"Seven Jewish Children" Just Won't Go To Sleep!

Barbara Kay: No poop bag big enough for Seven Jewish Children Posted: May 23, 2009, 10:00 AM by NP Editor

Left-wing Jews, forced to choose between Israel-centric Judaism and their anti-Israel political masters, have chosen leftism

In his May 19 review of Caryl Churchill’s 1,100 word play, Seven Jewish Children, Yoni Goldstein maintains that the work is a “nuanced piece of writing.” I couldn’t disagree more vigorously. Although I normally seek a certain level of refinement in polemical writing, I find that only a rather vulgar metaphor meets the rhetorical case here: Goldstein’s review is a classic example of a critic attempting to pick up an aesthetic turd by the clean end.

For those whose olfactory glands are willingly or innocently switched off, a turd can look a lot like an artfully constructed sculpture. But Seven Jewish Children, however cleverly conceived, is in microcosm to the theatre what Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was to filmmaking: an impressive and emotive, but aesthetically and morally corrupt, creation in the service of a wicked ideology. So in seriously assessing the literary properties of such a soiled product’s weight, shape, colour and density, Goldstein — and other critics, for he’s by no means alone in his entrapment — gives credibility to what should be consigned to the trash can of stage history.

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