Roald Dahl organisations ‘worked closely’ with leading charity on tackling antisemitism
Danny Stone MBE, chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, confirms his organisation have engaged with both the Roald Dahl Story Company and the Roald Dahl Museum in 'good faith' for several months
Lee Harpin is the Jewish News's political editor
Two organisations involved with preserving the works of children’s author Roald Dahl worked closely with a charity focused on combating antisemitism on how to educate their audiences about his shameful anti-Jewish past, it has emerged.
Danny Stone MBE, chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, has confirmed he has been working with both the Roald Dahl Story Company and the Roald Dahl Museum for several months providing “guidance and training” around tackling antisemitism.
Stone said both the company and museum have engaged with organisation in “good faith” over a period over several months in an “effort to recognise the impact of Dahl’s words and the desire of staff to educate themselves on antisemitism, and to do more on tackling the issue in the future.”
Dahl – author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – had once said in an interview that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
In a review of a book about the Lebanon War that appeared in the August 1983 edition of the British periodical Literary Review Dahl wrote, in reference to Jewish people, “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”
In 2021, after it was revealed that around the time Netflix purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company ,an acknowledgement of Roald Dahl’s antisemitism was quietly added to a section of the Roald Dahl Story Company website.
But there has been concern within the community that not enough has been done to publicise the author’s poisonous views on Jews.
Board of Deputies president Marie van der Zyl wrote of her concern last month in the Jewish Chronicle that despite new changes being made to some of Dahl’s children story texts, to take out now offensive words from new editions published by Puffin Books, little was being done to highlight his antisemitism.
Van der Zyl said The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, contains absolutely no mention or acknowledgment of the author’s antisemitism.
And she revealed the Board had raised the issue with the museum six months ago.
It was recently confirmed that Puffin Books, the children’s imprint of Penguin Random House, had hired sensitivity readers to go over the author’s books so that language deemed to be offensive would be removed from new editions.
Puffin has also decided to release Dahl’s works in their original versions with its new texts.“Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer,” explained Penguin Random House UK CEO Tom Weldon.
Ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been among those to criticise the decision to rewrite the texts as “woke.”
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