anti-Semite, making Dahl the third person whose work was excluded from the still-young state’s airwaves after Wagner and Strauss. Dahl had just published a book review considered to be so aggressively anti-Semitic that Paul Johnson described it in The Spectator the following month as ‘the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very long time’.
Writing of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Dahl compared the Jewish state with Nazis: ‘Never before in the history of man has a people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a state generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion. It is as though a group of much- loved nuns in charge of an orphanage had suddenly turned around and started murdering all the children…it makes one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are. It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again.’
Astoundingly, this was the softer redraft of Dahl’s views; his biographer Jeremy Treglown revealed the magazine’s editor had substituted ‘Israeli’ for ‘Jewish’.
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