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Two of London’s leading off-West End venues are currently hosting revivals of plays each offering different yet equally blinkered critiques of modern Jewish and Israeli history. In an increasingly febrile arts scene, where sadly one of the more fashionable zeitgeists is to be “anti-Zionist”, such revivals could possibly be expected. That both of these productions come companies with a significant Jewish pedigree in their make-up, sets a worrying trend.

My review of Broken Glass at the Young Vic, a play written by Arthur Miller late in his career, laid out my frustrations. Similarly, my review of Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs sets out that production’s fundamental flaws, with both productions predicated on demonstrably crumbling arguments.

However that when these flaky attempts at debate are delivered by casts and creatives who speak “as a Jew” “, or rather in these instances, “as Jews”, they bestow an apparent moral heft to the work that is undeserved. With so much genuinely hatred-fueled, malicious criticism of both Jews and the Jewish state already circulating, the conduct of such Jewish theatre-makers is at best idiotic and at worst, far more insidious.

Miller, while acknowledging his Jewish identity, clearly struggles with the religion, appearing unable to recognize the standout wickedness of the horrors of Nazi Germany’s antisemitism. He gives Sylvia Gellburg a psychosomatic paralysis,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)