Ugh, is this disturbing, troublesome, or just plain scary…

Here’s a sketch for a racist play about “moral decline” in black America since the civil rights era.

Act I: Heroic protestors gather at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to march in defiance of a segregationist state. Act II: The scene moves to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where the radical politics of the Black Panthers quickly give way to robbery and murder. Act III: A New York City crack house, circa 1985. Act IV: the trial of O.J. Simpson. Act V: The present, in which a black man on a prison furlough goes on a murder spree.

Appalled? I hope so.

Now substitute the word “Jewish” for “black” and change the scene to Europe and Israel and you have, roughly, the plot of celebrated British playwright Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” which debuted last month to some controversy and much acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater. It is now in the U.S., playing in small but respectable venues to sophisticated audiences that — judging from the performance I attended in New York last Thursday — are overwhelmingly disposed to like it.

But logic is not the issue here, nor, really, are the facts: Try arguing either with someone determined to ignore them. The issue is about taboo — a word easy to mock until you realize it often upholds what is best in society. Racism has become taboo in American society, and that’s a very good thing. Anti-Semitism used to be taboo, but that’s been eroded by an obsessive criticism of Israel that seems to borrow freely from the classic anti-Semitic repertoire (“tell her they’re filth”) while adopting the brilliant trick of treating Jewish victimization as a moral ideal from which modern Israel has sadly deviated.

Readers may wonder why Ms. Churchill’s trite agitprop, a cultural blip on the vast American stage, deserves a column. Maybe it doesn’t; maybe it’s best ignored. But I’m reminded of what a better Churchill — Winston — wrote about the German decision in 1917 to put V.I. Lenin on a sealed train to Petersburg, “in the same way you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city.” Something foul has now gotten into our water, too.

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