Wrestling with Shylock: Jewish Responses to the Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice occupies a unique place in world culture. As the fictional, albeit iconic, character of Shylock has been interpreted as exotic outsider, social pariah, melodramatic villain and tragic victim, the play, which has been performed and read in dozens of languages, has served as a lens for examining ideas and images of the Jew at various historical moments. In the last two hundred years, many of the play’s stage interpreters, spectators, readers and adapters have themselves been Jews, whose responses are often embedded in literary, theatrical and musical works. Join us for a dynamic discussion led by Edna Nahshon (Jewish Theological Seminary) about her recent book, co-edited with Michael Shapiro (University of Illinois), which examines the ever-expanding body of Jewish responses to Shakespeare’s most Jewishly relevant play.

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Dr. Edna Nahshon is professor of Jewish Theater and Drama at The Jewish Theological Seminary and a senior fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.  Her work focuses on the intersection of Jewishness, theater, and performance, a topic on which she has published extensively. Most recently she curated the exhibition “New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway” for the Museum of the City of New York (March 7-August 14,2016). The exhibition was accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Dr. Nahshon, (Columbia University Press, 2016). It was recently the recipient of  the prestigious George Freedley Award Special Jury Prize for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance. Dr. Nahshon is the author and editor of eight books. Her most recent, Wrestling with Shylock: Jewish Responses to “The Merchant of Venice” was published in April 2016 by Cambridge University Press.

Recent articles and book chapters include “A Hebrew Take on Shylock on the New York Stage: Shylock ’47 at the Pargod Theatre (1947)” European Judaism. 2017; “Maurice Schwartz przedstawia Dybbuka,” in Dybuk Na pograniczu dwoch swiatow. Gdansk: Muaeum Narodowe w Gdansku & Wydawnictwo Universytetu Gdanskiego, 2017; “A Temple of Art on Second Avenue, The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies; and “Jewish American Drama” in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).