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| - Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza is a controversial six-page, 10-minute play by British playwright Caryl Churchill, written in response to the 2008-2009 Israel military strike on Gaza, and first performed at London's Royal Court Theatre on 6 February 2009. Churchill, a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has said that anyone wishing to produce it may do so gratis, so long as they hold a collection for the people of Gaza at the end.
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| abstract
| - Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza is a controversial six-page, 10-minute play by British playwright Caryl Churchill, written in response to the 2008-2009 Israel military strike on Gaza, and first performed at London's Royal Court Theatre on 6 February 2009. Churchill, a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has said that anyone wishing to produce it may do so gratis, so long as they hold a collection for the people of Gaza at the end. Seven Jewish Children consists of seven scenes spread over roughly seventy years, in which Jewish adults discuss what, or whether, their children should be told about certain events in recent Jewish history that the play alludes to only indirectly : The Holocaust, Jewish immigration to Palestine, the creation of Israel, the flight or expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the dispute over water, the First Intifada, the death of Rachel Corrie, the building of the West Bank barrier, the death of Muhammad al-Durrah, Palestinian suicide attacks, Hamas rocket attacks, and the 2008 bombing of Gaza. The play takes the form of a litany, repeating the phrases "Tell her", "Don't tell her" to reflect the tension within Israel and the Jewish community over how to describe events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own/Tell her again this is our promised land/Don't tell her they said it was a land without people/Don't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known/Tell her maybe we can share/Don't tell her that." Churchill has been particularly criticized for an angry monologue within the play purportedly representing a hardline Israeli view: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her/Don't tell her that." Reaction to the play has been mixed, within both Jewish and non-Jewish community. The play is criticized by The Board of Deputies of British Jews as "anti-Israel", and by Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland as anti-semitic. While most of the original cast and director at Royal Court Theatre are Jewish themselves, Independent Jewish Voices sponsored and staged the play at Canada. Playwright Tony Kushner and academic Alisa Solomon, both Jewish-American critics of Israeli policy, argued that the play is dense, beautiful and elusive, and that "[a]ny play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point." What Strong Fences Make and Seven Other Children written as a response to the play. Churchill defended herself as calling "critics of Israel as anti-Semitic" is "the usual tactic" while the play is about "the difficulties of explaining violence to children. In the early scenes, it is violence against Jewish people; by the end, it is the violence in Gaza."
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