Does Shylock Trigger Antisemitism or Expose It?

By Susie Rosenbluth
TheJewishVoiceAndOpinion.com

BROOKLYN, New York — Playing Shylock, a one-man production now showing at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, asks the question most Jews wonder after being exposed to The Merchant of Venice: Is the play too antisemitic for the public at large? Is it better to ignore The Merchant, or is it worse to cancel a story that has traditionally shown Jews in a negative light—when all it takes to humanize the character of Shylock is to fully understand him?

The production, which will run until December 7, stars the passionate and redoubtable Saul Rubinek. It’s a must for anyone who cares about what antisemitism means, why Jews are too often our own worst enemies, and how the exploration into the often-ephemeral tie between parents and children should be viewed.

In a tour-de-force worthy of the most compelling Shakespeareans, Mr. Rubinek plays a character named for himself, using a script he assures us he did not write—but the audience may be tempted to take that denial with a grain of salt.

The playwright, Mark Leiren-Young, based the work on his own 1996 play, “Shylock,” that Mr. Rubinek says he hated. When Mr. Leiren-Young offered to rewrite the piece, Mr. Rubinek said that’s not what it needed. “It needed a ‘write,’” he says.

As a result, Mr. Leiren-Young, a distinguished playwright, author, journalist, screenwriter, filmmaker, and performer ploughed through decades worth of videos, paperwork, and interviews with Mr. Rubinek; his family; and his friend and director, Martin Kinch, in order to come up with the current play. Its conceit reflects Mr. Leiran-Young’s predilection for the mocumentary genre—an actor named Saul Rubinek has won the role of Shylock in a New York production of The Merchant of Venice, only to receive the news, just after the first intermission, that the run has been canceled. It seems some people, purporting to represent the “Jewish community,” have convinced the theater that this production “at this time” is not “in the best interests” of Jews. They fear it will provoke antisemitism.

A stupefied Saul Rubinek, dressed like a chassid right out of Boro Park or Mea Shearim, faces the audience, half-furious, half-amazed. “Right now, when you can’t go into a synagogue without passing armed guards, the real danger to our wellbeing is The Merchant of Venice? Oh, okay.”

For the next hour-and-a-half, Mr. Rubinek engages in a conversation with the audience. It feels like an impromptu, albeit one-way dialogue, but, in a post-performance interview, he insisted it’s all scripted. His subjects range from a scholarly explanation of what The Merchant is really about (“Shylock was the first three-dimensional character in the history of English literature” and the first major role in the theatrical canon specifically written for a Jew) to an all-too-true polemic against those who would shut down a play in the name of the “Jewish community” (“When did the culture wars turn into a circular firing squad?”).

Many of the serious issues the play tackles are interlaced with humor. For example, the set, designed by Shawn Kerwin, is supposed to be for The Merchant’s courtroom scene in which Shylock sues for his pound of flesh when the antisemitic Antonio cannot repay his debt. A huge cross looms over the players, prompting Mr. Rubinek to refer to the cancelation of the play with a joke: “I should have known. The last time a Jew got this close to a cross, it didn’t end well.”

Poignancy punctuates the evening, especially when Mr. Rubinek recounts his own career in the theater and how it resonated for his parents. It doesn’t take a Freudian to see how much of what he—the actor or the actor playing the actor—does is, in part, a tribute to his own father, a Holocaust survivor and pre-war Yiddish actor, whose career, Mr. Rubinek says in the show, “was also canceled—by Hitler.” The discussion the older Mr. Rubinek conducts with his own father, a Torah scholar who doesn’t see the theatre as a suitable career, is heart wrenching.

The part Mr. Rubinek’s father yearned to play was, of course, Shylock, which explains why the actor finds the on-stage cancellation doubly painful. In truth, it was probably a dashed dream for countless Jewish actors. Playing Shylock points out that, for centuries, the part has been given primarily to Gentiles. Many of them, including Laurence Olivier, Al Pacino, and Patrick Stewart, have garnered accolades for their portrayals—most of them sympathetic. Mr. Rubinek suggests Jewish actors have been denied the part for fear the character’s essential Jewishness will shine through.

Mr. Rubinek gives just a hint of what his Shylock would look like—a masterful portrayal based on a thorough understanding of who the character is and the environment in which he lived. Furious at the treatment he has been accorded at the hands of Antonio and his familiars, Mr. Rubinek’s Shylock doesn’t demand monetary interest for the loan he’s asked to give, but, rather, the ludicrous “pound of flesh.” By the time Antonio defaults and Shylock takes him to court, the Jew’s daughter, Jessica—the real villain of the play—has also betrayed him, running off with a penniless non-Jew, stealing her father’s money, and converting to Christianity, thus ending the family’s line in the Jewish community. Mr. Rubinek has no problem showing the audience a Shylock who has reached his breaking point.

To demonstrate his thorough understanding of Shylock’s emotional state, Mr. Rubinek adds some dialogue to the court scene. In addition to Portia’s famous speech extolling “the quality of mercy,” recited to exhort Shylock to relinquish his demand for Antonio’s flesh, Mr. Rubinek has her quote from the Talmud, explaining that Jewish law would also forbid him to collect this price. But by this time, Shylock is beyond reason.

Audiences from the original Elizabethan ones to those centuries later have been encouraged to see Shylock’s intransigence as representative of the quintessential “Jew.” In Mr. Rubinek’s hands, however, the moneylender’s emotional response is quintessentially human.

And that is Playing Shylock’s point. It asks: Does The Merchant of Venice inspire antisemitism or, when performed in the right hands, does it expose the roots of Jew-hatred and what it can lead to when it erupts?

By the way, it’s probably safe to say no one who sees Playing Shylock will ever think of Shakespeare, the playwright and poet, the same way. Mr. Rubinek’s argument for assigning the Bard’s work to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is so convincing, only a stiff-necked dogmatist could resist doing more research. (For those interested, the late-Professor Tom Regnier of the University of Miami School of Law wrote a piece entitled “Top 18 Reasons Why Edward de Vere Was Shakespeare.” How about this tempting hint: de Vere lived in Venice for a while and knew the real Jew on whom Shylock was based)

In truth, however, it doesn’t matter who wrote Shakespeare’s work. It matters only that it was written.
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Susan L. Rosenbluth is the editor and publisher of The Jewish Voice and Opinion in Englewood, New Jersey. Her upcoming novel, Blurred Vision, will be published by Red Adept.