In recent years, some have sought to shine a brighter light on the troubling nature of Dahl’s personal views. Puffin Books, a children’s imprint of Penguin Books, came under fire in February for working with the Roald Dahl Story Company, which was acquired by Netflix in 2021, to rewrite new editions of Dahl’s children’s books to remove language related to race, gender, weight, and mental health that today’s readers might deem offensive
https://time.com/5937507/roald-dahl-anti-semitism/
2018 is glorious!
During his lifetime, Dahl made openly anti-Semitic remarks on a number of occasions.
In a review of a book about the Lebanon War that appeared in the August 1983 edition of the British periodical Literary Review, Dahl wrote, in reference to Jewish people, “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”
He also made reference to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and asserted that the United States government was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.”
Later that same year, he doubled down on his statements in an interview with the British magazine New Statesman. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he said. “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.”
A few months before his death in 1990, Dahl stated outright that he was anti-Semitic in an interview with The Independent.
After claiming that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned,” he went on to say, “I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic 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. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media—jolly clever thing to do—that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel.”
https://time.com/5937507/roald-dahl-anti-semitism/