London's Tower Bridge
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The London, UK theater that recently apologized for the “unconscious bias” that led a playwright to give a billionaire character a Jewish-sounding name has come under further scrutiny after it was revealed that it hosted a map on its website that erased Israel.

Th Royal Court Theater also ignored the September warnings of a Jewish director that the play Rare Earth Mettle featuring a wealthy character named Hershel Fink would be offensive to the Jewish community, the Jewish Chronicle reported.

According to a report in the Sunday Times, the director spoke to Hamish Pirie, the theater’s associate director, telling him that the obviously Jewish name would likely cause outrage as it played into anti-Semitic stereotypes. But the character’s name remained unchanged until two months later when the issue caused a firestorm on social media.

In a statement, the Royal Court Theater said: “On 8 November the leadership of the Royal Court was informed that the name had been raised by a Jewish director in a workshop discussion held as part of the series Directors: Working on New Plays in September 2021. We are in conversations with this director as we hold ourselves accountable for why this was not taken further, nor passed on to the writer. This specific event will form part of the board’s internal review.”

Referring to complains that a map of the Eastern Mediterranean that erased Israel was allegedly on its site for “a number of years” and only recently removed, the theater said that the map was generated by Google.

“The maps used on all of the international department’s country pages (also including Mexico, Brazil, Syria, Russia, India) were autogenerated through a Google Map link and therefore not of our creation. At some point since 2015 the maps were no longer visible because the link to Google Maps ceased to function.”

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)