A Hebrew Take on Shylock on the New York Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-164
Author(s):  
Edna Nahshon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Hebrew Language

Abstract Shylock’47 was a Hebrew-language stage production presented by the Pargod Theatre in New York in 1947. Conceived and directed by Peter Frye, it was a metatheatrical play-within-a-play that interrogated the idea of producing The Merchant of Venice in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It combined original scenes culled from Shimon Halkin’s Hebrew translation of Merchant with present-based transitional scenes, created mostly through improvisation and discussion between director and cast. What eventually emerged was a script based on Shakespeare’s text with added dramatized discussions about the play’s meaning and relevance to Jews at that particular moment in history.

A Hebrew Take on Shylock on the New York Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-164
Author(s):  
Edna Nahshon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Hebrew Language

Shylock ’47 was a Hebrew-language stage production presented by the Pargod Theatre in New York in 1947. Conceived and directed by Peter Frye, it was a metatheatrical play-within-a-play that interrogated the idea of producing The Merchant of Venice in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It combined original scenes culled from Shimon Halkin’s Hebrew translation of Merchant with present-based transitional scenes, created mostly through improvisation and discussion between director and cast. What eventually emerged was a script based on Shakespeare’s text with added dramatized discussions about the play’s meaning and relevance to Jews at that particular moment in history.

Shylock in Buchenwald

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-174
Author(s):  
Gad Kaynar-Kissinger
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
World War ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World

Can The Merchant of Venice be performed in Germany after the Holocaust, and if so, how? Is the claim that the play is a touchstone for German-Jewish relations, with a philosemitic tradition – and therefore eligible to be performed today – verifiable? The article begins by briefly surveying this tradition from the Jewish emancipation in the mid-eighteenth century, which, with a few relapses, continued – especially in productions directed by Jews and/or with Jewish actors in the role of Shylock – until the rise of the Nazi regime, to be resumed after the Second World War. The main part analyses a test case, staged by the Israeli director Hanan Snir at the Weimar National Theatre (1995), and intended rhetorically to avenge the Holocaust on the German audience: Merchant as a viciously antisemitic play-within-a-play, directed by SS personnel in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp with eventually murdered Jewish inmates compelled to play the Jewish parts.

The Jew that Shakespeare Drew

1992 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 279-298
Author(s):  
Brett Usher
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust

How far is it legitimate for a director to correct Shakespeare’s antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice?SO, begging a question or two, wrote the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale in a review of a recent London production of the play in which the Christians were portrayed as rabid Nazis. Almost fifty years after the Holocaust, it appears, it is still difficult for directors and critics alike to approach The Merchant without a feeling of unease. Current wisdom—or lingering guilt—insists that the play is, in a real and unacceptable sense, racist.

The Merchant ON Venice [Boulevard, Los Angeles], Chicago, 2007

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-230
Author(s):  
Michael Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
English Speaking

Abstract Productions, adaptations and spinoffs of The Merchant of Venice since 1945 generally employ one of four strategies: continuing, historicizing, decentring and universalizing. Continuing means following nineteenth-century English productions in making Shylock a sympathetic outsider. Immigrant Shylocks still appear on English-speaking stages, but often seem sentimentalized and anachronistic. Historicizing means making the play reflect historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust, so that Shylock, however sharp-edged, automatically attracts sympathy. Decentring means making Jessica’s story at least as important as Shylock’s. Many recent productions and prose adaptations explore Jessica’s plight as immigrant’s daughter, belle juive, forlorn wife or remorseful child. Universalizing means mapping the play’s Jewish-Christian conflict onto other racial, religious or ethnic antagonisms, as in The Merchant ON Venice, about a Muslim ‘Shylock’ and his Hindu neighbours in Los Angeles.

The Word of the Lord to Shylock

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Atar Hadari
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Biblical Texts

Abstract Dror Abend-David’s Scorned My Nation in its comparative literary analysis of the German, Yiddish and Hebrew translations of The Merchant of Venice concludes that cultural context and political intentions changed dramatically between the two Hebrew translations in 1921 and 1972, limiting his textual analysis to the closing line of Shylock’s famous speech: ‘it shall go hard’. I examine two key words in that speech in the two translations to detect which biblical texts the translator called on, consciously or unconsciously, and gauge what the literary resources of the Hebrew language can make of Shylock and his complaint and whether the language portraying Shylock and his complaint did actually change over those fifty years.

“A True Jewish Jew:” Three Yiddish Shylocks

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
American Cities

“Of all of Shakespeare's works, The Merchant of Venice holds the greatest interest for Jews,” writes critic and theatre historian Bernard Gorin in 1911. Gorin's observation may seem so obvious today as to verge on the axiomatic, but Yiddish theatre practice in the 1890s, when Shakespeare's plays began being produced in Yiddish, would not in itself have led to such a conclusion. The only recorded Yiddish production of the play in New York during that decade ran for just one weekend in February 1894, and such a commercial failure would have been an unlikely export to other American cities.

The Merchant ON Venice [Boulevard, Los Angeles], Chicago, 2007

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-230
Author(s):  
Michael Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
English Speaking

Productions, adaptations and spinoffs of The Merchant of Venice since 1945 generally employ one of four strategies: continuing, historicizing, decentring and universalizing. Continuing means following nineteenth-century English productions in making Shylock a sympathetic outsider. Immigrant Shylocks still appear on English-speaking stages, but often seem sentimentalized and anachronistic. Historicizing means making the play reflect historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust, so that Shylock, however sharp-edged, automatically attracts sympathy. Decentring means making Jessica’s story at least as important as Shylock’s. Many recent productions and prose adaptations explore Jessica’s plight as immigrant’s daughter, belle juive, forlorn wife or remorseful child. Universalizing means mapping the play’s Jewish-Christian conflict onto other racial, religious or ethnic antagonisms, as in The Merchant ON Venice, about a Muslim ‘Shylock’ and his Hindu neighbours in Los Angeles.

‘Hard hearts’ resounding now: anatomising race, resistance, and community in The Merchant in Venice (2016) and Julius Caesar (2017)

2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Diana E Henderson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice

Placing two innovative, high-profile stagings of Shakespeare in dialogue, this essay emphasises the power of re-citations, both as aural echoes and as tableaux, across dramatic genres. Building on Martin Luther King’s self-quotation within his anti-Vietnam address, it reveals how the Compagnia de’ Colombari’s site-specific The Merchant of Venice, performed in the originary Jewish Ghetto, and the New York Public Theater’s Julius Caesar, which created a national furore, each employed non-traditional casting and Shakespeare’s Act 4 emphasis on threatened yet suspended male-on-male violence to create complex political theatre, addressing historical ethnic and racial inequalities within ‘the fierce urgency of now’.

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