Excerpted from Iqbal Tamini's Palestinian Mothers blog:

http://www.palestinianmothers.com/xn/detail/1970466:Topic:71199

Visit Palestinian Mothers at: http://www.palestinianmothers.com
http://www.palestinianmothers.com/forum/topics/seven-jewish-children-stage

Seven Jewish Children Stage - Caryl Churchill

Seven Jewish Children

Watch Jennie Stoller perform Caryl Churchill's play, Seven Jewish Children, which was written in response to the situation in Gaza in January this year

Seven Jewish Children Stage - Caryl Churchill

Seven Jewish Children - Austin, TX from Cambiare Productions on Vimeo.

http://www.cambiareproductions.com/SJC.html

http://vimeo.com/3901695

This is ROOMS Productions' official video documentation of Caryl Churchill's SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN a play for Gaza presented at ROOMS Gallery in Chicago, Illinois (Recorded March 14, 2009). SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN's script contains only 7 blocks of text - leaving the staging up to the those groups producing the work. ROOMS Productions presented the Chicago premiere of Ms. Churchill's script as a three hour looped performance installation (shown on March 12, 14 and 15 of 2009. At the request of Ms. Chruchill, donations for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians were taken at the door.

http://www.map-uk.org/

Go to ROOMSGallery.com for more info about ROOMS Productions.

SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN a play for Gaza PART ONE
Official ROOMS PRODUCTIONS Documentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OBA30Ax51s

SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN a play for Gaza PART TWO
Official ROOMS PRODUCTIONS Documentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV3iASkzQkg

Seven Jewish Children - a Play for Gaza

1

Tell her it's a game

Tell her it's serious

But dont frighten her

Dont tell her they'll kill her

Tell her it's important to be quiet

Tell her she'll have cake if she's good

Tell her to curl up as if she's in bed

But not to sing.

Tell her not to come out

Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting

Dont frighten her

Tell her not to come out even if she hears nothing for a long time

Tell her we'll come and find her

Tell her we'll be here all the time.

Tell her something about the men

Tell her they're bad in the game

Tell her it's a story

Tell her they'll go away

Tell her she can make them go away if she keeps still

By magic

But not to sing.

2

Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me

Tell her her uncles died

Dont tell her they were killed

Tell her they were killed

Dont frighten her.

Tell her her grandmother was clever

Dont tell her what they did

Tell her she was brave

Tell her she taught me how to make cakes

Dont tell her what they did

Tell her something

Tell her more when she's older.

Tell her there were people who hated jews

Dont tell her

Tell her it's over now

Tell her there are still people who hate jews

Tell her there are people who love jews

Dont tell her to think jews or not jews

Tell her more when she's older

Tell her how many when she's older

Tell her it was before she was born and she's not in danger

Dont tell her there's any question of danger.

Tell her we love her

Tell her dead or alive her family all love her

Tell her her grandmother would be proud of her.

3

Dont tell her we're going forever

Tell her she can write to her friends, tell her her friends can maybe come and visit

Tell her it's sunny there

Tell her we're going home

Tell her it's the land God gave us

Dont tell her religion

Tell her her great great great great lots of greats grandad lived there

Dont tell her he was driven out

Tell her, of course tell her, tell her everyone was driven out and the country is waiting

for us to come home

Dont tell her she doesnt belong here

Tell her of course she likes it here but she'll like it there even more.

Tell her it's an adventure

Tell her no one will tease her

Tell her she'll have new friends

Tell her she can take her toys

Dont tell her she can take all her toys

Tell her she's a special girl

Tell her about Jerusalem.

4

Dont tell her who they are

Tell her something

Tell her they're bedouin, they travel about

Tell her about camels in the desert and dates

Tell her they live in tents

Tell her this wasnt their home

Dont tell her home, not home, tell her they're going away

Dont tell her they dont like her

Tell her to be careful.

Dont tell her who used to live in this house

No but dont tell her her great great grandfather used to live in this house

No but dont tell her Arabs used to sleep in her bedroom.

Tell her not to be rude to them

Tell her not to be frightened

Dont tell her she cant play with the children

Dont tell her she can have them in the house.

Tell her they have plenty of friends and family

Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own

Tell her again this is our promised land.

Dont tell her they said it was a land without people

Dont tell her I wouldnt have come if I'd known.

Tell her maybe we can share.

Dont tell her that.

5

Tell her we won

Tell her her brother's a hero

Tell her how big their armies are

Tell her we turned them back

Tell her we're fighters

Tell her we've got new land.

6

Dont tell her

Dont tell her the trouble about the swimming pool

Tell her it's our water, we have the right

Tell her it's not the water for their fields

Dont tell her anything about water.

