The antisemitic comments of Roald Dahl have resurfaced and how his family have issued an apology for all the stuff he’s said in the past.
It’s been 30 years since Roald Dahl shuffled off this mortal coil but his work remains timeless among children while also proving to be an endless money-making machine for Hollywood, with Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of The Witches and a bunch of Netflix adaptations in the pipeline being some of the most recent projects to milk this cash cow.
But for all the love his work gets, it’s hard to talk about the Roald Dahl himself because of his history of making antisemitic comments, perhaps most famously once telling an interviewer (via The Guardian): “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides.
He also told the New Statesmen in 1983, “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Unsurprisingly, those comments didn’t go down well with folks at the time and certainly haven’t gone down well in 2020.
So perhaps in anticipation of the next time these comments get dug up (again), Roald Dahl’s family have issued a statement on the official Roald Dahl website apologising for the “lasting and understandable hurt” caused by his antisemitic remarks.
Here’s the statement in full:
“The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements.
“Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations.
“We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.”
The aforementioned report from The Guardian notes that this apology is the only instance where Dahl’s antisemitic comments are acknowledged on the site (and was also surprising difficult to find). The Guardian also reports that the apology was not sent out to Jewish organisations.
This is obviously something that’s going to be a little difficult to digest for some and it once again brings up that discussion of whether people are able to separate an artist from their art.
The family of Roald Dahl, author of childhood classics like “The BFG” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” has issued a public apology for the many anti-Semitic remarks he made throughout his lifetime. https://t.co/dRK8nZNMvh
— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 6, 2020
