(Jewish Group) Opinion: Why I hope my kids never read Roald Dahl

[Behind the Aegis]

As a nerdy Jewish kid in Indiana and Tennessee in the late 1970s and 1980s, I had far better relationships with books than I did with other kids. If I liked a book, I read it again, and again and again.

And so it was with Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." Dahl's protagonists Charlie and later James (of the "Giant Peach" ) both provided early models for how to find a better way through a hostile world where I always felt like an outsider.

Given that personal history, the announcement that Netflix has acquired Dahl's entire catalog and plans a robust lineup of multimedia adaptations ought to feel like good news.

Except I have no plans to recommend them to my kids. I'm not interested in what Netflix has planned, nor was I in any of the Dahl films that have come out in the last decades. In fact, although surely my children have read some of his books in school and seen some of the films, at no time have I suggested that they read Dahl.

Seeing his work still celebrated fills me with sadness, leaving me caught between attachment to something that mattered to me as a boy and commitment to the principles that, I hope, make me the man I am today.

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