Robert Shaw, Harold Pinter, And The Man in the Glass Booth

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

Robert Shaw (1927-1978), perhaps best known as the actor who played Quint in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” was also a provocative thinker and playwright whose writing often tackled politics, identity, and guilt. His novels The Hiding Place and The Sun Doctor won him wide acclaim, but The Man in the Glass Booth remains his most incendiary work and stands as one of the most provocative and unsettling works of postwar drama, addressing the legacy of the Holocaust, Jewish identity, and the perplexities of personal and historical guilt. Written in 1967 and later adapted into a 1975 film, the play caused significant controversy both for its daring themes and for the ambiguities of Shaw’s own relationship with Jews, Judaism, and the Holocaust narrative.

The Man in the Glass Booth opens in New York City and introduces the reader to Arthur Goldman, an enormously wealthy Jewish industrialist and Holocaust survivor who lives alone in a luxurious penthouse surrounded by bodyguards. He often offends people through irreverent and sometimes self-depreciation Jewish humor; my favorite example is when he announces that “we have a kosher restaurant in New York that killed more Hebrews than I did.” Haunted by paranoia and deeply damaged by his past, he rants about Nazis and reminisces bitterly and obsessively about the concentration camps, and Shaw treats his cruelty, eccentricity, and verbal extravagances as symptoms of psychological trauma stemming from his Holocaust survival.

Suddenly, Goldman is abducted by Israeli Mossad agents, who accuse him of not being a Jewish survivor at all but, rather, of being the notorious Nazi Adolf Dorff, a high-ranking SS colonel who oversaw mass murders at a death camp. The storyline then moves to Israel, where Goldman is put on trial in a bulletproof glass booth – intended to be reminiscent of Adolf Eichmann’s famous 1961 trial in Jerusalem – and witnesses testify that the man in the booth is indeed Dorff. Oddly, while neither confirming nor denying these accusations, Goldman delights in mocking the trial process, ridiculing the idea of justice, and playing mind games with the judges. As the trial unfolds, the prosecution becomes more certain that Goldman is a war criminal masquerading as a Jew, as the growing evidence against him seems overwhelming and witness after witness, including Jewish survivors, identify Goldman as Dorff.

However, in the final act, a stunning twist is revealed: Goldman really is Jewish, he is not Dorff, and the trial has been little more than a bizarre performance. Goldman, who had falsified his own dental records, had purposely engineered his own arrest and trial as a grotesque parody to expose what he saw as Israel’s obsession with Nazi hunting and the world’s obsession with Jewish victimhood, and he aimed to demonstrate that the Jewish identity itself was trapped in the “glass booth” of the Holocaust past, unable to escape the shadow of suffering, revenge, and paranoia. In the end, Goldman, consumed by madness, breaks down, crying out that he wanted to become “the perfect Nazi” to punish the world for turning Jews into eternal victims. He is removed from the court as a broken man – his sanity gone and his mission a bitter futility – and, at the end, there is no liberation and no relief; Goldman does not return to his life or reclaim his sanity and, instead, he is destroyed by the failure of the trial to erase his pain.

The reception of The Man in the Glass Booth, particularly in Israel and through the Jewish Diaspora in Europe and the United States, was marked by profound discomfort and bitter debate, and, in particular, it generated outrage among many Holocaust survivors and Jewish organizations. Unlike other postwar plays and films that presented clear moral lines between Nazis and Jews, such as the well-known Judgment at Nuremberg or The Diary of Anne Frank, Shaw’s play dangerously blurred these lines, as the protagonist appears to make light of the Holocaust’s moral weight. Holocaust survivors were horrified by what they saw as Shaw’s suggestion that Jewish suffering could be manipulated theatrically or that Jewish identity itself was somehow complicit in its own tragedy.

