JTA — Roald Dahl is a terrible messenger for a serious conversation about Jews and Israel.

Which is part of what makes “Giant,” the new Broadway play about the beloved children’s author’s 1983 antisemitic outbursts, so unsettling. The play asks urgent, complicated questions about Israel, Jewish solidarity and Diaspora responsibility — but it puts them in the mouth of a man whose own views were so steeped in bigotry that they distort everything he says.

The play, which opened Monday on Broadway, revisits the controversy over an antisemitic book review he wrote for a UK literary journal. That essay, meant as a heartfelt, outraged response to Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon and the toll it had taken on civilians, veered immediately off the rails into bigotry. Dahl attributed Israel’s perceived excesses to a “race of people” who “switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” He also spewed age-old tropes according to which US policy was controlled by “powerful American Jewish bankers,” and charged that the government was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.”

John Lithgow stars as the towering — literally and figuratively — author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “James and Giant Peach.” Over the course of its two acts, Dahl’s British Jewish publisher and an American Jewish sales rep dispatched from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux try to convince the author to issue an apology.

The play was conceived before the bloody Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, but its relevance has grown exponentially, even uncannily, since it first ran in London to great acclaim starting in 2024. In “Giant,” Dahl details the Israeli airstrikes that destroyed hospitals in Lebanon in 1982. On the night I saw the play, Israel had announced that it was stepping up attacks aimed at Hezbollah infrastructure in Beirut. Lithgow’s line about the 1982 war was greeted by the audience with a sort of audible hush.

But the play is at its most immediate in its endoscopic exploration of the Diaspora relationship with Israel. Lithgow as Dahl demands that his two Jewish guests account for Israel’s actions — not just defend them, if they dare, but confess their own complicity, as supporters of Israel, in what the IDF is doing in Beirut.

When Jessie, the American visitor, suggests that........

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