Howard Jackobson, the popular novelist, broadcaster and university lecturer, wrote the following in a blog for The Guardian (Why Jacqueline Rose is not right: Caryl Churchill's play is not just bad art, but part of a toxic discourse that masquerades Jew-hatred as denunciation of Israel):
The problem with Seven Jewish Children is that it isn't drama. Jacqueline Rose praises it for being "precised and focused in its criticisms of Israeli policy". I agree. And that's what makes it not art.
If we are saying that this play is not art, then we must be consistent and do the same for other works of drama, poetry and prose.
Where Libyan monsters yell,
From the most gloomy glens
Of Greenland’s sunless clime,
To where the golden fields
Of fertile England spread
Their harvest to the day,
Thou canst not find one spot
Whereon no city stood.
Do you call that art Mister Shelley?
"So let him stand, through, ages yet unborn,
Fix'd statue on the pedestal of Scorn'
Though not for him alone revenge shall wait,
But fits thy country for her coming fate:
Hers were the deeds that taught her lawless son
To do what oft Britannia's self had done.
Look to the Baltic--blazing from afar,
Your old ally yet mourns perfidious war.
Not to such deed did Pallas lend her aid,
Or break the compact which herself had made;
Far from such councils, from the faithless field
She fled-but left behind her Gorgon shield;
A fatal gift that turn'd your friends to stone,
And left lost Albion hated and alone.
Well, Mister Byron, and you have the gall to call that art?
But thou---from thy reluctant hand
The thunderbolt is wrung---
Too late thou leav'st the high command
To which thy weakness clung;
All Evil Spirit as thou art,
It is enough to grieve the heart
To see thine own unstrung;
To think that God's fair world hath been
The footstool of a thing so mean;
Give over!
As Hannah Arendt stated: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil"; James Baldwin also wrote: "Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable".
So, is Seven Jewish Children art? Well, yes. Like it or not, it's art. It may not be good art, it may be irritating art, it may even be vile art, or stupid art, but art it is.
So no, the argument that it's crap and it's not art is facile nonsense, whether one likes the play or not.
Incidentally, Marx, who knew and understood poets just as well as philosophers and economists, used to say: “The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.”
Having read the script, I do not think that the Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children is anti-Semitic. I would be the last person to deny the obvious existence of this abomination, which we call anti-Semitism, with its insidious presence in political movements ostensibly supported by people on the left of the political spectrum. However, I do not think that anti-Semitism is a charge that we can use against this particular play.
Whilst I can understand why states should wish to defend themselves, and I am not against the use of arms in all circumstances, and certainly not when people are lobbing thousands of rockets, for as homemade as they may be, into your backyard, I can also understand why the disproportionate display of violence and destruction would outrage a pacifist.
Outrage is expressed in many different ways, some people blog, some people comment on blogs, some people write articles, some people take to the streets to protest, some people shout at the TV, some people sing songs, Caryl Churchill wrote a short play.
Our ability, for example, to reconcile an understanding of both Israel's actions and the motivation for the play, is the dialectic aptitude of humanity, and to pretend that we cannot or should not think in this manner is simply a way of diminishing the intelligence of the civil society.
I know it is a cliché, but after reading the script of the play and the narrative of outrage, protest and counter-protest, I am lead to the conclusion that we are all Seven Jewish Children. Seeking to classify this drama as "not art" is a rather nasty and underhanded and illiberal way of attacking something for what it is not.