Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust

Reading Shakespeare in Jewish Theological Frameworks: Shylock Beyond the Holocaust uses Jewish theology to mount a courageous new reading of a four-hundred-year-old play, The Merchant of Venice. While victimhood and antisemitism have been the understandable focus of the Merchant critical history for decades, Lion urges scholars, performers, and readers to see beyond the racism in Shakespeare’s plays by recovering Shakespearean themes of potentiality and human flourishing as they emerge within the Jewish tradition itself. Lion joins the race conversation in Shakespeare studies today by drawing on the intellectual history and oppression of the Jewish people, borrowing from thinkers Franz Rosenzweig and Abraham Joshua Heschel as well as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and rabbis from the Talmud to today. This volume interweaves post-confessional, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and mystical ideas with Shakespeare’s poetry and opens conversations of prophecy, love, spirituality, care, and community. It concludes with brief critical sketches of Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and Macbeth to demonstrate that Shakespeare when interpreted through Jewish theological frameworks can point to post-credal solutions and transformed societal paradigms of repair that encourage action and the shaping of a finer world.

Caroline Wiesenthal Lion is a research associate at the New Swan Shakespeare Center, the University of California, Irvine. She has taught at and/or received faculty and research grants from Rogue Community College (Oregon), Southern Oregon University, and the University of Birmingham, UK. She holds a PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. In the past, graduate studies at the Tisch School at New York University in Dramatic Writing brought her to the award-winning Magic Theatre of San Francisco where she served as the literary manager. She has been rabbinically trained at the Academy for Jewish Religion (California), ALEPH, and the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem. She has received notable endorsements for her fiction, her rabbinic teachings have been published, and her plays produced. The widow of John Lion, founder of the Magic Theatre, she is most proud of their four talented children.