The film of Seven Jewish Children is as foul as the stage version - The Jewish Chronicle

Did Caryl Churchill know about the blood libel until she was accused of evoking it in Seven Jewish Children? I wondered this after a screening in Soho on Monday evening of a new film of the controversial work.

Imagine that. Perhaps the writer who presumed to dissect Jewish identity, to tell Jews what they think and why, did not know about the ancient slander used to justify their murder. Is that possible?
I wanted to ask the panel at the Q&A following the screening. But unfortunately I was not chosen to ask a question, and the rest of the audience there was not of a mind to ask.

Subtitled “A Play for Gaza”, the play was written in rapid response to Israel’s 2008-2009 military’s operation against Hamas in the Palestinian territory. As many as 1,400 Palestinians died during the three-week conflict, as well as 13 Israelis. Churchill said at the time: “Israel has done lots of terrible things in the past, but what happened in Gaza seemed particularly extreme.”

The backlash was swift. The novelist Howard Jacobson called the play a “wantonly inflammatory piece” that was an example of “Jew-hating pure and simple” because, “the Jews drop in on somewhere they have no right to be, despise, conquer and at last revel in the spilling of Palestinian blood”. John Nathan, reviewing it in the JC, wrote that: “For the first time in my career as a critic, I am moved to say about a work at a major production house that this is an antisemitic play.”

When she wrote the play, Churchill, now 86, said it could be performed anywhere, so long as performances did not charge an admission fee and collected funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

Omri Dayan, 23, an American-Israeli director, has now breathed new Jewish oxygen into the text with a screen version produced by Succession’s Brian Cox.

To read Seven Jewish Children is to wade through eight pages of crude contempt; to watch it is to witness that contempt made into a pound of flesh. Decades of Jewish history condensed into 15 minutes of filmed theatre, in which Jews land in Israel as if by magic, shackled to the trauma of their past and reduced to oppressors-in-waiting.

Dayan opened the sold-out screening of his film by asking people to “put aside our preconceptions". Afterwards, he invited the audience to “share thoughts” with someone nearby, and the word of the night was trauma. “Thank you for creating space for this,” gushed several actors.

He was joined by Dominic Cooke, the play’s original director for a Q&A, and the screening was padded out with poetry readings from actors-turned-activists. The Crown’s Khalid Abdalla, who was recently questioned by police for his role in an anti-Israel protest, read a poem, as did Juliet Stevenson, who made sure to tell the audience that her Jewish husband, the son of Holocaust survivors, also marches for Gaza. To cap it off, Dayan asked the audience to stand if they could donate £30 to MAP.

For all the talk of trauma, Seven Jewish Children allows no space for the reality of Israel or Gaza today. The film was shot before October 7 and it turns out that a film depicting Jews teaching their children to hate does not sit well after the massacre of 1,200 Jews at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. During the month when a headstone was laid for the Bibas babies, this feels particularly pernicious.

Dayan told the audience: “This is a conflict of humanity versus inhumanity,” and Churchill has made it clear which side the Jews are on; Seven Jewish Children demonises a people while pretending to offer them a lesson in morality.

In his sleek adaptation, Dayan reimagines the Jewish adults as a multi-generational family, casting his grandmother and father in two of the roles. The camera glides from one decade to the next, as the action shifts from the pogroms, through the Holocaust, then London, and finally to Israel. As soon as they arrive in Haifa, the characters – or caricatures – become villains.

The language, with all of Churchill’s hollow brilliance, revolves around a rhythmic pattern of “tell her / don’t tell her,” as a Jewish family decides how much history to reveal to a child.

Churchill seems to ask: what do Jews learn as children that turns them into killers? The play suggests that Jewish trauma is something that has been weaponised as an excuse for inflicting horrors. The play never explicitly says Jews become Nazis, but the implication is there.

In Churchill’s world, Jewish parents do not protect their children; they radicalise them in a moral vacuum. Mothers tell their kids they are the “chosen people” and Arabs are “animals”. The play’s most controversial line still stings: “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.”

When the play first opened, Dave Rich and Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust accused Churchill of creating “a deadly new libel for a new millennium”.

Dayan said the claims were “baseless and outrageous.”

“In 2009, over 200 kids were killed,” he said. “As of now, in this war, over 12,000 kids have been killed. If anyone reads anything celebratory in that last line, it reads much more on them than anything originally in the play.”

He added, “In an effort to protect ourselves, we build an inhumanity and a dehumanisation of the other. In that scene, when someone is so hurt and worried for their child, [they] develop an inhumanity to the other. We live in a time when Jews and non-Jews have so much generational pain that we’re dealing with, and October 7, that pain and trauma lingers and it is with us.”

In Churchill’s world, all Jews are Arab-haters. And Arabs are not present at all. There is a serious play to be written about anti-Arab racism in parts of the Jewish community. But this isn’t it.

Dayan insists his film is an attempt to “create space” for dialogue. But Seven Jewish Children leaves no space for anything. Thanks to Dayan, this crude agitprop has been given a new lease of life on the small screen. I can already see it being played in schools.

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