In “Playing Shylock,” which is about to end its Toronto run, Saul Rubinek (actor, writer, filmmaker) manages to reproblematize antisemitism and save it from the dumbing down and weaponization it has been subject to in relation to Gaza. He does a lot else in this solo drama by Mark Leiren-Young, but I’ll stick to that.
Antisemitism has a lengthy history during which it has been many different things. True, all involved enmity toward Jews, but Jews didn’t even have to be there, as they hadn’t been legally in England for 300 years before Shakespeare created the antisemitic stereotype of Shylock, in “Merchant of Venice.”
The classic version was Christ-killers, which basically excluded non-Christian places, like the Muslim world. There were Jews as global conspirators, sometimes filthy rich — or commie revolutionaries. Also, in the sudden mass rootlessness of the industrial era, as a mysteriously cohesive alien body. There was the pseudo-scientific racist version of the late 1800s, adopted by Hitler. Recently there’s the incorrect conflation of Israelis with Jews everywhere as “Zionists.” There’s even a recent attempt to impose a “working definition” over all others.
There’s also a widespread sense of antisemitism as a unique metaphysical entity that’s always existed and always will, in varied forms, hovering somehow above history but infecting it, making it uniquely malignant and incomparable.
There’s been vigorous debate on the topic, which is healthy. Definitions are always abstractions that come after actual realities and are devices meant to clarify them. But the monstrosity of the Holocaust tended to sweep aside any disputes. Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, was one of many currents responding to antisemitism, but rather swiftly supplanted other interpretations.
In the play, Saul Rubinek plays an actor named Saul Rubinek, who plays Shylock and whose show gets shut down during an intermission because “Jewish community” leaders say it will incite antisemitism. He’s been aching to play this part, not because it’s antisemitic — which it is — but because despite that and because Shakespeare is Shakespeare, it is the first portrayal of Jews as three-dimensional (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”) in the history of literature.
Rubinek rails at leaders who think they can legislate ideas through definitions and shut down millennia of vigorous debate among Jews: kings versus prophets, priests versus rabbis, antinomian messianists versus legalists, hassidim versus mitnagdim, secularists versus religionists, Zionists versus anti-Zionists and other Zionists! Plus, he yearns to play this energetic, contradictory figure onstage.
He even drags in whether non-Jews can play Jews (like Mrs. Maisel) or the abled play the disabled etc., along with: Isn’t all art appropriation? This is what I mean by reproblematizing, or revitalizing, the issue of antisemitism.
Let it breathe. Don’t try to suppress, for instance, almost any criticism of specific Israeli policies, including clear atrocities, as antisemitic. Rubinek’s role scarcely alludes to Gaza yet his performance encompasses it.
The Israeli novelist Aron Apelfeld, who was steeped in the Yiddish-speaking communities snuffed out by Hitler, once said, “In the modern world, every choice to be Jewish is a paradoxical choice.” Rubinek embodies this by asserting his right to go back onstage after intermission to play Shylock.
The most breathtaking moment comes near the end when Rubinek shows how his father, an actor in Poland’s Yiddish theatre before the war, would’ve played Shylock in the prick-us speech. It is a fierce proof of how unshakable a grip the past has on us. Few audience members, Jewish or not, could’ve missed each nuance — in Yiddish! Earlier he did it in the original, with a lot of Othello (warrior and general) in it. What a multifarious performance.
You may’ve seen Rubinek in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” “Frasier,” or “Star Trek.” Yet, he’s always, as he says, quoting his director and lifelong friend, Martin Kinch, Jewish. Here, by being so relentlessly, specifically Jewish and simultaneously so riven, he’s produced something truly universal. It may be the only, or at least the most effective, way to achieve that elusive goal.
Multicultural Meanderings 