Roald Dahl revision controversy
Reviewing Australian author Tony Clifton's God Cried, a picture book about the siege of West Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War, Dahl used several antisemitic tropes, including claiming that the United States was "dominated by Jewish financial institutions".
A report from British newspaper The Telegraph determined that Puffin Books altered hundreds of passages in Dahl's work, including in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr Fox, and The Witches.
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.
In the August 1983 issue of the Literary Review, a review by Dahl of Tony Clifton's God Cried appears, in which he writes that the United States is "so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions" and asks, "must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?
"[2] In a 1990 interview with The Independent, Dahl said that he had become antisemitic, "in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism".
[6] These statements were echoed further following Dahl's death in 1990, with book critic Michael Dirda accusing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches of racism and misogyny, respectively, in an article for The Washington Post.
[7] In the Jewish-American and feminist publication Lilith, Michele Landsberg argued that "evil, domineering, smelly, fat, ugly women are [Dahl's] favorite villains".
The word fat was regularly removed, being replaced with terms such as enormous or large, as were references to short height and similar descriptions.
[13] References to lack of privilege were sometimes altered, such as removing a description of Sophie as "a little orphan of no real importance in the world" from The BFG.
[14][15] Dahl's publishers in the United States, France, and the Netherlands announced they had declined to incorporate the changes altogether.
[…] One of my sensitivity readers told me that I should remove all mentions of terrorism and violence as it was "too heavy a topic with minors involved".
[19]Many readers and fans expressed outrage at the idea that an author's words would be changed after death, or dismay at revisions.
British-American novelist Salman Rushdie criticised the rewrites in a tweet, writing, "Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship.
"[24][16][25][26] Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, spoke on behalf of the organisation to condemn Puffin Books' changes.
'[30] English writer Philip Pullman suggested that Dahl's work should fade away in favour of authors such as Malorie Blackman, Michael Morpurgo, or Beverley Naidoo.
[31] At Writer's Digest, author and translator Diego Jourdan Pereira compared the situation to similar revisions of books in earlier decades, such as The Purple Smurfs and Tintin in the Congo,[32] saying that classic children's books will always be modified or withdrawn from sale to reflect modern sensibilities.
[33] The then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, referenced The BFG in his response to the books' publication, saying that Puffin "shouldn't gobblefunk around with words.
"[16][25][31] Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that although people "should be vigilant about freedom of speech", the publisher's decision was not comparable with "authoritarian systems where journalists are shot", and he observed that nobody would be stopped from reciting the original version of a poem that Puffin had edited.
[34] Kemi Badenoch, the Minister for Women and Equalities at the time, spoke publicly on the matter, saying, "If you change everything old to look new, then people don't know what things used to be like, which means that you lose the institutional memory, you lose the collective memory," adding, "But changing the words that someone wrote, I don't think is right.
[39] In a differing opinion, Matthew Walter of The Lamp viewed the controversy as insignificant, comparing the release of the collection to New Coke and Coca-Cola Classic.
"[44] The publisher Scholastic clarified in a statement that some edits had been made to reissues of the books several years previously, saying that they had "reviewed the text to keep the language current and avoid imagery that could negatively impact a young person's view of themselves today, with a particular focus on mental health".