Dont tell her about the bulldozer

Dont tell her not to look at the bulldozer

Dont tell her it was knocking the house down

Tell her it's a building site

Dont tell her anything about bulldozers.

Dont tell her about the queues at the checkpoint

Tell her we'll be there in no time

Dont tell her anything she doesnt ask

Dont tell her the boy was shot

Dont tell her anything.

Tell her we're making new farms in the desert

Dont tell her about the olive trees

Tell her we're building new towns in the wilderness.

Dont tell her they throw stones

Tell her they're not much good against tanks

Dont tell her that.

Dont tell her they set off bombs in cafes

Tell her, tell her they set off bombs in cafes

Tell her to be careful

Dont frighten her.

Tell her we need the wall to keep us safe

Tell her they want to drive us into the sea

Tell her they dont

Tell her they want to drive us into the sea.

Tell her we kill far more of them

Dont tell her that

Tell her that

Tell her we're stronger

Tell her we're entitled

Tell her they dont understand anything except violence

Tell her we want peace

Tell her we're going swimming.

7

Tell her she cant watch the news

Tell her she can watch cartoons

Tell her she can stay up late and watch Friends.

Tell her they're attacking with rockets

Dont frighten her

Tell her only a few of us have been killed

Tell her the army has come to our defence

Dont tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army.

Dont tell her how many of them have been killed

Tell her the Hamas fighters have been killed

Tell her they're terrorists

Tell her they're filth

Dont

Dont tell her about the family of dead girls

Tell her you cant believe what you see on television

Tell her we killed the babies by mistake

Dont tell her anything about the army

Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldnt she know? tell her there's dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she's got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I'm not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we're the ones to be sorry for, tell her they cant talk suffering to us. Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we wont stop killing them till we're safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldnt care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I dont care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, 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.

Dont tell her that.

Tell her we love her.

Dont frighten her.

© Caryl Churchill Ltd, 2009

This play can be read or performed anywhere by any number of people. Should you wish to apply for rights, please contact ruth@casarotto.co.uk, who will license the performances free of charge provided that no admission fee is charged and that a collection is taken at each performance for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), 33a Islington Park Street, London N1 1 QB. Tel: 020-7226 4114. Website: map-uk.org. Email: info@map-uk.org

Hard copies can be obtained from Nick Hern Books, 14 Larden Road, London W3 7ST. Email: info@nickhernbooks.demon.co.uk

The text must be performed as written. No changes of any kind can be made to the title or text of the play.

No children appear in the play. The speakers are adults, the parents and if you like other relations of the children. The lines can be shared out in any way you like among those characters. The characters are different in each small scene as the time and child are different.

Written by peoplesgeography

Seven Jewish Children Stage - Caryl Churchill

Israel's recent bombing and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, killed 1,417 Palestinians; thirteen Israelis were killed, five by friendly fire. Thousands of Palestinians were seriously wounded and left without adequate medical care, shelter or food. Among the Palestinian dead, more than 400 were children. In response to this devastation, Caryl Churchill wrote a play: Seven Jewish Children

Churchill's 10-minute play consists of seven short scenes in which Israeli adults discuss how they will explain to children, who are never seen on stage, seven key moments in Israeli and Jewish history. This includes the Holocaust, the first Intifada and the present-day bombing of Gaza. According to Churchill, the play explores "the difficulties of explaining violence to children".

Caryl Churchill has made Seven Jewish Children available for productions without licensing or royalties for presenters who request audience contributions for the London-based relief organization Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Apr. 22, 2009
Larry Derfner from THE JERUSALEM POST Wrote:

After reading a lot of the pro and (mainly) con about Seven Jewish Children - a play for Gaza, I prepared to write a column saying that while it took an excessively critical view of Israel, it was not anti-Semitic, and that there was a big difference between the two.

Being a responsible journalist, I then set aside 10 minutes to actually read the play, and I found that not only isn't it anti-Semitic, it isn't excessively critical of Israel, either. As far as I'm concerned, it's just critical enough - which is to say very, very critical. More precisely, this short play by Britain's Caryl Churchill expresses moral outrage at Israel - which is what I felt during the war in Gaza, and what lots of other Jews and gentiles who want the best for this country felt as well.

Seven Jewish Children says this country has become hysterical with fear and aggression, that the more hell we inflict on innocent Palestinians, the more desperate we are to deny any wrongdoing and the more medals we pin on our chests.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYAYnJ6HZ5M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OJot7RQ3c

http://pulsemedia.org/2009/03/17/seven-jewish-children-a-play-for-g...

http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/SevenJewishChildre...

http://pulsemedia.org/2009/04/30/seven-jewish-children-video/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/video/2009/apr/25/seven-jewish-chil...

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Seven+Jewish+Children&hl=...

.