For Israeli society, the Eichmann trial was not merely the legal reckoning of a war criminal; rather, it was a foundational moment in the shaping of Holocaust memory within the state as, for the first time, survivors spoke publicly about the horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen in an Israeli court. The trial served to validate the suffering of the survivors, many of whom had been marginalized in Israeli society in the 1950s as “weak Diaspora Jews” unfit for the new, militarized, and pioneering state, but Shaw seemed to invert the moral clarity of that trial: instead of a real Nazi war criminal in the booth, the Israeli judges in The Man in the Glass Booth confront a Jewish Holocaust survivor pretending to be a Nazi, a grotesque trivialization, a sacrilegious parody that many Israelis regarded as a desecration of their national trauma. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz denounced the play as “a cynical manipulation of the Holocaust” and “an insult to the memory of the victims and the dignity of the survivors,” and various theater critics and public figures attacked Shaw for exploiting Jewish pain for dramatic shock.

Israeli cultural leaders worried that Shaw’s play trivialized the Holocaust by turning it into an absurdist identity puzzle and that the ambiguity surrounding Goldman’s identity – Nazi or Jew? – was not clever existential commentary, as some argued, but, rather, a dangerous relativization of guilt and suffering. In Israel, where Holocaust education and remembrance were official state policy, any suggestion of the blurring of the lines between victim and perpetrator was viewed with abject horror and as a violent clash with the moral certainties that heretofore underpinned Israeli Holocaust discourse: the Jews were victims, the Nazis were murderers, and there was simply no overlap.

In contrast, the Diasporan response to The Man in the Glass Booth was mixed. In literary and intellectual circles, especially among some Jewish writers – including Harold Pinter, who we shall discuss below – there was guarded praise for Shaw’s audacity. Critics in magazines such as Commentary and The New York Review of Books argued that Shaw had identified a real and painful truth: that Jewish identity after the Holocaust was, in part, defined by trauma, paranoia, and unresolved guilt. Some Jewish thinkers even interpreted Goldman’s madness as a metaphor for the unbearable psychological burden placed on the second generation of Holocaust survivors – the children of those who lived through the camps, forever trapped in their parents’ suffering. In this reading, Shaw’s play was not antisemitic but a brutally honest exposé of how history can imprison identity.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, however, many Jewish critics voiced deep unease about Shaw’s play. For example, the New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes warned that the play “tampered dangerously with the moral clarity of the Holocaust” and the Jewish Chronicle in London accused Shaw of “appropriating Jewish suffering for Gentile amusement.” Holocaust survivor groups in New York later publicly protested productions of the play, claiming that it demeaned their memory and their trauma.

Goldman’s belief that Jewish obsession with suffering perpetuated Jewish victimhood was interpreted by some critics as “blaming the victim,” and Holocaust survivors and Jewish leaders argued that Shaw’s message implied that Jews should “get over” the Holocaust, a cruel and simplistic response to unspeakable trauma. Perhaps most provocatively, the fact that Shaw was not Jewish intensified criticism because his play spoke with shocking authority on Jewish identity, pain, and memory from the perspective of a Gentile, and many questioned whether Shaw had the right, or even sufficient understanding, to dramatize such themes.

Although Shaw was not Jewish, The Man in the Glass Booth indicates a deep engagement with Jewish history and identity, particularly as filtered through the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Eichmann trial. Fascinated, and unsettled, by questions of collective complicity and individual responsibility in the crimes of Nazi Europe, Shaw suggested that, for Germans, the booth represented their genocidal past; for Jews after the Holocaust, it represented historical guilt and victimhood; and, for all humanity, the booth represent the inability to become truly free of old traumas, myths, and roles. This existential (and not strictly political) view explains why some readers saw the play as brilliant, even necessary, while others condemned it as heartless.

Shaw’s personal relationship with Jews and the Holocaust was complex and not entirely clear-cut. During his acting and writing career, he was close to Jewish literary and theatrical figures in London and New York, and he spoke admiringly of Jewish resilience while also warning – perhaps condescendingly – that this resilience could be corrupted into paranoia or cultural stagnation if focused solely on the Holocaust.

