Israel needs to grow up!! Anyone who looks into their hearts will find that a wall surrounding a town, keeping families apart, fighting fire with bombs...is wrong. Can't they all just get along?

It's just another wretched piece of antisemitic propaganda wearing the sheep's clothing of art. Part of a continuum of the so called progressive left pandering to genocidal radical Islamic interests. The manipulation of casting Jews as Nazis is both perverse and libelous.

How little the playwrite knows about Israeli society... and how quick to criticize!

What I'd like to see is a play with the same brainstorming going on in a HAMAS thug's head before he tricks a "dishonoured" girl or a braindamaged 14 year old boy to don a suicide-bombing vest and go into a crowded Israeli bus and blow themselves up.

I wouldn't call this play anti-Semetic, but just terribly misguided and a big copout. It's open season on Israel and so it's ridiculously easy to write such a play. Go write a similar play about the "Palestinians" and I guarantee you their sympathizers will be violent and who knows - maybe will blow someone up :(

tdj is absolutely right. this play is misguided, onesided, and terribly ignorant. it does not do any justice to the complexities and humanity of this conflict on either end. for anyone who understands that this is not a black and white situation, this play is a joke.

Check out an Israeli mother's reaction to "7 Jewish Children" here: http://brians-op-eds.blogspot.com/

Staging this propoganda at Thatre Passe Muraille is a case of using my tax dollars to promote Jew-hatred.

Oh, sorry. It's defenders say this play is only about Jewish Israelis, who are portrayed as monsters, as baby-killers, etc.

Kind of like if Caryl Churchill did a play that showed South Africans as savage google-eyed idiots - would that be okay because it's not about every black - just South African blacks?

Or that would still be racist, wouldn't it, just as this play is antisemitic?

And of course "7 Jewish Children" is not just about Isralis; note the title: it's about Jews and how supposedly Jews have turned into Nazis.

Imagine a play called "Seven Moslem Children" It's about Palestinian adults explaining to their kids why enjoy strapping explosives to them and sending them off to murder Seventy Jewish Children, Seventy Jewish Grannies, Seventy Jewish Grandpas

(Note: the name of the play has the word "moslem" in it, because it's about Palestinians....just like the other play has the word "jewish" and the pretense is that it's about Israelis)

And of course, most importantly, it's not true!! Of course, you may find a few Israelis who speak hatefully of Palestinians, but the overwhelming population of Israeli parents do not speak of hate, do not applaud killing, desire only Peace for both Peoples. It is the Palestinian parents who you see celebrating in the streets when Jews are killed, when suicide bombers destroy buses and everyone on them, including children. It is the Palestinian books that teach hate of Jews, the joys of "martyrdom" for killing Jews, showing Jews as pigs and worse. Where is that play, Caryl Churchill??!

Seven Molsem Children...ha!

It's hard worki killing Jews when they fight back.

It's easy to criticize the "other," whether it be Israel or Palestine. But you're only half a human if you can't criticize yourself. When a Canadian writes "a play for Canada," about the Bloc GliberConDP signing security treaties with the world's two greatest rogue nations, the US and Israel, and it receives a good review in "Canada's National Newspaper" and the "National Post," then we can tell our children; "No dear, we don't lie, steal, murder and betray...like we used to."

Thousands of Israeli settlers have been expropriating Palestinian land and making midnight raids on Palestinian homes for years, on the grounds that they have a Divine mandate to do so.

That self-hating Jew (not) Noam Chomsky has documented this, and the same type of people that have been firing off extreme email missives in this space tried to stop people from reading Chomsky's articles by raiding paperboxes and throwing the newspapers in which they were printed into the garbage.

Speaking of which, hateful extremists such as Hamas typically arise in societies that are completely demoralized. Conscientious Israelis are well aware of this, and I think Churchill's play focuses on the internal conflict many feel about what is happening.

It's interesting that Israel's main ally in this one-sided military conflict is the United States, whose own history of theft of land from native inhabitants is well documented.

I am a non-Jew, and specious accusations of anti-Semitism have no effect on me. I owe you nothing but a recognition of your humanness. There is no question that there are anti-semitic schools in the Middle East, but consider that many Arabs consider Israel to be directly aligned with the Western nations that have plundered their territory since the 1800s.

I think one thing to consider is whether or not the parents speaking these lines actually believe them. In the first act, the parents consider telling their children the Holocaust is a game, that if they stay quiet, the bad men will go away.

The parents don't believe these things, they are trying to tell their children things that will not upset them.

If you saw citizens of an enemy country dead on tv, what would you tell your own child? Might you tell them that these people deserved it? Wouldn't you want them to believe they lived in a world where innocents survive and the guilty get what they deserve?

Maybe the point of the play is to ask to what extent we adults should believe these rationalizations, and whether they are enough to justify what happened in Gaza this year.

I read "Seven Jewish children" and I don't find the play hateful at all. I also don't agree that it incites hatred against Jews or Israelis. I think the play captures accurately all the confusion, guilt and contradiction within the Jewish/Israeli communities about the legitimacy of Israel and about the Israelis treatment of the Palestinians during the War in Gaza. I think that the final section would make any sensitive person angry about the attitude expressed which I believe is an accurate representation of how some Jews feel, but there is a big difference between making people angry and inciting hatred. Jews and Israelis need to be able to listen to legitimate criticism from thoughtful and sensitive people without screaming "anti-Semites".

My main quarrel with the play is that its anguish about the mistreatment of Palestinians by the Israelis is really about man's inhumanity to man, and it's not really fair for the playwrite to focus her outrage specifically at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The fact is that the armed forces of every nation are trained and brainwashed to be killers. Otherwise, they could never fight in a war and kill another human being. In this, the Israelis are no different and no worse than anyone else. This is the inhumanity and brutality of all wars everywhere, not just the War in Gaza.

After reading the comments above, I noticed that the best ones were always written by someone who actually has read or seen the play. It is not hateful at all, and in fact, presents a sensitive message of how difficult it is to talk to children in a complicated world. Don't just react or listen to the propoganda - think!

the incredible hypocrisy abounds amongst many of the comments attacking the play. i listened to a performance on CBC radio and as someone who is very knowledgeable on the subject it irks me to read the knee-jerk reaction and the boring grasp at the race card.

newsflash: critics of israel are sophisticated enough to differentiate between zionism and jewry. by underestimating the knowledge of israel's critics, zionists who support israel - permitting carte blanch behaviour - continues to alienate not only israel, but themselves. retreating into the faux outrage and accusation of anti-semitism, more and more, falls on deaf ears.

each time PR campaigns which call for the censorship and banning of artistic content critical of israel, it only fortifies what the world has begun to grasp: the truth of the conflict within the occupied territories.