BBC rejects play on Israel's history for impartiality reasons

Ben Dowell
guardian.co.uk,

David Horovitch in Seven Jewish Children at the Royal Court.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The BBC has declined to broadcast a radio version of Caryl Churchill's controversial new stage play about Israeli history, claiming it needed to remain impartial ‑ the same reason given for declining to air the Gaza emergency appeal.

In a move likely to resurrect the row over the BBC's refusal in January to broadcast the appeal to help the people of Gaza, Radio 4 rejected an unsolicited manuscript of the play, Seven Jewish Children, which recently finished a short run at the Royal Court theatre. BBC sources suggest that a significant factor in the decision was awareness of the controversy stirred by Seven Jewish Children during its theatre run and the fact that the BBC has only recently survived the onslaught of criticism for its refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal. In an email seen by the Guardian, Radio 4's drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe said that he and Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer thought Churchill's play was a "brilliant piece".

But Howe wrote: "It is a no, I am afraid. Both Mark [Damazer, Radio 4 controller] and I think it is a brilliant piece, but after discussing it with editorial policy we have decided we cannot run with it on the grounds of impartiality – I think it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill's view. Having debated long and hard we have decided we can't do Seven Jewish Children."

When asked about the email, the BBC said in a statement: "This play was not commissioned and no indication was given it would be broadcast. After due consideration, we felt it would not work for our audience."

Churchill's 10-minute play consists of seven short scenes in which Israeli adults discuss how they will explain to children, who are never seen on stage, seven key moments in Israeli and Jewish history. This includes the Holocaust, the first Intifada and the present-day bombing of Gaza. According to Churchill, the play explores "the difficulties of explaining violence to children".

In a letter sent to the Daily Telegraph last month a number of prominent British Jews condemned the Royal Court for showing Churchill's play which they said portrayed Israeli parents as "inhuman triumphalists".

Some critics agreed. Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times attacked what he called "the play's ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness". However, the Times said the play had "no heroes and villains" and the Guardian's critic Michael Billington said the play "shows theatre's power to heighten consciousness and articulate moral outrage".

Permalink Reply by Fakhri Dweik 1 day ago: Irish4palestine's Blog

HELP GAZA "Seven Jewish Children" Do Your Part

Ha, more kudos to Ireland for having two showings of "Seven Jewish Children" by Caryl Churchill. Which is a short play written during the recent genocide in Gaza, a ten minute history of Israel, ending with the bombing of Gaza. Keep reading to find out how you can help and bring this play to your town, country or city! The play opened in London and of course the Israeli "hasbara" machine swung into action, crying "anti-Semitism" and the usual ad nauseam garbage. Because criticizing Israel is "verboten" remember that!

Here are a few excerpts of a reviews in England (from the Guardian)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/feb/11/seven-jewish-children

The work consists of seven cryptic scenes in which parents, grandparents and relatives debate how much children should know and not know. It moves, implicitly, from the Holocaust to the foundation of the state of Israel through the sundry Middle East wars up to the invasion of Gaza. At first, the advice indicates the deep divisions within Israel ("Tell her they want to drive us into the sea" / "Tell her they don't"); at the end, it becomes a ruthless justification for self-preservation ("Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe").
What she captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter. Avoiding overt didacticism, her play becomes a heartfelt lamentation for the future generations who will themselves become victims of the attempted military suppression of Hamas.

And as reported below in the Irish Times today:

Controversial drama about Gaza bombing to get Irish staging
IT IGNITED a war of words when it was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London last month: now Caryl Churchill's controversial 10-minute play Seven Jewish Children is to be given a series of stagings in Dublin and Kinsale.

Churchill (70) wrote the piece as a response to the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza in January. The script can be downloaded from the internet free of charge, but theatre companies must apply for the right to stage it. No admission fee may be charged, and all proceeds must go to the Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) charity.

Billed as a 10-minute history of Israel, the play consists of seven short scenes in which Israeli parents debate how much to tell their children about various historical events, beginning with the Holocaust and ending with the recent conflagration in Gaza.
In his four-star review the Guardian's theatre critic, Michael Billington, said "the play solves nothing, but shows theatre's power to heighten consciousness and articulate moral outrage".

But as mentioned, here comes the "hasbara" and cries of Anti-Semitism, "Jew Haters" "Jew Bashing" nonsense Israel likes to employ to cover up the real reasons a play such as this would need to be written in the first place. So, the "Board of Deputies of British Jews" springs into action along with a pro Israeli journalist who writes and entire essay on Anti-Semitism to quell the British Zionists.

In a lengthy essay on anti-Semitism in the Independent, however, Howard Jacobson described the piece as "wantonly inflammatory" and "Jew-hating pure and simple". In the Spectator, Melanie Phillips accused Churchill of "perpetrating incendiary lies about Israel" and "drawing upon an atavistic hatred of the Jews".