In that vein, his own statements about The Man in the Glass Booth suggest that while he felt sympathy toward Jewish suffering, he was primarily impatient with what he saw as the obsessive remembrance of the Holocaust. In interviews, he described his play as a warning against “allowing the past to become a prison” and he viewed modern Israel, and postwar Jews generally, as dangerously fixated on victimhood, preventing spiritual renewal. Some commentators accused Shaw of slipping into traditional antisemitic stereotypes: the “rich, paranoid Jew” as represented by Goldman, the obsession with vengeance, and the idea that Jews manipulate suffering for power; although Shaw was steadfast in denying such intentions, the ambiguity of the play left him vulnerable to such characterizations.

In addition to The Man in the Glass Booth, Shaw wrote fiction dealing with Jewish characters and Holocaust echoes as, for example, in The Sun Doctor (1969), a novel in which he includes a character based loosely on Israeli political types. Here, too, critics noted his tendency to see Jewishness as both tragic and self-destructive – a dangerous duality that fed accusations against him of latent antisemitism. At the end of the day, critics argue that Shaw committed a dramatic crime by attempting to humanize self-hatred, and whether that was brave and insightful or sinful and unforgivable depends on one’s particular viewpoint.

Despite its unsettled reception, The Man in the Glass Booth was neither suppressed nor forgotten; to the contrary, its notoriety ensured its place in the canon of post-Holocaust drama. In academic Jewish studies, the play became a case study in the ethics of Holocaust representation and, in literary and cultural theory, it became an example of the “limits of empathy” problem and how far an outsider can imaginatively enter an historical trauma not his own. Ironically, some younger contemporary Israeli and Diaspora scholars in the 1990s and 2000s, influenced by postmodern theories of identity and trauma, reevaluated the play more positively as they argued that Shaw had captured something prescient: the impossibility of fully knowing oneself after catastrophe and the way survival itself could become its own prison. In this view, Goldman was not merely a monstrous invention but a tragic symbol of post-Holocaust Jewish identity – forever standing in the glass booth, on trial before the world and, perhaps more significantly, before himself.

* * * * *

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than fifty years. Among the best-known of his twenty-nine plays are The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), all of which he adapted for the screen. Known for plays that were simultaneously comedic and unsettling, he received over fifty awards, prizes and other honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature (2005).

Pinter, who was born in East London the only child of working-class Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, believed an aunt’s erroneous view that the family was Sephardic and had fled the Spanish Inquisition; as such, for his earliest poems, he used the pseudonyms Pinta and da Pinto. Later research by his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, revealed the legend to be apocryphal; three of Pinter’s grandparents had actually come from Poland and the fourth from Odessa, so the family was clearly Ashkenazic. Pinter had a bar mitzvah before distancing himself from the Jewish faith as a young adult but, although he did not thereafter practice Judaism religiously, his cultural and ethnic identity as a Jew was central to his worldview. Though he did not observe Jewish rituals or identify with institutional Judaism, his work often reflected a deep moral sensibility shaped by Jewish ethical traditions, particularly regarding truth, memory, justice, and the moral responsibilities to witness.

Pinter’s lifelong resistance to political oppression and his championing of human rights (particularly through his later activism) can be viewed through the lens of diasporic Jewish intellectual tradition, which emphasizes tzedek (“justice”) and zikaron (“memory”), although he was a passionate Palestinian sympathizer. He signed the mission statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (2005); was a signatory to its full-page advertisement, “What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain;” and, in April 2008, he signed on to a statement that “We’re not celebrating Israel’s anniversary… We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land… We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.” Pinter, who also championed Israeli traitor Mordechai Vanunu and signed a boycott of Israeli products and tourism, was a puppet of the Israel-loathing political left, who were ecstatic about using his Jewish birthright and fame to inflict maximum public relations damage on Israel.

In the December 28, 1967 correspondence written from London exhibited here, Pinter writes to “Arthur,” most probably Arthur Hiller, producer and director of The Man in the Glass Booth film:

Here’s the piece about THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH which you asked for. Probably the beginning of paragraph two could be better phrased. Perhaps we should say “On the publication of the book in London and New York?” Anyway, I’ll get it off to you. But I would like to know exactly what you intend to do with it.

