This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.The Shocking True Story About Roald Dahl That Inspired the Broadway Play Giant

Tim TeemanTue, March 24, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC

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Roald Dahl and the Truth Behind ‘Giant’Getty Images; Joan Marcus

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Roald Dahl held nothing back. In the infamous book review that inspired Mark Rosenblatt’s award-winning Broadway play Giant—now open at the Music Box Theatre—the celebrated children’s author wrote of Jewish people: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers… 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.”

Dahl’s article—originally published in Literary Review in 1983, when the play is set—was widely denounced as antisemitic at the time. In Giant, Dahl (played by John Lithgow, who won the Olivier Award for Best Actor for performing the role in the West End) hosts two publishing professionals at his home, his agent—the very real—Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey, who also won an Olivier), and fictional American sales executive Jessie Stone (Aya Cash) who want him to publicly apologize for his words.

Inevitably, a pugnacious Dahl—author most famously of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, and the then about-to-be-published The Witches—is resistant to their entreaties. Dahl’s charged exchanges with Stone—who, like Maschler, is Jewish—elicited audible gasps of shock from the audience at a recent performance this author attended.

Aya Cash and John Lithgow in Giant, which is now open on Broadway.Joan Marcus

The play, directed by Nicholas Hytner and also featuring Rachael Stirling as Felicity “Liccy” Crosland (Dahl’s then soon-to-be second wife), premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2024 before transferring to the West End, where it also won the Olivier for Best New Play. Lithgow told the Guardian, “It’s like a psychological suspense thriller. But it’s people sitting around for a Sunday luncheon.”

In the Literary Review article, Dahl’s anger was powered by the subject of the book he was reviewing, God Cried by journalist Tony Clifton and photographer Catherine Leroy, about Israel’s 1982 siege of West Beirut in Lebanon which had resulted, wrote Dahl, in “mass slaughter.”

“The authentic tales of horror and bestiality throughout this book make one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are,” Dahl wrote. “It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again.”

Photo credit: Ben Martin - Getty Images

Roald Dahl, who’s played by John Lithgow in Giant.

Photo credit: Evening Standard - Getty Images

Dahl’s agent, Tom Maschler, is played by Elliot Levey.

He added that the United States was “so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions" and asked, “Must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?”

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Also in 1983, Dahl told British magazine the New Statesman: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews.”

“I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere,” he said. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

The author Roald Dahl, whose antisemitic writing caused a fervor that inspired the new Broadway play Giant.Hulton Deutsch - Getty Images

In 1990, just months before he died aged 74, Dahl told the Independent that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “hushed up” by newspapers “because they are primarily Jewish-owned,” adding, “I’m certainly anti-Israel and I’ve become antisemitic inasmuch as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism… I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: 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.”

Before performances of Giant began in London, Rosenblatt told the Guardian he had become “alarmed, as a British Jew, by how openly antisemitic language and stereotyping was blurring with meaningful, constructive debate around Israel and Palestine.” (Rosenblatt wrote the play before the Hamas-led attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023 and the more than 75,000 lives lost since in Gaza, and the US and Israel’s present wars in Iran and Lebanon.)

Dahl’s views had a lasting impact, even if his reputation as an author remained undimmed. As the Guardian reported in 2018, plans by Britain’s Royal Mint to celebrate the centenary of Dahl’s birth with a commemorative coin had been scrapped because of his antisemitic views.

In 2020, the Dahl family and Roald Dahl Story Company apologized for his remarks on the author’s official website, a statement reading: “Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.”

In a responding statement, the Campaign Against Antisemitism criticized the apology. “For his family and estate to have waited 30 years to make an apology, apparently until lucrative deals were signed with Hollywood, is disappointing and sadly rather more comprehensible. It is a shame that the estate has seen fit merely to apologize for Dahl’s anti-Semitism rather than to use its substantial means to do anything about it. The apology should have come much sooner and been published less obscurely.”

Giant is anything but obscure and—as world events have borne out—extremely timely. Rosenblatt told The Times of London, “What I wanted to do was write something that was both nuanced and even-handed about the issues around Israel and Palestine, and also about the difference between meaningful discourse around that and antisemitic stereotyping.”

On a “human level” Rosenblatt also wanted to “try to find what was both incredibly generous and subtle and heartfelt about [Dahl] as a man—but also where his cruelty lay, and how and why it was difficult for people to operate around him. A story around someone’s antisemitism is never a good look, but I think, I hope, the play is more than that. When you write someone, you write critically and affectionately because otherwise you can’t bring them to life.”

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