The spokesman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Mark Frazier, told the Jewish Chronicle: "We knew the play was going to be horrifically anti-Israel because Caryl Churchill is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign."He added that the title – Seven Jewish Children, rather than Seven Israeli Children – "pushes it beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse".

Here's the best part, although this play will begin in Ireland, where ever you live in the world, you can download the script and organize a performance in your city, town or country. The only proviso is that you cannot charge for tickets and all donations collected must go to help Gaza, see below for explanation and where to download the script if interested in making this play a reality in your part of the world.

But first, if you live in Ireland here's where you can see the play:

Tomorrow, it will be staged at: St Stephen's Green, at 2pm, directed by Duncan Molloy; the Temple Bar Square Book Market, between 2pm and 4pm, and at Piedescalso Art Cafe, Thomas Street at 6.30pm and 7.30pm, performed by the Shining Eyes Theatre Company and directed by Hilary Cotter; and the Project Arts Centre, at 9.30pm, following the preview of Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, directed by Lynne Parker. On Sunday, it will be on at Bewley's Cafe Theatre, at 3pm, staged by Mirari Productions and directed by Maisie Lee. There are also performances at the Peacock Theatre from Thursday and at Vicar Street on March 16th.
On Wednesday. it will be performed around Kinsale.

The script of Seven Jewish Children can be downloaded in PDF format from http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/SevenJewishChildre...

And in other Gaza related news:

A group of Irish people is attempting to reach Gaza by boat in time for St Patrick's Day.

Spokeswoman Elaine Daly said some of the group were members of the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), "but the trip is non-party political and organised independently of the IPSC". Ms Daly said she and 19 others hoped to set sail from Cyprus on a "Free Gaza siege-breaking boat" on March 14th and arrive in Gaza port a day or two later.

Link: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0306/1224242372462...I would encourage people around the world to download the script and re-create the play all over the world. As the major crisis in Gaza drops off the news, we must keep the world focused on what Israel has done, murdered thousands of people and over 400 of them being young children! We must all keep pressure on until they are brought to justice for the war crimes they committed, white phosphorous, DIME missiles, depleted uranium, all used on civilian populations! Never forget that.

Permalink Reply by Iqbal Tamimi 1 day ago: Tell her soon she will grow up to become a mother...
Tell her she will understand how it feels to worry about her child, and how painful it is to lose a child.
Tell her blood is dearer than oil and money.
Tell her to reject discrimination and call for equal rights of all, since every human being is special.
Tell her if the killing stops we will enjoy art, music, and literature.
Tell her to demand an apology of the Israeli state to every mother who lost a child. Tell her to request compensating people for their losses.
Tell her the state of Israel claimed that they did not intend to kill the children and women of Gaza, and did not mean to bomb the schools, hospitals, universities, and ambulances, tell her to demand of Israel to rebuild what it has wrecked.
Tell her Israel is no democracy, no democracy will discriminate against ones beliefs.
Tell her a democracy will never imprison 55 MPs representatives of the people.
Tell her children of her age are in prison with the criminals deprived of schooling because they dared to love their country.
Tell her to thank God that she is not a pregnant Palestinian woman about to give birth at a check point.
Tell her we love her.
Tell her we want her to change every body's future because she will save many lives.
Tell her that her great grand parents lived in peace with Palestinians for hundreds of years before the apartheid regime ruled over the land of peace.
Tell her we want to sleep without fears.
Tell her not to be frightened, all the Palestinian want is equal rights and justice.
Tell her if she is brave to change this ugly system one day we will all meet like all good neighbours do.
Tell her Palestinian mothers used to baby set for Jewish mothers like sisters.
Tell her not to believe all the lies she hears from stream line media.
Tell her if she really believe in God she will respect life and dignity of others.
Tell her God is capable of making prophecies come true if he wants without the help of humans.
Tell her no God will favour some of his children over the rest of them.
Tell her it is not fair that she came from Russia and she lives in my home while I and my family were expelled from our home where we lived there1400 years.
Tell her...to ask them..why I can't go home now.
Tell her why people in my home town can't pray in our local mosque as they used to for hundreds of years.
Tell her 11.870 Palestinian are detained in prisons the majority were never tried at a court.
Tell her I want to die and be buried home under a vine tree.
Tell her my body blossomed from the soil of Palestine and one day it should be reunited with Palestine's soil to nurish a jasmine tree....climb the windows and stretch to hug the sky.
Tell her only justice can bring peace.