Love from Vivien and me. She has just returned from Russia and is glad to be home.

Vivian Merchant, the first of Pinter’s three wives, starred in many of his plays, including The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, and The Caretaker, as well as other roles in films such as Alfie (with Michael Caine) and Frenzy (directed by Alfred Hitchcock).

The journey of The Man in the Glass Booth from Shaw’s controversial 1967 novel to the 1975 film adaptation, for which Harold Pinter was originally commissioned to write the screenplay, is a rich and complex story involving questions of authorship, identity, and the ethical treatment of Holocaust memory. At the center of this transformation stands Pinter, the Jewish playwright of towering influence, whose initial involvement and eventual disavowal of the film adaptation reveal both the power and the peril of artistic reimagining.

Known for his elliptical dialogue, minimalist style, and profound moral seriousness, Pinter’s involvement brought immediate gravitas to the project, and he seemed an apt choice for a work grappling with Holocaust trauma, identity, and justice. However, his role in the final film version is complicated: although he produced an early screenplay, his version was significantly altered by the film’s producers and director Arthur Hiller, and Pinter ultimately demanded that his name be removed from the credits (the final screenplay was officially attributed to Edward Anhalt).

Pinter’s original screenplay draft reportedly stayed closer to the intellectual ambiguity and psychological depth of Shaw’s play, but producer Ely Landau and director Hiller were concerned with commercial and emotional accessibility. The screenplay was revised by Anhalt to heighten melodramatic tension and to offer a more coherent and morally digestible narrative, particularly through a clearer resolution of Goldman’s identity, but Pinter, feeling that the final product sacrificed the ambiguity and ethical complexity of both Shaw’s original work and his own vision, publicly distanced himself from the project.

The 1975 film, directed by Hiller and starring Maximilian Schell, altered the inherent ambiguity of Shaw’s work; whereas the novel and play leave the audience uncertain until the very end, the film resolves Goldman’s identity definitively: he is not Dorff, but a Jewish survivor undergoing a psychotic crisis. The courtroom scenes are edited to provide emotional catharsis and moral closure, a narrative direction that Shaw had assiduously avoided in his novel and, in marked contrast to Shaw’s and Pinter’s versions that sought to unsettle and provoke rather than console, the final confession in the film comes across as an explicit plea for understanding the survivor’s trauma. These changes were likely driven in part by the pressures of filmmaking in the post-Holocaust era, when the American film industry was reluctant to present Holocaust-related narratives that did not end with some redemptive message or clear moral orientation; thus, the commercial imperative to provide audiences with a “message” film – one that could educate without creating discomfort – led to the dilution of the play’s existential and psychological complexity.

For Pinter, the attempt to impose narrative clarity on Holocaust trauma risked not only misrepresenting the historical and emotional truth but also undermining the dignity of its suffering victims. His Jewish sensibilities made him deeply uncomfortable with the film’s reductive message, and his refusal to allow his name to be attached to the project can thus be seen as an act of protest against what he perceived to be an ethical failure. He believed that the Holocaust should not be presented as morally legible or easily resolved because it is a subject that demands ambiguity, darkness, and restraint, and this insistence placed him in tension with the film industry’s tendency to instrumentalize Holocaust narratives for didactic purposes.

Interestingly, Shaw’s novel and play did not provoke quite the same level of controversy as the film, primarily because the novel’s ambiguity and the play’s theatrical abstraction allowed readers and audiences to engage with the material as a thought experiment rather than a definitive moral statement. In marked contrast, the film was more emotionally direct and was consumed by wider audiences with less interpretive distance; thus, while Shaw’s original book invited readers into an intriguing philosophical puzzle, the film presented viewers with a psychological drama and emotional resolution.

Shaw’s own reaction to the film was largely positive, though somewhat reserved. He was said to have appreciated Schell’s performance and the seriousness of the production, but he did not publicly endorse the changes that diluted the ambiguity of his original text, and in letters to colleagues and in occasional interviews, he acknowledged the difficulty of adapting such a morally complex story for mainstream cinema.