Roald Dahl’s family just apologized for his Jew hatred. What were the 5 worst things he said?
Roald Dahl Image by Getty Images
By Thea Glassman December 7, 2020
The family of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl has posted a brief apology for his antisemitic statements on his website.
In 86 words — that’s three sentences — the family and the says they “deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt,” but they don’t specify the statements.
These five may well have been on their minds..
1)“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. I mean, if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers, I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they [the Jews] were always submissive.”
2) “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic.”
3) In book review written by Dahl in the periodical “Literary Review,” he referred to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and accused the United States Government of being “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.”
4) The Israeli military activity in Lebanon, he said, “was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned … there aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere.”
5) When further discussing the Lebanon War, he wrote: “makes one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are. It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again.”
Thea Glassman is a Multimedia Fellow at the Forward. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter at @theakglassman.
The Forward is free to read but not free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