'Tell Her the Truth'

By Tony Kushner & Alisa Solomon

Caryl Churchill has made Seven Jewish Children available for productions without licensing or royalties for presenters who request audience contributions for the London-based relief organization Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Israel's recent bombing and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, killed 1,417 Palestinians; thirteen Israelis were killed, five by friendly fire. Thousands of Palestinians were seriously wounded and left without adequate medical care, shelter or food. Among the Palestinian dead, more than 400 were children. In response to this devastation, Caryl Churchill wrote a play.

Churchill is one of the most important and influential playwrights living, the author of formally inventive, psychologically searing, politically and intellectually complex dramas, including Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest and Far Away. To this body of work she's now added the very brief (six pages, ten minutes long in performance) and very controversial Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. The play ran for two weeks in February at London's Royal Court Theatre and is being presented across the United States in cities such as New York (Theaters Against War and New York Theatre Workshop), Chicago (Rooms Productions), Washington (Theater J and Forum Theatre), Cambridge, Massachusetts (Cambridge Palestine Forum) and Los Angeles (Rude Guerrilla).

While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the "horrifically anti-Israel" text went "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse."

We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill's play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible.

Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.

The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative. Hence efforts to shut down exhibitions of Palestinian art all over the country, most notoriously, perhaps, in 2006, when Brandeis University officials removed paintings by Palestinian teenagers from a campus library exhibit, "The Arts of Building Peace."

Theater, arguably the most humanizing of art forms because it begins and ends with human presence, with an encounter between spectators and living actors, has often attracted the ire of people grimly determined to maintain the invisibility of others. It's been twenty years since liberal stalwart Joe Papp caved to pressure and canceled appearances at the Public Theater of a visiting Palestinian troupe, El Hakawati. In the decades since, American discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only become more vituperative and polarized, as the New York Theatre Workshop learned three years ago when it announced, and then retreated from, plans to present My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

With its title, its subject matter, its distillation of that subject matter, of a long, tangled, bloody and bitter history down to a few simple strokes, it's hardly surprising that Churchill's play has elicited outrage. The hostile reaction to Seven Jewish Children has been amplified by the context of a frightening wave of anti-Semitism in Britain and elsewhere, and exacerbated by the tendency to misread a multivocal, dialectical drama as a single-voiced political tract.

Even among those who are anguished and appalled at the catastrophe in Gaza and repulsed by the invective being hurled at Churchill, some are likely to be startled, if not to say troubled, by the play's blunt assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Even those familiar enough with Churchill's work to recognize in Seven Jewish Children another installment in her recent move toward poetic compression--and Beckett proved how profound dramatic minimalism can be--may be taken aback by the play's brevity, by the playwright's implicit rejection of the idea that the situation in the Middle East is too complicated, too impacted, too needful of historical exegesis and balancing points of view to be responsibly explored at anything other than great length.

There are passages, particularly in an ugly monologue near the play's conclusion, that are terribly painful to experience, especially for Jews.

It's difficult to imagine that the author didn't intend to court outrage, whether or not she anticipated its ferocity. This imputes nothing to Churchill of the mischievous or sensationalistic. Her play's political ambitions are at least as important as its aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it would be disingenuous and, in a sense, a betrayal of Seven Jewish Children to insist upon a calm, quiet reading or hearing free from the voluble passions it has enflamed. The fury that rises up around this conflict, and the cowed silence that is that fury's inevitable concomitant, are simultaneously the object and subject of the play. It's an incitement to speech and an examination of silence; in its content and through its inevitably controversial reception, it describes what can and cannot be said.

Why is the play so short? Probably because Churchill means to slap us out of our rehearsed arguments to look at the immediate human crisis. No wonder it smarts. The play dares reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the kind of stinging simplicity of Neruda's lines, "and through the streets the blood of children flowed easily/like the blood of children."

Why does the title use "Jewish" rather than "Israeli"? Because all the children the play revolves around are Jewish, but not all are Israeli. And because not all Israelis are Jewish; a sizable minority is Arab. More important, because her play addresses the worldwide Jewish community. Our history of diaspora and persecution led to the founding of the State of Israel, which claims to act on behalf of all Jews. We have an impact upon its policies. Many Jews, including the two of us, feel profoundly connected to Israel and concerned for its fate; Seven Jewish Children is speaking to us.

Why does the play feel, even to those of us who admire its virtues, so peculiarly and, at times, almost brutally painful? It is an exigent text, a rapid public response to and at the moment of slaughter; and, remarkably, as few such texts are, it is contemplative, interior, almost entirely soft-spoken, and demanding.

