Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza is a 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.
The play, which does not include the words "Israel" or "Zionist" but does reference "Jews" in several places,[1] 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 play has been criticized by some as antisemitic.[1] The Board of Deputies of British Jews has criticized it as both "horrifically anti-Israel" and "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse", while Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic called the play a blood libel and "the mainstreaming of the worst anti-Jewish stereotypes".[2] However, in support of the play, playwright Tony Kushner and academic Alisa Solomon, both Jewish-American critics of Israeli policy, have argued in The Nation that the play is "dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate"; and they further argue that "[a]ny play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point."[3]
Kushner was invoked but never defined (see the help page).