Thursday, May 31, 2012

The "Merchant of Venice" in Hebrew

A beautiful article by David Hirsh about the Habima production of the Merchant of Venice at the Globe Theatre in London. He addresses the play itself and offers a very interesting interpretation of it, intertwined with his observations on the antisemitic protestors who tried to disrupt it in the name of supporting Palestinian rights.

About the play he writes:
When I see a production of the Merchant of Venice, it is always the audience which unsettles me. The play tells two stories which relate to each other. One is the story of Shylock, a Jewish money lender who is spat on, excluded, beaten up, and in the end mercilessly defeated and humiliated. The other is an apparently light-hearted story about an arrogant, rich, self-absorbed young woman, clever but not wise, pretty but not beautiful, and her antisemitic friends. Shakespeare inter-cuts the grueling detailed scenes of the bullying of Shylock, with the comedic story of Portia’s love-match with a loser who has already frittered away his large inheritance. 
Shakespeare offers us an intimately observed depiction of antisemitic abuse, and each time the story reaches a new climax of horribleness, he then offers hackneyed and clichéd gags, to see if he can make us laugh. It is as if he is interested in finding out how quickly the audience forgets Shylock, off stage, and his tragedy. And the answer, in every production I’ve ever seen, is that the audience is happy and laughing at second rate clowning, within seconds. And I suspect that Shakespeare means the clowning and the love story to be second rate. He is doing something more interesting than entertaining us. He is playing with our emotions in order to show us something, to make us feel something....
[The audience] was there to face down those who said that Israeli actors should be excluded from the global community of culture, while actors from all the other states which had been invited to the Globe were celebrated in a festival of the Olympic city’s multiculturalism. So, the audience was happy to laugh loudly and to enjoy itself. We saw on stage how Shylock’s daughter was desperate to escape from the Jewish Ghetto, the darkness and fear of her father’s house, the loneliness of being a Jew. We saw how she agreed to convert to Christianity because some little antisemitic boy said he loved her, we saw how she stole her father’s money so that her new friends could spend it on drunken nights out. And we saw Shylock’s despair at the loss and at the betrayal and at the intrusion. Perhaps his unbearable pain was also fueled by guilt for having failed his daughter since her mother had died. 
And then the audience laughed at silly caricatures of Moroccan and Spanish Princes, and at Portia’s haughty and superior rejection of them. And now, not representations of antisemites but actual antisemites, hiding amongst the audience, unfurl their banners about “Israeli apartheid”, and their Palestinian flags, and they stage a performance of their own. How embarrassing for Palestinian people, to be represented by those whose sympathy and friendship for them had become hatred of Israel; to be represented by a movement for the silencing of Israeli actors; to be represented by those who show contempt for Jewish Londoners in the audience, who de-humanize them by refusing to refer to them as people but instead simply as ‘Zionists’. And a ‘Zionist’ does not merit the ordinary civility with which people in a great city normally, without thinking, accord to one another....
The day after the performance, one of the leading boycotters, Ben White, tweeted a picture of the beautiful Jewish face of Howard Jacobson, an opponent of the exclusion of Israeli actors from London. White added the text: “If you need another reason to support a boycott of Habima, I present a massive picture of Howard Jacobson’s face”. 
Faced with this, it is hardly controversial to insist that ‘criticism of Israel’ can sometimes be antisemitic.   
And here is a photo of Howard Jacobson's "beautiful Jewish face" (from the Telegraph):


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