The play consists of seven sequences, each composed of approximately twenty simple sentences, almost all of which begin with the words "Tell her" or "Don't tell her." There is no place-and-time setting specified for the sequences, and the lines are not assigned to specific characters. In fact, there isn't a character list or even a suggested number of performers, and the text looks less like a play than the poem it also is. Nonetheless, it's clear that these are discussions between the parents, adult relatives and guardians of a young girl, presumably a different little girl in each sequence, who the playwright specifies is not on stage, not seen. It's also clear that the first of the seven sequences begins during the Holocaust; then the play moves successively to the founding of the State of Israel, the displacement of its Palestinian population and the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arriving, finally, in a very dark, very dangerous moment--probably, although this is not made explicit in the text, concurrent with the military operation and humanitarian disaster in Gaza that occasioned the play. All else--the cast's size, gender, age (as long as all the players are adults) and ethnicity, as well as all staging choices--the playwright leaves to the director and actors.

Churchill is one of the most important and influential playwrights living, the author of formally inventive, psychologically searing, politically and intellectually complex dramas, including Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest and Far Away. To this body of work she's now added the very brief (six pages, ten minutes long in performance) and very controversial Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. The play ran for two weeks in February at London's Royal Court Theatre and is being presented across the United States in cities such as New York (Theaters Against War and New York Theatre Workshop), Chicago (Rooms Productions), Washington (Theater J and Forum Theatre), Cambridge, Massachusetts (Cambridge Palestine Forum) and Los Angeles (Rude Guerrilla).

While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the "horrifically anti-Israel" text went "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse."

We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill's play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible.

Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.

The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative. Hence efforts to shut down exhibitions of Palestinian art all over the country, most notoriously, perhaps, in 2006, when Brandeis University officials removed paintings by Palestinian teenagers from a campus library exhibit, "The Arts of Building Peace."

Theater, arguably the most humanizing of art forms because it begins and ends with human presence, with an encounter between spectators and living actors, has often attracted the ire of people grimly determined to maintain the invisibility of others. It's been twenty years since liberal stalwart Joe Papp caved to pressure and canceled appearances at the Public Theater of a visiting Palestinian troupe, El Hakawati. In the decades since, American discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only become more vituperative and polarized, as the New York Theatre Workshop learned three years ago when it announced, and then retreated from, plans to present My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

With its title, its subject matter, its distillation of that subject matter, of a long, tangled, bloody and bitter history down to a few simple strokes, it's hardly surprising that Churchill's play has elicited outrage. The hostile reaction to Seven Jewish Children has been amplified by the context of a frightening wave of anti-Semitism in Britain and elsewhere, and exacerbated by the tendency to misread a multivocal, dialectical drama as a single-voiced political tract.

Even among those who are anguished and appalled at the catastrophe in Gaza and repulsed by the invective being hurled at Churchill, some are likely to be startled, if not to say troubled, by the play's blunt assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Even those familiar enough with Churchill's work to recognize in Seven Jewish Children another installment in her recent move toward poetic compression--and Beckett proved how profound dramatic minimalism can be--may be taken aback by the play's brevity, by the playwright's implicit rejection of the idea that the situation in the Middle East is too complicated, too impacted, too needful of historical exegesis and balancing points of view to be responsibly explored at anything other than great length.

There are passages, particularly in an ugly monologue near the play's conclusion, that are terribly painful to experience, especially for Jews.

It's difficult to imagine that the author didn't intend to court outrage, whether or not she anticipated its ferocity. This imputes nothing to Churchill of the mischievous or sensationalistic. Her play's political ambitions are at least as important as its aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it would be disingenuous and, in a sense, a betrayal of Seven Jewish Children to insist upon a calm, quiet reading or hearing free from the voluble passions it has enflamed. The fury that rises up around this conflict, and the cowed silence that is that fury's inevitable concomitant, are simultaneously the object and subject of the play. It's an incitement to speech and an examination of silence; in its content and through its inevitably controversial reception, it describes what can and cannot be said.

Why is the play so short? Probably because Churchill means to slap us out of our rehearsed arguments to look at the immediate human crisis. No wonder it smarts. The play dares reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the kind of stinging simplicity of Neruda's lines, "and through the streets the blood of children flowed easily/like the blood of children."

Why does the title use "Jewish" rather than "Israeli"? Because all the children the play revolves around are Jewish, but not all are Israeli. And because not all Israelis are Jewish; a sizable minority is Arab. More important, because her play addresses the worldwide Jewish community. Our history of diaspora and persecution led to the founding of the State of Israel, which claims to act on behalf of all Jews. We have an impact upon its policies. Many Jews, including the two of us, feel profoundly connected to Israel and concerned for its fate; Seven Jewish Children is speaking to us.

Why does the play feel, even to those of us who admire its virtues, so peculiarly and, at times, almost brutally painful? It is an exigent text, a rapid public response to and at the moment of slaughter; and, remarkably, as few such texts are, it is contemplative, interior, almost entirely soft-spoken, and demanding.

