I was privileged to see “Giant” on Broadway tonight with many friends from the UJA-Federation of New York community.
We walked in expecting a complex portrait of artistic brilliance. We walked out shaken by something far darker. The play does not soften Roald Dahl’s words. The most chilling moments were not dramatized inventions but verbatim excerpts from his own on the record interviews, filled with sweeping, venomous hatred of Jews everywhere. Hearing language that blamed all Jews for military actions in Lebanon, stripped of geopolitical context and humanity, felt disturbingly current. It could literally have been pulled from today’s headlines.
What emerges is not just a story about one man, but a warning about how easily genius can coexist with cruelty, and how dangerous it is when an entire community is reduced to caricature and conspiracy. Today’s pervasive ignorance mixed with all this was an obvious and technologically amped-up parallel.
And then, in the talkback, came a moment I cannot shake. The superb Elliot Levey, a Jewish cast member, who portrays a Jew in the play, shared that just the night before, on Yom HaShoah, his synagogue in the UK was firebombed and it went unreported. He pointed to his experience of American Jewish confidence as the most significant difference between us here and the British Jewish community. He added that “And that if we begin to cower, ‘it’s over.’” He pleaded, it felt, that we know what we have been blessed to have as American Jews, and that we must fight like hell to protect it.
The past is not past. This play is not just theater. It is a mirror, and a giant warning.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor serves as Scholar-in-Residence at UJA-Federation New York and is the founder of Rabbis Against Gun Violence. Rabbi Creditor has authored and edited over thirty books, including A Rabbi’s Heart, and After October 7: Essays. With millions of views of his daily Torah videos and essays, his leadership has helped shape national conversations on gun violence prevention, LGBTQ inclusion, Zionism, Interfaith organizing, and Jewish diversity. Rabbi Creditor’s music, including the well-known song Olam Chesed Yibaneh, is sung in communities around the world. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Academy for Jewish Religion and speaks widely about the role of faith in building a more compassionate world. He and his wife, Neshama Carlebach, live in New York, where they are raising their five children.