Anyone who enjoys theater and plans to be New York soon, will hear about “Giant,” starring John Lithgow, a play with several Tony nominations, to be announced this coming Friday. I saw it in London last year, and am here to help anyone who is debating whether to invest their time and money in it. Hint: for two hours I didn’t feel as though I was watching a play, but rather as if I were listening to troubled Jews abroad, forced to grapple with themselves and with their surroundings at a time when Israel and its image are under heavy strain.

The giant is the late children’s author Roald Dahl, 6 feet 6 inches tall. He is the father of “The BFG (Big Friendly Giant)”, “Matilda” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and an unabashed antisemite – his family was to apologize for it. The play is set in 1983, after Dahl wrote a review of a book about Israel’s conduct during the First Lebanon War, in which he repeated stereotypes about Jewish control and cowardice and compared us to the Nazis. In a subsequent interview, he explained that there is something in the Jewish character that arouses hostility; even a stinker like Hitler, he said, did not pick on them for no reason.

The play features two Jewish characters, one real and one fictional. The real one is Tom Maschler, Dahl’s reserved British publisher, who was born in Berlin in 1933 and as a........

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