The play consists of seven sequences, each composed of approximately twenty simple sentences, almost all of which begin with the words "Tell her" or "Don't tell her." There is no place-and-time setting specified for the sequences, and the lines are not assigned to specific characters. In fact, there isn't a character list or even a suggested number of performers, and the text looks less like a play than the poem it also is. Nonetheless, it's clear that these are discussions between the parents, adult relatives and guardians of a young girl, presumably a different little girl in each sequence, who the playwright specifies is not on stage, not seen. It's also clear that the first of the seven sequences begins during the Holocaust; then the play moves successively to the founding of the State of Israel, the displacement of its Palestinian population and the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arriving, finally, in a very dark, very dangerous moment--probably, although this is not made explicit in the text, concurrent with the military operation and humanitarian disaster in Gaza that occasioned the play. All else--the cast's size, gender, age (as long as all the players are adults) and ethnicity, as well as all staging choices--the playwright leaves to the director and actors.

Tell her it's a game

Tell her it's serious

But don't frighten her

Don't tell her they'll kill her

Tell her it's important to be quiet

Tell her she'll have cake if she's good

In the next sequence, which takes place sometime immediately post-Holocaust, telling or not telling revolves around questions of memory and mourning, of protecting a child from the emotional annihilation of a grief too weighty and of a knowledge of evil too imponderable for her youthful capacities.

Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her   uncles and me

Tell her her uncles died

Don't tell her they were killed

Tell her they were killed

Don't frighten her.

Tell her her grandmother was clever

Don't tell her what they did

Tell her she was brave

Tell her she taught me how to make cakes

Don't tell her what they did

Tell her something.

In subsequent sequences, what can and can't be talked about are the anxieties of relocating (to pre-state Israel, although it isn't named), then the presence and forcible displacement of others (the Palestinians, again not named), the roadblocks, the bulldozing of homes, water rights. There's a shift at this point in the dialogue: the tension between assertions and their negation becomes tighter, more suggestive of conflict within the family or community, as the speakers struggle over how to deal with conflict from without.

Don't tell her she can't play with the children

Don't tell her she can have them in the house

Tell her they have plenty of friends and family

Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands   of their own

Tell her again this is our promised land.

Don't tell her they said it was a land without people

Don't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known.

Tell her maybe we can share.

Don't tell her that.

Just before the play ends, the back-and-forth of the dialogue is stopped for the first time by a monologue. Though it's ostensibly an answer to the question of what the girl can or can't be told, that question becomes mere pretext for an explosion of rage, racism, militarism, tribalism and repellent indifference to the suffering of others. It's important to note that this monologue is neither the last word in the play nor any kind of summation or harmonizing of the play's disputatious voices. But it's near enough to the end; and expansive as it is, after so much compression, it unavoidably feels like a dreadful conclusion; to some, it's manifestly an indictment.

Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn't she know? tell her there's dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she's got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I'm not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we're the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can't talk suffering to us. Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don't care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, 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.

This monologue is the "proof text" for those who've charged Churchill with anti-Semitism and worse, with blood libel, which her accusers discern in the last lines of the speech.

When the two of us first discussed Seven Jewish Children we turned immediately to those lines. We both winced when we read them; we both became alarmed. One of us was disturbed by the line "tell her we're better haters," resonant of Shylock and Alberich the Nibelung. The other focused on "tell her we're chosen people," contending that in this context it reflected a misunderstanding of the term "chosen people," casting Jewish chosen-ness as an expression of divine right and exceptionalism rather than of religious/ethical responsibility. We speculated that these two lines added fuel to the willful misreading as blood libel of the lines that follow: "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." Those who level the blood-libel accusation insist that Churchill has written "tell her I'm happy when I see their children covered in blood."

But that is not what Churchill wrote. Distortion, misrepresentation and name-calling are tactics familiar to anyone who's spoken out about the Middle East. There's no blood libel in the play. The last line of the monologue is clearly a warning: you can't protect your children by being indifferent to the children of others.

There's a vast difference between making your audience uncomfortable and being anti-Semitic. To see anti-Semitism here is to construe erroneously the words spoken by the worst of Churchill's characters as a statement from the playwright about all Jews as preternaturally filled with a viciousness unique among humankind. But to do this is, again, to distort what Churchill wrote. The monologue belongs to and emerges from a particular dramatic action that makes the eruption inevitable and horrifying.

The play traces the processes of repressed speech. The violence forcing that repression comes initially from without; the monologue gives voice to a violence that's moved inside. The play stages the return of the repressed, an explosion of threatened defensiveness that, unexpressed and unowned, has turned into rage. Encountering it is terrifying; we don't want to own it. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize it. And sad to say, there's no sentiment in the monologue's spew that we have not heard or read at some point from presumed "defenders" of Israel (as even a cursory survey of the Internet demonstrates: for example, the chilling story in the March 20 Ha'aretz about some Israeli army units making T-shirts celebrating civilian casualties and rape in Gaza).

