Notes on Seven Jewish Children

After watching Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, via The Guardian:-

• It’s a morality play.   It is not a play about characters as individuals.  The seven characters are seven aspects of a nationality (Jewish/Israeli).  The trajectory of the narrative is that, in the way that a child who was sexually abused grows up to sexually abuse children himself, so Jews, who were innocent victims of pogroms in Europe, have become monsters in Israel who have turned Palestinians into innocent victims.   (In the film Manhunter, the serial killer was an abused child and the hero who is looking for the serial killer says, "This man wasn't born a monster; he was made one. And while I cry for the child who suffered so much, the rest of me wants to blow the sick fuck out of his socks.") That’s the story of Seven Jewish Children – that the earlier suffering is now an excuse for a cruel and callous triumphalism. 
  
• It’s a piece of polemic.  How you react to it would be based on how much you agree whether that narrative is an accurate account of the history of the founding of Israel and of the present attitudes of Israeli citizens. If you think your typical Israeli citizen regards Palestinians as “animals” whom they want to wipe out (as the final diatribe says) that would reinforce your ideas about them.  If not, you would find it slanderous and disturbing that they should be presented in that way.
  
• Harry’s Place has a thread on the play where someone says:-

Would anyone (who considers themselves to be an anti-racist) be happy with a play entitled, 7 black children, 7 gypsy children, 7 Arab children or 7 Muslim children, etc which then proceeds to essentalise those kids and their parents, and all those connected to them, putting crude words in their mouth along the way?

I can’t imagine the Royal Court producing a play on those lines but I can imagine something like Seven Australian Children, about white Australians who begin as unwilling convicts transported to Botany Bay for stealing a loaf of bread and in the end are joyfully wiping out aborigines. Seven Pakeha (white New Zealander) Children, would say:-

Tell her they’re primitive.  Tell her they are wonderful at sculpture.   Don’t tell her how we got that land,

“they” being the Maori.  

I would guess that there have been anti British colonialism plays written by eg Howard Brenton (The Romans in Britain is like that).  Seven Jewish Children strikes me as an anti-colonial play, with the Israelis as kind of honorary British.In my New Zealand example, New Zealanders would be highly affronted if a foreigner wrote about their nation from the outside in that manner, saying what do you know about it?  You haven’t lived here and the situation is far more complicated than your cartoon.  I daresay Israelis would feel the same about Caryl Churchill.

• Israel is a foreign country to most Royal Court theatre goers, yet Caryl Churchill was evidently sure that the audience would know a rough outline history – from pogrom, immigration, displacement of Arabs, wars, settlements, infitada, Gaza. And indeed we do.  Could something be written of any other foreign country, which would be recognisable from such scanty references to time and place?  She mentions “Jerusalem” and “Arab” about once, and that’s all.  Israel has been stamped onto our consciousness. 
  
• Anti-semitic?  I don’t suppose anyone left that theatre after this play feeling better disposed towards Jews and I can imagine quite a few knowing nods during the chosen people and the land God gave us bits. Presenting a people who in their evolution end up laughing at the enemy’s death and wishing them to be wiped out is pretty damning. Two writers whom I greatly respect, Howard Jacobson  and Norman Geras, certainly see it in that light and are outraged by it.
  
• The first scene of the play, where the mother is hiding the child from a pogrom (the Nazis?), is poignant.  But then anything about hiding children from evil doers is poignant.  It’s about the easiest effect to pull off.  (I have to say I hate almost all films and other fictional works based around the Holocaust for that reason. You have a handy menace, an unspeakable evil that someone escapes, or that gets someone into its clutches.  It’s a ready to wear villainy that you don’t have to run up yourself.)

Comments

[Stephen M. Flatow]

Seven Jewish Children is anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism. There is no difference between them as both lead to giving excuse to the destruction of the Jewish people.

[modernityblog]

you wrote "Seven Jewish Children strikes me as an anti-colonial play, with the Israelis as kind of honorary British."

well, Rosie, had it be called Seven Israeli Children then that point might be strong, but it expressly uses "Jewish" as a tag to hang various nasty ideas on, and if the whole "chosen people" nonsense (an old Christian antisemitic notion, NOT a central element of Judaism) indicating the underlying thinking behind the play.

from the play:

"we’re chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her."

So just from this brief clip you have two age old antisemitic myths in one:

1) The Chosen People, part of Christian mythology

2) A variation of the blood libel, that Jews don't care if others are killed and covered in blood.

Hardly, anti-colonial more like a regurgitation of old fashion anti-Jewish racism.

[modernityblog]

ops, that should be "had it be called Seven Israeli Children then that point might be stronger"

[Jenny]

If you think your typical Israeli citizen regards Palestinians as “animals” whom they want to wipe out (as the final diatribe says) that would reinforce your ideas about them.

Really? http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/01/glorification-of-terrorism.html

Some of them, at least, do think of the palestinians as inhumane.

[David Lieberman]

Jenny:

"Some of them, at least, do think of the palestinians as inhumane."

No doubt some Israelis do think of Palestinians as inhumane. (Notice that I preserve your usage: "inhumane," not "inhuman.") Do you think perhaps that there might be some Palestinians who are inhumane? Are aware, for instance, of the methods Hamas operative used against their Fatah counterparts -- while the Israeli offensive in Gaza was still underway?

You nicely blur a distinction, by the way. Rosie explicitly discusses "your typical Israeli citizen." You discuss "some of them, at least." Do you have evidence to show that your "at least" indeed broadens out to "typical"?