The siege of Gaza over the past several years, which nearly starved a high proportion of the population, was unconscionable in humanitarian terms, but an even worse corner was turned this past winter. A placard at a peace-movement demonstration in Tel Aviv in January proclaimed, Slaughter Is Not Security. Apart from some brave thousands who took to the Israeli streets throughout the weeks of Operation Cast Lead, a large majority of Israelis--and their supporters in America--were convinced that the carnage was, indeed, justified as defense. Some even boasted about it. In America's weekly Jewish newspaper, the Forward, the president of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, in an op-ed defending the Gaza invasion, disparaged more hawkish Israel supporters for "the obscene, cowboy-like delight" in "the damage Israel's army is able to inflict." But even when softened into Yoffie's remorseful notion of the Gaza offensive as a "tragic necessity, unwelcome but inevitable," the justification amounts to the same thing: better them than us. Such dehumanizing rhetoric is common in mainstream Jewish-American and Israeli discourse (and, in fact, in all military conflicts). Churchill, a non-Jew, had the chutzpah to strip that rhetoric of its hangdog, contrite camouflage and reflect it back to us: "tell her all I feel is happy it's not her."

That hideous sentiment, however, is not the play's final word. There are three more lines:

Don't tell her that.

Tell her we love her.

Don't frighten her.

A playwright's presumptuous job is to imagine others, and the others Churchill has imagined in this play are Jews. If there's anger in the writing, there's also empathy, tenderness and intimacy. Nothing is more intimate than discussions between parents about what to tell their children; no act of speech is more carefully weighed or more fiercely protected. This is a family play, told from within the family. It concludes with love, and it concludes with fear.

Seven Jewish Children is a play. It must be read with an awareness of the incompleteness of plays on paper, destined as they are for collective rather than singular experience, for warm bodies speaking the lines, for empathy, for the variability of interpretation. All plays require that directors and actors make considered choices. Performance produces meaning. If an actor stresses "tell" in the line "Don't tell her that," it might suggest, That's true, but don't let her know. But if "that" is emphasized, it might mean, How can you even think such an outrageous thing? And much will depend on how the actor strikes the first word, "Don't"--collegially or adversarially.

Churchill ups the interpretive ante by leaving everything, beyond the lines themselves, to her interpreters. The monologue and the lines that follow it will carry different meanings if spoken, say, by a grandmother with a Yiddish accent or by a young man in an Israeli army uniform. Or by, say, a Korean-American man or a Chicana. Or, since the play is so short and could be watched three or four times in a row, with the lines spoken each time by different actors. Any director and company approaching the play will have to decide whether and how the audience will be made aware of the radical degree to which the written text has insisted, through its lack of character identification or stage action, on collaboration. Surely it's essential to understanding Seven Jewish Children that against the specifics of the script, the playwright, relinquishing nearly all traditional authorial control, engineers a far-greater-than-usual slippage among text and performance and audience reception, producing an unusually large amount of room for variant readings.

And it is perhaps only on stage that the central characters of the play come into their own: the eponymous seven Jewish children who are its heroines. We never see them. Our empathic imaginations are enlisted by the playwright. We have to conjure them.

In the opening scene of Churchill's Far Away, a girl asks her aunt about beatings she's seen her uncle commit. What's most terrifying is how easily the aunt placates, justifies and quells her niece's will to question. But in Churchill's play for Gaza, the girls never stop asking.

This is a powerful trope in Jewish culture; it's the questioning child around whom the Passover Seder is built. We're left to hope that this girl we've never seen, the last scene's girl, won't become one of the Israeli teenagers who recently gave the truly frightening Avigdor Lieberman the highest share of the votes in a high school election poll. Perhaps she's a pain in the ass, this girl; perhaps she'll keep questioning. Perhaps she refuses to succumb to those in her family whose loving desire is to protect her by not speaking, by not saying. Perhaps she's realizing that their repression of the truth has become not only misguided and immoral but fatal; for nothing survives on lies, on a denial of reality; eventually, reality wins. Perhaps she's found out about a relative of hers, mentioned earlier: "Don't tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army."

Perhaps this girl will grow up to work for justice.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090413/kushner_solomon

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Permalink Reply by Iqbal Tamimi 1 day ago: Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic techniques and feminist themes. She is acknowledged as a major playwright in the English language and a leading female writer. Her early work developed Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of 'Epic theatre' to explore issues around gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards increasingly fragmented and surrealistic narratives characterizes her work as postmodernist.